Liquid Criminology

Doing imaginative criminological research

Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Sandra Walklate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472455239
• eBook ISBN: 9781317104827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the ways in which criminological methods can be imaginatively deployed and developed in a world increasingly characterized by the blurred nature of social reality. Whilst recognizing the importance of positivist approaches and research techniques, it advocates a commitment to understanding the ways in which those techniques can be used imaginatively, at times in combination with less conventional methods, discussing the questions concerning risk, ethics and access that arise as a result. Giving voice to cutting edge research practices both in terms of concepts and methods that shift the criminological focus towards the kind of imaginative work that comprised the foundations of the discipline, it calls into question the utility and credentials of mainstream work that fails to serve the discipline itself or the policy questions allied to it. A call not to 'give up on numbers' but also not to be defined by statistics and the methods that produce them, Liquid Criminology sheds light on a way of doing research for criminology that is not only creative but also critical. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, criminology and social policy with interests in research methods and design.

Part I

Using conventional methods imaginatively

1 Doing imaginative criminology

Pat Carlen

Introduction

It is nearly 50 years since I first read C. Wright Mills’ Sociological Imagination. I read it before I began my sociology studies at London University, and though I did not fully understand it (at that time, indeed, I had never even heard of the sociological debates referred to), I do remember consciously taking away one thing from that seminal work. I gleaned that sociology is about making connections between seemingly disparate historical and present-day social phenomena in order to produce new knowledge of the relationships between them. And also that, because all disciplines, models, paradigms, definitions and statistics necessarily delimit meanings and lead to ideological closure, it is desirable, in order to create new knowledge, constantly to deny the already-known by crossing disciplines, puncturing models, denying paradigms, questioning definitions and going behind the statistics to get some inkling of why they take the form they do. Of course, I didn’t put it like that at the time. Rather, in 1967, I fitted Mills into a worldview that I already espoused – and without realising that I had just read one of the greatest books in sociology.

In 1910, in Howard’s End, the English novelist E. M. Forster used the epigram ‘only connect’ to capture his novel’s philosophical vision that, in order to understand how other people can have very different worldviews from ourselves, we need to appreciate the differing geographical and historical conditions in which their rationalities and sensibilities have been fashioned, and to read their biographies within the elemental emotional, cultural, ideological, political and historical components which, in different combinations, render each of us unique. Again, Forster in his book – he was primarily concerned with reconciling pairs of opposites – did not put it quite like that in 1910, and nor did I when I read Howard’s End in 1957. But by 1968, when I began my sociology degree, I was already imbued with a vague sense that new knowledge is generated from a bricolage of concepts and conceits that thinkers put together when the already-known forms of knowing do not seem quite adequate to investigation of the topic in question. This, I later came to understand, is the same process (though from innumerable disciplinary or artistic perspectives and achieved with varying degrees of competence, talent or artistry) that allows physical scientists, social scientists and artists of various kinds to imagine new possibilities for glimpsing the presently unknown, hearing the presently unheard, feeling the presently unfelt, thinking the presently unthinkable and, if they are of radical political persuasion, speaking the presently unspeakable.

Lacking belief in any compelling disciplinary focus, I have never had a strong (or exclusive) commitment to any ‘position’ in sociology. Questions as to whether anyone is a positivist, a functionalist, a symbolic interactionist – or any of the more modern ‘brands’ of sociologist, e.g. public, postmodernist or whatever – just leave me cold. ‘If that is so’, I hear you saying, ‘Why use the terms “sociologist”, or “criminologist” at all? What is “sociological” about “sociology” – and, more to the point here, what is “imaginative” about “imaginative criminology”?’ In reply, I will outline what I see to be the ‘promise’ of ‘imaginative criminology’ and then what I understand to be its ‘craft’. Meanwhile, two definitions: ‘sociological criminologist’ in this chapter refers to any academic whose fundamental rules of engagement with crime issues stem from academic perspectives relating to the social meanings of social phenomena, while ‘imaginative criminology’ refers to attempts to make new connections between the diverse conditions of existence of contemporary crime and justice.

The promise of imaginative criminology

It seems to me that most people ruminate on society and crime, and develop coherent explanations of different social and crime phenomena. From such a perspective, therefore, it might be argued that there are many different sociologies and many different criminologies (see Carlen 2011). Police officers and magistrates, for instance, frequently hold very cogent views about the causes of different types of crime and the making of different types of criminals. Politicians and churches, and a range of others, likewise argue for crime policies based on their own particular ethical or political beliefs about, say, human nature or the complementary social responsibilities of individual and state. Therefore, to the extent that many perspectives and interests are brought to bear on answers to questions of crime and justice, academic criminology is just one criminology among many.

