Deviant Knowledge

Reece Walters

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843920298
• eBook ISBN: 9781135991463
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this important and original book, Reece Walters examines the politics of criminology and the ways in which criminological knowledge is generated. It includes an overview of the politics and practice of conducting criminological research (drawing upon material from Britain, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the USA), and the ways that regulatory and governing authorities set research agendas, manipulate the processes and production of knowledge and silence or suppress critical voices through various techniques of neutralisation.

The book argues for 'knowledges of resistance' - a position that promotes critique, challenges concepts of power and social order, wrestles with notions of truth and adheres to intellectual autonomy and independence. It provides invaluable insights into the relationship between the criminological researcher, public officials and corporate representatives. Drawing upon a wide range of interviews with academics and administrators from government and business, the book provides rare insights into the ways that knowledge about crime and criminal justice is produced and consumed, revealing why certain topics of criminological enquiry are rarely funded and why others receive ongoing political and governmental support.

The book will be essential reading for anybody interested in the development of criminological theory and research, and the context and influences that shape it.

Chapter 1

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Questions, contours and methods

It is not only to the poets therefore that we must issue orders requiring them to portray good character in their poems or not to write at all; we must issue similar orders to all artists and craftsmen, and prevent them portraying bad character, ill-discipline, meanness or ugliness in pictures of living things, in sculpture, architecture, or any work of art, and if they are unable to comply they must be forbidden to practise art among us. (Plato, The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee: pt. 3, bk. 3, para 401)

Introduction

In 1979, at the seventh conference of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control in Copenhagen, Professor Manfred Brusten raised serious concerns about what he called the ‘social control of criminology and criminologists in West Germany’. Brusten's paper generated widespread reaction, and the following year, in Leuven, the conference convenors devoted the entire programme to debating the state control of criminological knowledge. In his address, Professor Brusten identified the various ways in which ‘deviant knowledge’ (that which is critical of the state crime-control apparatus or challenges the existing social and political order) was systematically neutralized or marginalized by what he called ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ social controls of criminological research (see Brusten, 1981). The offensive social controls included state-controlled research institutions and state-controlled research funds that initiate, finance and organize ‘scientific research to achieve better administrative control and legitimation’. The defensive mechanisms referred to the ways in which agencies of social control were able to defend themselves against critical research through various forms of passive resistance, all intended to ‘obstruct whenever possible research that is disliked’ (Brusten and Van Outrive, 1981: 18).

This book broadens the scope of Brusten's initial analysis by focusing on the sociology of criminological knowledge. It questions how knowledge about crime and criminal justice comes into being and examines the ways in which deviant knowledge (criminological knowledges that are unfavourable to, and/or critical of, agents of power) are regulated by new modes of conservative governance. In doing so it asks whether there are politics and governing practices that influence the processes, contours and production of criminological knowledge? If so, what forms do these practices take, and what impact, if any, do they have on contemporary criminological scholarship?

In order to address such issues, it must be acknowledged that criminological research does not take place in a social or political vacuum. It is a genre of knowledge, which has the potential to question the role and management of the state, structures of power and governance, as well as notions of social order. It is an eclectic discipline and is capable of touching those who govern ‘on a raw nerve’ as it attempts to unearth and locate new knowledges within contested discourses of power, human behaviour and social relations. Whether challenging underlying and established notions of social order or confronting government policy and practice, criminological research may provide views unwelcome to governments seeking reassurance about their political ideologies and agendas. The extent to which criminologies have realized their potential as knowledges challenging existing structures of power and governance will be a major focus of this book.

As Brusten noted almost 25 years ago, criminological researchers who question regulatory practices in society may risk conflict with the officials and authorities that govern such practices. Modalities of power (Foucault, 1980a) seek to regulate the production and utility of knowledge. Governmental practices, contextualized within broader notions of regulation and not confined to definitions of ‘state’ and bureaucratic authority (Foucault, 1977a), continue to evolve and hybridize in late modernity. These emerging forms of governance (private industry, state and local authorities, and regulatory bodies) are central to understanding the production, content and direction of criminological research. As Hogg points out: ‘The production and circulation of criminological knowledge and programmes are also governed practices, dependent on and relative to particular institutional, technical and normative conditions and frameworks’ (Hogg, 1998: 146–47).

