Public Criminology?

Ian Loader, Richard Sparks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136931529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society? How do, and how should, its practitioners engage with politics and public policy? How can criminology find a voice in an agitated, insecure and intensely mediated world in which crime and punishment loom large in government agendas and public discourse? What collective good do we want criminological enquiry to promote?

In addressing these questions, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks offer a sociological account of how criminologists understand their craft and position themselves in relation to social and political controversies about crime, whether as scientific experts, policy advisors, governmental players, social movement theorists, or lonely prophets. They examine the conditions under which these diverse commitments and affiliations arose, and gained or lost credibility and influence. This forms the basis for a timely articulation of the idea that criminology's overarching public purpose is to contribute to a better politics of crime and its regulation.

Public Criminology? offers an original and provocative account of the condition of, and prospects for, criminology which will be of interest not only to those who work in the fields of crime, security and punishment, but to anyone interested in the vexed relationship between social science, public policy and politics.

1

THE CONDITION OF CONTEMPORARY CRIMINOLOGY

CRIMINOLOGY TODAY: A SUCCESSFUL FAILURE?

Consider the following two reflections on the state of, and prospects for, criminology uttered by two past Presidents of the American Society of Criminology:

The strength of our numbers and the core characteristics of our discipline position us to be one of the central disciplines of the twenty-first century.

(Zahn 1999: 1)

Several signs suggest that this influence [on criminal justice policy and practice] is weakening and that our research and analysis may be becoming less relevant to the practices and problems of the system than they used to be.

(Petersilia 1990: 1)

It is no doubt true that Presidential addresses to academic conferences invite these kinds of dramatic diagnoses and prognoses – whether optimistic or gloomy. Yet these contrasting assessments of the condition of contemporary criminology are of wider importance because they capture what has of late assumed the status of orthodoxy – in Anglo-American criminology at least. In a reaction essay in Criminology and Public Policy, James Austin trenchantly summarizes this orthodox position: ‘Despite the annual publication of hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and textbooks proudly displayed at our annual conventions, policy makers are paying little if any attention to us’ (Austin 2003: 557). Cullen (2005: 2) similarly notes that ‘most criminological research, including mine, is ignored’ before going on to recount a tale which stands as an exception to the generally understood rule.

This orthodoxy highlights a paradox of ‘successful failure’. On the one hand, so the argument runs, criminology is booming. We have in recent years been witness to new courses and textbooks, more jobs, more students, new journals, more and larger conferences, bigger and new professional associations, the creation and awarding of prizes – in short, and against the inclinations and expectations of some of its leading figures, the entire paraphernalia and institutional apparatus of a discipline (Kerner 1998; Garland 2010). It is this state of affairs which underpins Zahn's confident assertion. On the other hand, this has coincided with, may even have been an effect of, the rising prominence of crime within the mundane culture and political programmes of a number of western societies, and the increasing drift towards more punitive solutions to crime and more intrusive approaches to security issues that is evident today. Viewed in this light, against the backdrop of the field's marginality to a penal culture that has become harsh, shrill and rarely informed by its findings, the recent success and future directions of criminology seem more uncertain. This is the state of affairs that Petersilia is so concerned about.

Different diagnoses typically accompany this observation. One of these detects a fall in demand for criminological knowledge within the institutions of government and wider society. As criminology has grown and its research output and potential to inform public policy has mushroomed, so government has turned its face. It has become less willing to commission or attend to independent criminological enquiry into crime problems, drawn towards a more compliant research consultancy market and increasingly pursues policy agendas that dance to the tune of other voices – typically those pressed by the media, or gleaned from focus groups or opinion polls. There has, in the process, been a weakening of the shared assumptions about what government can and should responsibly do to govern crime in a democratic society around which criminologists, government officials and senior practitioners were once able, from their respective institutional locations, to make common cause. This has been coupled with the propensity of government to encroach – in the name of public safety – upon the Enlightenment values and legal protections which many criminologists continue to hold dear.

