History,criminology and the ‘use’ of the past

Introduction

Being an academic surely means engaging in an inherently critical enterprise—one that requires us to ask awkward questions of power and the existent social order.

Historians do not count as ‘proper’ history that written … in the hope of changing the way politics and society function.

As the fields of sociological criminology and criminal justice history have developed over the last 30 years, there have been a number of what might be termed ‘manifestos of collaboration’—calls for a closer alignment of the concerns and members of the two disciplines (Davies and Pearson, 1999; Emsley and Robert, 1990; Lévy and Robert, 1984). More recently, a number of criminologists have reflected on the role of historical research in contemporary criminology (Bosworth, 2001; Knepper and Scicluna, 2010), and the temporal foci of the two fields have also increasingly elided. Criminal justice historians have begun to explore the post Second World War landscape (for example, Emsley, 2011; Jackson, 2008; Williams, 2007), while a number of criminologists have moved in the opposite direction (for example, Rigakos and Hadden, 2001; Zedner, 2006). Despite this, this article is based on the premise that criminal justice history remains both largely discrete and rather distant from mainstream criminological research.

Contemporary criminology views itself as, pace Downes, a rendezvous discipline. As such, there are of course some criminologists who have undergraduate or postgraduate qualifications in history, and who on occasion work from historical sources as well as using more present-focused methodologies (see, for example, Godfrey, 2008). There are also a few sociologically trained criminologists who have at times used historical sources and methods to great effect (for example, Eisner, 2003). However, such practice is not by any means a mainstream pursuit. A survey of articles published in the British Journal of Criminology since 1994 shows that just 5 per cent used what might be termed historical sources or methods, with the figure falling to just over 3 per cent (or 22 out of 644 articles) if the 1999 special issue on criminal justice history is omitted from the calculation. The vast bulk of academic criminological discourse and research is undertaken by individuals trained within departments of sociology, social policy and law, and hence adopts the methods and perspectives of those disciplines. Indeed, Appendix C of the Quality Assurance Agency benchmark document for criminology (2007), entitled ‘What is criminology?’, while referring to criminology as ‘a site at which social scientific disciplines interact’ (2007: 20), discusses overlap with the approaches of sociology, law, political science, social policy and forensic psychology but omits all mention of history. This article will thus contend that (with a number of notable exceptions) the past is not something most criminologists think about very often.

Among criminal justice historians, the obverse is true. They rarely consider anything but the past. It might seem rather facile to accuse historians of only thinking historically but, as will be argued, this has not always been the case. Historians of all hues have been, at various points since the inception of the discipline during the 19th century, more connected to the concerns of the present, more engaged, than they usually are now. While many criminal justice historians have been (and remain) motivated by a broad concern for social justice (for example, King, 2000) they usually stop short of making any explicit intervention in contemporary debates, which is often a primary goal for criminological writing. Crime, History and Societies, the foremost journal for criminal justice history has, since its inception in 1997, published only eight articles (5 per cent of the total) which could in any way be said to incorporate the primary markers of sociological criminology (which might be taken crudely to include some or all of: commentary on present-day debates and practices in the criminal justice field; reflection on and use of theory to inform methodology; a desire to abstract to some degree from the particular; use of types of sources and methods particularly linked to social scientific disciplines). There is, of course, a sense in which works of history which pertain to crime and criminal justice can be considered, de facto, criminology. However, the point being made here is that criminal justice history remains a largely discrete intellectual entity, with its own constituency, avenues of publication, conferences and networks.

This article considers why this remains the case. Given that it is possible for sufficiently motivated individuals to cross the practical boundaries imposed by separate institutional and funding structures, why are two fields—sociological criminology and criminal justice history—which seem to have such similar concerns, not more closely aligned? It will be contended that they lack a shared understanding of the extent to which the present can be explained and understood via reference to the past. In addition, the paths of development which the disciplines of sociological criminology and criminal justice history have taken have given very different types of ‘intent’ or ‘purpose’ to their work. Sociological criminologists usually seek influence in the present of one form or another, in order to shape the future. Criminal justice historians largely avoid imbuing their work with any explicit ‘purpose’. While, it will be argued, many do offer insights valuable to a contemporary critique of the criminal justice system, these are often constructed in ways which result in their contemporary utility remaining opaque to sociological criminologists in search of data with more immediate purchase.

