Abstract
The latest incarnation of the celebrated deviancy conferences took place in York in the summer of 2011. The very first deviancy conference also took place in York, in 1968, and the mode of critical engagement and outlook that found expression in that initial meeting had a hugely important role in the development of criminology. More deviancy conferences were held at York, and elsewhere, during the 1970s, and many of the organisers and delegates involved in the movement would go on to forge significant careers in the social sciences, making the trek from the anti-establishment margins to the very centre of academic criminology and the sociology of deviance.
Digging up the old ‘deviancy conference’ ideals and imagery in an age in which critical criminology appears to have lost much of its spark as a result of its successful integration into the corpus of mainstream academic criminology proved slightly contentious. In the marketised world of 21st-century criminology—a world apparently structured on rational debate, inclusivity and fairness—many saw the 2011 meeting as an unnecessary provocation. Why do we need a deviancy conference when the dominant institutions of academic criminology embrace intellectual diversity and welcome vigorous theoretical debate? Doesn’t the annual British Society of Criminology Conference welcome a discussion of ‘critical issues’? In the paragraphs below, and as a means of framing the articles presented in this Special Issue, we offer a brief justification.
The initial idea for the conference developed from our growing dissatisfaction with the direction in which academic criminology was heading. As Jock Young has often claimed, huge tracts of the discipline continue to be dominated by administrative ‘crime control’ discourses. Furthermore, we were of the opinion that critical criminology’s discourse with mainstream empirical criminology had been reduced to component parts of an increasingly popular but corporatised and mass-produced higher education product. The early successes of critical criminology appeared ultimately to lead to its co-option into the mainstream. For many of the growing number of disengaged and instrumental undergraduate criminology students, critical criminology was reduced to a section in a textbook, sitting alongside classical criminology, biological criminology and social learning theories, its vitality and history lost, its approach to knowledge accumulation and the operation of power unimportant.
Increasingly students on undergraduate criminology degrees in the UK are offered a series of competing ideas, all of which are presented as having their own insurmountable problems. The postmodern injunction to be incredulous towards metanarratives is followed to the letter in the criminology textbooks we give to our students. They all tend to reinforce the notion that we should not believe in anything, and that we should remain sceptical of every criminological idea presented to us. For increasingly goal-driven students the best route forwards is to appraise the history of criminological ideas as one might a conference buffet, taking a little bit from each intellectual plate in the hope of creating an attractive combination of flavours and avoiding tasteless mediocrity and intellectual indigestion. For us, a structuring intellectual commitment to truth and at the least some sense of social justice must be present if criminology’s disciplinary dialectic is to move forward from its current position.
The depressingly bland vista of contemporary criminological theorisation prompted the discussions that led to the 2011 conference at the University of York. We were firmly of the opinion that if critical criminology was to renew itself it needed a space in which new ideas could be discussed to help reanimate the discipline and to once again fill it with vigorous debate, incisive empirical work and ambitious theorisation. For us, critical criminology needed to find a new place in 21st-century criminology. It needed once again to take the lead in explaining and articulating a challenge to the staggering range of injustices, inequalities and harms that are an unavoidable by-product of a transformed postmodern and thoroughly globalised capitalism. We wanted to adopt the imagery of the original deviancy conferences and set it to work on a historical conjuncture radically different from the late 1960s and early 1970s. We wanted critical criminology to again become dynamic and unapologetic, to launch a withering critique not simply of rightist criminology but upon the world as it is. Our hope was that the conference might encourage critical criminologists to set about this task with renewed vigour.
We contacted many of the criminologists and sociologists who attended the original conferences and who remain active in contemporary academic life. Many of these people were keen to be involved and were excited about the project. Jock Young travelled from New York to be with us. Stan Cohen and Frances Heidensohn travelled from London. Paul Walton had planned to travel to York from Australia, but was ultimately forced to cancel. Roy Bailey, whose music had been the accompaniment to the original conferences, joined us, as did Tony Jefferson, co-author of Policing the Crisis and Resistance Through Rituals. To this list we added a number of sociologists and criminologists whose work we admired. Jeff Ferrell, one of the key architects of the new cultural criminology, travelled all the way from Texas. Rob White, now associated with the development of green criminology, travelled from Tasmania. We were also joined by Pat Carlen, recent recipient of the British Society of Criminology’s lifetime achievement award, Keith Hayward, Sandra Walklate, Steve Hall, and the political theorist Alex Callinicos, who presented to the conference a stirring account of the causes of the current global economic crisis.
