1 Situating Criminology On the Production and Consumption of
Knowledge about Crime and J ustice Ian Loader and Richard Sparks
Introduction: More footprints in the sandThe development of social
scientific theory and knowledge takes place not simply within the
heads of individuals, but within particular institutional domains.
These domains are, in turn, shaped by their surroundings: how
academic institutions are organized, how disciplines are divided
and sub-divided, how disputes emerge, how research is funded and
how findings are published and used. In criminology, an
understanding of these institutional domains is especially
important for knowledge is situated not just, or even primarily, in
the pure academic world, but in the applied domain of the states
crime control apparatus. (Cohen 1988: 67) Three decades ago, in
1981, Stanley Cohen published a report on the current state of
criminology and the sociology of deviance in Britain.1The paper,
entitled Footprints in the Sand, outlined the visions and divisions
of the field of social scientific research and teaching on crime as
Cohen observed them at the time.Cohen described the institutional
locations, disciplinary affiliations and guiding preoccupations of
what he termed mainstream British criminology, and charted some of
the key changes that occurred during the 1970s.He also mapped the
formation and fractious development of the National Deviancy
Conference and set out the ideas that were challenging, and seeking
to transcend, the parochialism of conventional criminology.His
conclusion was that while at the edges of the academic field new
ideas were being absorbed and accommodations made, little was
happening to dent the collective self-confidence of the
mainstream.At the centre of the criminological enterprise, Cohen
remarked, it is business as usual (Cohen 1988: 84).
1Thereportwaspublishedasoneofsetofreadingsproducedforathird-levelOpenUniversitycourseon
Issues in Crimeand Society (Fitzgerald etal. 1981). Itwas later
re-printed in a collection ofCohens essays (Cohen 1988). All
citations are from the re-print. 2 Business was not to remain as
usual for much longer.Revisiting Cohens analysis today one is
struck by two things.It is clear, first of all, that Cohen was
writing on the cusp of significant change inside criminology and in
the social institutions and practices within which it is enmeshed
and that it strives to understand and explain.In 1981 academic
criminology in Britain remained a smallish cottage industry, albeit
one that had recently been given impetus by the expansion of higher
education in the 1960s.It comprised a few dozen active
researchers.There was no annual criminology
conference.Criminological education was limited to five masters
programmes (at Cambridge, Edinburgh, Hull, Keele and Sheffield) and
a smattering of final year options on law and sociology degrees.The
idea that one could teach entire criminology degrees to
undergraduates had yet to capture the imagination of any would-be
course director or entrepreneurial vice-chancellor.The field had
two dedicated journals The British Journal of Criminology and The
Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and each year generated a
relatively small, and manageable, number of books, articles and
reports.It was possible to read everything that was produced.In the
intervening period criminology has boomed, in Britain and in
several other jurisdictions around the world (Kerner 1998).There
has, as we shall see, been a dramatic increase in the number of
researchers, teachers, courses, students, conferences, books and
journals.As a result, criminology has somewhat to the dismay of
Cohen and many of his contemporaries taken on the institutional
paraphernalia of an autonomous discipline (Garland 2011).The
publication and contents of this weighty Handbook (first published
in 1994, and now in its fifth edition) are testament to this
transformed state of affairs!2 This expansion has occurred in part
because the objects of criminological enquiry - crime, policing,
justice, punishment, fear, victims, control, order, security have
since the 1980s come to occupy a much more prominent and disputed
place in the lives and consciousness of citizens and the talk and
actions of governing authorities, in Britain and in many other
western democracies (Garland 2001; Simon 2007).At the time of
Cohens essay the early sightings of this heating up of the crime
question were already discernable, and indeed had been astutely
dissected by Cohen (1980).Rising crime rates, panics and
mobilisations around youth subcultures and the black mugger, and
police clashes with protestors and
2 For a review of the first edition situating the Handbook in
terms of what is says about, and what it might do to, the expanding
field of criminology, see Loader and Worrall (1995). 3 strikers had
made the 1979 general election the first in which law and order
figured loudly and swayed voters (Downes and Morgan 1994) even if
the institutions and settled assumptions of liberal elitism and
penal welfarism remained largely in place (Loader 2006).But in the
intervening three decades the landscapes of crime, order and
control shifted decisively (Loader and Sparks 2007).The growth of
mass imprisonment, private security, and surveillance technology;
the rise of penal populism and the victims movement; the
globalization of crime and development of transnational crime
control networks; 9/11 and 7/7; and the advent of the internet,
wall-to-wall news and new social media - all this attests to the
prominent and emotive place that crime and crime control have come
to assume in contemporary social relations and political
culture.This prominence is plainly and intimately connected to the
expansion of criminology.In our view, these altered contexts also
call for fresh thinking about the fields boundaries, focus and
ambition. The second striking and still valuable - thing about
Cohens essay is that it has a spirit and orientation that can
assist us in this task.Footprints in the Sand is an early exemplar
of an activity that has since become more common across the social
sciences namely, the attempt to think sociologically about the
production and consumption of knowledge, in this case
criminological knowledge.To think about and hence situate
criminology in this manner is to ask where this activity is
located, what its boundaries are, and what relations exist between
criminology and the institutions which support it.It means
attending, not only to the questions, approaches and knowledge
claims that constitute the activity, but also to the conditions of
possibility for different kinds of knowledge production, and to the
circulation and effects of the knowledge produced.It is to study
criminology not as a discipline (we do not, as will become clear,
think that this is the most helpful way of thinking about it) but
as a field, not just in its commonplace sense but also in Pierre
Bourdieus more particular application of this term.This orients
enquiry towards where and how criminology is constituted, to its
lines of vision and division, and to its relations to other fields
academic, legal, political, bureaucratic, journalistic, and so
forth (Bourdieu 2004). To suggest that this approach has become
more common in the years since Cohens essay was written is to point
to a thriving if rarely uncontroversial body of work in science and
technology studies which has examined, inter alia, the laboratory
practices of scientists, the 4 politics of scientific
claims-making, and the role and power of science in democratic
societies (e.g., Latour 1987; Collins and Pinch 1998; Irwin and
Michael 2003).To date, little of this work and its questions and
concepts - has been turned back on the social sciences themselves;
there is nothing like a social science studies of equivalent
empirical depth and theoretical sophistication.3 Such an
orientation has thus only sporadically found expression in studies
of criminology.There are, to be sure, several important historical
accounts of the origins and development of the science of the
criminal which emphasize that criminology was constituted in
prisons and reformatories before establishing itself as an academic
subject inside universities (e.g., Garland 1988, 2002; Rafter
2009).The work of the late Richard Ericson returned time and again
to the question of how criminological knowledge is produced and
communicated within circuits of power (Ericson 2003).Other writers
have investigated the often tense relations that exist between
criminological researchers and the sponsors and users of their
knowledge (Zedner 2003; Walters 2003), and one can point to a
notable recent collection of reflections on the condition, borders
and futures of the field (Bosworth and Hoyle 2011).The question of
criminological engagement with politics and public life has also
been the subject of our own recent work (Loader and Sparks
2010).Yet research and writing about criminology as a field of
enquiry remains a sporadic and unsystematic activity, lacking much
historical depth. It is, moreover, often dismissed as navel-gazing.
