International Criminology

A Critical Introduction

Rob Watts, Judith Bessant, Richard Hil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134083336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Procédure pénale

International Criminology is an easy-access critical introduction to how conventional criminologists in the international arena think about and research crime. By using examples from the US, UK and Australia, the authors outline key ideas, vocabulary, assumptions and findings of the discipline while opening up a set of critical underlying issues and problems.

From theoretical traditions to historical perspectives; contemporary criminology to reflexive criminology; this all encompassing text covers it all. This is the most valuable introduction to international criminology available for undergraduates and works as a superb refresher for more experienced students.

PART I
THEORETICAL TRADITIONS AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

The first part of this book introduces some of the central ideas, theoretical traditions and key debates that make the past and present of criminology.

In Chapter 1 we start with the core idea of crime itself. A few simple questions are asked about the idea of crime itself. What does it mean? How have criminologists understood crime? Is crime a straightforward sort of idea? Does the word ‘crime’ for example name certain human activities in the same way that ‘running’ and ‘jumping’ do? Can we count crimes and, if so, how do we count them? Even in this apparently simple exercise we come across some quite complex issues.

These issues suggest that there is more at stake than offering a simple definition or assuming that the ‘facts’ speak for themselves. As David Garland (1990:12) observes, this is a problem because ‘crime’ like so many other kinds of social activities is itself an interpreted matter. Far from being an objective matter like the number of wheels on a car, what counts as ‘crime’ depends on people making all sorts of interpretations and judgements and doing so differently according to time and place.

Attention is then given to one of the key questions that gives grief to some criminologists, namely: How much crime is there in any society at any given moment? Contemporary criminologists like Coleman and Moynihan (1996) talk about the ‘dark figure of crime’ to refer to the idea that we can determine the actual amount of crime going on in any society. We identify some of the problems associated with attempts to get an objective measure of the amount of crime in the USA or in England.

In Chapters 2, 3 and 4 we turn to the history of criminology, focussing on the last decades of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. This is not just history for its own sake. As will become clear, contemporary criminologists, like the other social scientists, rely on assumptions, ideas and ways of understanding which have been around for a long time. A history based on a sharp memory reveals that some things change while other things remain constant, an idea which challenges the simplistic idea that the history of criminology is a history of progress.

In Chapter 4 the focus is on some of the important criminologists who have been critical of conventional criminology. There have always been people sceptical about attempts to develop a ‘science of crime’. A number of different critical ideas surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s especially which continue to offer important and interesting ways of thinking differently about crime.

1
WHAT IS CRIME? HOW CRIMINOLOGISTS THINK ABOUT CRIME

A common-sense approach to criminology suggests that it must have something to do with crime. As Abe Fattah says, the concept of crime is as central to criminology as the concept of society is to sociology. Fattah (1997:29) suggests that criminology ‘may be loosely defined as the “study of crime” or as the “science of crime” and a definition of crime is therefore essential for our understanding of what criminology is all about’. However, as Fattah goes on to show, ‘crime’, like so many other key concepts central to the social sciences, e.g. ‘poverty’ or ‘unemployment’, is not all that easily defined.

In this respect criminology is just like sociology, economics or psychology. Each of these disciplines can be identified by the vocabularies or ‘key words’ their practitioners use, as well as by the arguments they advance. We will use the word ‘argument’ here not so much to suggest that criminologists are always shouting at each other – although this happens sometimes at conferences – but rather as a way of talking about the knowledge-claims we make. The idea of argument which relies on an analytical approach, spelled out by Stephen Toulmin (1961), tries to encapsulate the ongoing process of research and debate which is involved as criminological knowledge is created, criticized and is changed.

One way to begin to come to terms with criminology is to establish how criminologists deal with a key concept like crime. We may get a sense of what the discipline is by finding out how criminologists understand this key concept and how they then try to establish how much crime there is in a given society. We also want to spell out a simple but useful analytical framework for thinking about the knowledge-claims made by criminologists and how they use a word like ‘theory’.

Let us begin by asking what is crime?

What is crime?

Words like ‘crime’, ‘murder’, ‘suicide’ or ‘violence’ are frequently used by people as if their meanings are self-evident and can be applied easily to some simple fact or activity. For many people who are not criminologists, the idea of crime may be so ‘obvious’ that they do not think twice about it. After all, the newspapers, TV news and Hollywood films make it plain what crime is, so why bother defining it or thinking about it? It is therefore sobering to find a respected criminologist like Fattah (1997:37) arguing that ‘there is no universal or agreed upon definition [of crime] … It means different things to different people … all attempts to define it are doomed.’

Surely this cannot be right. Don’t we have dictionaries that are designed to clear up any confusion? A recurrent idea throughout this book is that concepts like crime and violence are not as straightforward as many people want to believe. This realization may lead us to reflect on the problems that arise when we use words without thinking.

So let us ask the question ‘What is crime?’ and start with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition. The OED defines ‘crime’ both as ‘an act punishable by law’ or as ‘an evil or injurious act’. Already this definition opens up some major issues. This distinction which is an important one needs some thinking about.

