Criminology and Social Policy

Paul Knepper

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412923392, 9781412923385
• eBook ISBN: 9781446225615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Criminology and Social Policy systematically examines the relationship between social policy and crime.

In this lively and engaging text, Paul Knepper discusses the difference social policy makes, or can make, in any response to crime. He also considers the contribution of criminology to the debates on major social policy areas, such as housing, education, employment, health and family. The book provides criminology students with an understanding of key social policy issues, and introduces criminological theory to social policy students. It is designed to cover the core components of courses in both of these areas.

Equipped with study aids and guidance on further reading, Criminology and Social Policy is essential for all students of criminology and social policy at undergraduate level.

Dr Paul Knepper is Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Sheffield.

PART ONE

Theories and Concepts

Criminologists and the Welfare State

1

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SUMMARY

• Criminology and social policy are concerned with different problems, but they share a common focus on policy and multi-disciplinary outlook
• Experimental criminology, crime science, critical criminology and left realist criminology imply a different role for criminologists in relation to the state
• Policymaking about crime reflects political, social, and cultural influences

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The study of criminology and social policy has to do with the difference social policy can make in dealing with crime. Exploring the links between these two areas is about understanding social problems related to crime, about visions of a better response, and about strategies for making them happen. This book reviews criminological theories, research, and discussion about social policy.

The next two chapters review criminological theories suggesting a link between social policy and crime, and critique popular images of poor people. The following five chapters describe the findings of criminological research applied to social policy areas – housing, health, unemployment, family, and education – and document the social welfare impact of policing and prisons. The final two chapters take up questions of political strategy and broader vision: we will examine the criminalisation of social policy and the pursuit of social justice. Before we begin, we need to do some ground-clearing.

This chapter examines the relationship between knowledge and policymaking. It is divided into three parts, each of which takes up a question: What do we mean by the terms criminology and social policy? Should criminologists seek to integrate themselves in the policymaking process? To what extent does criminological research actually influence policymaking about crime? The first part explores the ways in which the concerns of criminology and social policy overlap, and where they differ, with a look at the history of these disciplines and the views of two key founders. The second part deals with four conceptions of the role of criminology in a welfare state: experimental criminology, crime science, critical criminology, and left realist criminology. The final part outlines influences on crime policy other than criminological knowledge.

Criminology and Social Policy

Ordinarily, criminology and social policy are thought of as separate disciplines. But during the past decade or so, a combined course of study has become available at British universities. This raises the question of what these two disciplines are about: how they are alike, where they differ.

Two Disciplines

Criminology and social policy share a common focus of concern and strategy of inquiry. Both disciplines concern themselves with ‘action’ rather than ‘thought’ (Halsey, 2004: 13). In sociology, the classical project has sought to build up a store of scientific knowledge of social activity. Sociologists make theory-guided conjectures about why things are as they are and test them against sociological data. Alternatively, the action disciplines concentrate on the relationship between ideas and activities; they translate theories of society into programmes for solving specific social problems. If sociology aspires to grasp the social world as it is, separate from idealised conceptions of how it ought to be, criminology and social policy seek to bridge universal ideals and society’s more mundane concerns.

But of course, criminology and social policy concern themselves with a different set of problems. Criminology deals with the:

1. extent and distribution of criminal conduct in society; the
2. history, structure and operation of the criminal justice system; and the
3. social, political, and economic influences on changing definitions of criminality and criminal justice practices.

Or, to put it in a sentence: ‘Criminology, in its broadest sense, consists of our organised ways of thinking and talking about crime, criminals, and crime control’ (Garland and Sparks, 2000: 192). ‘Crime policy’ refers to the governmental response to crime. This includes the administration of criminal justice (police, criminal courts, and prisons) as well as broader programmes for crime reduction such as national strategies for crime prevention.

Social policy concerns the:

1. role of the state in distribution of resources and opportunities between rich and poor, workers and dependents, old and young; the
2. apportionment of responsibilities for this distribution to government and other social institutions – market, voluntary/charity sector, family and individual; and
3. an understanding of the social and economic consequences of different arrangements (Halsey, 2004: 10).

In a word – T.H. Marshall’s – the objective of social policy is ‘welfare’ (quoted in Hill, 1988: 2).

The term ‘social policy’ also refers to the policies themselves, that is, an arena of public policy concerning social welfare. (And when this term appears in the chapters to follow, it almost always has this meaning.) Policy areas typically referred to as comprising social policy include social security,¹ unemployment insurance, housing, health, education and family. While these areas do not cover the widest range of social policy, they are consistent with the vision of the welfare state supplied by William Beveridge in 1942. The Beveridge Report called for an attack on the ‘five giant evils’ of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness. During the 1940s, legislation laid the foundations of the post-war welfare state: Education Act (1944), Family Allowance Act (1945), Housing Act (1946), National Insurance Act (1946), National Assistance Act (1948), National Health Service Act (1948), and the Housing Act (1949). Beveridge did not refer to the personal social services, but this area has since been incorporated into the welfare state.