Even Cohen ended his report on criminology with a warning about the
dangers of obsessive self-reflection (Cohen 1988: 89). There are
some obvious reasons for this impatient and sometimes dismissive
attitude towards reflection on criminology.They have to do with the
social and political import, and the sociological interest, of
criminologys organizing questions. Cohen says that there are just
three: Why are laws made?, Why are they broken? and What do we do
or what should we do about this? (Cohen 1988: 9; see also
Sutherland et al. 1992: 3).How one answers these questions has
major practical and policy implications.They are also intimately
entangled with individual subjectivity and well-being; the texture
of collective life, and the scope, power, legitimacy and
accountability of the state and other governing authorities.These
are questions that lie close to the heart of social sciences
abiding concern with the problem of
3 There are, it should be said, somenotable exceptions (e.g.,
Abbott 2001; Haney 2008;Lamont 2009; Savage 2010). 5 order and are
inseparable from political contests regarding the nature of the
good society.Given this, the sceptic asks, why would anyone trouble
themselves with something as trivial as the study of criminology or
as tedious as the activities and self-understandings of
criminologists?We have some sympathy with this view and well
understand, indeed share, an impatience to get back to more
substantive questions.Yet it is precisely because of the close
proximity of criminologys subject-matter to the lives and
preoccupations of citizens, and the powers and interests of
governing authorities, that those who produce and consume knowledge
about crime and justice ought to cultivate and sustain a reflexive
awareness about the conditions under which such knowledge is (or is
not) produced and the contexts in which it is used, abused,
championed, derided, or ignored.Reflexivity in this sense is not a
distraction from the real business of trying to answer any one of
Cohens three questions. It is a vital constituent of good social
science research in respect of each of them. These, at any rate,
are the thoughts that animate our attempt in this chapter to
provide a sketch and it can only really be a sketch of the contours
of contemporary criminology.4
We begin by focusing on the conditions and settings of
criminological production.We describe the ways in which criminology
has expanded in the years since Footprints in the Sand appeared and
analyse the institutional arrangements and relations that condition
the production of knowledge about crime and justice today.Our
concern here is in thinking through some of the benefits and
dangers of criminologys emergence as an autonomous discipline.We
turn next to the object(s) of criminology.We outline some of the
lines of vision and division that shape the field in respect of
competing accounts of what it means to produce knowledge of the
social world. The range of issues that are selected for
criminological scrutiny today is very wide; and the new modes and
topics of enquiry that are attracting attention in todays
globalized and insecure world extend from genetics to genocide.We
then examine the consumption of criminological knowledge.Our
concern here is with the audiences, forms of engagement and visions
of governance that are
4MuchofthefocusofthisinstitutionalanalysiswillbeoncriminologyinBritainthoughwewillmake
comparison with other jurisdictions when it seems valuable to do
so.Having said this, we are aware that one of the criticisms made
of earlier editions of the Oxford Handbook is that they were about
criminology and criminal
justiceinBritain,orevensomethingcalledBritishcriminology.Wehopetomakeitclearthat,under
conditionsinwhichjusticeideasandprogrammesflowbackandforthacrossborders,itmakeslittlesenseto
speak of British or any other national criminology, as if they were
discrete entities. There is no methodological
nationalismhere(WimmerandGlickSchiller2002).Neverthelessthecriminologiespractisedindifferent
placesaroundtheworldaresignificantlyshapedbydistinctsetsofinstitutionallocationsanddisciplinary
traditions, as also needs to be acknowledged. 6 postulated by
producers of criminological research as they go about their work.We
note some of the ways in which criminology is received in the wider
circuits of culture and politics, and the contests that occur
between criminology and other claims to know about crime and
justice, and the demands for action which flow from them.In
conclusion, we suggest that this inescapably raises the question of
how criminological projects are entangled with competing
conceptions of the good society and hence with politics.We argue
that certain visions of politics lie buried within different
conceptions of criminology and that there is merit in making these
more explicit, before setting out the case for a research agenda
that takes as its object of enquiry the relationship between crime,
punishment and democratic politics. The field of
criminologyKnowledge about crime and justice doesnt just happen.Nor
is it located solely in the heads and activities of the individuals
who produce it.The question of what comes to be known, from what
theoretical perspectives, by what methods, about what crimes and
ways of responding to crime, in what forms, and with what effects
is conditioned by a whole range of institutions.These institutions
employ researchers (permanently or temporarily); fund (or do not
fund) research projects and programmes; permit (or refuse) access
to data, research subjects and sites; offer outlets for
publication; and use, abuse, champion or ignore the products of
that research.Each of these institutions universities, research
councils, charities, think-tanks, consultancy firms, publishing
houses, newspapers, broadcasters and new social media, campaign
groups and lobbyists, political parties, prisons, police forces,
government departments and so on are themselves situated in
economic, social and political contexts that shape how each of them
think and can act.To study criminology as a field is to explore how
power relations and struggles between actors in these different
institutional sites structure the knowledge that is (and is not)
produced. 5
5 In a recent extension of Bourdieus field theory to the
sociology of punishment, Page usefully defines field as a
semi-autonomous, relatively bounded sphere of action in which
people, groups and organizations struggle with and against each
other (Page 2012: ???). 7 One great virtue of Stanley Cohens essay
is that it sought, back in 1981, to map the field of criminology
with these issues very much in mind.Cohen noted the importance to
criminology in Britain since 1945 of a small number of key academic
institutions, notably the Cambridge Institute of Criminology
(founded with government backing in 1960 Butler 1974; Radzinowicz
1988), but also the London School of Economics and small clusters
of criminological activity in Edinburgh, Oxford and Sheffield.He
also registered the size and significance of criminological
research conducted within or funded by government most importantly
by the Home Office Research and Planning Unit (established in 1959
Lodge 1974) but also in research branches of the prisons department
and the Metropolitan Police. Cohen further signalled the role
played by quasi-academic bodies (1988: 83) with reformist ambitions
and close links to criminal justice and psychiatric
practitioners.The Institute for the Study and Treatment of
Delinquency, which founded and owned the British Journal of
Criminology, was foremost among these, though mention should also
be made of the Howard League for Penal Reform, a pressure group
which housed the fields other key journal, the Howard Journal of
Criminal Justice.Cohens point was that this institutional
assemblage structured the main contours of post-war British
criminology.First, its pragmatic frame of reference (1988: 69) and
distaste for theory its selfunderstanding as realistic, empirical
and moderate (Radzinowicz 1999).Second; the shape of its
inter-disciplinary eclectism - Sir Leon Radzinowicz, founding
Director of the Cambridge Institute and the towering figure of
mid-twentieth century British criminology, viewed
inter-disciplinary criminology in the following terms: A
psychiatrist, a social psychologist, a penologist, a lawyer, a
statistician joining together on a combined research operation
(1961: 177).Third, criminologys orientation to the task of
producing what it saw as an effective and humane in short, a
civilized - justice system.Finally, its remote and mutually
suspicious relation to sociology. Cohen also set out, however, to
describe the intellectual and political challenges that were
beginning to emerge to this conception of criminology and its
relation to the world.A new generation of sociologists, embarking
on academic careers in the the new universities of the 1960s, and
embroiled in the political and cultural tumult of that decade,
brought new objects of enquiry to the fore: deviance, social
control, political conflict and state violence, police power,
ideology and the manufacture of news, not to mention the reflexive
and intentionally subversive re-examination of the claims and
effects of criminology itself which were so much at issue in Cohens
essay and in other writing of the period. New theoretical
perspectives and 8 concepts were imported (from the US and from
elsewhere in the social sciences) and put to use: appreciation,
labelling, moral panics, symbolic interactionism, anti-psychiatry,
Marxism and feminism.New institutions were assembled to provide a
platform for these perspectives and to build alliances with radical
social workers and lawyers, anti-psychiatrists, students, prisoners
organizations and campaigns against state violence.Foremost among
them were the aforementioned National Deviancy Conference
(1968-1979) and the European Group for the Study of Deviance and
Social Control (founded in 1973 and still in existence).The then
smallish social world of British criminology had become one of
conflict and schism.6 What though has happened in the years since
Cohens essay was written?What does the field of criminology look
like today if we try to understand it in Cohens terms? The big
theme is one of expansion across a number of dimensions.The
platform for growth has been the embedding of criminology within
mass higher education.The first undergraduate programme in
criminology in Britain was launched at Keele University in
1991.Twenty years on 87 UK universities teach criminology and
criminal justice in single and joint degrees that number well into
the hundreds. Sixty-three British universities run postgraduate
programmes.This development sparked a two decade long explosion of
academic posts in the field.This has in turn in part under pressure
of a governmental research assessment regime led to a burgeoning
number of textbooks, handbooks, monographs, edited volumes and
journal articles.We ourselves, and all our peers of whatever
political and theoretical orientation, have been beneficiaries of
and participants in the resulting boom.In Britain, much of the
increasing flow of books was brought into existence by criminologys
own specialist academic publisher Willan.7 New journals
proliferated and now include (mentioning only the most prominent):
Policing and Society (founded in 1990), Theoretical Criminology
(1997), Global Crime (1999), Punishment and Society (1999),
Criminology and Criminal Justice (2001), Youth Justice (2001),
Crime, Media, Culture (2005), and Feminist Criminology (2006).The
rejuvenated British Society of Criminology has over 700 members,
awards numerous prizes, and runs an annual conference that reliably
attracts around 500 participants.Specialist conferences are an
almost weekly occurrence.However one measures it, this is a tale of
rapid and remarkable growth in what was once a small and
6 Key publications from the period include Cohen (1971), Taylor,
Walton and Young (1973, 1975), Taylor and Taylor (1975), Pearson
(1975), Smart (1977), Hall et al. (1978) and Downes and Rock
(1979). 7 In 2010, Willan was sold to the Taylor and Francis
Group.9 relatively obscure corner of the social sciences.One of the
central ironies of this story of course is that in Britain at least
it was precisely the radical, sceptical and critical versions of
criminology, those most apt to question its disciplinary
pretensions, that played a leading role in stimulating its growth
and institutionalization within the teaching and research
programmes of the expanded university system.In this regard the
boundaries, though often invested with no little emotive importance
from either flank, between mainstream and critical versions of
criminology seem increasingly blurred and confused (cf. Carlen
2011: 98).Stanley Cohen himself had perhaps the sharpest eye for
the resulting ironies: The more successful our attack on the old
regime, the more we received PhDs, tenure, publishers contracts and
research funds, appeared on booklists and examination questions,
and even became directors of institutes of criminology (Cohen 1988:
8). The expansion of criminology in Britain has been especially
striking.But it is by no means uniquely a British phenomenon.Rapid
growth in criminology and criminal justice programmes has also
occurred in the United States, especially in the form of
professional criminal justice education at state universities and
colleges sponsored by the Justice Departments Law Enforcement
Assistance Agency (Akers 1995; Savelsberg et al. 2002).Criminology
and criminal justice majors now far outstrip those enrolled on
sociology programmes.The annual meetings of the American Society of
Criminology and the more applied Academy of Criminal Justice
Sciences regularly attract over 3,000 participants.The field
comprises numerous dedicated journals.8 Across Europe, a more
diverse picture can be found.In certain instances criminology has
recently undergone rapid expansion, somewhat in the British manner
(The Netherlands).Elsewhere, one encounters places where
criminology has little autonomous institutional existence (Germany
and Italy) and where its niche in respect of its parent disciplines
principally law and sociology seems relatively precarious. Certain
societies have small but active and influential criminological
traditions (Finland, Norway and Sweden). In some places criminology
remains a fledgling activity striving to establish itself whether
in countries such as the Republic of Ireland and Spain, or in
post-communist societies such as Estonia and Poland.Yet for all
this unevenness, an
8 Including,Criminology andCriminology and Public Policy (run by
ASC),JusticeQuarterly, (run by ACJS), Crime and Delinquency,
Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology, Journal of
ResearchinCrimeandDelinquency,JournalofQuantitativeCriminology,andtheJournalofInterpersonal
Violence. 10 overall trend towards expansion can nonetheless be
discerned.The European Society of Criminology (founded in 2000) has
been a key organizational conduit for this: it currently has around
850 members from some 50 countries; hosts an annual conference
attracting in the region of 700 participants, and publishes the
European Journal of Criminology.9One should note, finally, that
criminology departments and programmes have spread across Canada,
Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and have begun to develop
in India, China and throughout Asia (Braithwaite 2011; Smith et al.