The conference attracted many other notable academics. John Lea, Simon Hallsworth, Elliot Currie, Dave Wall, Yvonne Jewkes, Walter DeKeseredy, Joe Sim, Vincenzo Ruggiero, Katja Franko Aas, Molly Dragiewicz, Kevin Stenson, Robert Reiner, Roger Matthews, Reece Walters, Nigel South and many others contributed to an atmosphere of genuine intellectual excitement that also involved many talented younger academics keen to acknowledge the achievements of the past while at the same time developing the theoretical and empirical frameworks that might sustain and drive forwards 21st-century critical criminology. In total, around 250 delegates passed through the doors at the University of York in the summer of 2011. This figure was far more than we had expected, and perhaps suggests a growing desire for a reinvigorated critical criminology that looks anew at a world of rising inequalities, austerity cuts and a historic contraction of the global economy, a growing energy crisis and profoundly important ecological transformations.
The conference wasn’t perfect. Tony Jefferson suggested that not enough time had been allowed for questions, and a number of others believed that the conference programme had been overly nostalgic, as if the late 1960s and early 1970s had been a golden era of theoretical exploration that couldn’t be matched or expanded upon. We have taken these and other criticisms on board, and hope that the next deviancy conference, tentatively timetabled for the summer of 2013, will be an improvement on the 2011 conference. The next conference will attempt to be more forward-looking and inclusive. We will, once again, attempt to attract high-calibre plenary speakers who can talk on issues related to the ongoing crisis and how we might attempt to understand the harms and injustices that are such a constant and disturbing feature of life today. Please keep a look out for our publicity material, and we urge all academics interested in critical issues to get involved with this project and to help shape its development.
We were particularly pleased to be invited by the editors of this journal to put together a Special Issue based on papers presented at the conference. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal has, in its relatively short history, attempted to create a space for critical and radical sociological and criminological theory and penetrating empirical work. It has welcomed the kinds of vigorous critical debate that other journals appear to be quite wary of, and it seemed the obvious and natural home for a collection of articles drawn from our 2011 conference. This CMC Special Issue begins with a fascinating analysis of critical and feminist criminologies by Frances Heidensohn from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Frances delivered the closing plenary address at the 2011 conference to a packed lecture theatre. Few delegates had drifted away, and this is testament to her huge importance to the development of criminology since the late 1960s. Frances has of course been a leading figure in the development of feminist criminology globally. Attending the original conferences, she found much of value, but acknowledges that gender issues were always a marginal consideration. Frances’s central claim here is that feminist criminology has been successful while ‘critical theory and left realism are discarded or moribund’, a claim that will, no doubt, be read with interest by many students and academic criminologists. Robert Reiner, also from the LSE, and recipient of the 2011 BSC lifetime achievement award, is no lesser figure. His article ‘What’s Left? The future for social democratic criminology’ is a spirited critique of the corrosive nature of neoliberalism, a reassertion of the moral case for social democracy, and a descriptive account of the history and key elements of social democratic criminology. Robert’s article is followed by Vincenzo Ruggiero’s ‘How public is public criminology?’, a critical investigation of the current fashion of public sociology and criminology in the UK and North America. This is followed by ‘An economy of false securities? An analysis of murders inside gated residential developments in the US’ by Rowland Atkinson and Oliver Smith. Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, follows this with an article entitled ‘Who is the victim of crime? Paying homage to the work of Richard Quinney’. Simon Hallsworth and John Lea’s article, ‘Reconnecting the King with his Head: The fall and the resurrection of the state in criminological theory’, is next, and this is followed by Steve Hall’s critique of the development of critical criminology and its tendency to focus on systems of control at the expense of that which elicits the perceived need for control. Hall’s call for a renewed interest in the operation of global capitalism is timely and is sure to attract broad agreement from younger critical realist criminologists with a keen awareness of the painful reality of social and economic marginality in contemporary Western democracies. Our final article is by Keith Hayward, whose work spans critical, cultural and theoretical criminology. Keith offers a fascinating analysis of the ‘life-stage dissolution’ created by the cultures of late capitalism that encourage a bi-directional ‘adultification’ and ‘infantilisation’.
We hope that these articles offer a realistic reflection of the range of analyses presented at the 2011 York Deviancy Conference and that they may help to energise critical criminology in the early phase of the 21st century towards a new period of growth and intellectual vitality. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of those who helped to organise and administer the conference, the delegates who attended, all of those who presented papers, and the editors of CMC. We hope to see you all at the next York Deviancy Conference in 2013!