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Part 1
A Feminist History of Criminology
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1
The Scientific Origins of Criminology
From Descartes onwards philosophers had thought of the human being as a subject in a world of objects, and because of that the central philosophical problems came to be seen as those concerning perception and knowledge. How do we as subjects gain knowledge of the objects that constitute the world?
Brian Magee, The Great Philosophers
In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell examines the role of science in the making of the modern mind and the modern world. According to Russell, ‘almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.’1 What Russell terms ‘the modern outlook’ entailed a new commitment to science as a means of making sense of the world and with it a bold rejection of myth and superstition. The great men who heralded in the new way of thinking were Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. The crucial effect of their scientific work was to transform ‘the outlook of educated men’:
At the beginning of the century [there were] … trials for witchcraft; at the end, such a thing would have been impossible. In Shakespeare’s time, comets were still portents; after the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687, it was known … that they [comets] were as obedient as the planets to the law of gravitation. The reign of scientific law had established its hold on men’s imaginations, making such things as magic and sorcery incredible.2
Through the ‘patient collection of facts’, it was now believed that one could arrive at ‘scientific truth’.3 The dominant epistemology, or theory of knowledge, from the seventeenth century until well into this century was to remain essentially scientific in nature. As John Jackson explains in a more recent account of the scientific outlook, it took as axiomatic that we gather evidence for principles about the nature of the world through an appeal to empirical data, ‘to what is alleged to be fact; and we select, analyse and interpret material on the basis of principles’.4 Scientific method was one of ‘testing such principles by discovering to what extent matters that can be deduced from them correspond to the facts’.5 From this method there follows a number of assumptions:
First, it assumed that there is a world of facts which exists ‘out there’ as part of reality independent of the human observer, and the task of the scientist is to discover as much of it as he can by comparing this reality with his own theories and hypotheses.… Second, it is assumed … the complete truth is in principle capable of being revealed.… Third, knowledge of this reality can be obtained by using as a foundation the empirical evidence of our sense experience. Since this experience is value-free, science can be conducted in a value-free manner without the intrusion of value judgements.6
In other words, the identity of the inquiring subject did not matter.
Empiricism and criminology
Among the leading criminologists of the United States,7 there is an enduring commitment to the sort of orthodox scientific method and quantitative research described by Jackson. As certain American commentators on the discipline have recently observed, ‘Regardless of whether the causes of crime are viewed from the biological, psychological or sociological perspective … the scientific method still provides the chief means for testing hypotheses, checking results and approximating objectivity.’8 Rigorous scientific method is thought to guarantee impartiality: for science ‘has no loyalty to political programs or ideologies’.9
To secure publication in the prestigious journal of the American Society of Criminology (and thus to secure a high profile within the American academy and at the big criminology conferences), it is indeed wise to publish heavily empirical work that either documents criminal careers via ‘the longitudinal research method’ or that provides detailed measures of crime across the population ‘especially using official records’, but also through large-scale self-report surveys.10 The more statistical the work, the more complex the correlations, the greater it seems is the chance of publication. The agile manipulation of very large numbers is highly esteemed, and concomitantly philosophical speculation or small-scale qualitative research is less highly valued.
This assessment of the scientific orthodoxy of the American discipline may be confirmed simply by scanning the addresses of the incoming Presidents of the American Society of Criminology. (This is not a difficult task because each year the lead article of Criminology is the Presidential address.) For example, in his 1991 Presidential Address, John Hagan declared that:
Some of the greatest advances of criminology over the past several decades have involved its evolution into a more systematic and precise science. These advances have demanded greater clarity and testability of our theories, and these advances have occurred through the dedicated efforts of some of our field’s most practiced contributors.11
In a similar vein, Joan Petersilia observed in her 1990 Presidential Address to the Society that ‘to succeed under the academic model [of criminology] graduate schools must place science first.’12 However, the problem then arises that scientific criminology becomes increasingly removed from the world beyond the academy. ‘The further we move into computer analysis of large data files with more sophisticated methods, the harder it becomes for practitioners and policymakers to follow.’13 Petersilia suggests that criminologists should not resile from science, but rather should ensure that their research is responsive to the needs of policymakers, ‘without compromising the higher objectives of research’.14 Modern American criminology should take the form of an applied and practical science. The implicit message is that criminologists should not engage in excessively academic and abstract speculation about the nature of critical theory and knowledge. Science should come first, and then its application to the real world beyond the university.