2011: Part III). A second key theme has been that of growing
autonomy: as criminology has assumed the institutional properties
associated with scientific disciplines it has found a more
established and discrete place inside the academic field (Garland
2011).Part of this story has to do with internal specialisation.As
the field of criminology has expanded so too has the effort of
handling the resulting diversity (in theoretical orientations,
methods, questions posed, disciplines drawn upon, commitments
expressed, audiences supposed) by institutionalizing the salient
differences of focus and purpose. We have discussed these multiple
divisions and differentiations elsewhere, and noted the dangers of
so many contending criminologies frequently claiming to be much
more than simple subject specialisms and instead casting doubt on
one anothers intellectual or political credibility (Loader and
Sparks 2010: ch. 1). But related risks also attach to the second
aspect of criminologys growing autonomy its separation from fields
of social enquiry that have historically nourished criminological
theory and research.Throughout its history, many of its leading
exponents have been careful to deny that criminology is a
discipline they have indeed, like us, been attracted by its
disciplinary impurity and recidivist transgression of boundaries
(Braithwaite 2011: 133).For example, Savelsberg and Sampson (2002:
101) argue that criminology is a multi-disciplinary field that has
a subject matter but no unique methodological commitment or
paradigmatic theoretical framework.Moreover, they argue, there are
no common assumptions or guiding insights.There is no intellectual
idea that animates criminology. David Downes (1988) has, in a
similar vein, famously described criminology as a rendezvous
subject a field organized around a social problem which serves as a
crossroads for exchange between researchers trained in more basic
disciplines (sociology, psychology, law, philosophy,
9ThisbriefoverviewdrawsheavilyontheinvaluablecountrysurveysthattheEuropeanJournalof
Criminology has routinely commissioned since its inception in
2004.
11 history, economics, political science), and is repeatedly
animated and rejuvenated by ideas and concepts imported from
outside. Yet, despite these protestations, criminologys expansion
has seen it assume the organizational properties of a discipline
separate departments, degrees, journals, conferences and prizes as
well, over time, as hiring researchers whose entire higher
education has been in criminology.In this context, it is worth
recalling Andrew Abbotts (2001) analysis of the cultural functions
of disciplines.Disciplines, Abbott argues, have what one might call
existential and epistemic purposes.In the former case, Disciplines
provide dreams and models both of reality and of learning.They give
images of coherent discourse.They create modes of knowledge that
seem, to the participants, uniquely real.Every academic knows the
experience of reading work from outside of his or her discipline
and knows the unsettling feeling it induces.Disciplines in fact
provide the core of identity for the vast majority of
intellectuals.In the latter case: A cultural function of
disciplines is that of preventing knowledge from becoming too
abstract or overwhelming.Disciplines legitimate our necessarily
partial knowledge.They define what it is permissible not to know
and thereby limit the body of books one must have read.They provide
a specific tradition and lineage.They provide common sets of
research practices that unify groups with diverse substantive
interests.Often . . . these various limits are quite arbitrary.
(Abbott 2001: 130-31) Abbotts point is that the organization of
disciplines matters: it has material effects on knowledge
production.Steve Fuller comments on these dynamics
pointedly.Disciplinary boundaries, he suggests, are artificial
barriers to the transaction of knowledge claims.Such boundaries are
necessary evils that become more evil the more they are perceived
as necessary (1993: 36).Viewed in this light, the risks of
criminology morphing into an autonomous discipline are several.
There is a risk that the field will lose connection with basic
disciplines (Garland 2011: 300) in a manner that narrows
intellectual horizons, insulates criminology from key ideas and
debates in the social and political sciences, and generates work
which lacks ambition and wider scholarly interest or indeed which
simply mis-states its intellectual origins and resources and
disclaims all interest in its own history (Rock 2005).12 This
disconnection would leave criminology ill-equipped to respond to
the challenges of living in globalizing, fretful and insecure times
a point made a decade ago by Garland and Sparks (2000).There is a
risk of criminological research and teaching programmes becoming
more vulnerable to external influence and control in ways that
orient the field towards policy-directed problem-solving and away
from curiosity-driven problem-raising.10As Andrew Abbott reminds
us: There is ample evidence that problem-oriented empirical work
does not create enduring, self-producing communities like
disciplines except in areas with stable and strongly
institutionalized external clienteles like criminology (Abbott
2001: 134).There is a risk, finally, of criminology predominantly
adopting a contractor-style relationship with the most powerful of
these clienteles, while losing connection with fields of social and
professional practice (some of which have played significant roles
in its historical development social work, most obviously, but also
public health) and with oppositional and counter-publics such as
the womens movement, prisoners rights campaigns and civil liberties
groups.Under such conditions the policy relevance of criminology
may appear at least to be established (though we shall have more to
say about this later), but its civic role and functions may become
attenuated and obscure (see Hope 2011: 467). The existence of
institutionalized external clienteles is, in fact, a key dimension
of the tale we have just recounted about academic criminology.The
expansion and expanded autonomy of criminology cannot be explained
by internal reference to activities within the field, or even by
taking account of the condition and incentive structures of
universities.The dramatic rise of criminology has been coincident
with and may be an effect of what we have elsewhere described as
the heating up of the criminal question (Loader and Sparks 2010:
ch. 3).For much of the twentieth century in Britain crime and
punishment were not routinely issues of major public concern, nor
did they figure prominently in contests for political office.The
criminal question was for the most part managed off-stage by a
network of senior government officials, strategic criminal justice
practitioners, and concerned but respectable reform groups (Ryan
1978).These elites understood their responsibilities to be
administering an effective and humane penal system (an activity in
which the rehabilitative ideal played a crucial legitimating role);
forging expert consensus on what were taken to be difficult even
intractable social problems, and managing always potentially
volatile public opinion
10InanimportantsociologicalstudyofUScriminology,Savelsbergandhiscolleagueshavedemonstrated
empirically this very effect (Savelsberg et al. 2002, 2004;
Savelsberg and Flood 2004). 13 (Loader 2006; see also Ryan
2003).The world of mainstream criminology described by Stanley
Cohen in 1981 was closely aligned - ideologically and
institutionally - with those circuits of elite liberal
governance.As we have intimated, however, Cohen was writing on the
cusp of the fall from grace of those elites and their preferred
mode of governing crime. The last three decades have seen some
far-reaching changes in the place that the criminal question
occupies in everyday social relations and political cultures of
Britain and many other western liberal democracies.The effort to
make sense of these changes has given rise to some of the most
important work and significant debate in contemporary criminology,
whether in respect of the culture of control (Garland 2001),
governing through crime (Simon 2007), or the penal effects of
neo-liberalism (Reiner 2007; Wacquant 2009a).We do not have space
to describe the relevant shifts in any detail.Nor can we analyse
the vectors of disagreement, beyond noting that the developments
these terms denote are unevenly encountered within and between
states (Tonry 2007; Lacey 2008; Barker 2009); that one needs to
emphasize continuities and contingency rather than epochs and
catastrophes (Loader and Sparks 2004; OMalley 2000), and that
aspects of them remain actively disputed (Matthews
2005).Nevertheless, this altered landscape of governance is of
great pertinence to the question of situating criminology, as we
shall see.A brief - and necessarily crude summary of key
developments is therefore in order: Politicization of crime.Crime
is no longer managed off-stage by experts but has become the
subject of political dispute and contest.As crime becomes a token
of political competition governmental reactions to it are heavily
swayed by short-term calculation and expediency.In this climate,
crime policy comes increasingly under the influence of mass media
and public opinion and at the mercy of sometimes actively
whipped-up popular emotion.Victims emerge as influential political
actors and representatives of the public interest.The result is a
policy environment that is hyperactive, volatile and unstable, one
in which it becomes difficult to make reason and evidence the
drivers of what is said and done.All this is underpinned, and to
some extent driven, by a heightened crime consciousness among
citizens, as anxieties about crime assume a more prominent place in
shaping everyday routines and social institutions. 14 Re-centring
of the penal state.In the face of rising insecurities and demands
for order (generated by socio-economic precariousness and the
partial retraction of social welfare) the criminal justice state