The Anglo-American legal tradition has long distinguished between two kinds of act, namely:

‘acts that are evil in themselves’;

‘acts that are prohibited’.

Is this distinction between ‘evil acts’ and ‘prohibited acts’ a sensible one? What does it mean to say that there are some acts that are ‘evil in themselves’ or that are intrinsically ‘evil’?

Crime as a universal evil?

Wilson and Herrnstein (1985), two well-known neo-conservative criminologists, advanced the idea that some activities are intrinsically bad or evil. They say that some human behaviours like homicide, incest, rape, theft and robbery are intrinsically and universally evil. They argue (1985:22) that crimes like these are ‘condemned in all societies, and in all historical periods, by ancient tradition, moral sentiments and formal law’.

Wilson and Herrnstein’s claim may sound reasonable until the devil that lies in the detail is disturbed. Mountains of historical and anthropological research contradict Wilson and Herrnstein’s claim.

What do we make, for example, of the legal marriages contracted between brothers and sisters in ancient Egypt, an activity usually defined as incest (Boswell 1994:128)? To be quite blunt about it, all of the activities that are likely to make the readers – and the writers – of this book shudder in horror, like

cannibalism,

incest,

the ritual killing of children for religious or magical purposes, or

sexual relations between very young people and adults,

have all been normal and admired aspects of some societies, somewhere, at some time.

Even more confounding to the belief that there are universal ideas about what constitutes ‘evils’ or crimes is the discovery that an activity widely understood to be undeniably ‘evil’ or unacceptable was not treated as a crime by the relevant criminal law system. How should we understand the widespread sanctioning of European slave traders engaging in the kidnapping of millions of black Africans for sale in the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade? What of the wholesale theft of land from indigenous peoples in so-called ‘regions of recent settlement’ (like Australia, Canada, the USA, South Africa or Brazil)? How should we think about the official sale and distribution of opium in China by the British government into the 1850s? What do we say of the deliberate policy of the British government to starve millions of Indians to death in 1877–78 (Davis 2001)?

This point is well illustrated by the tangled history of attempts to make genocide a crime (Rubinstein 2004). Genocide involves the killing of very large numbers of people for political, religious or ethnic reasons. No one could sensibly deny that genocide is truly evil. The major cases of genocide, beginning with the Armenians in 1916–17 through the killings of Europe’s Jews by the Nazi state after 1941 or the US Marine Corps killing of tens of thousands of defenceless indigenous people on Okinawa in 1945 (Cameron 1994), to the killing of millions of people in Indonesia (1965–66), Cambodia (1972–74), East Timor (1976–77) or Rwanda (1994), seem to render the meaning of ‘crime’ almost redundant. The United Nations Convention on Genocide (1948) has long defined genocide as a ‘crime against humanity’. Yet it is governments mostly which organize and carry out the killings. It is governments too that determine and ratify the legal code within the nation state, and it is governments that render the perpetrators of genocide largely immune to prosecution. Governments such as that of the USA – which started a ‘War on Terrorism’ in September 2001 – have refused to ratify the international anti-genocide convention. Others that have ratified the convention, like Australia, have not passed the requisite legislation to make it a crime in those countries. This allows people alleged to have committed genocide to reside in Australia immune from criminal prosecution.

The same point needs to be made about ‘terrorism’ especially after the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. The US government rightly condemned those attacks on civilians. Yet the US State Department’s attempt to exclude state-sponsored terrorism from its definition of terrorism points up the problem, especially when we recall the judgment by the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the American government for its terrorism against civilians in El Salvador in 1987 (Draper 1991). (On that occasion the US government simply refused to accept the court’s jurisdiction and refused to pay the hefty fines imposed.)

In short there are problems with claiming that some acts are so evil that they are always universally treated as criminal activities. If the reader believes that Wilson and Herrnstein are right, then he or she should try to nominate one kind of human conduct that has been universally condemned as being too evil to be tolerated. While people may want to believe that ‘crime’ is whatever is obviously ‘evil’, the stubborn fact is that ‘crime’ is not always obvious, objective or simple. Wilkins (1965:46) made the point that ‘at some time or another, some form of society or another has defined almost all forms of behaviour that we now call criminal as desirable for the functioning of that form of society’.

Crime is what the law says it is?

To deal with the problem that there are no universally defined activities that are always criminal because evil, it has been suggested that ‘crime’ is whatever the criminal law says it is. Michael and Adler (1933:2) suggest that ‘the most precise and least ambiguous definition is that crime which is prohibited by the criminal code’. Yet how useful is the idea that ‘crime’ refers to those acts ‘that are prohibited’ by law?

The idea that ‘crime’ is whatever a given government chooses to define as crime has the merit of being unambiguous, even simple. It certainly reflects a realistic approach to the problem. Yet this approach too poses some difficult problems and questions. For example, within countries like the USA or Australia, which happen to have federal systems of state governments each with their own criminal laws and multiple jurisdictions, the same activity may or may not be treated as a crime. This suggests why it was possible that while some American states made anal intercourse – or ‘sodomy’ – between a husband and wife illegal for much of the twe...