Criminological Ethnography: An Introduction

James Treadwell, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781473975712, 9781473975705
• eBook ISBN: 9781526416285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Written by one of the best Criminological Ethnographers in the business, this text will serve as an invaluable and insightful resource for both novice and seasoned ethnographers of criminological issues." - Anthony Ellis, University of Salford

In the first textbook to cover ethnography specific to criminology, James Treadwell guides readers through the ethnographic
research process in full, starting with a background to criminological ethnography, through planning and doing an ethnographic project, and finally, the writing up and reporting stage.

The book provides guidance for navigating key issues in ethnography, including access and researcher safety, and supports readers when carrying out their project with helpful exercises, questions and checklists. It also includes insightful case studies comprised of classic works and the author?s own ethnographic projects, along with a range of extra learning features including key terms, a glossary, and further reading suggestions.

A valuable resource for anyone embarking on ethnographic research in criminology for the first time.

Part One Background

1 Why Criminological Ethnography?

Learning Objectives

This chapter seeks to introduce the reader to the basics of ‘criminological ethnography’. It will introduce the basics and fundamentals of social scientific research, the background of which is essential to learn before becoming practised in the application of the approach and methods of ethnography. It will explore the research process and the fundamental conceptual components of undertaking social research, and the core elements of various research approaches. By reading it, you will gain an understanding of the positivist and interpretivist paradigm, as well as more complex ideas that frame all social research. By the end of this chapter you should have a better understanding of:

• what criminological ethnography is
• the basics of criminological research
• what I mean by the terms ontology and epistemology
• the positivist and interpretivist research paradigms
• what is meant by terms such as reliability, validity, generalisability and credibility.

Introduction

You have been told to go grubbing in the library, thereby accumulating a mass of notes and liberal coating of grime. You have been told to choose problems wherever you can find musty stacks of routine records based on trivial schedules prepared by tired bureaucrats and filled out by reluctant applicants for fussy do-gooders or indifferent clerks. This is called ‘getting your hands dirty in real research’. Those who counsel you are wise and honorable; the reasons they offer are of great value. But one more thing is needful: first hand observation. Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and the slum shakedowns; sit in Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter burlesk [sic]. In short, gentlemen, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research.¹

1 An unpublished statement made by Robert Park, recorded by Howard Becker while a graduate student in the 1920s, and first published in McKinney, 1966: 71.

Criminological ethnography has entered a Dark Ages of legal constraint and institutional disrespect … Ethnographic studies are seldom found in mainstream books or journals of crime and deviance … Such studies are routinely overlooked … and they receive only scant attention in many textbooks. (Ferrell and Hamm, 1998: 268)

Before I begin it is perhaps useful to briefly say something about the book and its intended aims. This is a book on ‘criminological ethnography’, an approach which for me has long been a central strand of criminological inquiry. From the outset, I have preferred to try and talk of ‘criminological ethnography’ as an approach, rather than a methodology, because for me, ethnography is not purely a research method (a data collection technique) or a methodology (a philosophical framework). Rather, I would suggest that it is a research strategy and more than that, a sensibility, that is, a sense of the lived expectations, complexities, contradictions, possibilities and ground of any given cultural group in a setting at a given point. Why ethnography matters where crime and its control are concerned is because it is a way of critical thinking, a way of being and a way of gaining better understanding.

Ethnography is a research strategy that involves spending time within a setting in order to study it. Unlike other qualitative research methods, it tends to be participant focused and driven. Traditionally, it often involved a larger time commitment (though the traditions of longstanding immersion in a setting are perhaps now not as significant as once they were). Almost all ethnographic studies take place within natural settings relating to the participants, as opposed to an artificial setting that is created in research interactions such as interviews. Yet stripped down, the basic ethnographic approach is that of watching, listening, thinking and writing. It is amazing how much there is to see and learn if we just watch, listen and think.

In criminology there is a long history of ethnographic study that dates back to Thrasher’s book, The Gang (1927), Klockars’ work on deviant subculture (1974), and Howard Becker’s seminal book Outsiders (1963), Polsky’s (1967) work on hustlers, Young’s book The Drugtakers (1971) and Stan Cohen’s study of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). Much of criminology’s most fundamental work has emerged from ethnographic research that some have dismissed as idiosyncratic, impressionistic and marginal. This book is my personal attempt to make it more mainstream.