A second, contrasting, analysis pinpoints a shortfall in the supply of criminological goods of sufficient quality or relevance. This in fact is the diagnosis that Petersilia offers. Criminologists, she claims, have become insular and insulated, habituated by their training and reward structures to publish in journals read only by other criminologists and refrain from disseminating their work in wider settings (Petersilia 1990: 8–9). But the argument has also been pressed by others – both by those working inside government (Wiles 2002) and by academic criminologists urging their colleagues to subject ill-informed, punitive penal agendas to public challenge (Currie 2007). The growth of criminology, their contention goes, has been accompanied by criminologists turning away from government and public life. The result is a profession absorbed in a world of arcane journals and conferences; a field which lacks the research skills that can assist in solving contemporary crime problems and whose practitioners are unwilling or unable to engage audiences beyond the academy. The more criminology has grown, in other words, the more it has fractured into self-referential specialisms that have lost their connection with the public concerns that they ostensibly address, and which provide criminology with its raison d'etre. In an interview with one of the present authors, a senior figure in British criminology spoke of a ‘mutual moving apart’ between criminology and government and of criminological practitioners who ‘have no idea how to talk to policy-makers’.¹ He continued:

Where is the oppositional political criminology? Where are the researchers who are actually challenging government policy on the basis of evidence and research? Where is that kind of criminology in this country? I don't know about you, but I don't see that debate.

These, then, are the elements of what has become a common and influential interpretation of the condition of contemporary Anglo-American criminology. But how accurate an assessment is it?

AN APPARENT PARADOX, REAL DILEMMAS

It is, in our judgement, wise to pause before accepting, without significant qualification, this characterization of the situation of criminology today and the explanations that accompany it. Let us consider three reasons why.

The first calls into questions the terms that make up the awkward, curious notion of ‘successful failure’ – both their application and their meaning. We might ask here whether, as a matter of empirical fact, criminology is failing, or being reduced to a marginal place within a shrill, populist penal culture. Are there not plenty of examples – to put a neutral gloss on it – of criminology remaining closely connected with, and influential upon, crime control and penal policy – think of situational crime prevention, or problem-oriented policing, or preventative interventions focused on risk and protective factors, or restorative justice programmes; or even of criminological concepts having altered the vocabulary within which contemporary societies think about crime and its control – moral panics, police culture, hot-spots, designing out crime? One might note, further, that national and sub-national governments, criminal justice institutions and many forms of media continue to seek out – if not always to heed – criminological wisdom and advice. Some of these – notably, in a British context, the police – have demonstrably become closer to, rather than more remote from, criminology in the last two decades.² And one can record that processes of responsibilization, pluralization and globalization have resulted in a proliferation of both the range and number of agencies involved in the governance of crime (to include, inter alia, housing authorities, private corporations, national and transnational NGOs, and the European Union) and the demand for, and opportunities to promote, criminological knowledge and expertise. The empirical picture is to say the least uneven, an unevenness which complicates any one-dimensional tale about criminology's waning influence and marginality (Young 2003; Zedner 2003).

Yet even were one to accept that today criminology exercises little influence in contexts dominated by popular emotion and political expediency – why call this failure. Has criminology really ‘failed’ simply because political rulers or criminal justice actors choose to pursue crime and penal policies in ignorance – wilful or otherwise – of its hard-earned lessons? Surely this is akin to blaming toxicologists rather than the food producers or retailers for an outbreak of food poisoning among a supermarket's customers. The task of criminology is – to recall Edwin Sutherland's still hard-to-beat definition of the field – to generate knowledge about ‘the processes of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting toward the breaking of laws’ (Sutherland et al. 1992: 3). It is not to be expert in getting others to accept or act upon that knowledge – a task that anyway lies largely beyond criminologists’ individual or collective control. Why, moreover, should we assume or accept that governmental bodies are the principal audience for criminological research? One might equally retort that the hallmark of scientific enquiry is that its exponents interact first and foremost with one another in search of answers to internally generated intellectual puzzles, not externally set agendas. Conversely, one cannot simply assume that because criminology appears in good health when measured by the yardsticks described above (more conferences, students, journals, etc.) that this necessarily makes it a ‘success’. One judges the field by the quality of its efforts to understand and explain those aspects of the social world that are brought under its gaze, not by totting up the number of outputs produced. The total may, after all, be largely an effect of ‘massive overproduction and loss of quality control’ (Abbott 2006: 206).

