History and Crime

Barry S Godfrey, Paul Lawrence, Chris A Williams

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412920803, 9781412920797
• eBook ISBN: 9781446229644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This lively and accessible text provides an introduction to the history of crime and crime control. It explains the historical background that is essential for an understanding of contemporary criminal justice, and examines the historical context for contemporary criminological debates.

 

Topics covered include:

• Crime statistics
• Constructions of criminality
• Policing
• Prisons
• Surveillance
• Governance
• White-collar crime
• Immigration and crime

For each topic, the book provides an overview of current research, comment on current arguments and links to wider debates.

 

 

The Key Approaches to Criminology series celebrates the removal of traditional barriers between disciplines and, specifically, reflects criminology's interdisciplinary nature and focus.  It brings together some of the leading scholars working at the intersections of criminology and related subjects.  Each book in the series helps readers to make intellectual connections between criminology and other discourses, and to understand the importance of studying crime and criminal justice within the context of broader debates. 

 

The series is intended to have appeal across the entire range of undergraduate and postgraduate studies and beyond, comprising books which offer introductions to the fields as well as advancing ideas and knowledge in their subject areas. 

1

Introduction

Why write this book? We like the popular metaphor of ‘the elephant in the room’ – a large issue which nobody mentions even though it is difficult to ignore. In criminology and crime history we appear to have two elephants in a very small room which both ignore each other. This volume intends to explore the relationship (mainly in Chapter 2) and to explore some areas where historical study can offer much to criminological understanding, and vice versa.

This book could have chosen any number of topics to explore. Each of the topics we finally selected will illustrate the utility of combining criminological and historical knowledge, but there are many others that would be equally valid that we have left unexplored for reasons of space. We have in fact limited ourselves to six subjects which meet most if not all of the following criteria:

• The topics are (hopefully) interesting and entertaining as self-contained enquiries.
• They are perennial criminological concerns which have not benefited from a dialogue between historians and criminologists, e.g. the construction and validity of criminal statistics (Chapter 3) or the history of surveillance (Chapter 7).
• The topics have been prematurely consigned to the dustbin of history, e.g. the local control and governance of the police (Chapter 4); the problem of mass incarceration and the possibilities of decarceration (Chapter 8).
• They are live topics’ in that they are currently perceived as important criminological topics – street crime, public disorder, immigration (Chapters 5 and 6).

The book is meant to be accessible to a wide range of people: undergraduates and postgraduates; academic experts working at the intersection of crime history/criminology; or those with a general interest. To that end we have devised a clear structure, with further reading for those who want to deepen their interest, and suggestions for study questions.

Following this introduction, in Chapter 1 we attempt to describe the separate developments of crime history and criminology, and how they have overlapped and converged in recent years. The chapter presents a chronology which can be found in the standard textbooks, but raises some contentious questions about who and what have been included under the auspices of history and what has been ruled in and ruled out of the discipline of criminology. Subsequent chapters then explore the contribution that historical perspectives can make to modern criminological studies, and pressing issues of crime, policing, surveillance and punishment in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 3 interrogates the reasons why criminal statistics were originally compiled and the uses to which they were put. Positivistic, interactionist and pessimistic approaches to crime statistics are discussed. Each of those perspectives has a view on the accuracy, validity and possible manipulations of crime numbers and crime rates. The chapter concludes by insisting that taking a longer perspective on the collection of crime data can inform us not so much about trends and amounts as the underlying rationales for collecting, collating and studying crime statistics.

The validity of crime statistics is a long-standing one in both historical and criminological circles. Police governance, however, has drifted in and out of fashion as a topic of study. Chapter 4 explains how local control over police forces has been eroded in recent years – and is far from the structure envisaged by nineteenth-century models of governance. Yet, the topic is set to re-emerge in the near future, with the reorganization of police forces into larger administrative units that cross County jurisdictions, and with the possibility of a national force controlled by the Ministry of Justice.

