Abstract
To say that Robert Reiner is one of the most admired scholars in criminology is to state the more than obvious. Reiner's achievements are legion, and his personal as well as academic influence immense. As long ago as the early 1990s Paul Rock's sketch of the social organization of criminology in Britain identified Reiner as the field's most influential member (Rock, 1994), as much for his reach as a teacher, mentor and model as his then-published work. That work, however, has been truly remarkable in its scope and quality. Reiner was by no means alone in developing the sociology of policing as a topic of inquiry in the United Kingdom, but his studies in that field reached across and beyond criminology as an academic field (including into the professional formation and changing consciousness of police officers themselves). This is far from all, of course. Reiner's work on crime in news media and popular culture, his contributions as an editor (most obviously with Mike Maguire and Rod Morgan on the first five editions of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology) and much else, have established him as a central figure. Reiner's personal qualities of probity, gentleness and humour are also, quite rightly, legendary. Not only is he one of our most admired colleagues, but also among the best-loved.
Over the last decade or so, Reiner's central focus has been on questions of crime and political economy, especially the effects of neo-liberalism as a political ideology and its associated inventions in respect of policy and practice. This is not a new concern for him—indeed it is prefigured long ago in essays such as ‘British criminology and the State’ (1988). It has however become a more focal and, I think, somehow more urgent theme. Social Democratic Criminology is centrally concerned with the political economy of crime and punishment, and especially with recovering prior, and ultimately discovering new, alternatives to neo-liberal perspectives on these topics.
Sometimes people grow more radical with age, in the manner sometimes attributed to Bertrand Russell. And sometimes they achieve this largely by standing still, or at least by holding on tenaciously to certain articles of their faith. In Social Democratic Criminology Robert Reiner has given us one of his most conceptually ambitious as well as most overtly political books. It is a book that very visibly and consciously reaches back to a world with which our connections often now seem very faint—the ‘trente glorieuses’ that followed 1945 in Britain and much of Europe. In that world, Reiner argues, there was a virtuous confluence between economic growth, better distributed public goods and enhanced trust in institutions, crucially including those of the criminal justice system. One key to that rising legitimacy was that neither political actors nor criminologists overburdened those institutions with expectations. Rather they shared an understanding that the foundations of an ordered and secure life lay elsewhere—principally in stable employment, housing, education and healthcare.
In this context the social democratic criminology to which Reiner alludes is not a single body of theory but rather a shared sensibility towards the tight relationship between knowledge-production and rational policy-making, and a commitment to moderating inequalities and a criminal justice state shorn of its more arbitrary and overbearing features. Intellectually, the sources of this outlook are pretty varied—and Reiner acknowledges that his social democratic criminology is a rather flexible category, accommodating quite a lot of things that he approves of. Those references include Durkheim, of course, and Willem Bonger, about whom Reiner writes here with particular feeling. Reiner credits Bonger with fashioning out of a broadly Marxist concern with crime in relation to power and inequality a practical ethic based on a critique of rampant egoism under capitalism. In the United States Reiner focuses mainly on the line of influence that extends from Merton to Messner. Among British authors his heroes (not I think too strong a word) are Hermann Mannheim and Barbara Wootton. However disparate, these authors share a confidence that many crime problems can be substantially reduced by wise policy, most of which has little to do with criminal justice per se. For this reason, Reiner's roll-call of influences centrally includes authors who did not write about criminology at all, such as TH Marshall, whose Citizenship and Social Class (1950) remains in many ways emblematic of the convictions that Reiner hopes to recover and restore.
What happened next, with the rising influence of neo-conservative, and especially neo-liberal ideologies and their criminological counterparts is, of course, much more familiar to most people working in the field today than the lost world of the mid-century consensus itself. So much of the most influential work, from Hall to Garland and beyond, is precisely concerned with the criminological and penological consequences of that disruption. The ideological weaponization of crime control, and the tooling-up of the criminal justice state that ensued, have many effects that have been amply catalogued in recent scholarship, but few of these in Reiner's view have had much to do with the mitigation of harm or the advancement of human flourishing.
Reiner argues that despite the exciting growth of critical criminological work in recent decades, systematic focus on questions of political economy has been thinner on the ground. I think it is true that works of comparable ambition to this one are quite few (though Reiner might have had more to say about Wacquant's contributions, for example, or those of major contemporary scholars such as Bruce Western). The few other works of similar ambition might include the late Ian Taylor's Crime in Context (1999), itself now almost a quarter of a century old. Certainly, part of the illumination that Reiner provides to contemporary readers is precisely that he reaches back to political and economic debates of the mid-20th century, informing us as much about the intellectual origins of neo-liberalism as about the social democratic temper that it displaced.
Social Democratic Criminology comes in four substantial chapters. If the first three of these include a lot of expository work, and chronicle a decline, the fourth strikes a very different tone. This final chapter argues for a renewal of the social democratic faith for our times. It is the most personal part of the book, and perhaps the most unguarded and plainly committed piece of Reiner's writing that I have read. I would like to think that its tone is not valedictory, but it is in a proper sense, somewhat prophetic. From what he all too clearly interprets as the wreckage of a political project, he seeks to draw some strands of hope. Like generations of socialists before him, from Engels, via Rosa Luxemburg to Tony Benn, Reiner argues fervently that the choice before us, within criminology and far beyond it, is still one between socialism and barbarism.
No doubt, the effort that Reiner makes to build connections with current scholarship and social movements is partial and incomplete. Social Democratic Criminology, arguably like all too much work within the social democratic tradition, has little of substance to say about gender or sexuality. Although it has only goodwill towards movements for environmental justice, and for criminological work that contributes to these, it does not add much to those bodies of work. Above all, it almost completely omits to mention that in our world new thinking on questions of crime and social justice comes chiefly from scholars and actors in the global South and East. But to focus unduly on such omissions is also in important ways to miss the point; and Reiner sincerely longs to pass the torch to new generations. What we gain from this book is both a much clearer understanding of a major tradition—one that continues to inform the thinking of many scholars and practitioners around the world, however implicitly—and a sharp sense of the need to rethink and revitalize that current of thought. It is a bold and poignant statement by an extraordinary scholar.