The production of criminological knowledge may present a site of contestation and conflict. Governments may attempt to stifle, suppress and regulate dissenting views of official policies and practices. The unwillingness of governments to entertain criticism is of major concern, given the changes occurring in academic institutions. O'Malley (1997) argues that neo-liberal political ideologies requiring a cost-effective public sector have placed pressure on universities to be both business- and profit-centred institutions. Criminological research is becoming more commercially and market driven. Many criminologists are finding themselves working in environments that demand greater efficiency and output, where tenure is difficult to secure and where university ‘managers’ are placing pressure on academics to seek out and engage in commercial research (O'Malley, 1997: 270). We are witnessing an unprecedented volume of ‘private criminological research’ or consultancies, where the researcher enters into a transaction as service-provider to a designated client. These contractual arrangements continue to blossom as government and private industries seek expertise or aim to demonstrate accountability, and with them they bring a range of regulations covering the scope of the research as well as legal controls over the way the research findings are reported and disseminated. This phenomenon is not unique to criminological discourses. The promulgation of New Right ideologies is affecting the production of new knowledges across a variety of disciplines as well as altering the traditional role and autonomy of academic institutions, although it is on the governance of criminological knowledge and research that this book will focus. It will analyse the ways in which ‘deviant knowledge’ is policed and/or censured by regulatory agents.

Therefore, this book explores the politics of criminological research. Those often unwritten events or struggles (such as negotiating access to information, copyright and intellectual freedom, difficulties over publishing results, seeking ethical approvals and pressure to alter findings) that seem to have become ‘part-and-parcel’, in one way or another, of contemporary criminological endeavour are factors that barely receive attention in the final product of publication (Jupp, 1989; Hughes, 1996) but are integral to understanding the nature and content of criminological knowledge. We need to examine the genealogy of these struggles as both independent and singular events (Foucault, 1977b) as well as within the broader historical contours and contexts of criminological thought. Such explorations require us to journey within academic institutions and examine the ways in which university management, driven by neo-liberal ideologies, are influencing the genesis and progress of research projects through methods that are challenging traditional notions of academic freedom, as well as redefining the centrality of academe as the ‘critic and conscience’ of society. This excursion examines the regulations of university ethics committees as well as exploring the new managerialist policies driving university research.

The ‘booming industry’ of criminology

Is this a topic worthy of detailed analysis? Why ask questions about the production of criminological knowledge? Surely criminology with its increasing student numbers, its new degrees and journals and its flourishing commercial opportunities are signs of a discipline in a healthy state? In their introductions to the second and third editions of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology (1997 and 2002), Maguire et al. refer to the growth of criminological studies as ‘an explosion in academic activity… a boom in criminological research’, an ‘enterprise’ seen to be flourishing in teaching and research and influencing criminal justice policy and practice. They point out that the expansion of the number of criminological centres, teaching institutions, journals, funding bodies and criminal justice professionals accelerated in the postwar years in tandem with increases in reported crime and government rhetoric about law and order. So extensive is the expansion in criminological knowledge that Maguire et al. (2002) argue that ‘it is no longer possible, as it once was, for individuals to keep abreast of all this activity and output’ (2). Moreover, Jewkes and Letherby (2002: 1) assert that criminology has been ‘one of the fastest-growing subjects for university study’ throughout the past decade. Similar increases in student numbers and memberships of criminological societies have also been reported in North America (see Laster, 1994; Adler, 1996; Dantzker, 1998). Morgan (2000) points out that this ‘criminological enterprise’ is attributable partly to law-and-order politics and the growth of ‘evidence based policy’, notably in the United Kingdom. Do these developments in criminology signal or define a discipline in a healthy state?

