Introducing Criminology

Clive Coleman, Clive Norris

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134016945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Criminology, or the study of crime, has developed rapidly as a subject in recent years, while crime and the problem of how to respond to it have become major concerns for society as a whole. This book provides a succinct, highly readable - and much needed - introduction to criminology for those who want to learn more, whether they are already studying the subject, thinking of doing so, or just interested to discover what criminology is about.

Introducing Criminology begins by asking basic questions: what is crime? what is criminology?, before examining the ways in which crime has been studied, and looking at the main approaches and schools of thought within criminology and how these have been developed. The authors focus particularly upon attempts to understand and explain crime by the disciplines of psychology and sociology, and consider also the impact of feminist and postmodern thought on the development of the subject. In the second part of the book the authors take three very different topics to illustrate themes raised in the first half of the book, exploring the particular issues raised by each topic, and showing how criminologists have gone about their work.

Chapter 1

Crime, the criminal and criminology

Having invited you to the party, it is now time to find out more about the guests and their activities. The starting point is to introduce you to two key terms: crime and the criminal. Although the meaning of these terms may initially seem obvious, there have long been arguments about the definition of them. These arguments are important, for they raise key issues about criminology and its scope, and the way in which societies identify and respond to actions as criminal. This leads into a consideration of the nature and focus of criminology itself. There are different ideas about its nature and aims, which will be explained. The final part of the chapter attempts to contribute to our understanding of criminology by taking a brief overview of its history, particularly in its early days. When was it born, and do those early years help to explain its nature and development in the years to come?

What is crime? Who is the criminal?

The legalistic position

For most of us, these do not appear to be particularly difficult questions. Crime is that action which is prohibited by the criminal law, and the criminal is the agent who carries out that action. Michael and Adler (1933: 2) are often cited as an example of the legal definition of crime: ‘the most precise and least ambiguous definition of crime is that which defines it as behaviour which is prohibited by the criminal code’. They recognised that the definition of the criminal was rather more difficult, for although any person who breaks the criminal law is a criminal, how are such persons to be identified by criminologists? They conclude that ‘the most certain way... to distinguish criminals from non-criminals is in terms of those who have been convicted of crime and those who have not. ... The criminologist is therefore quite justified in making the convict population the subject of his studies as he does’ (Michael and Adler 1933: 3). In practice, for many years criminologists conducted studies of prisoners; the prison provided a convenient captive sample for researchers and a context within which their specialism could develop with a particular focus – the individual criminal. However, prisoners are only a sample of those convicted of crime, who in their turn are only a sample of those who have broken the criminal law; it cannot be assumed that such samples are representative of all law-breakers.

Conduct norms and their violation

Not everyone was happy with such a focus on crime and the criminal. One of the dissenters was Thorsten Sellin, a famous sociologist of his day, who put forward an argument which has been heard in a number of different versions over the years. Sellin (1938) pointed out that the criminal law often reflected the values of powerful interest groups, even in democracies, rather than the moral standards within the general population. What is defined as criminal could vary over time and between different societies, making crime and the criminal a very slippery subject matter for the scientist, who should be using concepts that had a ‘universal’ nature, rather than ones which had a different meaning depending upon the particular society and historical time.

Rather than using ‘ready made’ terms and subjects of study defined by non-scientists, Sellin argued, scientists should be free to define their own terms, to reflect the nature of the subject matter and its ‘universal’ properties. Since all social groups in any society had rules or norms, a better basis for scientific investigation would be the study of these conduct norms. The more complex the society, the more likely that norms would come into conflict, such as where individuals are members of groups with different norms, or where one group has power over another with different conduct norms. These conduct norms, how they develop and relate to each other, and violations of them would be the focus of study, rather than crime and criminal as defined by the criminal law and the criminal justice system.

Many of these points were to be reiterated in years to come. The point about the relationship between criminal law and power rang a few bells in the USA, a country which had experienced Prohibition. This involved legislation that prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of ‘intoxicating liquor’ and represented a political victory for the moral code of one segment of American society at the expense of others. Sellin’s view that we should study the origins and violations of conduct norms was increasingly taken up by those who began to speak of ‘deviant behaviour’ as the focus of study, rather than crime. Most difficult to grasp is his idea that conduct norms could somehow be identified and classified into ‘universal categories, transcending political and other boundaries, a necessity imposed by the logic of science’ (Sellin 1938:31). This is an example of the attempt to imitate the way in which the natural sciences operated: to develop concepts and terms which would be equally applicable whether you found yourself in Tipperary or Timbuctoo (in the way that those such as velocity, density, gravity are in natural science). Most important for current concerns is that Sellin did not argue that the concept of crime should be extended to all violations of conduct norms, perhaps aware of the confusion this would create: ‘extension of the meaning of the term crime is not desirable. It is wiser to retain that term for the offenses made punishable by the crimincl law ...’ (Sellin 1938: 32). Others came to a different conclusion.