becomes materially and symbolically central to the management of
order and control of marginal populations.Prison returns as the
modal institution of social regulation and is accompanied by an era
of mass penal supervision.New powers and orders proliferate to
control anti-social behaviour, violent and sex offenders, and
terrorism.Policing becomes more visible and pivotal to efforts to
manage conflicts and assuage social anxieties.This is accompanied
by a public framing of the criminal question which privileges
public protection against the criminal Other.A silent revolution in
crime control.The reassertion of sovereign authority is accompanied
by what David Garland (2001) calls adaptive strategies for managing
crime risk.Situational crime prevention schemes manipulate the
environment to reduce opportunities for offending.Local
multi-agency partnerships proliferate, as does problem-solving
policing.Government makes greater efforts through targets,
inspection and audit to micro-manage criminal justice bureaucracies
and shape outcomes.New techniques and discourses of risk management
are used to predict future crime, target offenders and address the
behaviour of those under penal supervision.This is often
accompanied by systemic demands for new knowledge and a greater
orientation to locating crime control in an evidence
base.Pluralization of policing and security.The state has become
but one of a number of actors engaged in the delivery of punishment
and the governance of security.Responsibility for crime prevention
spreads downwards to private citizens and to businesses, schools,
hospitals, planners and so on.Involvement in crime control spreads
outwards to the private sector whose personnel and hardware play a
greater role in policing and protection and the building and
management of prisons.Responsibility and capacity also spreads
upwards to new international and transnational bodies, including
the European Union (which assumes a vital new place in cross-border
policing and the control of migration), the Council of Europe, and
the International Criminal Court. Global flows of crime and crime
policies.Under conditions of globalization, there is acceleration
in the intensity and extensity in the flow of capital, ideas,
people and 15 goods across borders.The world becomes one of
networks and flows rather than places and borders, and the
conditions exist for criminal activity to be organized and take
place across frontiers.But the same holds for circulation and
exchange between institutional actors and policy prescriptions.We
inhabit an age of transnational policy elites, mobile entrepreneurs
and global think-tanks which play key roles in the international
circulation of such crime control innovations as zero-tolerance,
community policing, three-strikes sentencing and penal
privatisation.One needs now to attend to the travels of the
criminal question (Melossi et al. 2011a).This means investigating
not only the agents of diffusion, but also the forms and meanings
that policies assume in different local contexts, and the reasons
why some crime control techniques find it difficult, or even fail
more or less completely, to travel. What though is the impact of
these socio-political transformations on the production of
knowledge about crime and justice and the shape of academic
criminology?The most direct of these changes concern the relation
between government and criminological knowledge production (Newburn
2011).There are of course institutional reasons why this relation
is tense and prone to conflict as, indeed, it long has since been
(Zedner 2003).But the altered climate of crime governance we have
just described has tended to make governments more demanding, less
loyal and, arguably, less pivotal sponsors of criminological
knowledge.On the one hand, the politicized policy environment has
intensified the long-standing tendency of government to directly
and indirectly support research with short time horizons that
answer pressing policy concerns, while also giving rise to
micro-management of the research process and heightened wariness
about potentially scandal-creating findings.Some who have been
scarred by this new climate have used their experience to expose
governments claim to be doing evidence-based policy as a fiction
and to call for a boycott of official research conducted under
these conditions (Hope and Walters 2008).Those on the other side of
the commissioning fence routinely claim that criminology is today
lacking in the required skills and appropriate disposition (Wiles
2001).On the other hand, government has increasingly resorted to
other - less demanding and risky knowledge producers, such as
consultancy firms, social research companies and a thriving public
opinion industry, to supply the information it requires. 16 Some
actors in this market are attractive to the users of research
simply because they deliver the product on time, in a technically
competent manner, with fewer overheads and less self-regard than
university-based academics.Others can exercise appeal and suasive,
even sometimes decisive, political influence precisely because they
have a line, a known and readily communicated position, which,
moreover, happens to align with the political preferences and
prevailing rationality of governments, or aspirants to govern. The
periods of ascendancy enjoyed by the inventors of certain
well-known policy diagnoses (Murray 1984), recipes and
interventions (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Kelling and Coles 1998),
and techniques or methods (Bratton 1998) need to be understood in
something like these terms (Jones and Newburn 2006; Wacquant
2009b). These innovators are no mere technicians, still less
disinterested scholars.They become political players in their own
right, entrepreneurs of packaged programmes and solutions, and the
court philosophers to powerful policy actors.In this regard the
more focal crime and punishment have become to the programmes of
political parties and the decision-making of institutions (Simon
2007), and the more salient in the wider circuits of political
discourse and popular culture, the more the production and exchange
of knowledge about crime has seeped out from the universities and
in-house government research units and become the stock-in-trade on
one hand of consultants, analysts and various more or less
technical experts, and on the other of think-tanks, lobbyists,
campaigners, pundits and sales-persons. One outcome of this more
contested and plural crime complex is that, even while the criminal
question has become more politically charged, government or as we
might say, sometimes contentiously, the state is arguably displaced
from its once pre-eminent place as the primary sponsor and
recipient of criminological research.In this altered climate,
police and penal professionals, private security firms, NGOs and
pressure groups also become producers, mediators and users of
knowledge about crime and justice, as well as a source of new modes
of engagement and collaboration.11There are dangers of capture at
many points in these developments, and many instances of
criminology making itself all-too-readily available as a docile and
un-questioning producer of serviceable knowledge for rationalizing
the operations of the already powerful. Or, as John Braithwaite
more polemically puts it: For the moment, criminology is too
comfortable with itself to see the potential to leave a great
11 Mention might bemade in this context of the proliferation of
quasi-academic journals which aim to straddle the worlds of
knowledge production and practice. These include, inter alia,
Probation Journal, Policing, Police Practice and Research, Crime
Prevention and Community Safety, and The Security Journal. 17
intellectual legacy. It is too much a creature of capitalism to
turn around and bite it the way capitalism needs to be bitten
(Braithwaite 2011: 142).But there may also be a possibility of
liberation into less constrained, more democratically involved and
accessible, creative and imaginative roles as we have tried to
indicate elsewhere (Garland and Sparks 2000; Loader 2010; Loader
and Sparks 2010).We take up these issues in more detail in the
section on the consumption of criminology below. Let us take
stock.What lessons can be taken from our brief overview of the
field of criminology and its conditions of possibility?We think
there are three.First, that only the most un-reflexive exponents of
the criminological craft, and incurious among its students, will
regard the growth and autonomy of criminology as a self-evident
good.In our view, there are in fact sound reasons to pay careful
attention to its potentially damaging effects, if only so one is
better equipped to guard against them.Second, we have shown that
the production of knowledge about crime and justice is structured
by institutional contexts, not only inside the academic field, but
also in terms of the relation of knowledge producers to political,
bureaucratic and journalistic fields, and their preferred forms of
capital and operative rules.Institutional arrangements matter.But
this should not, thirdly, lead us to an analytical stance which
reduces disposition to position, closes down the space for agency
and detracts attention from debating the substantive claims of the
criminology that is produced.People make their own knowledge about
crime and justice.But, as Marx (1852: 15) reminds us: They do not
make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and
transmitted from the past.One needs to remain mindful of this as we
turn to the stuff itself. The object(s) of criminology The doubts
about criminology set in early.In a brilliantly premonitory article
of 1933 entitled Some basic problems of criminology Jerome Hall
looked across dubiously from the ostensibly higher ground of
criminal law theory.In its current state of development, he said,
social science looks like little more than social policy more or
less disguised (1933: 119).Criminology, in particular, contains
expressions of approbation or displeasure masquerading as objective
judgements.It struck Hall as unlikely that criminology would