In exploring the ramifications of these differences, this article will briefly consider the occasionally fractious relationship which developed between the disciplines of history and sociology from the mid-20th century onwards. It will then outline the main contours of sociological criminology’s ‘time-consciousness’ and ‘purpose’. The same style of analysis will then be applied to the field of criminal justice history. The article concludes by proposing an arena for future discussion between criminal justice historians and criminologists.

History versus sociology?

At first glance, it is tempting to view the lack of interaction between criminology and criminal justice history as a subset or legacy of the sometimes fractious relationship which developed between history and sociology in Britain after the Second World War. From the later 1940s onwards it was common among British historians to view sociology as largely divorced from the empirical tradition on which British history-writing was based, and overly given to sweeping theoretical claims (the elision of ‘sociology’ with ‘sociological theory’ being common among historians at the time). The inaugural issue of Past and Present noted, for example, that ‘one need not deny that theories may throw some light on limited aspects of the subject; but they must be severely kept in their very modest place’ (Morris and Hobsbawm, 1952: ii). A decade later Eric Hobsbawn and others again noted, at a conference devoted to the topic, how sociologists remained too interested in the general over the particular, and Hugh Trevor Roper, giving a paper in 1969 at the London School of Economics lamented public fawning over ‘the new queen of sciences, sociology’ (Aylmer and Adamson, 1964; Trevor Roper, 1969: 4). The first editorial of the influential History Workshop Journal noted an intent ‘to confront … sociology’s … confidence in dubious psychological stereotypes, … its exaltation of statistics irrespective of their sources, … its predilection for transhistorical generalization … and its ambitious claim to the title, “social science”’ (Samuel and Stedman Jones, 1976: 8). In the later 1970s, Gareth Stedman Jones (1976: 296) still felt justified in his belief that ‘the incoherence of much sociological reasoning’ was enough ‘finally to convince the historian that theoretical work is too important to be subcontracted to others’. Similarly, Geoffrey Elton (1977: 208), speaking as president of the Royal Historical Society, lamented the way in which (in his view) social scientists were so caught up in the establishment of agreed orthodoxies that ‘they simply have no means of grasping that there are valid forms of knowledge which achieve their ends in other ways’.

Historical research was equally not something which generated much interest among British sociologists between 1945 and the later 1970s. Early in the period many predicated their work on the concept of modernity or, later, post-modernity, and, rather enraptured by the presumed novelty of the object of their study—contemporary society—felt they had little to learn from historical retrospection. Ernest Gellner (1964: 66), for example, was only partially tongue in cheek when he claimed that ‘in transitional situations … men learn nothing from history: they cannot. They have to invent sociology instead.’ Such attitudes were, as Calhoun (1987: 616) has argued, partly a product of the ‘inordinate disdain’ shown by some historians, but this may in turn have been generated by Marxist infighting, as both the Communist Party Historians Group (who were very influential in the 1960s and 1970s) and many mid-century sociologists were inspired, if not informed, by Marxism. The prominent social historian Edward Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (1978), for example, was written in direct response to Althusser’s For Marx (1969) and Reading Capital (1970), with its perceived (by Thompson) attack on the empirical methodology of British social history. Even from within British sociology itself, however, there was little reflection on change over time in the decades following the Second World War. As Calhoun (1987: 615) has argued, the struggle to professionalize during this period led to an emphasis on ‘work that could more readily be justified in terms of its contemporary utility or relevance’.

