tazking heads

The whole reason d’etre of criminology is that it addresses crime. It categorises a vast range of activities and treats them as if they were all subject to the same laws - whether laws of human behaviour, genetic inheritance, economic rationality, development or the like. The argument within criminology has always been between those who give primacy to one form of explanation rather than another. The thing that criminology cannot do is deconstruct crime. It cannot locate rape or child sexual abuse in the domain of sexuality, nor theft in the domain of economic activity, nor drug use in the domain of health, to do so would be to abandon criminology to sociology, but more important it would involve abandoning an idea of a unified problem which requires a unified response.

Carol Smart

The quote above is the reason that I have come to resent taking one of my third-year papers, called Criminology, Sentencing and the Penal System (CSPS). It’s an introduction to criminology, but when its foundations seem so shallow, how worthy will anything be that’s built on top of them? With its scientistic “stats and trends” fetishism, criminology takes an unquestioning approach to both “CRIME” and “CRIMINALS”, looking too closely to see the structural contexts of crimes, and from too far away to use qualitative, human methodologies and provide much new insight.

Divorced from sociology, which could have given the discipline a good grounding in social institutions, processes, change, power relations and the like, criminology studies the people who commit crimes, why they are like that, and what we should do with them.

Criminology reifies crime and the people who commit it, instead of regarding the former as politically constructed and the latter as individuals with life histories. It seems to assume that crimes are inherently and self-evidently bad, and that all types and incidents of crime are inherently and self-evidently bad in the same way. Like Smart says, sex crimes may be more relevant to sexuality than to criminality, as drug crimes may be more relevant to health than to criminality, etc. The analytic category of ‘crime’ eclipses the variety of activities made to be illegal. I propose a remedy to this: the word “crime” should be banned when talking about trends and patterns, in favour of “crimes”. This recognises that crime is constituted by a multiplicity of activities, the only major unificatory factor being that you can be tried and punished for doing them.

Similarly, I’d replace the word “offender” with “person who has committed an offence”. It recognises the agency of the person (i.e. it’s not a deterministic attempt to oversocialise individuals) but it doesn’t write off groups of people with one ghettoising master status. It’s a clunkier use of language but it’s important so that criminology can’t hark back to its biologically essentialist foundations, where women were treated as evolutionary throwbacks. Is criminology studying why people commit crimes or why offenders do what they do? If this endeavour is to be useful, it is more likely to be so by framing its observations through the former lens.

Criminology has a distinctly uncritical approach even in its attempts to address what it sees as injustice. This was highlighted to me in its treatment of gender. The Corston Report (2007) on women in the criminal justice system essentially said, “Women are unlike men. Women are A, B and C. Women need X, Y and Z. Penal institutions should be reformed accordingly.” For example, women are more likely to self-harm in prison than men are, and women are more likely to be their children’s primary carers than men are. This is one example of a habit I would say is quintessentially criminological - that is, taking the categories of analysis and the boundaries of criminology as givens. Even if gender weren’t problematised in the first instance (which may be understandable in concise governmental reports), the researchers could at least acknowledge that there is a world outside of Holloway’s gates - of employment, families, education, communities, culture. Criminology hermetically seals the people who offend, by being so uncritical about its analytical categories and so parochial about its tasks. In doing so, it fails to acknowledge that people exist before they commit crimes, and outside of criminal justice institutions.

Perhaps basic criminology has exhausted its scope of instrumental functions. It collects and compares data (e.g. British Crime Survey, official police statistics, prison statistics). It draws surface-level links between likelihood of offending and age, race, gender, socioeconomic group, neighbourhood, intelligence and other inherent and environmental factors. It observes how data vary according to collection methods. Of course, criminologists can always collect more data or more up-to-date data, or more specific data. It can continue to record correlates and mediate between police, courts and lecture theatres. But I feel that that’s where it passes the buck to sociology, for rigorous interpretation of its data. Without sociological thinkers like Howard Becker and Paul Willis turning numbers into theory, criminology is a stack of numbers that shows us how to find, avoid and punish the bad people. Should that really be its purpose? And, if so, has it already completed its mission?

Surprising glimpses indicate that criminology doesn’t boil down to just that. For all the lectures I skipped, I did actually attend an extra-curricular panel talk on the legitimation of state authority that took place in the Institute of Criminology. That was more like it. It raised issues about how the judiciary gains and loses public legitimacy. These are the sorts of questions that will lead us beyond talking about patterns, towards something more causal. If criminologists can reach beyond crime statistics to look at societal institutions then they start to overcome the stunted remit and possibilities of criminology. But if these seminars hold the best kept secrets of the Institute of Criminology, then why does CSPS lead one to believe that criminologists are merely the Lord Chancellor’s number-crunchers?

It may not have been the intention for criminology to be the handmaiden of the state, but this course’s statistical focus and uncritical perspective lends itself well to the management of people with whom other social institutions can’t or won’t interact. ‘Pathways into and out of crime’, which sounds like it could provide valuable insight into how to affect people’s goals and motivations in a socially beneficial way, instead gives us a checklist for detecting persistent offenders. It shouldn’t be for subaltern criminology and sociology to address why people deviate or why they conform - it should be an integral part of criminological research. Furthermore, criminologists need to reflexively examine their own enterprise and whether any generalisation can usefully be made about this phenomenon of ‘crime’. The state may not differentiate between criminals, but a criminal may see her theft as a yielding to peer pressure. Is criminology best placed to investigate that? Without situating ‘crime’ and ‘criminals’ amongst the rest of the society, criminology marginalises and pathologises the offender, telling us little more about crime than a GCSE sociology textbook.

Treating crimes as crime and people who offend as offenders ends up perpetuating the hegemonic viewpoint of the political establishment. Is it possible for criminology to scrutinise its own foundations?