This book seeks to introduce readers to the varied methodological, practical and ethical challenges involved in doing ethnography on crime and control. It also aims to ensure those working in the field of criminology could become versed in ethnography relevant to the subject, from the simplest fundamentals of the practice to more complex theoretical debates connected with it. To that end, you will find that this book seeks to be a mix between textbook, guide and introduction to the topic, and specifically to that end, the book seeks to be an interesting starting point for those new to the subject, but also, to engage in more complex debates about the nature and character of the ethnographic approach and sensibility as specific to criminology.

What is ‘criminological ethnography’?

While I am happy to talk of ‘criminological ethnography’, I recognise that the title might strike some readers as a little odd. The central claim, that there is a strand of the ethnographic endeavour that is specifically ‘criminological’, or that ‘criminological ethnography’ is a thing that exists in its own right as a specialism or a subject might, may not convince everyone. However, it would seem to me that rather than being a somewhat niche or specialist research practice used by only a few committed researchers (a caricature that perhaps accurately captures the situation encountered with ethnography and criminology the 1980s and 1990s), the social sciences more broadly, and criminology quite specifically, have increasingly embraced an ethnographic sensibility.

It would seem now that talk of ethnographic criminology or criminological ethnography is becoming established in criminology. Rather than being a marginal or maverick research strategy, ethnography in criminology has become increasingly mainstream and, I would argue, worthy of a book. In 2015 and 2016 I attended symposiums at the University of Leicester and University of Birmingham on ‘ethnography on crime and control’, and the topic seems to hold a growing interest for students in the UK and the USA. Moreover, I have watched the popular and sometimes controversial reception of texts such as Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day (2009) and Alice Goffman’s On the Run (2014) and the increasing mainstream appetite for such ‘real’ research. Criminological ethnography has featured heavily in the nominees in all the major categories of the British Society of Criminology book prizes in recent years, and several recent winners of main book prizes have been for ethnographic work (Fleetwood, 2014; Fraser, 2015) while ethnography has also done well in the critical criminology prize categories in the UK and USA (Ellis, 2016; Briggs and Monge Gamero, 2017). In the UK, the popular BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed has even instituted an annual award for ethnography, and there seems to be growing receptiveness to the method in official quarters. In many ways in criminology, and in the social sciences generally, it seems that ethnography is in the ascendency, moving out of the Dark Ages.

The title of this book was chosen partly out of convenience, and yet I understood there were many other ways I might have framed the focus of this text. I could have stressed the links between ethnography and criminal justice, or ethnography and the study of deviance (and the sociology of deviance). However, I quite like ‘criminological ethnography’ as the title also reflects the growth of criminology as a subject.

Criminology as an academic subject has gone through something of a meteoric growth, from the first small degrees just a few years ago and its status as largely a postgraduate subject, and has emerged from the periphery of social science to become its success story. In the UK at least, the growth of criminology has come as something of a challenge to sociology, and hence, while many students will take modules on social research or criminological research methods, I am struck by the fact that this often sees ethnography on criminology degrees reduced to just a single teaching session or a textbook chapter. Yet as I hope to show here and in the coming pages, criminological ethnography is sufficiently broad and complex to merit so much more. It is a fantastic subject on which to have real world debates, and to critically reflect on and analyse the state of the discipline of criminology, and the academic enterprise more generally. I would suggest that criminological ethnography then is deserving of more extensive coverage.

It is not my intent to simply produce a textbook that instructs readers how to conduct ethnography of crime and punishment, or use the methods associated with the approach to study crime, criminals and forms of institutionalised punishment. Nor is it my aim to simply cover the history of the discipline and outline and retell the stories of the core contributions. Instead, in this text I am seeking to try to navigate between these aims, and produce a comprehensive, single guide to the topic that gives an idea of what the method entails, how it might and can be done, how it has been used. However, my main aim is that I hope this book will equip readers with a desire to go out and do some ethnographic research. I hope that it will get people as excited about criminological ethnography as I am and demystify the approach. I hear a lot of confusion about the ethnographic approach, especially from those who have not previously used it, and I really hope that this book will help reduce this and, in the process, make ethnography more accessible to emerging researchers, at whatever stage of their studies or career they are.