Extending the concept of crime

Like Sellin, Edwin Sutherland was concerned about the narrow focus of much criminology. He, however, was interested in the offences committed by business and professional people in the course of their occupations (what he called white-collar crime), and the way in which these were virtually ignored by criminologists and their theories of criminal behaviour. Sutherland (1940) therefore conducted a study of the decisions made by courts and commissions of the USA against the seventy largest business corporations in such matters as false advertising, anti-trust activity, labour relations, and infringement of patents, copyrights and trademarks (types of white-collar crime now frequently referred to as corporate crime). He found that 547 such adverse decisions had been made, an average of 7.8 per corporation, with each having at least one made against it. However, only 49, or 9 per cent of these decisions were made by criminal courts. Undaunted, Sutherland attempted to show that the remaining decisions were that the behaviour was ‘actually’ criminal. He did this by extending somewhat the definition of crime, which he claimed involves two things: ‘legal description of an act as socially injurious and legal provision of a penalty for the act’ (Sutherland 1945: 132). Note that this definition still takes the law as its yardstick, but not just the criminal law. In a sense, therefore, he was still clinging to a legalistic definition. According to this definition the remaining actions of the corporations were therefore ‘crimes’, although they were in practice treated as if they were not crimes. They thus avoided the usual stigma (and some of the harshest punishments) which were attached to offences treated by the criminal law, an example of what he termed the differential implementation of the law. He saw three main reasons for this relative leniency: the higher status of the offenders; the trend away from punitive responses; and the relatively undeveloped public hostility towards such offenders.

Sutherland was pointing to what he saw as class bias in the usual definition of crime and bias towards the respectable in the operation of the legal system. Not only were ‘white collar’ persons treated more leniently when they were caught, but also many such offenders were never prosecuted in the first place. Futhermore, if criminologists confined their attention to crime as usually defined, a kind of class bias would be introduced into their study, with a concentration on those from the poorer and less powerful sections of society. If so, the theories of crime likely to develop from such a blinkered vision would be correspondingly partial. Finally, since these sorts of offenders and offences rarely found their way into the official crime statistics (produced by the agencies of the criminal justice system), they were even more likely to be ignored by criminologists and not seen by the public as being part of the ‘crime problem’. If taken seriously, the implications were momentous, requiring us to revise our ideas about crime and the criminal, the way to get information on them, and the kinds of theories we need to explain them.

The legalistic position restated

The sorts of arguments put by people like Sellin and Sutherland clearly got up the noses of some other criminologists, particularly those with a legal background, for whom ‘crime’ had a very precise meaning, and for whom the term ‘criminal’ should only be applied after the operation of the due process of criminal law. To take any other approach would lead to confusion and unethical branding of those who should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty. Paul Tappan is a good example of someone whose nostrils were particularly affected. Tappan (1947) accepted that it was quite legitimate for sociologists to study all sorts of ‘conduct norms’ and their violation. But for him criminal law provides us with an important, and fortunately very precise, type of these conduct norms: ‘crime is an intentional act in violation of the criminal law (statutory or case law), committed without defense or excuse, and penalized by the state as a felony or misdemeanor’ (Tappan 1947: 100). In addition, Tappan accepted that convicted criminals were not necessarily representative of all offenders, because of the selective processes of the discovery, detection, prosecution and adjudication of offenders. Nevertheless, ‘ajudicated offenders represent the closest possible approximation to those who have in fact violated the law, carefully selected by the sieving of the due process of law’ (Tappan 1947: 102), and should be the focus of study. It would be wrong to identify someone (or a business corporation) as a criminal unless they had been convicted of a crime.

In some ways, Tappan’s background as both lawyer and sociologist appears to be pulling him in different directions. It is, however, easy to see the force of his concerns. But if his definition of crime is accepted and criminology is simply the study of violations of criminal law, there remain objections to a discipline which limits itself to a subject matter defined by the state (and, by implication, powerful interests which may influence the law-making process). Disciplines such as sociology could take a broader view of a wide range of different rules and violations of them. Questions had also been raised about the nature of criminal law and the interests it represented. Why not study the law in this way, rather than simply behaviour that violates it? As we shall see, sociologists gradually took up these questions. Unfortunately, those who attempted to extend the concept of crime to cover various kinds of misbehaviour not presently covered by the criminal law found themselves getting bogged down in acrimonious debates about definitions and terms, as happened with Sutherland (1945) and his work on ‘white-collar crime’. As for the ‘criminal’, Tappan’s views raise a key issue: if it is possible that adjudicated offenders are not representative of those who have broken even the criminal law, this represents a serious problem for those trying to make generalisations about criminals. This was enough to make some researchers attempt to find out about those who had broken the law but had not been caught (such as by the use of self-report studies, which ask people directly about their involvement in offending: see Coleman and Moynihan 1996: chapter 3). It was also a powerful impetus to look at those processes of law enforcement and criminal justice to see in what ways they were selective.