Nowadays, the success of a policy or programme is often determined by its level of acceptance or its subsequent proliferation. When a business, government sector or ‘community’ is seen to be embracing a concept, this is presented by governments or managers as evidence of its value, often without any critical appraisal of its origins, theoretical underpinnings or application. If it is consistent with the organization's ‘strategic objectives’, is cost-effective and widely embraced, then it must be worthwhile and/or successful. The expansion of criminology as a ‘booming enterprise’ and references to it as a discipline in a ‘healthy state’ must also be critically examined. The litmus test for assessing a discipline's achievement must be its content and not its popularity, political versatility or pragmatic relevance. Toffler (1965) critiqued the ‘culture boom’ in the United States during the postwar years, described as a cultural revolution or renaissance (Grana, 1964). As Americans began to crowd the theatres and art galleries during the early 1960s, many began to question what the emergence of ‘art affluence’ meant for contemporary society. The ‘art elitist’ referred to it as the vulgarization of art; others saw it as a cultural revolution. Toffler citing Mannes, argued that the booming industry of art was insufficient to conclude that American society had become more cultured.

I know people who have gone to concerts every week of their lives and say they love music, but most can't tell Bach from Haydn or know what a grace note is … Attendance, then, at a cultural event is alone not evidence of culture. (Toffler, 1965: 12)

Nor is the growth of criminological centres, journals, programmes, student numbers or contract research necessarily evidence of a discipline in a healthy or productive state. It is evidence of the market value of criminology but such value requires a critical examination. For some, such as Hillyard et al. (2003), this expansion in criminology ‘mystifies a range of perverse and … deeply disturbing trends in the content of criminology’, namely a ‘ceaseless chatter’ or noise about criminal justice practices driven by the political rhetoric of ‘evidence-based policy’ (1). At the same time, they argue that criminology fails to engage critically with the state or with notions of social and political order, while remaining silent about crimes of the powerful. This Foucauldian position of ‘garrulous discourse’ suggests that criminological knowledges have, thus far, been dominated by a self-serving or state-serving noise of narrowly defined notions of crime and criminality.

Criminology – and the need for a sociology of knowledge

Criminology as a viable and constructive knowledge or as a healthy discipline has been the subject of rigorous intellectual debate for decades. There have been several positions suggesting the ‘failure’ and crisis of criminology (see Taylor et al., 1973; Cohen, 1988; Braithwaite, 1989a; Smart, 1990; Daly and Maher, 1998 and so on). Chan (1994: 25) argues that the criminological research agenda is dominated by a pragmatic or applied element: ‘[I]s criminology losing its critical edge or have we fallen victim to the lure of relevance’?

This is an important question and one that this book examines. It is a question that requires a reflexive analysis of criminological discourses as well as one that demands an investigation of the notion of critique. What is the critical edge that criminology may be losing? And has ‘relevance’ become a key factor for the production and consumption of criminological knowledge? To address these questions, Pavlich (1998) argues that we must examine the ways in which criminology has developed within narrowly defined discourses of critique. He charts the lines of descent, or the genealogies, that have informed the development of various strains of thought within criminology and contends that critical genres within criminology are unreflexive, limited and historically fragmented. If we are to assert that critical commentary by criminological researchers may bring unwelcomed responses from governing authorities, we must ask why this is so. What does it mean to be critical within new modes of governance? This book will examine these questions through the lens of a sociology of knowledge. Inspired by the works of Michel Foucault, it examines how criminological knowledge comes about and takes form. What counts as knowledge? What is important and what is not? Why are certain forms of knowledge upheld as sophisticated, relevant and useful and others marginalized, neutralized, dismissed and disregarded – in what this book refers to as ‘deviant knowledge’.

In doing so, it emphasizes the importance of criminology's intellectual history and its contemporary politics, in what Barbara Hudson (2000) refers to as ‘critical reflection as research methodology’ (176–77).

The initial impetus for this book came from my previous and current experiences as a criminological researcher working at universities in Australia, New Zealand and Scotland. These experiences have involved the coordination of research under contract with various government agencies and the submission of written reports, as well as the provision of short-term, paid and non-paid, consultancies for verbal and written advice. Therefore, many of the questions that this book raises have emerged from my 12 years of conducting criminological research under various forms of ‘agreement’ with governments. Naturally, it would be insufficient to develop a book based solely on the above personal experience, and, therefore, the theoretical and analytical framework in this book has been informed by a series of 36 semi-structured interviews with scholars from Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand (see Appendix A and C).