As a practised ethnographer who has used the approach in a range of settings and contexts, I know well that while it is certainly not easy, criminological ethnography isn’t that hard either. It can be undertaken in a range of places, and it can be fruitful in them all. From the street, to the shop, the pub, the custody suite, even the prison, there are plenty of settings where an ethnographic sentiment can shed light on human interactions and help us make sense of the world.

Moreover, while there are many ways to measure and consider crime, crime is a human phenomenon, and while crime can be variously researched, a significant and important part of the crime story should be that human story of crime. Qualitative research, and particularly ethnography, has long been well placed to explore the human stories behind real life crime events and their control, both the mundane and the occasionally spectacular. Of course, this brings methodological, practical and ethical challenges. Undertaking ethnography on crime and control in criminological studies, using participant observation, semi-structured interviewing and analysis of personal documents, has now been commonplace for more than a century. These research techniques can be employed to develop and test theoretical explanations and to examine the process of policy implementation and, importantly, to challenge the often common sense notions of criminality, comparing ideas about law-breaking and violence with the realities and frequently highlighting how reality can be counter to the intuitive position that many people may hold. Ethnography therefore undoubtedly has much to offer criminology.

David Downes has famously claimed that criminology is a rendezvous discipline (Young, 2003: 97), that it is a meeting place for ideas from a range of disciplines and draws on an eclectic range of influences rather than standing as a distinct discipline in its own right. In a similar manner, ethnography as a research approach is something of a rendezvous approach, as strictly speaking and in praxis, ethnography is a collection of qualitative methods. That said, before I attempt to introduce criminological ethnography, I shall attempt to give a brief and simple overview of research in criminology

Criminological research – the basics that you need to know

I perhaps ought to start out by simply saying that research, as most will accept, is a systematic investigation of sources and materials in order to establish facts and reach conclusions. Most texts on research methods will start from the point of describing variously the features of research as being a structured, systematic, controlled, empirical and critical investigation of hypothetical positions, questions or propositions about presumed relations and hence, for the most part there is acceptance that:

• research is a process
• it must be planned and intended: it does not happen by accident but by design
• facts and data are not necessarily the same as knowledge
• describing a phenomenon is not the same as explaining it
• research must be robust and rigorous
• it must be capable of withstanding external criticism and challenge from individuals who may not agree with the methods employed or findings produced
• for that reason, ethically it should be as transparent as possible to allow for critique.

As I note above, research is a process, and the nature of that process is that it will always have in common three stages in the process:

• the question
• data collection/gathering
• the answer.

On this basis, the generation of the question in research is sequential, and influences the later stages.

That said, if research requires a ‘question’ as simply put, it also needs to recognise that there are different ways of acquiring knowledge.

We discuss epistemology and ontology specific to ethnography below, but for now I will simply clarify those terms.

• Ontology is perhaps understood as the term we give to the philosophical study of being. More broadly, it involves the concepts that directly relate to being, becoming, existence and reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist.
• Epistemology is the science of knowledge, and essentially a debate between empiricism and rationalism, in which the former claims knowledge can only be gained through experience whereas the latter believes that knowledge can be acquired through reason alone.

Social science researchers use the terms ontology and epistemology to describe these two things because, essentially, they describe the parameters of a researcher’s view as to the nature of the social world, and the assumptions made about how and what we study.

In criminological research (as a field of study) there are essentially different ways or methods for acquiring knowledge, and these will be infl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Background
• 1 Why Criminological Ethnography?
• 2 Classic Criminological Ethnography
• 3 Core Ethnographic Principles and Approaches
• Part Two Preparation and Action
• 4 Planning a Criminological Ethnographic Project
• 5 Doing Ethical Criminological Ethnography
• 6 Entering the Field
• Part Three The Follow-Up
• 7 Writing Criminological Ethnography
• 8 Impactful Criminological Ethnography
• 9 Emerging Perspectives and Future Challenges
• Glossary
• References
• Index