Criminology

Theory and context

John Tierney, Maggie O'Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138134379
• eBook ISBN: 9781317903130
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Criminology: theory and context, third edition, expands upon the ideas presented in previous editions, while introducing new material on critical theory, feminism, masculinities, cultural criminology and postmodernism. The text has been thoroughly updated throughout to reflect key perspectives in contemporary criminological theory. Relevant updates include discussions on New Labour's criminal justice and penal policies in its third term in office, and the latest developments in criminal justice and the politics of law and order in the UK and US. This edition revisits societal and cultural influences that have shaped the discipline and invites the reader to re-examine the phenomena of crime and deviance.

Criminology: theory and context, third edition, is presented in a logical structure and adopts an accessible framework. The text is essential reading for students of criminology, criminological theory and criminal justice and will also be of key interest to those studying sociology, law and the wider social sciences.

Part I

Preliminaries and Early History

Chapter 1

Criminology, Crime and Deviance: Some Preliminaries

Key themes

• Good old common sense

• Setting the scene

• Criminology

• Crime

• Deviance

Introduction

This first chapter invites the reader to think critically about terms such as ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ and, indeed, the notion of ‘criminology’ itself. Challenging taken-for-granted, common-sense understandings is an important dimension to this. The chapter indicates some of the ongoing disputes and debates within criminology regarding its subject matter, conceptual language, research methodologies and purpose. The chapter includes a brief discussion of sources of crime-related data; this is returned to in the next chapter.

Good Old Common Sense

One of the tasks of criminology should be to question taken-for-granted assumptions regarding what crime and deviance are, what criminals are like, and so on. It should, in other words, question common-sense knowledge. However, as Howard Becker has pointed out, the term ‘common sense’ is used to mean two different things. Sometimes common sense describes an approved quality of mind:

the common man [sic], his head unencumbered by fancy theories and abstract professional notions, can at least see what is right there in front of his nose. Philosophies as disparate as pragmatism and Zen enshrine a respect for the common man’s ability to see, with Sancho Panza, that a windmill is really a windmill. [From now on, rather than clutter up the text with ‘sic’, whenever a quoted author uses such genderised language, disapprobation can be taken as given.]

(Becker, 1974: 50)

This meaning of common sense is found in injunctions such as ‘Use your common sense’, and, expressed like this, is difficult to criticise. In reality, though, it is not always easy to distinguish this common sense from the second type, though we all like to think of ourselves as Sancho Panza. This second, less estimable, way in which the term ‘common sense’ is used is described by Becker as follows:

Common sense, in one of its meanings, can delude us. That common sense is the traditional wisdom of the tribe, the mêlange of ‘what everybody knows’, that children learn as they grow up, the stereotypes of everyday life.

(Ibid.: 49)

Defined in this way, common sense refers to generally held views about the social world which in some cases can, and should, be contradicted, or at least questioned by the social sciences. As Becker describes it, there is the possibility of delusion, of being misled by common sense. This is congruent with the observation made by the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber: ‘That a belief is common is as likely to stamp it as a common superstition as a common truth’ (Kroeber, 1952: 27). From this perspective, generally held beliefs about the nature of crime, criminals, deviance and associated themes need to be carefully scrutinised and, if necessary, challenged. This challenge, though, involves more than just setting the record straight by providing ‘factual’ information. Fundamentally, it is to do with the taken-for-granted meanings of these categories. They are not neutral objects, given in nature, but are social constructions, and as such are the outcome of processes involving relationships of power. As Pat Carlen says: ‘the very task of theory is to engage in a struggle over the “meaning of things” (including all material and ideological constructs)’ (Carlen, 1992: 62).

Common sense is particularly active in debates about crime and criminals, and participants will, of course, insist that theirs is the ‘no nonsense’ rather than the ‘delusion’ variety. Over the years a steady stream of politicians, journalists, researchers and practitioners have, sometimes tentatively, sometimes confidently, explained the ‘causes of crime’, or announced a treatment/punishment package that they believe will actually work. We have had a bewildering galaxy of causal explanations, taking in bad genes, chromosome deficiencies, deformed personalities, unemployment, deprivation, trendy parents, lone parents, trendy lone parents, simple greed, blocked opportunities, peer group pressure, status frustration, too much money, too little money and artificial colouring in fish fingers. Suggested treatment/punishment regimes have been equally wide ranging, and some of them have been tried out. Thus offenders have been incarcerated in hulks on the River Thames, transported to Australia, hanged, pelted with eggs in village stocks, tortured in dungeons, given short sharp shocks in detention centres, injected with mind-altering drugs, sterilised, made to face their victims, sent on safari to Africa and locked up in prison. Each of these wildly varying causes and treatments may very well represent common sense for some people.