As an academic discipline, criminology is linked with the Lombrosian project and the governmental project (Garland, 2002). The Lombrosian project refers to Cesare Lombroso’s effort in the late nineteenth century to explain the difference between criminals and non-criminals. While he failed in his specific programme, he did manage to popularise criminology as the scientific study of criminal behaviour. The governmental project, developed several decades later, began with efforts to generate a practical knowledge for more efficient management of police and prisons. But in Britain, historically speaking, criminology did not extend from Lombroso. The first university lectures in criminology were given in Birmingham in the 1920s by prison medical officers to postgraduate students in medicine (Garland, 1988: 135). Criminology did not really become institutionalised in Britain until the years after the Second World War. Hermann Mannheim, a legal scholar and refugee from Hitler’s Germany, offered the first sustained introduction to criminology in his lectures in the Department of Sociology during the 1930s. Mannheim became a Reader in Criminology at the LSE in 1946, the first senior post in the subject established at a British university (Hood, 2004: 481).

Social policy began with ‘the social question’ which had to do with explaining why poverty persisted in a time of advancing prosperity (Halsey, 2004: 9). Britain’s industrial economy had made a quality of life possible for people at the end of the nineteenth century that could scarcely have been imagined in 1800. Yet it had also left many trapped in demoralising poverty, particularly in the cities. Beginning before the First World War, social investigators carried out social surveys with the aim of formulating an appropriate response from government. Social policy, or social administration as it was known originally, began at this time under the guise of training social workers. The universities of Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leicester developed courses for social workers and probation officers before the Second World War. But like criminology, social policy did not become organised as a university discipline until later on. Richard Titmuss secured his position as Chair in Social Administration at the LSE in 1950, the first academic post in social policy. His work as a historian of the Cabinet Office, culminating in his Problems of Social Policy (1950), led to his wide recognition as an expert in social policy (Halsey, 2004: 196–8).

Radzinowicz on Criminology and Social Policy

To explore the relationship between criminology and social policy further, it is worthwhile to compare the outlook of two founders. Leon Radzinowicz in criminology and Richard Titmuss in social policy have had great influence on their respective disciplines. Radzinowicz was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1906; he studied law in Paris, Geneva, and Rome. In 1936, he emigrated to England where he became Assistant Director of Research in Criminal Science at Cambridge, and in 1959, Wolfson Professor of Criminology. That same year, he became founding director of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge, a position he held until his retirement in 1973.

The problem of crime, Radzinowicz taught, was intractable. Any attempt to isolate the cause of criminal behaviour was a wasted effort. He remained sceptical of abstract over-arching theories he considered pretentious as well as esoteric. Sociological approaches advocating a single explanatory structure amounted to ‘unilateral approaches’ leading to conceptual cul-de-sacs. ‘The most that can be done is to throw light upon the combination of factors or circumstances associated with crime’ (Radzinowicz, 1988: 95). Radzinowicz pursued a multi-disciplinary criminology, a vision expressed in the founding of the Institute of Criminology. The Cambridge Institute received the support of Lord Butler, who had become Home Secretary in 1957. He promoted the need for teams of sociologists, statisticians, psychiatrists, and legal specialists to carry out systematic investigations into criminal behaviour with a focus on intervention and prevention.

Radzinowicz believed in the use of empirical findings in social science as a means of bringing about humanitarian reform of criminal justice administration. He viewed criminology as a discipline that could provide a ‘rational improvement’ in the government’s response to crime and criminals (Hood, 2002: 154). Reform of archaic practices in the punishment of criminals could only come about, he taught, by systematic research contributing to a long-term plan. Reforms should not follow swings in political expediency or popular emotion following particularly disturbing crimes. Radzinowicz was committed to British liberalism, perhaps because of his status as a European émigré. He endorsed the Howard League for Penal Reform: ‘Being British,’ Radzinowicz said, ‘it was down to earth, practical, observant, critical and yet ready to accept reasonable compromises’ (quoted in Cottee, 2005: 220). Yet the connection between scientific evidence in criminology and criminal policy should not be adhered to too closely, Radzinowicz insisted. He appreciated the influence of politics, in the form of an advancing welfare state ‘with its emphasis on the protective and supportive functions of society as a whole’, which he believed had a beneficial influence on criminal policy (Radzinowicz, 1964: 12).