During the early 1980s, however, a new climate developed. Peter Burke’s Sociology and History, while acknowledging that ‘sociologists and historians are not always the best of neighbours’ at least sought to set out what the two camps could learn from each other (Burke, 1980: 13). On the part of sociologists, Anthony Giddens (1979: 230) argued that there were ‘no logical or even methodological distinctions between the social sciences and history—appropriately conceived’. Philip Abrams (1980: 14, 4), while conceding that ‘historians and sociologists still have a long way to go in cultivating a common rhetoric’ also argued that there was ‘an emerging common mode of practical explanation’. Further fruitful debate continued in the 1980s but there was something of a retrenchment on the part of sociologists in the early 1990s, with some arguing that they had modelled themselves too much on historians, and had thus been seduced away from general theory (Kiser and Hechter, 1991). Other interventions, such as that of Goldthorpe (1991: 225), were more nuanced but, nonetheless, re-asserted the superiority of sociological methods, claiming that ‘history and sociology can, and should, still be regarded as significantly different intellectual enterprises’.

Such debates over idiopathic vs nomothetic methods rumble on (Calhoun, 1998). Yet, while certainly informing the academic contexts of criminal justice history and sociological criminology, such altercations can only be part of the answer as to why the two disciplines intersect relatively rarely even now. Rather, the proper focus has to be on the ‘purpose’ or ‘intent’ with which the two disciplines are invested by their practitioners, and the differing relationships to past, present and future that these ‘purposes’ generate. More specifically, sociological criminology has a strong sense of contemporary purpose, and a shallow time/depth perception. Criminal justice historians tend to have a weak, or at least diffuse, sense of contemporary purpose, and a strong sense of time perception. To understand these factors requires a consideration of the development of both disciplines over time.

Criminology and the past, present and future …

While sociology’s preoccupation with ‘modernity’ has now largely evaporated, many sociologically trained criminologists have only relatively recently begun to realize the significance of the past. Adam Crawford put it well when he referred in 2005 to ‘the (rather sloppy) theoretical assumption that underpins some criminological and social science research that we live in ‘new times’ that demand new concepts, ideas, understandings’, an assumption which has ‘tended to suggest a rupture with the past and hence efface historic continuities’ (Rock, 2005: 474). Yet criminology was not always so focused on the present. Early ‘modern’ criminology, to use Garland and Spark’s (2000: 193) characterization, had, due to the backgrounds and influence of its ‘pioneers’, a strong historical bent.

The work of Leon Radzinowicz is of particular interest, partly because he was more influential than either Mannheim or Grünhut, but also due to his marked interest in the historical dimensions of criminal justice policy, a facet of his work often disregarded. His biography is well known (Butler, 1974; Martin, 1988; Radzinowicz, 1999) but it is perhaps worth pointing out that, after his arrival at Cambridge at the end of the 1930s, his first project was a consideration of the contribution made by the 19th-century Blue Books (government compilations of largely statistical information) to the evolution of criminal justice policy in England. He believed such a consideration was ‘vital’ in order to understand ‘English penal thought, legislation and policy’ (Radzinowicz, 1999: 156). A foreword to this early work by the Chairman of the Department of Criminal Science at Cambridge (a lawyer also much taken by historical research) noted that without such historical research ‘attempted amendments of the law [would] be one-sided, or even positively mischievous’ (Winfield, 1943: 180).

Radzinowicz was actively sponsored at Trinity College by George Trevelyan, who was Master during the 1940s. Trevelyan was arguably the last of the Whig historians and he and Radzinowicz undoubtedly shared notions of historical progress. Radzinowicz (1999: 181) certainly believed that in England, ‘the uninterrupted continuity of its development’ meant that without adequate historical knowledge ‘the present state of criminal legislation cannot be fully understood nor the course of its future evolution rightly conceived’. Nor were shared notions of the significance of a historical perspective confined to the university sector. Viscount Templewood (Samuel Hoare) was invited by Radzinowicz to give the first annual lecture in criminal science in 1947. In his lecture Templewood, who as Home Secretary from 1937 to 1939 had tried but failed to introduce a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill, noted that ‘the history and lessons of crime have been too long neglected’ (Hoare, 1947: 1). He and Radzinowicz were on familiar terms and it is likely that Hoare’s educational background (he had studied history at New College, Oxford) was pertinent to their relationship.

Thus early on in the development of modern academic criminology, the ‘use’ of history directly to explain the present and inform future policy was not conceived of as problematic. Historical research was something readily accommodated within the world view of both academic criminologists and Home Office officials. While Radzinowicz’s influence was ‘more decisive than either Mannheim’s or Grünhut’s’ these latter were also interested in historical methods (Hood, 2004: 469). Upon his arrival at the London School of Economics Mannheim gave a course of lectures (1938–1939) which considered the aims and history of punishment with the professed purposed of ‘giving an insight into the philosophical basis of punishment and into the historical development of the various penal methods’ (Rock, 1988a: xviii). Grünhut’s postdoctoral thesis on Anselm von Feuerbach was primarily a piece of historical-biographical writing and, on his arrival in England in 1939, he listed one of his specialisms as the history of the criminal law. His opus Penal Reform (1948) was a historical and comparative study of penal thinking and policy extending over 150 years, in which he argued that penal policy was always shaped by broader social concerns. Thus all three interwar pioneers contributed to the development of ‘the English pragmatic and humanitarian approach to criminology and criminal policy’ (Hood, 2004: 470), and part of this approach was a common-sense notion that discussions of contemporary policy and institutions could and should be informed by a consideration of the historical conditions out of which they had grown.

This approach changed significantly during the second half of the twentieth century. There is no need to rework the extant histories of the development of criminology during this period (see, inter alia, Garland, 1997; Hahn Rafter, 2009; Rock, 1988a, 1988b). It is germane to note, however, that during the 1950s and early 1960s, criminology was ‘institutionalized’ to some degree, with the foundation of the Home Office Research Unit in 1956 and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1959. While, as Loader (2006: 566) has noted, there continued to be a ‘close and proximate relationship’ between government officials and criminologists, by the time of the influential White Paper ‘Penal Practice in a Changing Society’ (1959) criminology was already moving away from any kind of historical focus. The ‘platonic guardians’ continued to share an elite liberal worldview (and continued largely to be educated at Oxford and Cambridge in classics, history and modern languages), but there was a perceptible turn towards an empiricism focused on the immediate demands of the present.

During the later 1960s and the 1970s, partly as a result of dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, a more critical and reflexive style of criminology developed, strongly influenced by the National Deviancy Symposium (NDS) and its expressed disillusionment with ‘official criminology’. Cohen has remarked that the criminologists involved in the NDS were impatient with the ‘highly empirical, anti-theoretical bias’ of official criminology, which they saw as unduly focused on ‘administrative needs’ (Rock, 1988b: 60). The NDS engendered much active reflection on the ‘purpose’ of criminological research, with critical criminology seeking very much to ‘speak truth to power’, a phrase still often employed by some criminologists (for example, Newman, 2008). During the 1980s and 1990s there was then a partial turn away from such ‘anti-criminology’ towards what Loader (1998: 193) once pejoratively termed ‘jobbing criminology’, with a broad swing back towards empirical work designed to solve immediate problems in a practical way. This article is not the place to trace the complex and multi-layered development of academic criminology in later 20th century, the import of which is still a topic of lively debate. However, two points are worth drawing from this overview.

First, it is possible to trace a broad shift from early origins which suggested the possibility of rapprochement with historians, or at least a confidence that historical data could inform current policy and practice, to a situation in which sociological criminology is now generally much less focused on historical reflection and research than during the immediate post-war period. There are notable exceptions to this, but even among criminologists interested in the past there is a tendency to use historical data to problematize criminological assumptions about the present rather than actually to explain the genesis of contemporary behaviours, policies or institutions. For example, recent historical work on public/private policing in historical context has served primarily to problematize (as well as energize) an extant sociological analysis of the present, rather than to provide to a historical explanation of present phenomena (Zedner, 2006).

Second, throughout the 20th century, criminology has often had a definite ‘purpose’ in the present, consciously debated and reflected upon. Whatever the approach taken to research, the intention behind much criminological research has not been simply to understand the present, but to inform and shape policy and opinion in the future. As Loader and Sparks (2011: 6) note, ‘criminologists are typically drawn to their chosen field of enquiry at least in part by a reformist impulse’. It is not unusual for criminologists to aver intent in their research. Elizabeth Stanko, for example, reflecting on her research, noted that ‘my problem is that I care too passionately about the issue of violence against women. Sometimes it is difficult to separate my personal commitment to minimizing the damage of violence from my professional role of analysing that damage’ (Holdaway and Rock, 1998: 35). Equally, Robert Reiner, reflecting on his own work, noted that:

policing, as the unfortunate necessity of using evil means—violence—to attain good or at least minimize harm, is ultimately inescapable in some situations. The only viable political and analytic project is to minimize those situations where violence becomes tragically necessary and to imbue the dispensers of legitimate violence with the means and culture to achieve minimal force interventions.

However much one might agree with Reiner, clearly the motivation behind his research—to change both policy and practice—indicates an attitude towards research different from that held (or least publicly espoused) by most historians. Among radical criminologists, whose aim is less practice-based, an intervention—a political critique of the status quo—is also still sought, with a view to shifting significantly the contours of the criminal justice system.

Even criminologists working historically carry this purposive approach with them into the past. Consider, for example, Mary Bosworth’s article on Salpêtrière, an institution for the confinement of women in 18th-century Paris. Bosworth (2001: 431) initially notes an intention to ‘consider how historical research into the prison contributes to an understanding of imprisonment today’, and then sets out ably the ways in which historical research of this kind can lead towards a revision of the usual criminological chronologies of punishment. Towards the end of the article, however, the author asks rhetorically what the purpose of studying punishment might be, and answers ‘surely, one must study punishment in order to understand and change it’ (2001: 439). She further notes the desirability of a ‘challenge to the current system of incarceration’ and argues that:

only by reconsidering how we engage in research may we be able to envision a new approach to punishment and perhaps alter some of the current practices and ideologies of what remains, above all, an institutionalized form of state violence.

This is an expressed aim in the present, with arguments based on the past intended (ideally) to shape future policy.

None of the above examples are raised in order to object to such orientations, which are entirely appropriate to the discipline of criminology. Rather, they are cited in support of the claim that a key characteristic of criminology is the desire to understand the present with a view to influencing the future. This type of discourse has become largely alien to many historians (criminal justice historians included), for reasons which will be discussed in the following section. If criminologists on occasion work from historical sources, and make no attempt to link this work explicitly to the concerns of the present, they are effectively acting primarily as historians. It is the desire to understand the present and shape the future (in the criminal justice sphere) which characterizes sociological criminology. This is very different to the disciplinary discourse espoused by the majority of historians.

History and the past, present and future …

There is an increasing body of research which has considered the ways in which western societies have tended to think about the past, and to incorporate such knowledge into their explanations of the present (Burrow, 2007; Gallois, 2010; Hartog, 1996; Koselleck, 2004; Nora, 1989). More specifically, there is a somewhat larger body of work reflecting on the development of ‘history’ as a defined university subject (for example, Berger et al., 1999; Burke, 2002; Iggers, 1997; Tosh, 2000). As such, there is no need to consider the development of history writing in detail here. Indeed, it is debatable whether it is even possible in the 21st century to write of ‘historians’ or ‘the discipline of history’, given the diversity of methodologies and motivations apparent among those who write about the past from within an academic context (academic writing being the primary focus of this argument). However, to give a basic context for the line of argument to be followed, it is contended that, during the course of the 20th century, there was broad shift from a position where it was common for university historians to make explicit statements linking past, present and future to one where direct statements about the present (and indeed active engagement in contemporary debate) are now somewhat rarer and engaged interventions in debates about the future are rarer still.

The closing decades of the 19th century were arguably the pinnacle of historians’ confidence in their social role. Historians customarily searched for patterns of progress from a more primitive past to a more sophisticated or enlightened future, and many felt quite at home making statements about the nature of the present based on the past (which was nothing new), but also in making explicit statements about the future based on the past, an approach encapsulated in John Seeley’s (1883: 1) maxim that ‘history … should pursue a practical object … it should not only gratify the reader’s curiosity, but modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future’. Notwithstanding a number of sophisticated reflections on the role and purpose of historical research (Butterfield, 1931; Collingwood, 1946), such belief in the possibility and desirability of ‘progress’, coupled with a sense of social purpose, persisted among many English historians until well into the first half of the 20th century. George Trevelyan (1949: 77), for example, one of Seeley’s successors as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge freely admitted that his history of Italian unification (with its unashamed promotion of the ideals of democracy and national self-determination) was, in his own words, ‘reeking with bias’.

However, during the latter half of the 20th century, there was a profound erosion of historians’ confidence in the linear development of human affairs. The putative causes of this shift are manifold. The experience of two world wars and the Holocaust are routinely cited. Both Hartog and Nora, in addition, discuss the declining significance of the nation-state and the increasing divergence between popular memory and ‘scientific’ history. While the postmodern challenge of the 1970s and 1980s arguably had little influence on the day-to-day practice of historical research as conducted by most historians (Croll, 2002; Gunn and Rawnsley, 2006), it is likely that it, too, contributed to historians’ increasing wariness in linking their work to the present. The key accusations levelled by postmodern theorists at established historical conventions—that no definitive or ‘true’ knowledge about the past can ever be presented, and that the concerns of the present are irrevocably intertwined with the enterprise of historical research—led some historians to respond by confining themselves primarily to the realm of the past, attempting to divorce their work from explicit statements about and interventions in the present. As Ludmilla Jordanova (2000: 108) has claimed, one of the prevalent historical fashions of the last 30 years has been the ‘loss of confidence in causal explanations, in our ability to give clear answers to “why” questions’.

This line of argument should not be read as a narrative of decline, however. The latter part of the 20th century also witnessed the flowering of a huge variety of innovative new approaches to the study of the past. Deeper and richer dialogues with source materials massively expanded the scope of increasingly sophisticated historical methodologies and dissemination practices. Equally, it should also not be taken to imply that contemporary historical research has no intended meaning or significance in the present. Rather, the more limited claim being made is that a shift occurred during the 20th century from an accepted mode of historical practice which foregrounded the social role of the historian in making evidence-based claims about the present and future, to a mode wherein the ‘purpose’ of current historical writing tends to be implicit rather than exposed and actively debated. Historians do still seek relevance in the present (at least, it would be a rare historian who claimed otherwise), but in ways very different to those sought and discussed by sociological criminologists. It is this divergence in expressed intent which can provide the key to understanding the lack of interaction between the two fields of intellectual endeavour. This assertion is perhaps best substantiated here by an example which draws specifically on the works of criminal justice history.

Consider the history of policing. In the first half of the 20th century, such histories as were written were very much imbued with the confident, ‘whiggish’ historical prose of the period. In his many publications of the 1940s and 1950s, Charles Reith (1943a, 1952) eulogized the British police to occasionally absurd lengths. His work presented them as a unique exemplar of British exceptionalism, and further attempted to move from this to an advocation of the adoption of similar systems of policing elsewhere (including, for example, post-war Germany—Williams, 2001). In tracing the historical development of the British police system, Reith clearly aimed at both explaining its success in the present and promoting its expansion in the future. His work was also published in criminology journals (for example, 1943b) and shared with Radzinowicz’s work on the police the same kind of common-sense assumption that history could and should inform present and future policy developments. For Reith, and for others before and after him (Critchley, 1967; Solmes, 1935), advocacy of the police via historical writing bordered on an ideology, ‘the literal answer to all worldly problems’ (Robinson, 1979).

Then, during the 1970s, a new generation of police historians motivated by a Marxist critique of contemporary law and order policies, as well as by the growing ‘history from below’ movement, moved into the field. Robert Storch, for example, claimed that the ‘new police’ of the 19th century, far from being an embodiment of consensual order production, had in fact acted to enforce new, middle-class standards of decorum and public orderliness on the developing working class. Acting as ‘an all-purpose lever of urban discipline’ (Storch, 1976: 481), they were considered by those who were the primary object of their attention as a ‘plague of blue locusts’ (Storch, 1975). Storch’s (1976: 509) work contained an implicit but also still, at times, explicit critique of contemporary methods of policing, noting that:

the basic technique of daily surveillance of the streets and recreational centers [sic] of working-class districts proved a lasting one, and would ultimately be applied not only to nineteenth-century Leeds or Manchester but—in highly sophisticated variants—to twentieth-century police work as well.

However, research into the history of policing during the latter part of the century was then shaped by a group of highly empirical historians including Clive Emsley, David Philips and David Taylor. They sought to deconstruct both Whig and Marxist approaches to the history of policing, as typified by Reith and Storch, viewing the police instead as a ‘multi-faceted institution used by English people of all classes to oppose, to co-operate with, and to gain concessions from, each other’ (Emsley, 1991: 6). Emsley’s (1991: xi) stated aim in writing the history of the English police was simply ‘filling the gaps’ in ‘our knowledge of … how the institution and job developed’, a strikingly dispassionate and detached objective in comparison with preceding authors. Recent work has followed this approach, making detailed and nuanced use of historical data but marshalling it in a far less ‘engaged’ manner than the police historians of the 1970s and before. There are exceptions, of course (see Williams, 2003) but, in general, current research into the history of policing concentrates on historically specific developments, and does not explicitly seek to connect significantly with the present and future. This is not to say that it does not have a role to play in contemporary debates, however. It does contain implicit claims which are of striking relevance to contemporary debates, highlighting (for example) both the historically contingent nature of many policing practices and the persistent tension between the necessity for operational discretion and the desire for centralized control of personnel. But these interventions are couched in ways which tend to remain opaque to sociological criminologists used to far more direct discussions of relevance.

Space does not permit, but a similar worked example might be outlined for the extant histories of the penal system, starting with the Webbs’ (1922) early, uncritical exposition of ‘progress’, moving through a Marxist-inspired critique (Ignatieff, 1978) towards more neutrally presented studies of specific historical contexts (McConville, 1991; Wiener, 1994). There are still relevant messages which can be drawn from recent historical work on prisons—that they are historically contingent forms of punishment of recent advent and that prison populations decline as well as rise over time, for example—but again these messages are not writ large within the works themselves.

Thus, the main claim being made in this section of the article is that many (but by no means all) historians are now often somewhat reticent in actively relating the past to the present. Criminal justice historians no longer feel that they have a confident rationale for making ‘true’ statements about contemporary affairs on the basis of their historical knowledge. Whether due to the shadow cast over empirical methodology by postmodernism, or to problems with stage theory and periodization, or due to a broader crisis in the idea of linear time, it is possible to argue that historians have retreated into the past somewhat. Even those studying the very recent past usually stop just short of the present (bar a few concluding remarks, perhaps). This does not mean that such work has no relevance in the present, but rather that any relevance often remains implicit within historical works rather than exposed and actively promoted by authors. Criminal justice historians and sociological criminologists thus lack both a common ‘purpose’ and a shared methodological framework for making statements about the present and the future based on the past. It is for this reason that, despite the apparent obviousness of the potential synergies between criminological and criminal justice history research, there has been relatively little convergence between the disciplines, despite repeated calls for this to happen.

Is criminal justice history ‘all in the past’?

It is worth asking, then, why the past ought to be studied at all and what function can be served by the contemplation of things under the aspect of history. Put another way: is there any reason why we ought to study things under the aspect of their past-ness rather than under the aspect of their present-ness, which is the aspect under which everything offers itself for contemplation immediately.

It has been argued above that historians withdrew somewhat from their prior, present-facing public role during latter part of the 20th century. For various reasons, many historians often formed the view that ‘the present’ was not their domain, and that even to engage with a broad public not a key element of their intellectual function. Over the last decade, however, some historians in Britain have become markedly more assertive in defence of the role which their discipline might play in the present, claiming that it has ‘a great deal to offer the democratic culture of British society’ (Tosh, 2008: 140). Criminology, too, appears to have undergone a period of introspection since the turn of the century, with renewed debate around the question ‘what is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society?’ In a recent contribution to this debate, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks have argued in favour of a new form of ‘public criminology’, one which acts as a ‘democratic under-labourer’ and thereby contributes to ‘a better politics of crime and its regulation’ (Loader and Sparks, 2011: 116).

