Questioning Crime and Criminology

Moira Peelo, Keith Soothill

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134021987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a text for criminology students designed to take them to the heart of the contradictions, confusions and blurred boundaries around the subject of crime, about what crime is, about social regulation and control, and about social responsibility. It focuses on the key questions and issues underpinning them in contemporary definitions, representations and explanations of crime. It aims to question the platitudes and cliches surrounding public discussion of crime, by acknowledging the individual, social and political frameworks within which we explore crime and criminality.

Chapter 1

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Capturing criminology

Keith Soothill

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is simple. The task is to ensure that criminologists recognise that there have been various attempts in the past to ‘capture’ criminology. Such attempts are usually in the form of theories that are proffered to explain crime. The theories are so widely embracing that they are often referred to as ‘general theories’. These ‘general theories’ attract much interest and attention with enthusiastic supporters, on the one hand, proclaiming the success of the endeavour while, on the other hand, opponents begin to cast doubt on the worth and the wisdom of a new approach to explanation. Certainly they often create conflict and controversy. While some theories do not produce much more than a ripple of interest, there are others that capture a place in the pantheon of criminology, so that the discipline of criminology is never quite the same again. The names of these theorists often crop up in textbooks of criminology, but their importance is perhaps not always clear.

The theories that purport to explain crime seem to have a limited life. In many respects they are the products of their time. Others come forward to challenge or modify current ‘truths’. There will certainly be new ones in the future. Hence, studying the past has the dual purpose of enabling us to identify whether supposedly new theories are simply old theories dressed in some new clothes and, more crucially, providing us with knowledge of how the discipline has actually developed. Without such knowledge, questioning of contemporary criminology has little meaning.

The value of history

Two famous but misleading notions of history were stated within five years of each other. In 1916, the American car manufacturer, Henry Ford, stated, ‘History is more or less bunk’, going on to say that ‘… the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today’.¹ In 1920, the British historian and biographer, Philip Guedalla, suggested, ‘History repeats itself.’² We would be unwise to try to dismiss history — as Shakespeare says, ‘There is a history in all … lives’³ — while we would be equally unwise to expect easy answers from history. In fact, history has to be interpreted and there are various approaches to interpreting history. So, for example, a Marxist approach developed which challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory — that all that was necessary was to apply the methodology of science to it (Hobsbawm, 2005).

For social scientists, interpreting the world is more complex than that. Developing theories is one crucial aspect of trying to understand the social world. There are theorists who have tried to ‘capture’ criminology by proposing ‘general theories’ of crime. The question posed for this chapter is what do we learn from studying these ‘general theories’? Are the ambitions of these theorists, indeed, too ambitious? Are there dangers? Should we lower our sights?

Foundations of criminology

We need to recognise that theorising is the motor of a discipline. Why is this so? Theorising helps us make sense of information, imposing some sort of order on what may appear to be a variety of information. It helps us to interpret, to analyse and to question. Without theory, the establishment of an academic discipline is perhaps questionable. Certainly Newton's observation of the falling apple — that contributed to his understanding of gravity — would not have made much of an impact on physics without the theorising that eventually accompanied the observation. Without history, one cannot understand what has gone before and the impact of the past on the present. Indeed, without history, one cannot appreciate the dangers of some earlier theorising in criminology. When one does understand, the cry of ‘beware criminology’ may have some potency.

There has been some important theorising in criminology. Some has been more influential than others, but the impact has been quite evident. What I call grandmasters (there have been no grandmistresses yet in criminology that have had the impact of these male theorists) have laid down key questions that can be still explored in different ways today. The ones considered here are those that theorise within the context of producing a ‘general theory’. I raise the central concern of whether it is worth constructing a general theory of crime which leads to the question of whether we can in some way usefully integrate theories. With the example of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (DLC), I later focus on this possibility. Meanwhile, of the grandmasters, the four I consider are Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), Edwin Hardin Sutherland (1883–1950), Robert King Merton (1910–2003) and Travis Hirschi (b. 1935). Few could deny their importance and few would challenge the limitations of their theories, but nobody can do criminology seriously without coming to terms with their contributions and, indeed, the dangers of their contributions.

While very different in many ways, they all have one compelling appeal: at various times they have made criminology appear simple and straightforward. The other compelling feature of these theorists is that they — again in their different ways — tried to produce a general theory of crime.