Chapter 5 explores a subject that has been debated by psychologists, psychiatrists, social investigators, criminologists, historians and cultural theorists for over 100 years. These debates over the persistent or habitual offenders have been given a new twist latterly with New Labour’s determination to stamp down on ‘the hard core of offenders who blight our inner cities’ within a general rhetoric of inclusivity and social welfare. This chapter, and Chapter 6, both chart the processes of exclusion for the poor, marginalized and immigrant members of British society. They show how conceptions about the nature of criminals, and about ethnic minorities, have directed the criminal justice system towards iniquitous and unjust dispositions.

Chapter 6 attacks the idea that the settled peaceable kingdom has been periodically unsettled by waves of unruly, uncivilized violent immigrants (Irish and East European Jewish settlers in the nineteenth century, the West Indian and Commonwealth immigration of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recently, again, fears about Eastern Europeans). The chapter unpicks attitudes towards social change, and how the criminal justice system has often been the instrument used to control ‘problem’ communities.

Chapter 7 also takes a long view, this time of the growth of surveillance in society. It outlines some prevailing models of surveillance and control that evolved in the nineteenth-century factory system. It then traces the faltering steps of CCTV to the point where there are now 4 million cameras in the UK – more than there are in the whole of the United States. Lastly, it re-evokes and re-examines Bentham’s Panopticon, the ‘ideal prison’ of the eighteenth-century imagination, and one that has proved influential over social theorists in recent decades.

Chapter 8 concludes the book with a examination of mass imprisonment – how did we get to the position of having the highest ever number of people imprisoned in this country in 2007, and one of the highest per capita rates of imprisonment in the Western world? It traces the development of forms of punishment, together with the aims of deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation that drove them. It ends by questioning whether, at the seemingly height of the power and use of the prison, we are actually about to enter a period when decarceration and community penalties can actually dominate the punitive landscape?

2

History, Criminology and ‘Historical Criminology’

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Chapter Contents

The history of the criminology

Histories of crime

Overlap, collision or convergence?

Summary

Study questions

Further reading

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OVERVIEW

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Chapter 2:

• Provides an introduction to the history of criminology and the development of historical studies of crime.
• Questions whether historians and criminologists are now beginning to use similar methodological and theoretical models to study crime and policing.
• Asks whether the relationship can be characterized as an overlap, collision or convergence of interest; and what the implications are of the growing relationship between history and criminology. This chapter attempts to answer this question with reference to extracts of criminological and historical writing.

KEY TERMS

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criminology

crime history

historical criminology

discipline

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Despite the fact that interest in the topic of crime and policing has developed significantly within the discipline of history during the last 20 years, and that many criminologists have also come to appreciate the value of a historical approach to their own discipline, there has actually been very little published which considers the mutual advantage of association between these two ‘disciplines’ or ‘sub-disciplines’. The underlying rationale for this chapter is to answer or at least begin to answer a set of questions – have crime history and criminology grown closer together as they have evolved, and do they now share many of the same methods, theories, concepts and aspirations? If they have (to some extent) converged or overlapped, where do they meet? And do they meet? What would be the advantages of ‘historically contextualized criminology’, and what are the advantages for ‘histories of crime’ that are informed by criminological theory?

First, however, it is valid to ask whether criminology and crime history have anything in common at all. After all, both criminology and crime history have employed very different empirical and theoretical frameworks, and used them at different levels, in different ways, and for different purposes. Neither use the same terminology for apparently similar research methods – the ‘oral history interview’ seems remarkably similar to the ‘survey interview’, for example. Both groups of scholars seem to have been imprisoned in their own silos, or parishes, as Burke puts it:

Historians and social theorists have the opportunity to free each other from different kinds of parochialism. Historians run the risk of parochialism in an almost literal sense of the term. Specializing as they usually do in a particular region, they may come to regard their ‘parish’ as completely unique, rather than as a unique combination of elements each one of which has parallels elsewhere. Social theorists display parochialism in a more metaphysical sense, a parochialism of time rather than place, whenever they generalize about ‘society’ on the basis of contemporary experience alone, or discuss social change without taking long-term processes into account. (Burke, 1992: 2)