Setting the Scene

This first chapter will indicate some of the basic conceptual debates within criminology. This will entail a preliminary examination of how the academic terrain of criminology may be mapped out, and some of the attendant difficulties involved in defining the core terms ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’. The chapters that follow will examine these issues in greater detail.

One of the tasks of criminology is to unravel, or deconstruct, the concept of crime and in the process challenge common-sense understandings that are taken for granted. It is not uncommon for politicians and journalists, for instance, to ignore the complex structures and processes within which crime and criminality are constituted, and to rely instead on a dangerous rhetoric whereby crime is reduced to a simple causal factor. Critically questioning what is meant by ‘crime’ opens up a whole range of questions lying at the heart of the criminological enterprise such as:

1. What type of crime? It is commonplace for crime to be discussed as if it was more or less one specific type of behaviour, and the emphasis is usually on ‘conventional’ crime such as burglary and robbery. ‘Crime’, though, covers a vast number of quite different sorts of activity, including white-collar and corporate crime, domestic violence, ram-raiding, child sexual abuse, and rape.
2. Explanations of crime? Clearly, given the wide range of possibilities, it is futile to believe that one explanation can be found which covers all crime. Furthermore, even if one particular type of crime is examined, the problems involved in seeking out an explanation are still enormous. In fact, if we narrowed it down to one particular person who stole a bar of chocolate from a store, trying to explain why they did it raises immensely complex issues.
3. Who decides what is a crime? Crime only exists because laws exist; therefore crime is not a fixed, absolute quality of an act. Over the years laws change and vary from one society to another. Furthermore, although all legal jurisdictions are likely to have laws prohibiting, say, murder, there is wide variation in how this offence is defined. If we take as an example a case where someone is assaulted, goes into a coma, and subsequently dies. Whether or not the assailant can be charged with murder varies from one jurisdiction to another, depending upon, among other things, the length of time the victim is in a coma before they die.
4. When does a crime exist? This is an intriguing question. Some criminologists, loosely described as ‘realists’ – and not to be confused with left and right realists discussed later – approach crime statistics as if there exists a real, objective amount of crime ‘out there’. The task, then, is to develop suitable methods for accurately measuring these crimes. Others take an ‘institutionalist’ view and argue that crime rates are socially constructed: that is, they are produced by organisational behaviour and various subjective processes on the part of, say, the police. More extreme versions go further and argue from a ‘constitutive’ position that ‘crime’ itself does not have an independent existence, but is socially constructed. Thus crime is seen as a social entity created not by an offender, but by control agents who, in specific cases, designate an act as ‘criminal’. From this perspective, crime is a product of various processes mediating between an original act and a final judgement regarding its criminal or non-criminal status. Using this reasoning they reject, for example, the view that last night a certain number of cases of ‘threatening behaviour’ occurred in the town centre, and yet only some were discovered, the remainder forming part of the ‘dark figure’ of crime. Thus, because this offence is dependent on interpretations by, say, the police, it cannot exist as a ‘real’ thing detached from these interpretive processes. Crime is therefore not conceptualised in the same way that, for instance, the number of individuals carrying the Aids virus is conceptualised. Some have argued that a crime only exists as a social entity when a court finds a person guilty.

It is important to appreciate that debates regarding the definition of key terms are not merely semantic quarrels, a luxurious digression from the real business of criminology. Because phenomena such as crime and deviance are not theoretically neutral objects waiting ‘out there’ to be identified and analysed, it is necessary to consider seriously how best to conceptualise these areas of study. How they are conceptualised will have profound implications for the types of theories developed. Unfortunately, for a large part of its history academic criminology has often not suspended what Colin Sumner calls ‘a commonsensical acceptance of these categories’ (Sumner, 1990: 26). As a result, many analyses have proceeded within a conceptual framework built upon ‘what everyone knows’, with crime and deviance treated as if they were non-problematical, ahistorical categories of harmful/immoral behaviour. This is not necessarily because criminologists have been, or are, unaware of the conceptual difficulties inherent in these categories. In practice, a criminologist will often put the debate to one side because it is not thought relevant to the particular project in hand. The bracketing off of these fundamental conceptual debates is, perhaps, most vividly apparent when the mass media – say, television – invite a criminologist to comment on a crime-related issue. Due to the structural constraints imposed by the genre itself, with its demands for bite-sized nuggets of sagacity, the criminologist who launches into a detailed critique of the concept of crime is unlikely to be asked back again.