We need, secondly, to recognize the parochialism, or at least specificity, of the idea of successful failure. This depiction emerges from – and makes at least some sense in – the USA and England and Wales, societies where a criminology that was once closer to centres of power, and once ‘cautioned the nation about underlying social needs and problems’ (Skolnick 1994: 2), has seen its expansion inside universities coincide with the decline of a receptive constituency within government who shared criminology's commitments and were minded to call upon its practitioners for counsel and advice. It is a process one of us has elsewhere described as the fall of the ‘Platonic guardians’ (of whom criminologists counted as associate members); one which underpins and helps account for the tendency of some US and English criminologists to bemoan – but rarely explain – their loss of influence and the alleged irrationality of contemporary political responses to crime (e.g. Blumstein 1993; Radzinowicz 1999; see further, Loader 2006). We might thus acknowledge that the successful failure paradox illuminates some aspects of crime control in those political cultures which have been most radically reshaped by neo-liberalism since the 1970s and where penal policy has become more punitive in substance and populist in style, as well as pinpointing certain of the tensions and dilemmas that this creates for criminology.

It is much less clear, however, that this depiction speaks to, or helps us makes sense of, the condition of criminology elsewhere. If one looks across Europe, for example, a more diverse picture emerges. There are societies in which criminological research has an established place in government and inside universities (France) or has recently undergone rapid expansion (the Netherlands), but where the field's claims and concerns have nonetheless been displaced as government anti-crime agendas have taken a more punitive turn. But elsewhere, one encounters places where crime and punishment has retained a relatively low profile within politics and society and where criminology has little autonomous institutional existence (Germany and Italy); societies where criminologists have played an active public role in creating and sustaining relatively mild penal systems (Finland, Norway and Sweden); and societies where criminology remains a fledgling activity striving to establish itself in the face of governmental inattention – whether in countries such as the Republic of Ireland and Spain, or in post-communist societies such as Estonia and Poland. These are simply not societies where the idea of successful failure makes a great deal of sense as a depiction of the condition of criminology or its relation to the social and political world.³

The notion of successful failure risks, thirdly, being rather too charitable towards criminology and sociologically incurious in the rendition it gives of its current status, fortunes and intersections with politics and policy-making. It rests, in particular, on an express or implied self-understanding of criminology as a restraining, civilizing force seeking to protect, even salvage, a liberal criminal justice and penal system from an ill-informed, punitive populace and political rulers who are today irresponsibly or self-interestedly minded to give voters what they demand.⁴ If there were more criminology around, and decision-makers took more notice of it, then things would by definition be better. There may, for reasons already given (and explored further in later chapters) be some good grounds for this self-presentation. But it too easily forgets, and neglects to come to terms with, the (continued) embeddedness of criminological practitioners, research and categories in the circuits of governmental and penal power, and criminology's role in generating, disseminating and reproducing forms of common sense about crime and punishment.

Criminology is and remains, as Dario Melossi has pointed out, a not to be under-estimated producer of ‘representations of the criminal’ (Melossi 2000, 2008). In this regard, he argues, the preponderance of criminology's symbolic work has flowed with, rather than against, the prevailing cultural tide, displaying affinity with and sympathy for offenders at moments of the twentieth century when this was the dominant structure of feeling (the 1920s and the 1960s) and distance from and antipathy towards offenders when the public and political mood swung against them (the 1970s onwards).⁵ Whatever the merits of Melossi's specific claims, his wider point is well taken: criminological discourse may be best apprehended and investigated not only or mainly as an oppositional or counter-cultural force doing battle against the agents of penal regression, but as ‘part of the warp and weft of modern culture, articulating the mentalities and sensibilities of the age in a particular form and for a particular purpose’ (Garland 1992: 420). Bourdieu generalizes this point in a manner that criminologists would be wise to ponder. ‘Attentive observation of the course of the world’, he says, ‘should incline them to more humility, because it is clear that intellectual powers are most efficacious when they are exercised in the same direction as the immanent tendencies of the social world’ (Bourdieu 2000: 3).