First some prescriptions when one tries to address theory. Elsewhere (Soothill et al., 2002), we have stressed the importance of theorising and that, in criminology, theorising is about real people in the real world trying to make sense of the times in which they live. There we argued (pp. 98–9) that there are three basic questions worth considering when trying to get to grips with specific theoretical explanations:

1 What is the theory trying to explain, and therefore what aspects of the crime-criminal problem does it ignore?

2 How might we categorise this theory in relation to:

– school of thought/periods of time;

– key concepts and ideas;

– main theorists?

3 When and where was the theory written? What was the potential influence of the social context at that time?

Lombroso

The social context of each of our grand theorists is crucial. Lombroso (born 1835 and died in 1909), often known as the ‘father of criminology’, was essentially responding to two demands — a popular belief that criminals are somehow different beings from the rest of us but also articulating that popular belief in what appeared to be the veneer of scientific explanation. Lombroso described how he was once standing with the skull of a notorious brigand in his hand and pondering over the problem of crime when suddenly the sun broke through the clouds and sunrays fell on the skull. Then, he said, it suddenly dawned on him that this skull and its anatomical structure provided the answer. For him there existed a distinct anthropological type, a born criminal, an individual likely or even bound to commit crime.

Lombroso's insights are easy targets nowadays for ridicule. However, what is important is that Lombroso was both implicitly and explicitly building on what has been termed the positivist viewpoint. Positivism is the contention that deviance (but usually, more specifically, criminality) can and should be studied by the methods of science. Certainly within criminology, ‘the methods of science’ have had a rather narrow interpretation. In fact, as it developed, the positivist position denied that offenders were responsible for their deeds, thus claiming that a punitive posture towards offenders is unjustified. This led on to the viewpoint that lawbreakers should be treated, not punished.

Pasquino (1991) suggests that the debate on what was then termed criminal anthropology shook the theoretical foundations of law and began to transform the perspectives of jurisprudence throughout the European continent, from Russia to Holland and Italy. He suggests that the defining moment for the start of this debate began in 1885 when Enrico Ferri delivered a university lecture on ‘The positivist school of criminology’. Ferri was an academic and a jurist, a pupil of Lombroso and the most active and best-known member of the Italian legal school. It is said that during his lecture there emerged a new figure — homo criminalis — which was outside the sphere of classical penal thought. In classical theory, penal justice is constructed around a triangle formed by law, crime and punishment. However, what is of interest about this triangle of law, crime and punishment is the absence of the figure of the criminal. What occupies its place is the postulate of a ‘free will’ that establishes the subjective basis of the power to punish. As free will is common to all (i.e. to every juridical subject), it is hence not the object of a special form of knowledge. Within that classical tradition that is now seen as pre-positivist thinking, anyone can commit a crime, for it exists as a potentiality in each of us. Committing crime is, therefore, regarded as a rational process — we can decide to do so or not. In fact, Pasquino stresses how from the 1870s and 1880s, the essential elements of the old penal rationality began to be dramatically overturned, as there was growing concern about the impotence of punishments and the rising number of crimes. The new approach of positivism was the outcome.

The problem came to be posed in terms of the origin or aetiology of crime. As Pasquino stresses, at the heart of the new theory was Darwinism whereby it was posited that a social organism could exhibit different stages of the evolution of the species. By this account, criminals can be identified as archaic residues who are unable to keep up with the proper pace of evolution and are left behind by it. Lombroso was essentially arguing that heredity was the principal cause of criminal tendencies. However, his main legacy is his focus on the criminal rather than the crime. In his famous lecture in Naples, Ferri — echoing his teacher — said that the criminal is naturally a savage, and socially an abnormal. In other words, Ferri was arguing that the criminal simply does not think like a normal and honest person. Hence, a different explanation is required.

So what was to be done, given the supposed impotence of punishments and the rising number of crimes? For Ferri, the answer lay in the elimination of the very sources of crime, namely the criminal. The new theory began to be concerned far less with dissuading the citizen from law breaking than with rendering the criminal incapable of harm. The question was what to do with these evil and dangerous persons?

One line of development reflected Ferri's proposal to send hardened criminals to reclaim the marshes of Latium, where they would perish of malaria, thereby ridding society of them for good. As Pasquino notes, this suggestion was actually put into effect during the fascist era in Italy. In fact, Ferri's own move from joining the Socialist Party as a young progressive in the 1880s to becoming a convert to the fascist regime in Italy is not without interest.

