Values in Criminology and Community Justice

Cowburn, Malcolm, Duggan, Marian, Malcolm Cowburn, Marian Duggan, Anne Robinson, Paul Senior

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781447300359
• eBook ISBN: 9781447320630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Criminologie

The way we think about crime and the way that society responds to it are imbued with values that can determine what is considered important and what gets attention. Sometimes values that are claimed may not be the values expressed in practice, as we see in the multiple and confusing discourses about victims and offenders, punishment and protection, rights and responsibilities.

This collection of writings considers values in crime theory, criminal justice and research practice, uncovering the many different 'sides' – to echo Howard Becker's famous phrase – that criminologists, policy makers and researchers take. It spans Marxist, postmodernist and feminist perspectives on criminology, analyses of the dynamics of race, gender and age, research methods and ethics, the working of the criminal justice system and engages with current debates about new challenges for criminology, such as the green movement and Islamophobia.

This is a timely and thought-provoking collection which will be of interest to academics and students in criminology and criminal justice, and on professional courses, such as probation and youth justice practice.

SECTION ONE

Values of criminological theories

The first section of this book assesses ‘sides’ and values in relation to a selection of criminological theories that have come a long way from the early classical or positivistic schools of thought. The contributors in this section review, critique and evaluate what has been included and omitted from traditional criminological inquiry, placing a particular emphasis on, or arguing from, subordinated and overlooked perspectives. These chapters demonstrate some of the ‘sides’ that Becker’s (1967) article sought to address while also offering perspectives on newer or emergent areas in criminological theorising, indicating the ever-expanding nature of values within this discipline.

Beginning with Chapter One, Simon Cottee sets the scene by examining the place of morals and values in criminology’s traditional judgement of, and suggested responses to, offenders and offending. Drawing on the discipline’s failure to account for some of the worst atrocities in history, Cottee suggests that criminologists are (implicitly at least) engaged in a moral positioning of the offender, upon which public responses to offending are based. Therefore, if theorising about crime can be argued to have a direct impact on how crime and criminals are treated, then criminologists must be aware of who they are including or omitting, and how their own values and judgements are imparted to, and received by, the public. In emphasising the diversity of such values, Cottee provides an insightful round-up of the most prominent criminological theories to date, from early positivistic depictions through to more recent cultural incarnations, demonstrating the vast range of values and judgements demonstrated within criminology while also paving the way for several of the chapters to follow.

In Chapter Two, Liz Austen and Malcolm Cowburn present the first in a series of ‘sides’, examining the social construction of criminological research and theory production through a postmodernist lens. The recognition that knowledge is informed by, shapes and determines understanding and perspectives is demonstrated by reference to several identities addressed within the postmodernist ‘umbrella’. These subject positionings are revealed to have emerged as responses to more traditional forms of criminological inquiry, and prove vital for challenging the foundational concepts upon which much criminological thought has been constructed. Indeed, in addressing the issues of presenting different sides of a story within the developing realm of ‘public criminology’, Austen and Cowburn reiterate the need for criminologists to be aware of the discussions that they are contributing to, and the responses that such perspectives may elicit.

In Chapter Three, David Moxon analyses the challenges facing Marxist criminologists, who, following a recent period of relative silence, appear to be experiencing a revival in terms of a valid, if shifting, theoretical approach in criminology. Applying Becker’s questions of ‘sides’ and ‘values’ to Marxist criminologists, Moxon demonstrates how the impact of four decades of social change has posed difficulties to Marxists attempting to answer such queries. As a result, he suggests invoking Colin Sumner’s notion of ‘censure’, applying the concept in a manner that shifts the focus of these inquiries to more pressing issues more suited to Marxist analysis. The chapter’s discussion of the changing nature of society and developments in class and economic divides illustrates the need for Marxist criminology to reassert itself in relation to Becker’s questions if it is to remain relevant in a contemporary environment.

Victoria Lavis and Tammi Walker explore the impact of feminism on criminology in Chapter Four. Invoking key theorists in this area, they address five core areas of perceived tension in relation to the competing values evident in feminism and criminology. These areas cover: theorising from ‘real’ and ‘discursive’ positions; focusing on specific versus generalisable theories; whether a ‘feminist criminology’ is both desirable and achievable; addressing gender essentialism and feminist perspectives on male lawbreaking; and, finally, whether to focus on gender awareness or gender neutrality when engaging in feminist analyses. Ultimately, Lavis and Walker draw on the merits of intersectional approaches to assess how feminist methods can challenge discrimination in the criminal justice system.