advance beyond this condition any time soon for the primary reason
that rather than taking a 18 discrete scientific object of
investigation it moved in a world in which our frames of reference
have been constructed for us (ibid).Hall could see no necessary
relation between wise policy and the endless refinement of
scientific precision (1933: 128).The prospects for criminology were
limited in that it was composed of several fields that overlap and
intersect at so many points that it is impossible to detect any
common characteristics (1933: 132). Much has changed in the
intervening almost eighty years but not everything.Some at least of
Halls concerns have distinct contemporary echoes, even if he wrote
before almost all that we now pass on to students as the canonical
(if not indeed clichd) account of the succession of landmarks in
criminological theory remained to be written.Two kinds of question
resound down the decades.The first regards whether criminology ever
can have or should aspire towards some form of paradigmatic unity
or consensus.The second concerns the uncertain relationship between
criminological knowledge and social and political action in the
world. Since Hall wrote, most serious considerations of the
question of paradigmatic unity in criminology have concluded that
this is at best unlikely, if not indeed actually dangerous.In what
we might now view as a companion piece to Cohens classic 1981
essay, appearing in the same volume, Jock Young precisely and
formally set down a number of models of criminology.Those that
concerned him then were: classicism, positivism, conservatism,
strain theory, new deviancy theory and Marxism.Young compared and
contrasted these positions in terms of their assumptions on a
series of dichotomous dimensions human nature (voluntarism or
determinism); social order (consensus or coercion); the definition
of crime (legal or social); the extent and distribution of crime
(limited or extensive); the causes of crime (the individual versus
society) and policy (punishment or treatment). Others have
subsequently undertaken similar mapping exercises see, for example,
Einstadter and Henry (2006) for one of the more stimulating recent
examples. Young was of course acutely aware that most of these
models were not uniquely criminological theories; nor indeed were
they theories of quite the same kind (Young 1981: 250).Classicism
is the name given by criminologists to a certain version of social
contract 19 theory as applied to crime and punishment.Positivism is
in the first instance a position in the philosophy of (social)
science.Conservatism is a body of political beliefs and
sensibilities.Strain theory is a sociological hypothesis with a
bearing on the explanation of crime in certain kinds of social
structure.New deviancy theory is self-consciously a challenge to
what it construes as conventional criminology.Marxism is a
materialist theory of historical development via dynamic change in
the means and social relations of production and exchange.As Young
observes, it is not just criminologists who think seriously about
crime.Moreover, part of the point is that these disparate and
uneasy bedfellows both converge and, ultimately, diverge, in some
cases irreconcilably.Their disagreement is permanent, but not
entirely chaotic.There will be, Young correctly predicts, no
uni-linear development, no single dominant theory (despite various
takeover bids).There will also be, he argues even more acutely, a
high degree of historical forgetfulness and nave rediscovery (1981:
306-7).This is finally because the study of crime is not a marginal
concern to the citizen but plunges us immediately into fundamental
questions of order and morality in society and to the examination
of the very basis of the civilization we live in (1981: 307).
Rather than attempt another typology or formal exposition of
positions or paradigms, we intend to follow Youngs precept where we
think it takes us.This means picking up the second strand of
unresolved questioning echoing down the decades from Jerome Hall
onwards and focussing upon the relationships between criminological
theory and various forms of social action in respect of the
changing world to which that theory responds.One source of guidance
here is again provided by Young, writing a bit over a decade later
in the first edition of this very Handbook.By this time, in 1994,
the sample of theoretical positions that engage Youngs attention
have changed.The criminologies of relevance in the 1980s and 1990s
are for him all ways of addressing (or denying) the conjoined
crises of aetiology and policy he terms these Left idealism/radical
social constructionism; New administrative criminology; Right
realism and Left realism.The substance of this particular bit of
cartography is not our main concern here seen from other vantage
points in the world the mapping would have been done on a different
projection, just as things look different again another fifteen
years on.Youngs points include that these positions are themselves
mainly versions of the earlier ones, a reiteration made possible by
historical amnesia and seeming rediscovery (cf. Rock 2005).He goes
on to argue that disciplines have both an interior and an exterior
history.The interior history involves many of the topics we have
already 20 addressed above the nature of academic exchange, the
institutional settings in which research is conducted, its funding,
publishing and so on and hence its constitution as a viable
field.The exterior history, meanwhile, involves the extent to which
the interior dialogue is propelled by the exterior world; scholars
of different conviction clash on a terrain determined by the
specificity of their society (Young 1994: 71; see also Melossi
2008).Theory, for Young, emerges out of a certain social and
political conjuncture and has different uses and applications in
diverse contexts around the world.Generalizations are not
altogether impossible, but they do not all travel as well as their
producers sometimes imagine (see Melossi et al. 2011a). It is
apparent nevertheless that the various criminologies, while not all
by any means expressly affiliated to one or other political
ideology, and by no means only conducted by overtly political
people, involve distinct theories of action, depictions of
institutions, assumptions regarding the feasibility of various
forms of policy, visions of smaller or grander forms of moral
invention (OMalley 1992), management and intervention.They claim
certain kinds of social or political change small or large - as
possible and desirable and dismiss or preclude others as either
unattainable or unacceptable.They feature different notions of the
viability of intervention through the institutions of the criminal
justice system as conventionally understood, and distinct premises
regarding the effectiveness or otherwise of various modes of
punishment or other species of social regulation.They envisage
different kinds of relationship between the role of states in
coercive social control and their activities in educational, health
or family policies and attribute different weights and significance
to these.They project different and in some cases ultimately
mutually exclusive images of the proper roles of government
agencies and other loci of collective action, commercial or
associational.They magnify some problems and dispute the relative
significance of others.In other words, criminological theories may
not all be political theories (they may be, and very frequently
are, all too ignorant of the claims of political theory properly
so-called - Loader and Sparks 2010: ch. 5), but they all, without
exception, find their uses and applications in circumstances that
are shaped and conditioned by the realm of politics and they carry
implications from and for that world. 21 There are two primary
kinds of challenge with which criminology has to come to terms
today, and these are both acutely contemporary forms of the same
challenges that Jerome Hall noted in 1933.The first, which is in
some degree the leitmotif of this chapter, concerns the various
ways in which criminology deals with its inherently
trans-disciplinary character, at the same time as coping
intelligently and productively with a range of contingent pressures
and incentives towards disciplinary consolidation.The second has to
do with the ways in which its practitioners estimate the relative
urgency and importance of a range of substantive topics and
questions, some more or less familiar but others entirely novel,
and find compelling ways to speak to these before a variety of
possible audiences.The latter point also by extension returns us to
the vexed issue of how, by whom and with what effects, criminology
is consumed and put to use, and the chances criminologists have of
influencing those uses.We address these questions separately in the
next section. Every now and again somebody comes up with a more or
less prescriptive view on what criminology is or should be really
all about.Really it is all about variations in self-control.Really
it is all about criminal events, not criminal dispositions.Really
it is all about psycho-social development.Really it is all about
the appropriation by states of the power to criminalize human
action.Conversely, every now and again someone states that really
and truly criminology has failed, or indeed cannot exist.We have
discussed a number of such moves and why we think they are all
implausible, at some length elsewhere (Loader and Sparks 2010:
17-26) and do not intend to rehearse that argument again now.More
commonly, criminologists tend to affirm (some would say pay
lip-service to) the principle that criminology is indeed a multi-
or inter- or trans-disciplinary enterprise.Sometimes these
statements are themselves disguised attempts at closure really
criminology is just a species of something else, be it psychology
or sociology, to take only the most common. We ourselves are at
times tempted to say that really criminology is a species of the
genus Politics, but we know this would be reductive and
over-simplify our own point and so, mostly, manage to refrain.
