Criminology

A Sociological Introduction

Eamon Carrabine, Pam Cox, Isabel Crowhurst, Anna Di Ronco, Pete Fussey, Anna Sergi, Nigel South, Darren Thiel, Jackie Turton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351343824
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

Comprehensive, critical and accessible, Criminology: A Sociological Introduction offers an authoritative overview of the study of criminology, from early theoretical perspectives to pressing contemporary issues such as the globalisation of crime, crimes against the environment, terrorism and cybercrime.

Authored by an internationally renowned and experienced group of authors in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, this is a truly international criminology text that delves into areas that other texts may only reference. It includes substantive chapters on the following topics:

• Histories of crime;

• Theoretical approaches to crime and the issue of social change;

• Victims and victimisation;

• Crime, emotion and social psychology;

• Drugs, alcohol, health and crime;

• Criminal justice and the sociology of punishment;

• Green criminology;

• Crime and the media;

• Terrorism, state crime and human rights.

The new edition fuses global perspectives in criminology from the contexts of post-Brexit Britain and America in the age of Trump, and from the Global South. It contains new chapters on cybercrime; crimes of the powerful; organised crime; life-course approaches to understanding delinquency and desistance; and futures of crime, control and criminology.

Each chapter includes a series of critical thinking questions, suggestions for further study and a list of useful websites and resources. The book also contains a glossary of the criminological terms and concepts used in the book. It is the perfect text for students looking for a broad, critical and international introduction to criminology, and it is essential reading for those looking to expand their 'criminological imagination'.

part 1

The criminological imagination

chapter 1

Introduction

Key issues

■ What is criminology?

■ What is sociology?

■ Why a sociological introduction to criminology?

■ Why are ‘social divisions’ important for criminology?

■ How does this book work?

An introduction: the many meanings of criminology

Criminology has many meanings, but at its widest and most commonly accepted it is taken to be the study of crime, criminals and criminal justice. There are many different approaches to criminology and the subject itself has been shaped by many different academic disciplines. While this book covers most of these approaches to criminology, it focuses primarily on sociology and criminology. It outlines the distinctiveness of a sociological approach to crime and suggests how this differs from other approaches.

What does criminology mean to you? Why have you chosen to study it? Whatever your reasons, you are not alone. Criminology is a fast-growing subject, attracting thousands of students across the world. The criminal justice ‘industry’ is, for better or worse, expanding at a similar rate, as ideas continually change about how crime should be defined, how it should be dealt with and how all this should be measured and financed. Daily life in many parts of the world is closely influenced by crime. Many newspaper stories, TV schedules, websites, films, books and computer games are built around crime stories of various kinds. This book offers a primarily sociological view of these and other developments.

What counts as a criminological topic?

Criminology is relatively new as a degree subject but the area of study began at least 250 years ago. Since then, it has been shaped by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, geographers, medics and lawyers, as well as by sociologists, social theorists, cultural analysts and historians. As Lucia Zedner (2007a: 275) observes, one of criminology’s greatest strengths is its disciplinary hybridity, whereby criminology is ‘voracious in its capacity to absorb new ideas, and unashamed in its plundering of neighbouring social science disciplines in a continuing bid to adapt, advance and meet new challenges’.

Any study of crime must involve the study of law. Criminology explores the bases and implications of criminal laws – how they emerge, how they work, how they get violated and what happens to violators. But we also know that laws vary from time to time and from place to place. Laws are relative, and they are always historically shaped. Even something as seemingly universally condemned as killing others has its moments when it is acceptable (for example, in war or capital punishment). Many criminologists believe therefore that they should not be confined by the bounds of law – as this would make criminology a very traditional, orthodox and even conservative discipline. Rather, criminologists should also be able and willing to take on wider matters – particularly events that may be harmful but not necessarily illegal. The most common form of crime around the world is property crime or different kinds of theft. Clearly, however, there is much more to criminology than the study of theft. As you will see, although we focus on current laws in this book, we also include an array of areas that are not quite so clearly defined by them such as crimes against human rights, damage to the environment, hate crimes and state crimes. To include these kinds of areas is to maintain a broad vision of forms of crime, social order and disorder and the social relations that uphold these.

It is arguably this broad vision that characterises a more sociological approach to crime. By contrast, psycho-social and bio-medical approaches have, for instance, tended to focus more closely on individual dispositions and personal motivations in relation to crime, and they pay much greater attention to physical, emotional and cognitive issues. In terms of criminal justice interventions, they have tended to be linked to evidence gathering and to the design or evaluation of strategies that aim to change criminal or chaotic behaviour. In this sense, they have viewed criminology as a more expert-based forensic science. This leads some to conclude that they are more grounded in the realities of crime than sociologists who work with a more ‘general’ approach to crime and ‘less specific’ notions of disorder. This book sets out what a sociologist, while respecting this view, might say in their defence.

Criminological methods

It follows from this that in the same way that different disciplines focus on different criminological topics, they also favour different kinds of research methods. Depending on their orientation and training, a criminologist might use anything from psychological testing to global crime statistics, or from life-stories to media analysis. Chapter 3 outlines the main research methods used within sociological criminology and we aim to illustrate how these methods have been used in different studies discussed across the book.