Expanding on the theme of gender and criminology, in Chapter Five, Anthony Ellis and Maggie Wykes seek to ‘bring back the boys’ by interrogating the limitations of theory accounting for men’s involvement in crime. Demonstrating how masculinities theories largely focus on the criminal and physical harms of marginalised or socially insecure men, they illustrate the need for a more explicit analysis on theorising the violences of powerful men. The chapter invokes a global perspective, drawing on case studies espousing the nature and impact of men’s violence before turning its attention to the crimes of the powerful, with particular reference to men involved in the recent economic crisis. The critique offered in the chapter suggests that criminology needs to go further in addressing the constitutive benefits of crime and violence to powerful masculinities in order to effectively theorise a wider range of harms.

In Chapter Six, Sunita Toor provides an overview of how negative engagements with racial diversity have led to a ‘racialisation’ of crime in the UK. Several significant domestic and international events have occurred over the past decade, which, in turn, have prompted a disproportionately negative focus on Asian Muslim populations in the West and a growing criminalisation of British Asian Muslim communities in particular. The chapter illustrates how events such as the Salman Rushdie affair, the Bradford Riots and the fallout from 9/11 and 7/7 have increased surveillance of these communities (as opposed to the ‘traditional’ focus on black populations), homogenising ‘Asian’ and ‘Muslim’ within a framework of danger and fear.

In Chapter Seven, James Banks and David Moxon provide an overview and critique of cultural criminology, demonstrating how the discipline continues to expand into new and under-theorised territory while indicating the potential for a unified, macro-approach to criminological theorising. The chapter draws on well-known proponents of the cultural criminological enterprise, relocating the study of crime in a sociological framework before querying why a uniformity of analysis has not yet emerged in this area. One rationale for this is the reactionary nature of cultural criminology; continually taking the ‘other’ side has led to it being more of a response to macro-level theories than a producer of such theories in its own right.

Finally, in Chapter Eight, Gary R. Potter addresses similar issues in his analysis of green criminology, a more recent development in comparison with the other perspectives in this section, but one that can be seen as occupying the margins of criminology with regards to research and theory production. Illustrating the varied and applicable lessons green criminology can offer the discipline as a whole, the chapter addresses critiques and justifications of the green approach while demonstrating how green criminology’s espousal of core value positions is at the heart of the critical criminological enterprise, providing a voice for the powerless while demanding accountability from the powerful.

Reference

Becker, H. (1967) ‘Whose side are we on?’, Social Problems, vol 14, no 3, pp 234–47.

ONE

Judging offenders: the moral
implications of criminological
theories

Simon Cottee

Introduction

This is from An intimate history of killing, Joanna Bourke’s controversial and unsettling account of military combat in the 20th century:

The massacre had begun just after eight o’clock on the morning of 16 March 1968, when 105 American soldiers of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade of the American Division, entered the small village of Son My in the San Tinh District, Quang Ngai Province, on the north-eastern coast of South Vietnam near the South China Sea. By the time Calley and his men sat down to lunch, they had rounded up and slaughtered around 500 unarmed civilians. Within those few hours, members of Charlie Company had ‘fooled around’ and laughed as they sodomized and raped women, ripped vaginas open with knives, bayoneted civilians, scalped corpses, and carved ‘C Company’ or the ace of spades on to their chests, slaughtered animals, and torched hooches. Other soldiers had wept openly as they opened fire on crowds of unresisting old men, women, children, and babies. At no stage did these soldiers receive any enemy fire or encounter any form of resistance save fervent pleadings…. After the massacre, the men of C Company burned their way through a few other villages, eventually reaching the seashore where they stripped and jumped into the surf. (Bourke, 1999, p 160)

These gruesome details – and, indisputably, the devil is decidedly in the detail here – are by now notorious, as is the name to which this massacre is commonly referred: My Lai. War crimes and massacres are tangential to the subject matter of criminology. There are historical reasons for this, relating to the circumstances of criminology’s birth and its dependence on state patronage (see, especially, Garland, 1994). But there are no good intellectual reasons for it. War crimes are moral abominations; but they are also of course crimes, and are thereby part of the subject matter of criminology.

I begin with war crimes and massacres not because I want to argue that criminology is deficient in neglecting to address them (although this is certainly the case; see Maier-Katkin et al, 2009), but because they vividly bring into focus and dramatise the problem I want to explore in what follows. The problem centres on how social scientists write about and understand the perpetrators of human suffering and injustice. More specifically, I shall be concerned to explore how criminological explanations – that is, purportedly neutral accounts of why offenders offend – morally construct the offender.