Criminology, we suggest, not very originally, has strong reasons to
acknowledge its hybrid and cross-disciplinary status and in various
ways and degrees has long done so.Since it stands at the confluence
between, and seeks to engage with, a series of fields and streams
of 22 influence that constitute its subject-matter, and since these
fields are of (at least) political, legal, philosophical, economic,
cultural, institutional, policy, professional, practical and
personal characters, it can scarcely do otherwise.While the
particular configuration of streams that are arranged around the
criminal question may be unique, the dilemmas of disciplinarity
arise certainly across the social sciences and in all likelihood
everywhere.For this reason the question of how disciplines are
constituted how they come into being, develop, consolidate and
disperse is itself the topic of increasing attention (Repko
2008).In the case of criminology certain terms crop up
frequently.Sometimes criminology is thought of as a kind of
scavenger or gleaner it raids other disciplines for what it can get
out of them (e.g., Zedner 2007). Its relationship with them is
somewhat opportunist, if not actually parasitic.On other occasions
criminology is depicted more peaceably as having a bridging
function between other more separate, but more fundamental,
subjects (Garland 2011: 293).As Repko (2008: 22-4) points out, such
metaphors arise frequently wherever disciplinary boundaries are
placed in question, or a need is sensed to transcend or subvert
them. What should we deduce from this little excursus?First, we
have argued repeatedly that while criminologists continue to teach
and to debate some version (but evolving and shifting versions) of
a canon of known, classic positions we should also cultivate a
conception of criminology as a field with open, porous borders,
receptive to new inputs, perhaps from unexpected quarters (Loader
and Sparks 2010: ch. 5). Second, criminological theories are
evaluated just like others in terms of coherence and explanatory
power, evidentiary weight, accountability, originality and so on,
and not by any special or uniquely criminological
characteristic.None of this means, however, that debate in or about
criminology is either merely chaotic or unnecessary.Criminology
shares its provisional and contingent quasi-disciplinary character
with many other fields of study.For these reasons we think it makes
most sense to think about criminology socially and institutionally,
rather than deductively or prescriptively.Richard Jones has argued
that we think of it as an aggregation of communities, or following
Etienne Wenger, of communities of practice (Wenger 1998) with
certain shared, disputed or brokered boundary objects.12
12 Jones made this point in oral presentation at the launch of
Bosworth and HoylesWhat is Criminology?, All Souls College, Oxford,
3 February 2011.23 If we cannot seal the borders we cannot seal
them a priori on any side, choosing to engage only with those forms
of knowledge we find most congenial.Many students of criminology
ourselves very much included continue to insist on seeing
criminology as among the more social of the social sciences, to
borrow a phrase Mary Douglas (1992: 12) once used in another
context.That is, its disputatious and contested character is
intrinsic, given that its objects of inquiry themselves belong in
the domains of strife and disorder, and are characterized by
conflicts over their meaning and interpretation, as much as over
the practical measures undertaken towards them by way of control or
redress.Crime, criminalization, sanctioning and social control have
always been socially and politically constituted at their very
core.As Garland points out (2011: 307), with reference to Kitsuse
and Cicourel (1963) and Hindess (1973), students of crime and its
control have known this for a very long time, implying that there
are few excuses for behaving as if it were either not known, or was
merely of tangential relevance.Yet this in no way precludes the
pursuit of more primary, etiological and explanatory questions
about how and why people come to act in violation of law.Those
questions have always had a central place among the raisons detre
of the field, and criminology cannot simply shrug off the
legitimate expectation from various quarters that it has something
to contribute to addressing them.To disclaim any such interest is
to cede the relevant ground to others who may be, as Garland puts
it in a slightly different context, innocent of all criminological
theory (2011: 302).13The point, rather, is to insist that such
explanatory projects meet the requirements imposed in studying such
a complex object, in terms of definitional precision, awareness of
cultural and jurisdictional variation and contingency, of coherent
connections between relevant levels of explanation and so on.All of
these considerations necessarily stand among the facts that a
theory of crime has to fit. No doubt there are criminologists they
may even be quite numerous who would sooner carry on doing the old
work in the old way.Nevertheless it seems clear that some of those
who are currently conducting the more creative and original
explanatory work are well aware of these conceptual problems, and
take pains to address them.Recent work by investigators such as
Sampson and Laub (1993, 2003), Wikstrm (2010a and b) and others
demonstrates
13Garlandrefersheretothegrowthofterrorismandsecuritystudies,largelyinignoranceofthepotential
contribution of analogous themes and insights from criminology.24
an enhanced awareness of, inter alia, the dimensions of time and
space in all human action, and of the knotty and inherently
contingent connections between individuals, situations, settings,
communities and actions (see generally Wikstrm and Sampson 2006).In
this regard some of the more intriguing and potentially fruitful
developments from within the heartlands of the field flow from the
increasing availability of data from maturing longitudinal studies
(inherently costly and demanding many years of investment and
committed work). Moreover, the world we now inhabit is one that is
being re-made at every moment by scientific and technical
developments.Our relations with the world of things, our
communicative capacities, our social relationships, our relations
with our own very bodies and identities are all in change for these
reasons. Indeed much of the most sophisticated current work in the
social sciences is directed towards precisely this intersection
(Barnes 2000; Yearley 2005).Now more than ever, it is fruitless to
attempt to defend the social in social science merely by building
defensive walls against the natural sciences on grounds of their
imputed taint of positivism.We have little option but to address an
environment in which knowledge drawn from genetics, neuroscience,
evolutionary psychology and other such newer socio-technical fields
will claim application to questions of crime and punishment.One
foreseeable outcome of such developments is a new set of boundary
disputes in which criminologists become drawn into a series of
arguments over what Ericson (2003: 43) called their disciplinary
jurisdiction.Another, perhaps more fruitful, response is to proceed
not by reflex rejection but rather by participating in
conversations that subject these developments to rigorous ethical,
conceptual and indeed sociological inquiry, the better to estimate
not just the validity of their substantive claims but also their
ideological effects and their potentially far-reaching roles in
reconstructing the governance of crime.As Garland points out, it is
criminologys fate to have as its object of study a state-defined
social problem and the set of state and non-state practices through
which [it] is managed (2011: 305). If this makes criminology
necessarily governmental it seems to follow that it is compelled to
track, analyze, comprehend and critique the changing modes of
knowledge and technique that bear upon the governance of crime. 25
One set of questions about such new scientific knowledges could be
that several of them might be seen to have in common the tendency
to direct attention onto the characteristics of individuals.In this
respect, if not in all, they might appear to reproduce
characteristics long associated with biological positivism, and
social critiques thereof.One of the tasks fulfilled by the
intellectual histories of those earlier movements (Melossi 2008;
Rafter 2009) is to remind us, paraphrasing E. P. Thompsons
celebrated expression, that the mind has walked these cliffs
before, even as we struggle to accommodate to the new landscapes of
knowledge that confront us now.It would indeed be regrettable if
criminology were allowed to succumb to a new individualism when so
many of the emergent problems and questions that currently confront
the social sciences precisely demand attention to new
configurations in economy, culture, technology and social
organization that circulate globally and which pose distinct and
testing questions about governance, policy, institutional design at
multiple levels, including the supra-national.We noted above that
the environment that current criminology addresses and which
constitutes what Young termed its exterior history - changes
continually and in dynamic ways.We identified new forms of
politicization and the intensification in penal politics in many
countries, the advent of new modes and techniques of management and
ordering, the pluralization of policing and security, and the
increasingly global flow of both crime and crime policies as
prominent features of the terrain that criminology now
confronts.Here we can only pick out a small number of what seem to
us to be the most salient points, in terms of their implications
for the production and circulation of criminological knowledge. We
have argued previously (Loader and Sparks 2007) and continue to
hold that, as Bauman (2001: 11) has it, the advent of global
figuration is by far the most prominent and seminal feature of our
times.Without rehearsing our own and others arguments in ways that
space forbids, and which would in any case be redundant,14 we took
a lead from David Held and his colleagues who conceptualize
globalization in the following terms: A process (or set of
processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial
organization of social relations and transactions assessed in terms
of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact generating
transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity,
interaction, and the exercise of power (Held et al. 1999: 16).