Yet academic criminology has a distinctiveness of its own. It is characterized by its professional commitment to scientific and ethical protocols which must always be capable of explication and assessment by other academic criminologists and their various publics. Its aim is to provide new knowledge of the meanings of crime in society. In furtherance of that aim, criminology’s practitioners may work from a variety of perspectives and with a variety of aims – statistical, theoretical or empirical/investigative – and some of that work will replicate the already-known in attempts to check and/or build on previous work. The most original, however, will be imaginative insofar as statisticians, theorists and social investigators will puzzle over new ways of working, of seeing new connections and of informing their analyses with concepts, metaphors and methods taken sometimes from perspectives which might previously have been considered to be totally eccentric to the topic under investigation (see Cain (1989) on ‘transgressive criminology’ and Young (2011) on ‘transformative criminology’). This is how all scientific progress is made. However, when I refer to ‘imaginative criminology’, I am not referring to this more general use. My usage is more specific.

Despite Émile Durkheim’s (1895/1938) imaginative and radical demonstration that crime in society is ‘normal’ (statistically speaking, that is), lawbreaking has always been seen as a social problem, and law and order issues have repeatedly been amongst the prime concerns of governments seeking legitimacy and/or re-election. It is not surprising therefore that, in the early days of criminology, a professional administrative criminology developed which, rather than posing new questions and looking for new answers about the causes of crime, took its questions (and funding) from governments whose own agendas were not directed at open investigation, but at ‘managing’ law and order. The questions asked and the permissible knowledge range within which answers might be given were limited by policy interests more concerned with gaining descriptive knowledge about criminals and lawbreaking for the purposes of prevention and intervention than they were with examining critical issues about the meanings of crime in society and why crime issues take the form they do.

Administrative criminology persists to the present day (see Young (2011) for a searing critique of its more bizarre varieties) and, because of university pressures on academics to gain funds, it is practised occasionally even by criminologists who at other times engage in the more imaginative criminology that allows them to use their scientific arts both to experiment with innovative ways of knowing and to produce new knowledge (see Carlen 2012). When I use the term ‘imaginative criminology’, therefore, I am not using it in recognition that ‘imagination’ is used by all scientists and artists. Indeed, elsewhere (Carlen 2011) I have referred to criminology as a scientific art in general recognition that all scientific breakthroughs (including some made in the pursuit of an administrative criminology agenda) employ imagination at some stage in the production of new knowledge. In this chapter, however, the term ‘imaginative criminology’ is used to refer specifically to a criminology which, in eschewing the pre-given knowledge parameters of administrative criminology, consciously seeks to destroy the ideological (already-known) conditions of its existence. Its aim is not only to produce something new, but also to imagine new and more just forms of social justice.

Insofar as imaginative criminology eschews administrative criminology’s quest for evidence of the already-known in favour of imagining the new, it is one manifestation of a broader critical criminology. Unlike administrative criminology, which involves a reflexive journey into an official past, imaginative criminology embarks on an uncharted voyage into an unofficial future. But, more than that, the promise of imaginative criminology is that it is well-designed to be a bridge between critical criminology and a critical politics of criminal justice policy. For imaginative criminology, in the second and very specific sense that is being used here, does not pretend to exclude politics from critique (Carlen 2012). Though it might be possible to use administrative criminology’s evidence-based approach in part-support of a critical politics of criminal justice, an evidence-based approach is, in itself, inadequate as a guide to social change. This is because while ‘evidence’, as I have already pointed out, is necessarily about what has been done in the past, the imagined principles of a new criminal justice are about how we might want to live in the future. The promise of imaginative criminology, therefore, is that by deconstructing the minutiae of already-known criminal justice issues, it can sort through the debris of old ways of thinking about criminal justice and then, from that very debris, fashion new desires and locate new possibilities for a more just criminal justice – subject always, of course, to the political conditions of the time. That for me is the promise of imaginative criminology. Its promise is multifaceted and unlimited. Likewise, its practice.

By definition, there can be no rules for doing imaginative criminology, although as, also by definition, it is in part answerable to an intellectual discipline, it is, at times, likely to engage with ethical and methodological imperatives shared with other types of academic criminology. C. Wright Mills himself (1959) referred to the craft of sociology. I will, in the rest of this chapter, outline the practice of an imaginative criminology in the service of a critical politics for more just, more equal and more humane criminal justice. Before I make this attempt, two disclaimers. First, I cannot imagine anything more inappropriate to write about than to attempt a description of ‘doing imaginative criminology’. Creative work cannot be subpoenaed and fenced-in with protocols. Second, I am supremely conscious of the irony of discussing imaginative criminology in the prosaic terms employed in this chapter. Therefore, I salve my conscience by inviting readers who would like to experience what is actually imaginative about imaginative criminology to read Jock Young’s The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007) and The Criminological Imagination (2011) – together with the other imaginative works which I list in the chapter’s final section.