In his inaugural lecture as Wolfson Professor of Criminology at The University of Cambridge, England in 1986, Anthony Bottoms has offered some remarkably similar reflections on the nature of modern British criminology, endorsing its commitment to the methods of conventional science.15 Bottoms speaks not unkindly, of the angry young British criminologists of the 1960s and 1970s who sought to transform the discipline (see chapter 2). Apparently, they had been charmed by the siren songs of phenomenology, of ethnomethodology, of Marxism and so they had strayed from the true path of criminology. In those passionate times, according to Professor Bottoms, ‘it was legitimate to wonder whether anyone, other than those who had all along been committed empiricists, would, amid all the heady theory, return to the task of studying crimes, criminal justice and punishment.’ With some relief, Bottoms then observes that criminology has come to its senses, ‘that phase has … been transcended, and empirical studies have been returned to with full vigour.’16
With these few words, Bottoms takes us to the intellectual roots of criminology. He reminds us that the discipline as we know it, both in the United States and in Britain, is the creation of nineteenth century men of science who were committed to the empirical scientific method described by Russell and that it is still men of science who assume a central place in the academy today.17 In true scientific spirit, Bottoms (much like Hagan) also suggests that the criminological project is one of discovery and conquest over an unknown world which could, with enough sustained effort, be known thoroughly. He tells us that ‘criminology is very much still at the beginning of its intellectual quest, and that our knowledge is still usually ‘fragmentary and unsatisfactory’ consisting only of ‘scattered clues and glimmers of hope’.18 Again, we are reminded of the nineteenth century scientific explorer who hoped through science to gain mastery over that which he did not yet understand and so reduce the things in the world to the objects of his understanding. In the case of criminological inquiry, those objects were criminals.
The first men of criminology seemed quite naturally to take their project to be the dispassionate and scientific study of criminal man. There was (almost) never any question of concerning themselves with women in any serious way. Caesar Lombroso and William Ferrero’s work on women has come to be regarded as an interesting historical exception rather than an endeavour to incorporate women as subjects of equal interest into the scientific study of crime.19 From the start, it was a given that criminology would be the study by men of men, though these men were not to be regarded as interesting because they were men, but rather because they were criminals. Criminology was the study of criminals who happened mainly to be men and so the male criminal was what was studied, though not as a man or masculine being, but as a criminal. This, it seemed, was simply the natural, logical starting point of the discipline. The assumptions underpinning this scientific selection were unexamined and remain largely unexamined today.
The idea that there was a certain inherent logic to criminology’s brief for itself – the scientific study of criminal man – is certainly to be found in David Garland’s recent account of the history of the discipline. He observes that by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘the idea of a specialist criminological science [had] emerged – centred, as it happens, on the figure of the “criminal type” – and that … this subsequently led to the establishment … of an independent criminological discipline.’ The term ‘criminology’ was generally adopted in the 1890s. Garland goes on to remark that ‘Since the discipline was characterized by a … concern to pursue the crime problem in all its aspects, the subject is continually expanding to embrace all of the ways in which crime and criminals might be scientifically studied.’ He suggests also that ‘the tendency of the modern discipline [is] to embrace everything that might be scientifically said about crime and criminals’ (my italics).20
In these statements, Garland describes and appears to endorse the assumptions of his predecessors: that the scientific study of criminal man was the quite natural and logical starting point of the discipline and that scientific criminology was and remains interested in everything that can be said about criminal man. Like the early men of the discipline he portrays, Garland is wearing gendered blinkers. Although he is discussing the very fact that criminology developed as the study of criminal man (he calls it the criminal ‘type’, hence, stripping criminal man of his maleness in much the same way as his predecessors), he does not appear to see that as a consequence there is something highly unscientific and skewed about the criminological enterprise from the outset. For criminologists are studying men (not women), and yet they are not interested in the maleness of their subjects. Thus, they are ignoring the ‘man question’ of criminology that is its most critical dimension – statistically and, I will suggest, socially and politically.
That Garland himself cannot see the distortions at work is evident from his observation that criminologists are interested in ‘everything that might be scientifically said about crime’. This is patently not the case, for surely the most interesting first question of a scientific nature would have been, and remains still, the ‘man question’. Even his own reference to the title of Lombroso’s famous volume, L’Uomo Delinquente (1876), does not alert Garland to the masculine preoccupation and blinkers of the discipline. Then (and now) the sex specificity of the discipline was unremarked. Women were invisible, and so was the fact of their invisibility. Women were absent from the start (both as criminal subjects and as noncriminal subjects with whom the male criminal might be compared, and as victims of crime), but there was never anything to be made of their erasure from the fraternity of criminology. Criminology was simply the study of criminal man, but criminal man could be studied without reference to his gender. By necessary implication, men were beings whose gender was not crucial to their identity; it was only women who constituted a particular sex.
The idea that it is still possible and legitimate to study criminal men scientifically without referring to their sex is reiterated in the American and British criminology texts considered in the opening chapter. Recall that the editors of the Oxford volume referred to the study of ‘gender and crime’, quite uncritically, as a ‘relatively new specialist interest’. Similarly, the American texts accorded a minor place to their discussion of women, gender and feminism, implicitly regarding them as marginal to the main discussion of (male) crime. What each of these texts are saying, in effect, is that scientific criminology can still be conducted in a manner which is free from the considerations of gender, and that it is still legitimate to produce vast modern tomes which glide over the sex of the offender under investigation (as long as he is a man). Garland too repeats this notion that there is a distinction between ‘central’ or ‘substantive’ criminological topics and the newer ‘ideological’ concerns, such as those of feminism. Again, the implication is that of an ideology-free (and so gender-free) substantive scientific criminology to which the ideologically-mounted concerns of feminism have recently been added.
In Garland’s history of the discipline, we are brought up to the present day and told that criminology is now a robust scientific discipline which is ...