Crime as the violation of human rights

If Tappan was disturbed by the ideas of Sellin and Sutherland, he would have been dismayed by those of Herman and Julia Schwendinger (1970) some years afterwards. These writers were concerned with the attempt to identify basic human rights (such as personal security) rather than legal rules as the way to define crime. As such, forms of social organisation, as well as individuals, which violate such rights are criminal:

individuals who deny these rights to others are criminal. Likewise, social relationships and social systems which regularly cause the abrogation of these rights are also criminal. If the terms imperialism, sexism and poverty are abbreviated signs for theories of social relationships or social systems which cause the systematic abrogation of basic rights, then imperialism, racism, sexism and poverty can be called crimes according to the logic of our argument.

(Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1970: 148)

Although it is difficult to do justice to the ‘logic of their argument’ here, their position is that the definition of crime is inescapably political. Those accepting the legalistic approach of state-defined crime run the risk of becoming subservient to that particular state, the status quo, and the interests it serves. For example, consider the position of a criminologist in Nazi Germany of the 1930s, where certain groups in the population had their human rights attacked, with the support of the state and its legal apparatus. From the human rights perspective, the state can be seen as a perpetrator of crime, rather than simply the authority that defines crime. For the Schwendingers the role of the criminologist should be to engage in the stuggle for those basic human rights so that criminologists become guardians of those rights rather than defenders of the current order of things (consider again the predicament of our criminologist in Nazi Germany). What the human rights approach shares in common with that of some earlier writers is the attempt to identify certain basic standards, any deviation from which is ‘crime‘.

Crime as a social construction

What was clear from previous debates was that the contents of the category of crime, as defined by the criminal law, varies over time and place. Sutherland and Cressey (quoted in Rock 1973: 20) produced a list to illustrate the variety of acts which had been defined as crimes at some point, which included ‘printing a book, professing the medical doctrine of circulation of the blood, driving with reins, selling coins to foreigners, having gold in the house, buying goods on the way to market or in the market for the purpose of selling them at a higher price, writing a cheque for less than a dollar’. So various are the things that have been defined as crimes that some took the view that the only thing they have in common is the fact that they have been defined as crimes by the criminal law. One reason why some scholars had spent so much time trying to identify the ‘essential’ nature of crime was that they were concerned with developing a theory (a systematic explanation) of criminal behaviour. If crime was in fact a rag-bag of assorted acts with very little in common between them, the chances of developing a general theory of crime seemed pretty slim indeed. Some researchers tried to reformulate their subject matter as deviant behaviour, anti-social conduct or the violation of conduct norms. At least these, defined by the researcher rather than the state, might have enough in common to make generalisations possible.

As we shall see, the years of effort in attempting to develop such theories took their toll. Eventually, some gave up the quest altogether and explored other avenues. If crime was simply that which has been designated as such by the criminal law, why not study how this comes about? Why not look at the criminal law itself as socially created, in particular social, economic and political circumstances? The variability and the political nature of criminal law were no longer problems hampering progress, but something to be investigated. From this perspective, crime was defined in particular historical circumstances, as a result of the activities of agents with varying degrees of power. Here were new processes and topics for investigation. In this view, criminal law was a social construction (rather than a set of given rules, violation from which was the principal topic for study). According to one version of this perspective it can be viewed as a collection of ‘negative ideological categories with specific historical applications ... categories of denunciation or abuse lodged within very complex, historically loaded practical conflicts and moral debates ... these negative categories of moral ideology are social censures’ (Sumner 1990: 26, 28).

If criminal law was a social construction ripe for investigation, so were crime and the criminal. How do some acts and persons come to be designated as criminal by the criminal justice system, out of a pool of possible candidates? Here we are speaking of social processes that produce recorded crimes, suspects, charged persons, prosecutions and various outcomes, such as discharges or prison sentences. These processes can be studied to see precisely how crimes and criminals are ‘produced’. Seen in this way, crime and the criminal are the focus for investigation, but in a very different way from the traditional approach with its search for the causes of crime. For example, it asks such questions as what impact do race, class and gender have on whether an individual becomes a suspect for crime? The approach described briefly here is concerned with the processes of criminalisation. Such an approach focused attention on who made the rules, and who enforced them, rather than merely on who broke them; as we shall see...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Crime, the criminal and criminology
• 2 Offenders and non-offenders: spot the difference?
• 3 A broader vision of crime
• 4 Thinking seriously about serial killers
• 5 Policing and the police: key issues in criminal justice
• 6 CCTV and crime prevention: questions for criminology
• 7 Criminology: some concluding thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index