Different research methods often result directly from different approaches to grasping and understanding knowledge. The ways in which we choose to find out about the world – which can be called our epistemology – are linked to our views of what we think might be relevant, what it might be linked to and why it matters. Some criminologists make claims to be very orthodox scientists: observing, testing, measuring and trying to produce law-like statements around crime. We will meet some of this work in Chapters 4 and 5 where we introduce positivism and experimental criminology. However, other criminologists do not claim to be scientific in this way. For instance, in 1958, G.B. Vold published a text called Theoretical Criminology. Here, he was simply concerned with laying out major ways of theorising crime rather than with testing these. Likewise, when Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young published The New Criminology in 1973, their aim was not to make a scientific study but rather to make space for a new critical stance with which to better comprehend crime and its control. More recently, Jack Katz (1988) and Jeff Ferrell (1998) have used cultural methods to analyse the ‘seductions’ or attractions of crime, risk-taking and thrill-seeking. So, as we shall see, the study of crime takes researchers in a number of different and often conflicting directions.

Sociology and the ‘sociological imagination’

Sociology can be defined as the systematic study of human society – whereby society is seen as collections of people doing things together. But sociology is much more than a series of facts and theories about society. Instead it becomes a form of consciousness, a way of thinking, a critical way of seeing. As Peter Berger (1963: 34) says: ‘The first wisdom of sociology is this; things are not what they seem.’ By this he means that nothing is self-evident, fixed or ‘obvious’ – and crime is no exception.

Thus, in criminology, a sociological approach does not take for granted ‘common sense’ ideas about crime – as found, for example, in the media or even the news. Instead, it challenges the norm and asks questions about what we believe to be true about crime, why we might believe this and how crime and our view of it is shaped by wider social factors.

Some fifty years ago, Charles Wright Mills claimed that developing what he called the ‘sociological imagination’ would help people to become more active citizens. Wright Mills (1916–62) was a US sociologist who held up sociology as an escape from the ‘traps’ of our lives. It can show us that society – not our own individual foibles or failings – is responsible for many of our problems. In this way, Mills maintained, sociology transforms personal problems (like criminal behaviour) into public and political issues (like ‘the crime problem’). For Mills: ‘The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise …’ (Mills, 1967: 4). Mills famously denounced the professional sociology of his day for its irrelevance, indulging in either obscure ‘grand theory’ or meaningless ‘abstracted empiricism’ that divorced data from context. Moreover, he insisted that sociologists had a certain duty to play a public role by addressing and engaging with the private troubles afflicting ordinary people.

Mills established a distinctly sociological diagnosis of the crisis facing US sociology. It was crucial to the vision of public sociology later advocated by Michael Burawoy (2005) in his American Sociological Association presidential address, which sparked considerable debate. He identified contemporary sociology’s failure to engage sufficiently and critically with key public issues and contemporary challenges, contending there is a growing divide between an increasingly inward-looking professional ethos of the discipline and the world at large. The challenge then is one of developing a public sociology that is capable of engaging ‘multiple publics in multiple ways’ (Burawoy, 2005: 4). The intervention was one that struck a chord: inspiring allied calls for public philosophy, public history, public anthropology, as well as public criminology (Carrabine, Lee and South, 2000).

Sociology and the ‘criminological imagination’

From its origins in the nineteenth century, sociology has been concerned with a fundamental question: what is society? This leads us to some other basic but vital questions. What brings people into relationships with others? What holds them there? What can cause these relationships to break down? How can such breaches be repaired? What can we use to repair them? If they are not repaired, what are the consequences? Sociology’s focus on society as a social order means that it has always had, from its earliest days, a corresponding focus on social disorder.

As outlined in the previous sections, sociology is also about seeing the human world in a holistic way and with a critical eye – realising that there are general patterns of social life that shape people’s individual life experiences, their attitudes, beliefs, behaviour and their identity. The human world that sociologists are interested in is broad and diverse in scope, ranging from day-to-day interactions between people to historical and global social phenomena. Taking a sociological perspective on that world involves trying to step outside society, becoming a stranger, so that the familiar becomes a field of adventure, not a refuge of common sense. It involves trying to look at society as a newcomer.

This way of looking at the social world involves nurturing and applying the ‘sociological imagination’. In particular, it involves developing our minds to see that many personal troubles experienced by individuals – unemployment, poverty, punishment and crime victimisation, to name just a few – are also public issues and that, in turn, these are interrelated with wider social forces.

In this book we aim to apply, and hopefully nurture, a ‘criminological imagination’. This involves appreciating that:

• Crime is a truly social concept. It does not exist as some autonomous entity but is a social construct, and what is regarded as crime is not fixed but varies across time, place and people.
• The criminal is also socially constructed, defined as such by similar social processes that define certain acts as crimes and others not.
• Crime control and punishment are also shaped by social influences that determine the seriousness of acts defined as criminal, and the forms and priority with which those crimes are to be addressed.

The major task remains one of constructing ‘a fully social theory of crime and deviance that does not maintain that there is a sociology of ‘normal’ people and another discipline seeking to explain crime and deviance’ (Young, 2013: xiv). These words were written by Jock Young in an essay introducing the 40th anniversary of the publication of the New Criminology where he goes to some lengths to situate the book in a critical sociology that was inspired by Mills and his vision of The Sociological Imagination. It serves as an important reminder that the problems generated by crime, deviance and punishment should not just be situated at an individual level of motivation or whim, but in wider social structures and historical processes.

Sociology, social divisions and crime

The analysis of social divisions is central to the sociological enterprise. For a long time though, sociologists focused primarily upon one major system of social division: inequalities associated with social and economic positions. Such a focus looks at how people are ranked in terms of their economic situation, their power and their prestige, and the effects of that upon their behaviour. It focuses especially on social class (and on caste and slavery in some kinds of societies) but, more recently, sociologists have recognised that other divisions are very relevant in framing all kinds of social relations...