The practice of imaginative criminology

In 2010, I outlined a personal practice of criminology as being based on three working beliefs:

First, an ontological belief about the social world: that everything that is could be different. Second, a belief about the task of social science; that it is more important to account for social phenomena than it is to count them. And third, a belief about the task of [academic] criminology: that as the concept of criminal justice must remain imaginary (that is, impossible of realization) in societies based on unequal and exploitative social relations, one rationale for investigating the meanings of contemporary lawbreaking and the social responses to it is to imagine the conditions for them being otherwise. For me, the project of a criminological imagination is forever to demonstrate that contemporary penal justice is both just and unjust, both possible and impossible, and with conditions of existence that have infinite possibilities for change. (Carlen 2010: 1)

I summed up my favoured mode of operation as involving:

A method of qualitative critique or argument which, like a kaleidoscope, first partially describes and theoretically deconstructs events and discourses and then, equally partially, reconstructs and re-inscribes them in alternative discourses, the aim being to create something new. The moment when an analysis is recognized (or not recognized) as possible knowledge is the moment of knowledge/ideology; when an alternative analysis is legitimated as desirable knowledge it is the moment of politics/ideology. (Carlen 2010: 1)

More practically and prosaically, such a mode of operation:

1 begins with a common-sense question about what is being observed, read or thought about. For instance: ‘How can anyone make sense of what is going on in one of London’s magistrates’ courts where formality is often undermined by poor acoustics, defendants and witnesses who do not understand the court rules and professionals all working under different auspices themselves?’ (see Carlen 1976; 2010);

2 tries to see the scene, hear the discourse or read the text via a particular theoretical perspective, as well as according to its own logic – or the logic of the interviewees in the case of interviews. When one perspective fails to shed any light on what is happening, other perspectives are tried, and if none of them works, the question is changed and maybe, too, the mode of knowing. Perhaps a metaphor sheds light on what has previously been so puzzling; maybe there is a sudden awareness of a glaring absence in the text or that the logic of people’s explanations is absurd insofar as they are formally contradictory or substantively incredible; or sometimes it is a line from a play, a theme from a novel, some well-worn folk cliché or the lyric of a pop song that is inspirational. And, occasionally, it is a throwaway line by another academic or a new understanding of someone else’s arguments. There is no hurrying this stage; it takes as long as it takes and just involves thinking, thinking, thinking . . . until;

3 there is a realization that the whole thought process began in the wrong place and with the wrong questions. Some bits of the investigated phenomenon then seem to fit together to form new questions. But other bits of the puzzle become even more puzzling and don’t fit anywhere. And so the process of deconstruction, reconstruction and deconstruction continues, taking one to places one never expected to be – and also leading the imaginative investigator up quite a few dead ends. Though remember, a cul de sac for one investigator may well be the beginning of something new for a subsequent one and should not be tidied away in the service of a solution, a logic or a proof. Rather than being seen as a dead end, it should be left as a loose end. Nonetheless, and as I have argued previously, although an imaginative criminology should never lead to an ideological closure suggesting that all that is to be known about a crime or justice issue is now and forever always and already known, an imaginative criminologist should also be able (if he/she so wishes) to imagine how elements of the imaginary of today’s criminal justice might, if imagined differently, give birth to new and more democratic conceptions of criminal justice (Carlen 2008; 2016).

I will illustrate this process of construction and deconstruction of the imaginary in service of a critical politics of criminal justice by outlining what I retrospectively imagine were the analytic moves made in two recent papers: the first is titled ‘Imaginary Penalities and Risk-Crazed Governance’ (in Carlen 2008), hereafter referred to as ‘Imaginary Penalities’; the second, ‘Against Rehabilitation: For Reparative Justice’ (Carlen 2013) is hereafter referred to as ‘Against Rehabilitation’. Much of what follows, therefore, is necessarily adapted from these two papers. The overall objective is to indicate how, through a series of analytic manoeuvres, I moved from two rather mundane research questions about the practice of rehabilitation to endpoints in two very different places: imaginary penalities and reparative justice.

Doing imaginative criminology: a glimpse of ‘imaginary penalities’

The concept of imaginary penalities originated in a study of a women’s prison in Australia which, for the purposes of anonymity, I called Optima. I had initially asked permission to undertake research there because I had read on the relevant Corrections website that Optima had been designed with the aim of running therapeutic programmes for sentenced women with a view to their re-integration into the community. However, when I began the research a year after the prison had been opened, no rehabilitation courses were running. The prison staff nonetheless continued to act as if they were working in a therapeutic pris...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction Introducing ‘liquid criminology'
• Part I Using conventional methods imaginatively
• Part II Developing imaginative methods
• Part III The craft and challenges of imaginative liquid criminology
• Index