However, as Burke states, both groups can substantially benefit from appreciation of the other. Both disciplines seek similar insights into the functioning and regulation of past and present societies, and just as most historians have become familiar with theory, most criminologists would now say that an understanding of historical contexts is essential. As C. Wright Mills stated in The Sociological Imagination in 1959, ‘Every social science – or better, every well considered social study – requires an historical scope of conception and a full use of historical material’ (1959: 145). The caveat is essential. There are some criminologists who, although very good on their own ground, are a bit shaky when they think historically. Loose phrasing by criminologists – ‘our forebears’, ‘in times gone by’, or ‘in the [unidentified] past’, for example – are likely to make historians wince (King, 1999). In many criminological studies and criminology textbooks, the history of crime merely provides an introduction to the ‘main’ chapters that follow. There has been a prevailing sense that historical studies can be bracketed off, left behind – their authority and explanatory power contained within ‘the past’ and its historically specific conditions – before modern studies then explain crime and its control. As Burke lamented, historians have been perceived as antipathetic to theory, with only a few exceptions:

Relatively few historians utilize theory in the strict sense of the term, but larger numbers employ models, while concepts are virtually indispensable… The distinction between practice and theory is not identical with the distinction between history and sociology… some students of these disciplines produce case studies in which theory plays only a small role. On the other side some historians, notably the Marxists, discuss theoretical issues with vigour. (Burke, 1992: 1)

Historical studies are accepted as providing context, but the ideas they contain are somehow presented as less relevant; as dead issues. At least that has been the case until recently: because crime history and criminology seldom spoke the same language, and did not constructively interact until the late twentieth century, the relationship was characterized as a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ (Braudel, 1958; see also Skocpol, 1984) which neither ‘side’ wanted to change. For example, Hay stated that: ‘Recent histories of crime and criminal law make little use of criminology, partly because it is noticeably indifferent to what interests historians most: cultural, political and economic change. More importantly, much criminology still seems to be infected with the belief that the civilised legal order must represent the healthy, or the collective conscience, or some more recent formulation of the norm’ (Hay, 1980: 45). However, that comment was written over a quarter of a century ago, and perhaps we can now suggest that historians and social scientists, particularly criminologists, are at last learning to listen to each other. ‘Despite not being the “best of neighbours” historians and sociologists are both concerned with the study of human behaviour’ (Burke, 1992: 2). In fact, we can be more specific: the vast majority of historians and social scientists are both concerned with the way society is constructed, operated, functions, fails to function, changes, alters, interacts and otherwise affects human beings. We can also be more positive: they may be more like neighbours chatting over the garden fence, to borrow Burke’s analogy, than lovers entwined in each other’s arms, but historians and criminologists do now seem to be beginning to share a common framework, use similar methods and, in many cases, to reference the same social theorists (Elias and Foucault notably). Where empirical approaches are concerned, while striving for quasi-scientific rigour, both disciplines have been required to address the problems of objectivity and interpretation of evidence. Historians now think of the ethical considerations of their work much more than they once did, and both sets of scholars are sometimes required to submit their research proposals to ethics committees of one kind or other. Moreover the ecumenical instincts of many modern crime historians and criminologists have meant that their intellectual enquiries have begun to significantly interact in the last few decades. Crime history often has its own stream at criminology conferences (The British Criminology Conference, and the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology Conference), and crime history is now taught on the vast number of criminology and criminal justice studies courses – each year Keele University teaches crime history to 250 undergraduate criminologists, for example.¹ The pace of convergence seems to be gathering. However, because conversations between crime historians and criminologists are such recent features, it is appropriate that this chapter first provides a lengthy overview of the separate development of modern crime history and of criminology; only then will it consider how the two disciplines are coming together, and what elements of each discipline are necessary for a rigorous ‘historical criminology’ to flourish (if that is indeed possible and desirable).

Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the processes of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting towards the breaking of laws. (Sutherland and Cressey, 1955: 3)

This statemen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 History, Criminology and ‘Historical Criminology’
• 3 The History of Criminal Statistics
• 4 Police Governance – Enforcement, Discretion, Professionalism and Accountability
• 5 Changing Perceptions of Criminality
• 6 Immigration, Ethnicity, Race and Crime
• 7 Surveillance: From the Workplace to the Streets?
• 8 Incarceration and Decarceration
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index