We will take up this issue in due course. For now we hope to have done enough to show why the paradox of successful failure only partially illuminates, and in some ways obscures, the condition of contemporary criminology. Yet as this paradox crumbles, or we at least leave it behind, a series of real dilemmas moves into view – dilemmas that the idea of successful failure in part helped to highlight, and which do indeed confront criminologists today, however much they vary in their intensity and precise form across different jurisdictional settings. These dilemmas have three elements that are worthy of immediate note. They are, first, very far from being novel or of recent vintage. The issue of how to reconcile the competing claims of autonomy and engagement, knowledge production and social relevance raises questions about the relationship between social science and politics that are as old as the social sciences themselves and, indeed, duly exercised their founders. Secondly, they are open to being addressed in a number of ways – most often through the medium of personal, and always potentially narcissistic, reflection and stance-taking (whether public or private) among individual scholars, or by means of an – all too often ahistorical – journey into and through the philosophy of social science. Nor, it should be added thirdly, are they amenable to any easy, definitive resolution.

None of this is sufficient though to gainsay their contemporary relevance and importance. The predicaments they create cannot, in our view, be wished away, especially by those working in that corner of the social sciences which is concerned with rule making and breaking – matters that are of intense concern to the institutions of social regulation and penal control, and to the co-citizens of those who specialize in their study. The issues of what topics criminologists work on, how they work on them, the forms of knowledge they strive to produce, the audiences they envisage for their work, the intersections between that work and government, the positions criminologists assume and interventions they make in wider public controversies about crime, punishment, security and the like – the issue, in short, of what criminology is for; these are conundrums that have long vexed – and ought properly to vex – those who embark on the social analysis of crime and punishment.

Yet they arise for consideration today in a world radically altered from that in which the field of criminology was formed in the late nineteenth century; or the one in which criminology developed an affinity with the institutions, practices and values of penal-welfarism during the middle decades of the twentieth; or the world in which socialists, feminists and conservatives revolted against criminological liberalism in the 1970s. We will have more to say about these altered conditions of criminological practice – what we shall call the ‘heating up’ of crime and criminology – in Chapter 3. For now, suffice it to say that contemporary criminology is shaped by, and seeks to shape, a world in which security questions have become paramount; a world where crime and punishment tend – albeit unevenly – to assume more prominent and contentious places in the political cultures and social relations of contemporary societies; a world dominated and reconfigured by dizzying technological change and a ‘24/7’ media culture; a world in which the ‘local’ and ‘global’ interact in ways that have potentially profound ramifications for crime and its control. These are times, in short, that call into doubt the answers that might once have been adequately given to the question of criminology's public roles; that bring this question sharply back into focus and delimit in new ways the plausible answers that one may give to it. For all these reasons, the whole issue stands pressingly in need of more sustained comparative enquiry and sociological analysis than it has tended thus far to receive.

THE ‘PROBLEM’ OF CRIMINOLOGICAL PLURALISM

There have been signs of late that these matters have begun to receive renewed attention and debate. This is no doubt prompted in part by the altered background conditions that we have just briefly described. But it has also been a direct response to Michael Burawoy's recent efforts to address these questions in the neighbouring field of sociology and to promote what he calls ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy 2005a, 2005b). This is an important intervention and we devote the next chapter to an extended consideration of Burawoy's argument and the debate about public social science that it has provoked. For now, we want simply to register and reflect upon the manner in which these issues have been translated into the field of criminology and on their relation to some existing positions and recurring tendencies that are to be found within that field.

The idea of a ‘public criminology’ has surfaced of late in various places – in articles (Groombridge 2007; Uggen and Inderbitzen 2010); in the rousing conclusions of two recent books (Hughes 2007: ch. 8; Carrabine et al. 2008: 452–54); in a special issue of Theoretical Criminology (Chancer and McLaughlin 2007); and in two ‘public criminology’ blogs, one hosted in the USA the other in the United Kingdom.⁶ The reframing of some old questions of ...

Table of contents

• FRONT COVER
• PUBLIC CRIMINOLOGY?
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE CONDITION OF CONTEMPORARY CRIMINOLOGY
• 2 THE PUBLIC SOCIAL SCIENCE DEBATE
• 3 CRIMINOLOGY IN A HOT CLIMATE
• 4 COOLING DEVICES
• 5 CRIMINOLOGY AS A DEMOCRATIC UNDER-LABOURER
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX