Abstract
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice is an engrossing and authoritative volume. It is the sixth volume in the ‘Oxford Handbooks in Criminology and Criminal Justice’ series, published under the general editorship of Michael Tonry. The aim of the series is to offer comprehensive and critical state-of-the-art surveys of current thinking and research in criminology and criminal justice. Earlier volumes focused on the areas of white-collar crime, organized crime, criminological theory, crime prevention, and police and policing. This volume is once again authored by distinguished specialists and edited with great care. It is highly readable, up to date, rich in information and insights, and fully complies with the series’s promise to provide an outstanding reference tool for scholars, students and policy makers.
Until recently, a rather strict separation existed between historians of crime and criminologists, whereby the first focused on pre-World War II issues and archival research, and the second on current affairs, interviews, or observations, and policy oriented research. However, boundaries have become increasingly porous. Historians borrow methodologies from the social sciences, and vice versa, and all are affected by the source revolution (the Internet, digitalization, new search methods). Taken together, these researchers cover a vast, interdisciplinary, and rapidly evolving field, and are now generally referred to as crime historians.
Due to the now largely shared understanding of crime as a social construct and culturally dependent categorization, the history of crime and the history of criminal justice are also increasingly entangled. The decision to bring both together in a single Oxford Handbook is a timely and wise one. It has clearly stimulated the authors of the 32 chapters included in this book to treat their subject matter in a dynamic and dialectic manner, and makes for attractive reading.
To keep the volume coherent, editors Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen narrowed the topic down to some extent. The focus is on the modern period (1700–2000), and mainly on urban affairs, as ‘little is known about the criminal justice system in rural and peripheral areas’ (p. 31). The geographic focus is Western, particularly the United States, Europe (mainly the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands), Canada, and Australia. By and large the contributing authors do also come from these countries and references to non-Western countries are few and far between, with the only exceptions being Daniel Siemens’s chapter on criminal trials and their publics, and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s on penal transportation. The editors themselves attribute this bias to the ‘nationalist’ tendency in crime history. That said, this bias does not make this handbook any less relevant as a reference tool for those working on the history of crime and criminal justice in non-Western countries.
The editors, in their introduction, stress that most historical writing ‘has yet to recognize the significance of the state’ as most invoke ‘a simple model, formed more by a priori assumptions than by empirical research’ (p. 10). They must have communicated this message to the authors gathered in this book, as most of them do pay serious attention to legal and wider institutional reforms and their interrelations with crime (while also paying attention to social, cultural, and economic developments). Constance Batman, for instance, in her chapter on violent anarchism at the turn of the 19th century, highlights, among other things, how the perceived threat led to the criminalization of anarchism, but also to a wider institutional turn, including new policing models and techniques, a change in immigration policies, and efforts – mostly in vain – to increase international intelligence coordination. Similar historical interactions between crime and criminal justice are surveyed in other topical chapters on organized crime, policing, popular justice, terrorism, and gender, among others.
This book is structured in eight parts, each of three to six chapters, most 20–25 pages long, although some are shorter, and all written by different authors. Throughout, repetitions are sparse: inevitably, Lombroso is introduced various times, and so is the exemplary digitalization project of the Old Bailey. Cross-references among chapters are held to a minimum, enhancing the impression of stand-alone entries, as proper for a handbook. All chapters end with excellent and up to date bibliographies, most of three to five pages. The index, on the contrary, has gaps – no entrance for ‘Old Bailey,’ ‘underworld,’ ‘mafia,’ and other topics thoroughly covered in the book – and clearly addressed to expert readers: for instance, the emblematic Chicago School is hard to find, because it is listed under the more esoteric ‘social theory’ entry.
Part I of the book (‘Historians, Interpretations, Methodologies’) focuses on the interaction between history and social science. The chapters cover four major theoretical frameworks and conceptual approaches: methods of historical research (including the advantages and pitfalls of statistical data); long-term European trends in crime and its explanations; and differences between history of rural and urban crime and criminal justice. Part II (‘Forms of Crime’) focuses on the historical development and historiography of specific forms of crime, including its relationship with the criminal justice system, with chapters focusing on interpersonal violence, prostitution, retail theft, the underworld (as a concept and reality), violent anarchism (1870s–1914), and the history of drug trafficking as a local and international crime. Part III (‘Crime, Gender, and Ethnicities’) is concerned with conceptual developments of violence and masculinity and methodological issues. Part IV (‘Cultural Representations of Crime’) includes a chapter on crime news and the press that attempts to reconstruct how the press has, at different moments in time, played a role in both stereotyping and in dismantling stereotypes. Other chapters examine crime fiction in Mexico, crime museums and monuments, and the crime genre.
Part V (‘Rise of Criminology’) offers critical inquiries in how criminology formed as a new social science, and includes chapters on the historical context of criminology’s rise, the medical turn, and early Soviet criminology and gender issues. Part VI (‘Law Enforcement and Policing’) covers issues from the birth of policing in the 18th century, to more contemporary issues, including the issues of crime in post-World War I. Part VII (‘Law, Courts, and Criminal Justice’) has chapters on the role of popular justice in US history, criminal trials and their publics (including comparative references to China, South Africa, Japan, and global processes in general), the historiography of pardoning, and a lackluster chapter on legal history. The chapters in Part VIII focus on the history of punishment and prisons.
Most of the 32 chapters do an excellent job in surveying the arguments and counterarguments, contested concepts and ideas, debates, ground-breaking publications, and institutional turns or paradigmatic shifts that define the historiography of their specific fields. For instance, Heather Shore, in her chapter on the underworld and organized crime (1750–1950), when briefly reviewing Prohibition, explains that most historians agree on Prohibition’s transformative impact on crime, but differ on the type of impact it may have had on organized crime. Some argue that it led to an increase in organized crime, while others have not found such evidence, and argue that it merely led to increased visibility of preexisting forms of organized crime. Many chapters survey the range of methodological and theoretical approaches now available to researchers. Most chapters are somewhat open-ended, and explain that there is always more to be said and researched.