Radzinowicz (1988: 95) took the position that ‘the frontiers between social policy and criminal policy should not be confused or blurred’. Social welfare schemes, he explained, should be pursued as a matter of ‘natural justice, of ethics, of economic and of political expediency’ but not as a matter of crime reduction because ‘social welfare schemes may not necessarily lead to a general reduction in crime’. He denied that social welfare represented the ultimate solution to delinquency and he worried about politicians turning crime into a political problem and exaggerating their power in response. Radzinowicz had seen how the positivism that had excited him as a student of Enrico Ferri had become distorted and abused by fascist regimes in the 1930s. The response to crime should remain tempered by the rule of law. He advocated the formation of a Ministry of Social Welfare so that some of the ‘secondary responsibilities’ of the Home Office could be hived off, allowing it to fall back on ‘its fundamental and primary responsibility for law and order’ (Radzinowicz, 1964: 24).

Titmuss on Social Policy and Crime

Richard Titmuss advocated a similar understanding of social policy but disagreed with Radzinowicz about social policy and crime. Remarkably, he was entirely self-taught. After the death of his father, a farmer, he found work with an insurance firm in London, and, using contacts with the Eugenics Society, landed a post with the Cabinet Office as official historian of wartime social policy. From his post in social policy at the LSE, he exercised a major influence on the subsequent development of the discipline during the 1950s and 1960s.

Titmuss laid the foundation for the discipline of social policy with his conceptualisation of ‘social accounting’, an analytical strategy for measuring the total amount of welfare benefits extended by government (Kincaid, 1984). Defenders and critics of social welfare alike erred in conceptualising social welfare in terms of direct services to the poor, unemployed, ill, and so on. Workers received substantial benefits via occupational schemes providing pensions, sick pay, and housing allowances that would otherwise appear as company profits and be subject to taxation. Substantial cash benefits provided via the tax system to the advantage of the better-off should also be regarded as welfare benefit. As an academic discipline, social policy represents ‘a search for explanations of how and why state power affects the allocation of every type of financial, welfare and environmental resource’ (Kincaid, 1984: 117–18).

And for Titmuss, this search was multi-disciplinary. Titmuss utilised the work of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, and medical doctors to address the roles and functions of social services. One cannot find in Titmuss a consistent theoretical or political position (Kincaid, 1984: 114). He did, however, reject economic imperialism, the application of economic analysis to non-market behaviour, and made strategic use of economic arguments to refute the work of the economists at London’s Institute of Economic Affairs. Titmuss avoided committing himself to any disciplinary perspective, but instead built up a repertoire of concepts that would enable him to tackle specific problems (Fontaine, 2002: 404–6).

Titmuss was a Social Democrat who regarded capitalism not only as economically wasteful but threatening social integration in driving out altruism (Welshman, 2004: 226). Problems of Social Policy established two principles. First, it was necessary to help all citizens, regardless of income and social class. The exclusion of the middle classes from social benefits encouraged contempt for recipients. Second, social policy should not attempt to means-test recipients; social benefits should be extended on a universalist rather than a contingent basis (Kincaid, 1984: 116–17). The ‘Titmuss paradigm’ expressed optimism about human nature, belief in universal services, and opposition to means testing (Welshman, 2004: 232). Essentially, Titmuss believed in the virtue of centralised state bureaucracies and the public ethos of working in them. He regarded the administration of social services as a benevolent activity.

Titmuss did not formulate a theory of crime. What he says on the subject must be pieced together from comments on the work of criminologists. Generally, he regarded crime as ‘a social ill’ or a ‘social problem’ that should be understood in relation to social activity and not individual pathology. Successive generations of social and economic upheavals stranded a portion of citizens in deprived areas of the city, a portion that turned to crime, Titmuss suggested, as the only available means of social mobility (Titmuss, 1954). Crime is a social problem originating within market inequalities, and because social policy seeks to iron out inequalities within the market, it makes sense to rely on social policy as a means of responding to crime. Titmuss, who read Mannheim’s study of delinquency in inter-war England in 1939, agreed with Mannheim about ‘faulty parenting’ as a causal factor. But he insisted that ‘overcrowding and bad housing conditions produce social misfits, frustration, petty delinquencies, and so on’ (quoted in Welshman, 2004: 229). It follows that improvements in housing, by means of universal housing policy, would serve as a delinquency reduction measure.

Social Science and the State

The relationship between criminologists and politicians has never been easy. Some criminologists seek to integrate themselves in the policymaking process; others insist criminologists should criticise policies from a safe distance. Four different roles can be identified in relation to policymaking which differ according to beliefs about government and science.

Experimental Criminology

Experimental criminology sees the university-based research centre as a primary site for the production of criminological knowledge. Specialists in different fields work as a team to solve problems of interest to government authorities (who fund such research). This model came to prominence in the decade or so after the Second World War when national governments and international organisations solici...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Theories and Concepts
• Part II Policy Areas
• Part III Emergent Issues
• References
• Index