There is, then, one other important aspect of the heritage of Lombroso that needs to be recognised. Both implicitly and explicitly Lombroso is claiming the sovereignty of medical discourse, with a biological slant, over traditional legal discourse in enabling us to understand crime and criminals. This shift of discourse provides the context for many of the historical fights within criminology, for this is the source of the simple, but wrong, assertion that ‘scientific research’ can be equated with the medical model. Such fights, dressed up in various forms of battledress, can more colloquially be seen as ‘turf battles’.

Understanding ‘turf battles’ — that is, who owns the dominant discourse within criminology — is an interesting way of considering the contributions of the three grandmasters (Sutherland, Merton and Hirschi) who, with their general theories, tried to ‘capture’ criminology. Essentially ‘turf battles’ are about professional competition and there are some important battles before the 1930s when Sutherland and Merton came more prominently onto the scene.

Turf battles

Nicole Rafter (1997) identifies the important historical point that theories of crime causation changed rapidly in the early twentieth century. Rafter has persuasively located this evolution of criminology in the context of the history of the professions. The changes occurred against a backdrop of competition between psychologists and psychiatrists for the authority to identify and classify offenders. Rafter's work identifies the battle between these two professions who are both working within the medical model, but this type of analysis can embrace other professions and disciplines.

Psychology was an immature but ambitious profession when Henry H. Goddard, one of the first clinical psychologists, decided to invade the jurisdiction of the criminal anthropologist which was still championing the notion of an atavistic, physically stigmatised born criminal (Goddard, 1914). Using Binet's new intelligence tests, Goddard popularised the feeble-mindedness explanation of criminal behaviour. In fact, Goddard's work on The Kallikak Family (originally published in 1912) had attempted to show that mental deficiency was inherited according to Mendelian law.⁴ In establishing links with crime, pauperism and prostitution, Goddard maintained that it was specifically feeble-mindedness which was transmitted. The evidence was limited but superficially impressive. Goddard had traced two lines of descent from Martin Kallikak — one normal, the other feeble-minded.

Martin Kallikak, a soldier in the American Revolutionary War, had a child by ‘an unmarried feeble-minded girl’, and after the War married a ‘Quaker girl from an honest and intelligent family’. Some 496 descendants of the Quaker girl were traced, Goddard asserted, among whom there were no criminals, and all except one had been mentally normal. However, of the 486 descendants of the feeble-minded girl that were traced, Goddard claimed that ‘36 have been illegitimate, 33 sexually immoral persons, mostly prostitutes; 24 alcoholics, 3 epileptics; 82 died in infancy, 3 criminals and 8 kept houses of ill-fame’. The detail is not to encourage us to applaud the industry of Goddard, but to recognise a line of reasoning and an empirical approach that may become fashionable again in the twenty-first century with the increasingly emerging discipline of genetics. In short, the emperor may soon have a new set of clothes.

Psychiatry, a much older profession than psychology, had become stagnant in the late nineteenth century, a specialty practised mainly inside lunatic asylums by administrators more interested in controlling patients than treating them. However, a new generation of reform psychiatrists was emerging, hoping to wrest the specialty away from the asylum superintendents, making it much more clinically useful and moving the practice of psychiatry into the community. Psychopathy — a concept derived from German psychiatry — provided the reformers with a vehicle for promoting these goals and making psychiatry relevant to criminal justice. In Rafter's words, ‘psychopathy became the Trojan horse in which psychiatrists entered the criminological territory of psychologists’ (pp. 239–40).

Rafter explains how, in the United States, the most influential and extensive early twentieth century discussions of psychopathy appeared in works by the psychiatrists Bernard Glueck (1884–1972) — who was also the brother and brother-in-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the contributors
• Introduction: crime is exciting but what of criminology? Moira Peelo and Keith Soothill
• 1 Capturing criminology
• 2 Crime and the media: public narratives and private consumption
• 3 Racing to conclusions: thinking sociologically about police race relations
• 4 Inequality and crime
• 5 Burning issues: fire, carnival and crime
• 6 Drug and alcohol studies: key debates in the field
• 7 Explaining changing patterns of crime: a focus on burglary and age–period–cohort models
• 8 Everyday surveillance: personal data and social classifications
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Index