Given the congruence between the questions historians and criminologists have recently been asking about the public relevance of their disciplines, the co-production of a revitalized public criminology would be a project likely to spark interest among both criminal justice historians and sociological criminologists. Loader and Sparks identify three elements to their proposed public criminology—to produce primary knowledge pertaining to crime and criminal justice policy, to strive to increase the regard for this evidence among the media (which would in turn require a deeper understanding of the way in which crime problems are selected for public prominence) and a normative function—seeking to unearth the significance of the crime question within contemporary society. All three elements could, it might be argued, benefit from a historical dimension.

Considering first the production of primary data about crime and the mechanisms devoted to its control, historians are obviously engaged in creating data about crime and justice in the past. Clearly, there is scope for greater collaboration here given the paucity of criminological articles incorporating historical data. In addition, Loader and Sparks (2011: 130) note ‘criminology can and should bring to public discussion of its subject matter a scepticism that refuses to treat at face value the categories, assumptions and self-understandings that make up “common sense” about crime and its control’ and there is no reason why historical data should not contribute to this process too. For example, recent work by criminal justice historians on interpersonal violence has tended, with some well-argued exceptions, to indicate a marked downward trend over the longue durée, flatly contradicting contemporary concerns over growing levels of violent behaviours of all kinds (King, 2010; Spierenburg, 2008; Wood, 2004). At the least, such perspectives could be integrated more closely with more contemporary data.

Regarding the aim to increase the esteem in which data about crime and criminal justice policy is held, via better understanding of and engagement with the media, this too is an endeavour to which criminal justice historians could usefully contribute. History has a high degree of public purchase. Particularly on radio and television, but also in terms of book sales and the media, the general public is interested in the history of crime and its control. Historical writing aimed at the public is accessible and able to convey both meaning and perspective in ways readily understandable to a lay audience. In short, there is a market for criminal justice history in the public arena. Thus, by working more closely with historians, sociological criminologists could inculcate more active interrogation of data about crime. It is arguably this, rather than the historical data itself, which might be useful to criminology’s labours. As William Stubbs, Regius Professor at Oxford noted in 1867, ‘the stock of information accumulated is only secondary in importance to the habits of judgement formed by the study of it’ (Stubbs, 1886). There is a need for a cooler consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of different sorts of data about crime, and interrogating historical data would be one way of defusing the emotive charge often present in current media debates.

The normative function of public criminology, the interrogation of the social significance of fears and debates about crime, could also be aided by drawing on historical research in a number of ways. Most obviously, a detailed dissection of the ways in which such debates have changed over time (starting perhaps with the assertion that before c.1780 ‘the criminal’ was not yet discerned as ‘a social archetype, symbolic of the nation’s collective ill-health’—Gatrell, 1990: 248) might help foreground criminological work in this area. In addition, however, consideration of the question ‘why are certain accounts of the past preferred, even when demonstrably untrue?’ could feed directly into investigations by criminologists as to why certain issues remain of public concern even though they are, arguably, of little real social significance. Finally, the recent ‘affective turn’ in public history (Agnew, 2007) could also be of use in normative criminological debates. A public appetite for historical television and radio programmes which explore ‘not so much “what happened” as “what did it feel like to be there?”’ (Salber Phillips, 2008: 56) could serve as a powerful mechanism for encouraging urgently needed public reflection on the contemporary purposes served by criminal justice processes (Loader, 2010). Rather than to remind citizens of their obligation to the past, here the role of the historian would be once again ‘to force upon them an awareness of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future’ (White, 1966: 132).

Overall, the current aims of both criminal justice history and sociological criminology—to understand crime and its control in the past and the present, to contribute to a better-informed and more rational criminal justice policy and to alert participants to the normative aspects of debates about crime and its control—are congruent. Although, for the reasons of purpose and temporal focus discussed above, there has been relatively little convergence between the fields, there are grounds to suggest that the construction of a vibrant public criminology would be a viable collaborative project, recognizing, of course, the differing contributions that each discipline has to offer.