14Therelevantpaperofours,originallyinthepreviouseditionofthisHandbook,isavailableat:[OUP
resources URL] 26 As numerous analysts have noted, this poses
problems for the examination of societies as distinct entities with
clear boundaries and instead brings to the fore the issue of
networks and flows movements of capital, goods, people, symbols and
information across formerly separate national contexts (Castells
1996).We also took it to suggest that local social relations, and
the fate of particular places, are being reconfigured in ways that
contemporary social and criminological enquiry is only beginning to
get to grips with, and that sovereign authority is no longer merely
territorial, the sole prerogative of nation-states, but instead
also inhabits new sites of power beyond the state.Such developments
certainly affect and frequently intensify social cleavages,
insecurities and inequalities (of affluence and destitution, access
and exclusion, mobility and fixity).By extension we live in a time
of contradictory political responses that globality has ushered
forth- old fundamentalisms and violent protectionism on the one
hand, new international social movements and cosmopolitan
possibilities on the other. Certain of the effects of these altered
mobilities and relationships in terms both of transnational
organized crime and of transnational developments in policing and
security are now becoming more fully registeredin a range of
scholarly and policy literatures, even if the scale of what is at
stake in these fields can baffle and deter.As Castells (1998: 166)
has aptly suggested, these are new phenomena that profoundly affect
international and national economies, politics, security, and,
ultimately, societies at large.Certain key substantive issues thus
posed notably that of trafficking in people for purposes of sexual
and economic exploitation have latterly begun to receive more
intense attention as topics of both research and intervention
(e.g., Munro 2006; Lee 2007, 2011). Topics of this magnitude
necessarily breach disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. They reach
across national and international law and policy, development
economics, gender relations and a variety of other bodies of work;
and contributions to knowledge on them arises from groups and
individuals ranging from local activists and NGOs, to journalists,
to some of the most powerful governmental organizations in the
world.A host of similar points might be made, inter alia, about
debates on drugs, environmental harm, migration and the
criminalization of mobile populations, and terrorism and security
policies. Our point here is not to try to stipulate what
criminologists or others must or should do: we have gone to some
lengths elsewhere to dispute the value of such legislative
utterances 27 (Loader and Sparks 2010: 20-22).Our claim is simply
that while it has long been true that criminology inhabits a range
of distinct sites and registers it is as Ericson (2003: 43) put it
a multi-disciplinary, multi-professional, multi-institutional field
the scope, reach and complexity of the problems that it might
legitimately bear upon today is very great.This is not to
presuppose, still less to try to impose, some kind of humanly
unfeasible omni-competence on the part of criminologists. But it is
to raise questions about their professional formation, the
curricula they study and teach, their openness to multiple
perspectives and the ways in which we debate and discuss the
priority that we accord to different possible topics and objects of
inquiry.What, properly speaking, might be said to be the
criminological contribution to discussions of genocide and other
crimes against humanity (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2009; Savelsberg
2011) - and does this question still make sense? At least three
implications stand out as worthy of further brief mention.First,
there is scope for criminologists to give renewed attention to the
sense in which their subject is a legal as well as a policy field
(Lacey and Zedner this volume; Zedner 2011).This concerns not just
the obvious yet somehow all-too-often neglected point that
criminology has an internal relationship to problems in the
definition and application of criminal sanctions in short to
criminalization and its alternatives (Simester and von Hirsch
2011).It also, in the context of the developments sketched above,
suggests a need for more intense attention to a series of
constitutional and jurisdictional questions, such as those raised
in respect of questions of multi-level governance, international
treaties and convention-compliance, and so on.This point has been
well-made by Murphy and Whitty (2007) with specific regard to
studies of contemporary prisons by criminologists and other social
scientists, but it has wider application. They remark on what they
see as the existence of a curious disciplinary divergence in which
social scientists make scant reference (or none at all) to human
rights, notwithstanding their increasing salience in the vocabulary
of prison administration and their role in restructuring prison
governance.This omission, they argue, results from some combination
of disciplinary closure and over-dependence by researchers on
officially-defined pragmatic and managerial considerations (ibid:
800). The irony here is that social scientists, in failing to
engage with legal scholarship, miss key aspects of what is going
on. These factors go some way towards explaining why [British]
criminologists have not engaged in a sustained and informed way
with human rights.That said, it remains hard to understand 28 why
the 1990s criminological turn towards the rise in punishment did
not prompt a companion interest in the growth of rightsbased legal
constitutionalism in the United Kingdom or, more specifically, in
the impact of the European Court of Human Rights on UK law in
relation to matters such as prisoner release dates, disciplinary
hearings or prisoner access to legal advice and the courts (cf.
Lazarus 2004). Conversely, Murphy and Whitty suggest, while there
has been some development in doctrinal and substantive discussion
among lawyers of human rights, with respect to prisons as in other
fields, there is still very little empirical literature within law
on the impact of human rights [in the United Kingdom], in terms of
both the initiation of rights claims and the implementation of
rights norms (2007: 801).In similar vein, but on a broader European
canvas, van Zyl Smit and Snacken (2009) advert in the sub-title of
their book to a concern to connect Penology and Human Rights.They
argue that the growing recognition of the human rights of prisoners
in Europe, including the principle of the use of imprisonment as a
last resort (2009: xvii) is in part attributable to empirical
research on the characteristics of prisons as institutions, and the
effects of imprisonment, as well as to wider reflections on
theories of punishment and the aims of imprisonment. These seem
strong arguments for mutual learning. Secondly, it no longer seems
good enough for criminologists to focus the overwhelming bulk of
their attention on the domestic concerns of a handful of the worlds
wealthiest nations.For all that criminologists have a long and in
many cases honourable record of concern for the effects of
inequalities within those nations, the fields track-record of
genuine curiosity in, or concern with, the majority of the worlds
countries or people is limited at best.In light of the foregoing
this is no longer sustainable.As Agozino (2010) sharply remarks
Western modernist criminology has for too long buried its head in
the snows of Europe and North America.This has resulted,
notwithstanding the efforts of a number of pioneers (e.g., Sumner
1992; Cain 2000; Agozino 2005) in a selective ignorance concerning
the effects that Western policy and intervention have had, and
continue to have, around the world. It distracts from the sense in
which the experiences of African or Latin-American societies might
temper or correct the purportedly generalizing claims of
Anglo-Saxon criminologies.In other words, the world ushered into
being by the successive historical effects of colonialism and 29
latterly of capitalist globalization is as connected as it is
unequal a multiplicity without unity, as Beck puts it (2000: 11).As
one of us has noted elsewhere (Melossi et al. 2011b: 6) these
concerns continue to pose as crucial the embeddedness and
particularity of the criminal question in each national, historical
configuration (the traditional domain, that is to say, of
comparative criminology- Nelken this volume), at the same time as
drawing attention to the ways in which various forms of savoir
travel along lines of historical, economic, political and
linguistic influence or affinity. One version of the latter
argument has recently been canvassed eloquently and influentially
by Loc Wacquant.In Wacquants view convergences between the language
and practice of criminal justice systems round the world do not
result simply from common responses to similar problems, nor yet
from the pragmatic adoption or emulation of lessons or techniques.