I

The conventional ‘self-reflexive’ wisdom in criminology goes something like this: criminology is a heavily and unavoidably value-laden enterprise. It is shaped by the political or policy interests of those who patronise it. Even those who remain determinedly independent from the criminal justice state cannot escape the hegemony of values: the thematic emphases of their research and the perspectives that they adopt necessarily reflect their moral concerns and sympathies. Furthermore, criminological research objectively has implications for policy: it can illuminate the wisdom or otherwise of doing (or not doing) things. All this is now fashionably and forthrightly recognised among contemporary criminologists. But the really interesting and absolutely fundamental question in relation to values is the one least discussed or least acknowledged among them. This is the question of how explanations of offending behaviour morally frame the offender. When refracted through the prism of criminological explanation, what does the offender look and feel like to us? Having been enlightened about the sources of their criminality, are we likely to feel more or less indignant towards them? Those murdering sadistic bastards of ‘C Company’, how does the criminological narrative shape how we think and feel about them? For one thing, it will not contain the description ‘murdering sadistic bastards’. The criminological consensus is firm on this: professional criminologists are not in the business of condemning, still less verbally abusing, the offender; rather, their aim is to understand them. But not so fast: criminologists may say this, but this is no guarantee whatsoever that their proffered understandings will be free of moral judgement on the matter. So, the question must be asked: what are criminological theories doing in respect to the offender? In trying to explain his or her behaviour, do they at the same time somehow shape how he or she looks, in terms of key moral categories (good, bad, evil, etc)? Or, are they perfectly neutral on this issue? Connectedly, how (if at all) do criminological theories impact on the moral sentiments of those who absorb them? Do they leave us emotionally unmoved, or are they doing something to us, like, for example, tempering our hostility towards the offender, or, at the other extreme, intensifying our moral contempt for them? Who, hypothetically, would the offender rather have as his or her narrative interpreter: a radical Marxist or a rational choice theorist? From which theoretical prism would they look their best?

My own sense is that these questions, despite their importance, exacerbate criminologists. This, I think, is for two reasons. First, for many criminologists, the subject of the criminal offender (as opposed to the societal reaction to him or her) is simply not a matter of central intellectual concern (see, especially, Jefferson, 2002, p 145), and, hence, any probing about his or her moral evaluation in criminological theories can be readily dismissed. Second, the idea that criminological theories contain or elicit moral judgements about offenders strikes at the very heart of the criminological psyche. It calls into question the foundational criminological assumption that criminology, however value-laden, is still a serious candidate in the business of producing credible and morally neutral explanations for why or how people offend.

These issues raise some important, indeed fundamental, questions about the criminological enterprise. ‘Nothing’, Dostoevsky famously wrote, ‘is easier than to denounce the evildoer’, and criminologists are self-avowedly not in that business. But what business, exactly, are they in? Criminological theories, plainly, are designed to enlighten and educate: that is, to provide more or less convincing explanations of why people engage in criminal conduct. But if they contain, or may elicit, certain moral judgements towards the criminal offender, they are also doing something more than enlightening and educating: they are, in addition, doing moral work. What if the effect of that moral work is to make life difficult for the offender? Ought the criminologist to revise their explanatory scheme in response, or to continue to remain faithful to it because they believe it to be empirically sound? What, more fundamentally, is the point of criminology: to intellectually enlighten the public about crime or to morally edify its responses to criminal offenders? And what happens when these two projects stand in tension with one another? I touch on and leave open these questions in the conclusion.

II

Cesare Lombroso’s (1876, pp 435–36) anthropological criminology characterises the offender as a monstrous and genetically abnormal person. Willem Bonger portrays him as a brutalised, egoistic, sordid inadequate (Taylor et al, 1973, pp 222–36). Durkheim thinks he’s either a rootless loner (the egoist) or an irrepressible individualist (the anomist) (Giddens, 1971, pp 82–5). Robert K. Merton, reformulating Durkheim, posits that he is a frustrated social climber (Finestone, 1976). Subcultural theory presents him as a belligerent, status-obsessed loser (Cohen, 1955). Labelling theory implies that he is a victim, ‘more sinned against than sinning’ (Gouldner, 1968, p 122). Marxist criminology (or variants of it) suggests that he is a revolutionary, anti-capitalist insurgent (Young, 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A brief introduction
• Notes on contributors
• Section One: Values of criminological theories
• Section Two: Values in criminal justice
• Section Three: Values in research, policy and practice