The complexity of these definitional issues makes life difficult for writers of introductory textbooks, and for those delivering introductory lectures in criminology. Usually the problems are resolved, or at least temporarily ameliorated, by offering a brief discussion on why defining criminology is complex, and why basic terms such as ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ are difficult to define and measure. Following an overview, en passant, of ‘problems with crime statistics’, and ‘crime as a socially constructed entity’, the rest of the chapters or lectures may proceed, sustained by a few working definitions. This partly accounts for the heavy use of inverted commas in such textbooks (or, in the case of a lecture, the frequent use of jiggling fingers as sign language for inverted commas). The vocabulary of criminology is replete with terms requiring this treatment, for example, ‘true’ or ‘real’ crime rates, the ‘dark figure’ of crime, ‘deviant’, ‘mad’, ‘bad’, ‘pervert’, ‘immoral’, ‘meaningless violence’, ‘hooligan’, ‘undersocialised’, ‘sick’, ‘maladjusted’, ‘hyperactive’, and so on. Essentially, the message being transmitted, quite correctly, is that these are risky concepts.

Criminology

It would be reasonable for students of criminology to ask at the outset: What is criminology and what do criminologists do? The complexities surrounding this apparently simple enquiry can be indicated by noting that it is not unusual for elderly criminologists still to be debating these questions as they head for their dotage. The term ‘criminology’ obviously suggests that ‘crime’ lies at its core, and the Shorter Oxford Dictionary stretches the definition to ‘the scientific study of crime’. This, however, merely points the student in a general direction. As a definition it is loaded with interesting epistemological problems. From a more academic viewpoint, A Dictionary of Criminology defines criminology as:

The study of crime, of attempts to control it, and attitudes to it. Crime is interpreted in its widest sense, so as to include minor as well as major law-breaking, and also conduct which, but for the special status or role of those involved, would be regarded as lawbreaking; e.g. excessive punishment of children by parents, antisocial practices of commercial undertakings.

(Walsh and Poole, 1983: 56)

Moreover, a glance at the four editions of The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Maguire et al., 1994, 1997, 2002, 2007), for instance, indicates the wide range of activities in which criminology takes an interest: the politics of law and order; crime data; violent, white-collar, professional and organised crime; crime prevention; policing; pre-trial processes; sentencing policies; probation and community sanctions; prisons; ‘race’, gender and mental disorder and crime; victims, and so on.

And what of ‘deviance’? If criminology is the study of crime, can criminologists study deviance and still work within recognised academic parameters? During the 1960s a large number of academics, some of whom had previously described themselves as criminologists, began to call themselves sociologists of deviance. This signalled a shift from the study of crime, as such, to the study of a broader range of rule-breaking activities, some illegal, some not. Today there are those who continue the sociology of deviance tradition, but academics have on the whole reverted back to the label of ‘criminologist’, though they may well engage in the study of what they see as non-criminal forms of deviance (having said that, quite a few working in this field, however, use the term as a flag of convenience).

Although there are clearly basic parameters whereby criminology has an identity and recognisable shape, it is by no means a totally integrated, theoretically homogeneous discipline. Internal divisions and disputes can be outlined as follows.

A range of disciplines

Over the years, those describing themselves as criminologists have based their work on many different academic disciplines, first one, then another, becoming dominant. As Stan Cohen puts it: ‘Somewhat like a parasite, criminology attaches itself to its host subjects (notably, law, psychology, psychiatry, and sociology) and drew from them methods, theories and credibility’ (Cohen, 1988: 4). At the same time, representatives of the various disciplines have given temporary attention to issues of crime and criminality, without, as it were, leaving their original discipline and emigrating to criminology. Frances Heidensohn (1989: 3) paints a suitable image:

crime has sometimes featured as a social science tourist attraction, a Taj Mahal or Tower of Pisa, which everyone visits – once. Hence major theorists such as Durkheim, Parsons or Merton have made key but brief appearances on the crime scene.

Competing focuses

Crimino...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the third edition
• Introduction
• Part I Preliminaries and Early History
• Part II World War Two to the Mid-1960s
• Part III The Mid-1960s to the Early 1970s
• Part IV The 1970s
• Part V The 1980s to the Mid-1990s
• Part VI The Mid-1990s into the New Millennium
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index