Rather, Wacquant detects the dominance of a certain set of models
and slogans broken windows, zero tolerance, no-frills prisons and
so on that are, in his view, integral to the ways in which
hegemonic neo-liberalism (2009b: 5) superintends the insecurities
and fears that it itself engenders. These developments, on this
account, come as a package and are actively and energetically
exported by think-tanks, consultants and other evangelists for
neo-liberalism and for its penological and policing solutions. In
these ways, Wacquant argues, the dissemination of zero tolerance
partakes of a broader international traffic in policy formulae that
binds together market rule, social retrenchment, and penal
enlargement (Wacquant 2009b: 171). Melossi et al. (2011b: 9)
suggest that some versions of a strong, diffusionist thesis need to
pay greater attention to the ways in which translation and
translocation raise obdurate and challenging conceptual issues. How
are discourses and practices changed in the process of their
movement between cultural contexts?As well as such questions of
reception, however, there is an increasing requirement on Western
criminologists to attend much more carefully to voices from the
Global South as producers of criminological knowledge. The
criminology of the post-colonial world (Cuneen 2011) necessarily
concerns not just assimilating the often disturbing implications
and effects of history but also why certain generic solutions fail
to apply when lifted out of context, as well as why other more
contextually appropriate ones may. In these respects the
discoveries and implications of African, Asian and Latin-American
30 scholarship, as well as studies of indigenous peoples within
Western countries, are likely to be among the leading and most
provocative themes of the next few decades. Thirdly, and finally
for now, we need to demonstrate awareness that the world of
globalization is not flat. A concern with the implications of
macro-level developments for criminological theory and research is
not now (any more than at any other time) simply a licence for
preferring the novel, the fashionable and the sweeping over the
grounded, the empirical and the local, nor for disengaging from
intricate and detailed problems of policy and politics wherever we
happen to encounter them.In the midst of some potentially
far-reaching transformations in the world we inhabit, there remains
much to be said for research strategies that continue to attend to
such things as experience, beliefs, values, sensibilities and
feeling. There is, furthermore, much to be gained from seeking to
grasp aspects of global social and political change microscopically
through ethnography, and observation, and talking to people about
the lived texture of their everyday lives. Those dimensions of
social life denoted by the idea of culture continue, in short, to
matter and ought properly to command criminological attention. They
matter because macro-level social change of the kind we have been
concerned with here filters into the lives, experiences and
dispositions of individuals and social groups (become, as it were,
features of mundane culture) in ways that are uneven and never
entirely predictable, and which cannot simply be read off from the
texts and tenets of social theory they stand, in other words, in
need of patient empirical investigation. In part, this points to
the renewed significance of that rich body of enquiry concerned
with how crime, order, justice and punishment are represented
through print and an increasingly bewildering and diverse array of
electronic media; this being one of the principal routes through
which the profane meanings of notions such as security, risk and
danger and encoded and passed into cultural circulation. The
criminological gaze might also fruitfully turn (further) here
towards the ways in which crime and social order figure in the
lived, and always in some part local, social relations of
differently-situated persons in a wide, surprising and frequently
vastly under-explored variety of places and circumstances.There
remains a powerful need for what Daly, following Christie (1997),
calls near data research (2011: 117-9), and for an ethnographic
imagination that is committed to capturing the passion and
particularity of the ways in which the criminal question is lived,
transacted and fought out around the world. 31 The consumption of
criminology Among the ways in which criminologies differ is their
conception of their relation to audiences, impacts and influences
for who and for what purposes are they written? What modes or
models of influencing are envisaged by them and how successful are
they in realizing these?As the field has expanded and diversified,
in the ways we outline above, so the explicit or implied answers
offered to these questions by different schools and practitioners
have become more various and arguably more contested. Cohens
implicit sociology of knowledge in Footprints in the Sand was
sophisticated and appreciative, but the world it addressed seemed
both smaller and in some respects less complex than the one that
criminology confronts today.In its formative periods most versions
of the map of possibilities of the ways in which criminology might
be put to use in the world envisaged the criminologist as being on
fairly intimate terms with their intended audiences. For those in
the mainstream of whom, in Britain at least, Radzinowicz was the
dominant and emblematic figure this meant civil servants and senior
professionals. If criminology produced knowledge-for-policy it did
so in a milieu whose locale was rather more the senior common room
than the laboratory.Indeed at least one alert social critic of the
period, Raymond Williams (1983), argued that the informality and
casual amiability of these exchanges was a key aspect of the ways
in which members of the dominant intellectual and political groups
maintained their dominance and reproduced a shared picture of the
world.In Britain, Radzinowicz was a serial member of Royal
Commissions and other august bodies, such as the Advisory Council
on the Penal System (Radzinowicz 1999). Nigel Walker, Radzinowiczs
successor as Director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology,
was a civil servant before he was an academic.Some analyses of the
lost world of elite liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s, from the
vantage point of the harder and hotter 1990s (Windlesham 1997) are
sometimes also in part expression of regret for the social worlds
that sustained those postures, and the easy circuits of
communication that were a feature of their mode of operation. 32
For the radicals and critics from the 1970s onwards there were also
interlocutors and reference groups, but these were of different
temper many of them previously un-represented and un-heard in
academic discourse.They included prisoners, the families of people
who had died in custody, and a number of less privileged
practitioner groups such as youth workers.Aspirationally at least,
and sometimes genuinely and effectively, the new oppositional
accounts of criminology saw themselves as related to various fields
of social struggle.Of these feminism has clearly been the most
durable and the one that has fundamentally affected the field, as
it has most fields of research across the humanities and social
sciences.There has also however been a gradually increasing
acknowledgement of intersectionality vis-a-vis race and class
(Sokoloff and Burgess-Proctor 2011). In sum, the space of positions
for policy and political engagement in the world that Cohen
addressed in 1981 seemed somewhat simpler.There was mainstream
criminology directed principally towards government; and there were
the radical criminologies assembled within the NDC oriented to new
social movements and radicalised professionals. This distinction is
arguably of limited utility in a world in which criminology has
expanded and diversified and in which the politics of the criminal
question have heated up. To think about these matters today raises
a number of questions. For example:Who are the postulated audiences
for criminological research? If criminological knowledge today
circulates in a more contested space, what other discourses and
interests surround and intersect with it?How does criminological
work engage with the worlds of politics, policy and the media? Are
there beneficial by-products of the hotter climate, for example
because things become more explicit and more clearly problematized?
In the remainder of this section we take up these questions and the
issues at stake in answering them. In so doing, we use the
evidence-based policy movement (EBP) in criminology, and the
claims, presuppositions and visions of politics and good governance
mobilized by some key actors, as our case in point. In our earlier
discussion of the various modes of engagement of criminologists
with social action and policy debates (Loader and Sparks 2010) we
note that students of crime and punishment of all sides, factions,
schools and convictions have taken seriously the contributions of
the knowledge that they produce to policy, to public discourse more
broadly, to decision-making, and to professional practices of
various kinds.As several thoughtful 33 commentators have observed
something of this kind is more or less foundational for the field
(Ericson 2003; Garland 2011), just as it is among the originating
concerns of the social sciences more generally.The positions
concerned vary in their epistemological self-confidence, and in
their expectations of direct influence, but they are all versions
of knowledge/policy or knowledge/practice relations. Most of the
positions currently in play, in criminology as elsewhere, have an
affinity with may even be seen as versions of - one or more classic
attempts to resolve the problem of knowledge/policy relations that
have been attempted at earlier points in the history of social
science.For example, many of the current arguments of
evidence-based and experimental criminology (Sherman 2009) are
reminiscent of the view of the sciences of democracy associated
with Harold Lasswell (1951) one which understands the policy
analysts operational task as focusing the attention of all those
involved in policymaking so as to bring about their maximum
rationality (Hoppe 2005: 202).These views contrast somewhat with
the no less celebrated accounts of Lindblom (1959) and Schn
(1983).Lindbloms famous paper offers a modest vision of the
capabilities of social science in an environment of incrementalism
and polyarchic competition. Schn takes us further again in the
direction of a sceptical and provisional understanding of the
capabilities of knowledge to inform policy.In a famous statement he
suggests that: There is a high, hard ground where practitioners can
make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and
there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing 'messes'
incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that the
problems of the high ground, however great their technical
interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the
large society, while in the swamp are the problems of greatest
human concern. Shall the practitioner stay on the high, hard ground
where he can practice rigorously, as he understands rigor, but
where he is constrained to deal with problems of relatively little
social importance? Or shall he descend to the swamp where he can
engage the most important and challenging problems if he is willing
to forsake technical rigor? [...] There are those who choose the
swampy lowland. They deliberately involve themselves in messy but
crucially important problems and, when asked to describe their
methods of inquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error,
intuition, and muddling through. (Schn 1983: 42-3) 34 These
utterances remind us of the need to acknowledge a spectrum of
positions on the feasibility of scientific support for
decisions.The most ebullient versions of this support envisage what
Hoppe (2005: 202) calls the scientization of the knowledge system,
characterized by the instrumental use or research as data, in
direct support of decision-making.Most knowledge utilization, in
crime policy or anywhere else, has not historically looked much
like this, although advocates of EBP in criminal justice have in
recent years come close to claiming that it should. In the UK a
high water-mark of the latter view came in a speech by then Labour
Cabinet Minister David Blunkett in 2000. Tell us what works and
why, the Minister enjoined.For Blunkett it is self-evident that
decisions on Government policy ought to be informed by sound
evidence (Blunkett 2000, cited by Parsons 2002: 43).What
policy-makers require is to be able to measure the size of the
effect of A on B.This is genuine social science and reliable
answers can only be reached if the best social scientists are
willing to engage in this endeavour' (ibid).This is plainly a
direct governmental demand for explicit, instrumentally applicable
knowledge what one sceptical commentator called a view of evidence
as things that can be added up, joined up and wired up (Parsons
2002: 48).Blunketts invitation certainly found a number of willing
and conscientious takers. Nevertheless, many subsequent
observations have been less sanguine than he might have hoped.There
have been at least two very distinct lines of critical response to
EBP in criminal justice in Britain. The first suggests that it
never really happened; they were not serious, or at best they were
intensely (and ideologically) selective. EBP is, on this view, more
rhetoric than practice, a scientific cloak for a series of thinly
disguised political preferences (Hope and Walters 2008). The second
says: it did happen but its instrumentalism, and its association
with the proliferation of governmental surveillance systems (audit
trails, performance units, delivery metrics etc.) make EBP
inherently tied to a command-and-control logic of knowledge
production and use (Parsons 2002).Conversely, of course, there are
social scientists for whom EBP is not a managerialist convenience,
but an item of deeply held conviction and as-yet unrealized
aspiration.On this view, the task of evidence-based or experimental
criminology is to use the highest quality scientific research
evidence available to encourage more efficacious and just public
policy (Farrington and Welsh 2007: ix), and to make it a top
priority of government to cast aside political rhetoric and the
need to satisfy a mythical punitive 35 public in favour of research
evidence (ibid.).This may, as Farrington