I make no claims to be value-free in the creation of my argument. In the spirit of ‘standpoint epistemology’ I agree that ‘the creation of objective, value-free knowledge … is unrealistic’ (Hudson, 2000: 184), and while my ideological persuasions are influenced by critical social theory I have nevertheless approached this topic without prejudice and with careful attention to ideological perspectives, narratives and discourses. I recall reading Thucydides’ Pelopennesian War as a student of Greek history and remember his grappling with the issue of providing an unbiased account. He wrote:

I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions; either I was present myself at the events which I described or else I heard them from eye-witnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses gave different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or else from imperfect memories (Thucydides, 1, 22, cited in Warner and Finley, 1972: 11).

I'm not claiming to have been as thorough as Thucydides. His account of the Pelopennesian War was a magnum opus, which took him 27 years to research and write. That said, his above statement acted as a working principle for this book, namely, not to reach conclusions too early, but to investigate as thoroughly as possible the veracity of a given theme before making definitive statements.

Structure and Content

This book will use the terms ‘criminological research and/or knowledge’, ‘criminologies’ or ‘criminology’ interchangeably throughout. ‘Criminology’ was adopted as a unifying and neutral term in the late nineteenth century (Radzinowicz and Hood, 1986) in preference to value-laden and demarcating phrases such as ‘criminal biology’, ‘criminal psychology’ and ‘criminal sociology’ (Garland, 1997). Nowadays, some scholars speak of ‘criminologies’ in preference to ‘criminology’ in order to encapsulate the various narratives, which include a variety of ‘distinctive brand names’ (Carlen, 1998: 64), such as ‘Marxist’, ‘feminist’, ‘postmodernist’, ‘republican’, ‘administrative’, ‘realist’ and so on. This book argues that all criminologies are susceptible to differing degrees of governance. These regulations often take different forms and this book will distinguish between the different modes of governance that operate against specific forms of criminological knowledge.

This book uses the label ‘criminologist’ to identify those scholars engaging in criminological research, while recognizing that it is a term fraught with stigma and unwanted connotations. Interestingly, the title

‘criminologist’ is selectively used within academia. Academics working within schools of criminology often express resentment when referred to as ‘criminologists’, and individuals may opt for the more generic referents of ‘sociologist’ or ‘historian’, ‘feminist’ or ‘social theorist’. The origins and constestations within the discipline of criminology may provide valid explanations for an unwillingness to be constrained by what many interviewees in this research refer to as a ‘limiting title’; namely, one that fails to recognize the various levels or ‘metadebates’ (Cohen, 1998: 119) within studies of crime, knowledge, power and social order. As Ericson (1996) argues, academics working in criminological roles ‘cringe when they are asked by acquaintances who are not insiders to explain what criminology is. They cringe because they find it uncomfortable to be so unclear about the boundaries of Criminology’ (Ericson, 1996: 16). Perhaps this statement is somewhat hyperbolic; yet it serves to illustrate the ambiguous, disparate and expansive nature of criminological discourses. As such, criminology has been described as a ‘hotly contested terrain full of turf wars’ (Ericson, 1996: 17; cf. Nelken, 1994). The term ‘criminologist’ is, therefore, reluctantly used throughout the book and should be interpreted broadly to include those scholars who cross disciplinary boundaries to analyse discourses on crime, law and order, and deviance.

Throughout the book terms such as ‘governmentality’, ‘governance’ and ‘government’ appear. Inspired by the works of Foucault (1977a, 1978), researchers from various disciplines have examined new methods or technologies of rule in what is broadly...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Questions, contours and methods
• 2 Contours of criminological knowledge: haunted by a spirit of pragmatism?
• 3 Criminology, government and public policy
• 4 The politics and control of criminological knowledge
• 5 Silencing the critics: the ‘War on Terror’ and the suppression of dissent
• 6 New modes of governance and the commercialization of criminological knowledge
• 7 Reflections and new horizons
• Appendices
• References
• Index