Confessions of a recovering ‘administrative criminologist’: Jock Young,quantitative research and policy research

Introduction

Jock Young started using the term ‘administrative criminologist’ in the mid-1980s, at the same time that he and his colleagues were developing their ‘Left Realist’ position. He set out a definition of administrative criminology in his essay ‘The failure of criminology’ (Young 1986), contrasting it with ‘positivism and the social democratic ways of reforming crime’ (p. 9). Administrative criminology involved an antagonism to the idea that social circumstances cause crime, and a lack of interest in the causes of crime. He identified J. Q. Wilson as the key US theorist, and Ron Clarke in the Home Office as the key UK figure. And indeed, in the first major work on situational crime prevention, Designing Out Crime (edited by Clarke and Mayhew, 1980) the introduction (which I co-authored with the editors) railed against the ‘dispositional bias’ in criminology:

…this theoretical emphasis has had an unfortunate consequence. It has encouraged the view of crime whereby criminality in some way inheres in the personality of offenders, so that, come what may, they will seek out their opportunities for crime. In terms of prevention, too much effort has been expended on unproductive attempts to change the ‘criminal disposition’ of offenders. (Hough et al. 1980: 3)

Ron has long since left the Home Office – although he continues to be critical of criminology’s ‘dispositional bias’ (Clarke, 2012) and thus still counts as an ‘administrative criminologist’, narrowly defined. However, Jock’s label of administrative criminologist has stuck firmly to those who do policy research for or within government – even though the majority now have very little sympathy for the Wilson/Clarke position on the causes of crime. The label has acquired other connotations, most of them unflattering: unimaginative, atheoretical, politically suborned and corrupted by the pressures of grantsmanship. At one stage Jock would certainly have seen me as an ‘administrative criminologist’; indeed, the above quote is a smoking gun. I worked closely with – or for – Ron Clarke in the Home Office at the time when Jock was developing his Left Realist position. I suspect too that in his later work he may have seen me as a ‘datasaur’ (Young 2011: 15) given that I have done a lot of policy research for government since then, much of it quantitative – and have made a comfortable living from running sizable grant-supported research centres.

This paper ruminates on the process of being ‘othered’ by Jock and his labels over the course of the last 20 or 30 years. I hope that the end-product does not sound bitter; like others I found him a warm and engaging person, and no-one can fail to be impressed by books such as The Exclusive Society (Young, 1999). But I will not deny that it was irksome to be labelled as an administrative criminologist in the 1980s, and to see quantitative research so unfairly derided in Jock’s last book, The Criminological Imagination. The paper falls into four parts. The first provides some contextual information about ‘administrative criminologists’ in the Home Office in the 1970s and 1980s. This is simply a prologue to the second part of the paper, which is concerned with Jock’s ‘Left Realist’ phase in the 1980s, when he deployed quantitative research methods to considerable effect, as in the 1986 Islington Crime Survey. The third part discusses the attack on quantitative criminology in his later work. I end with discussion of the political marginalisation of academic criminology, which can be traced to a disdain that has become almost institutionalised within large sectors of academic criminology for both quantitative research and policy research.

‘Administrative Criminology’ in the 1970s and 1980s

To make sense of this paper, the reader needs a little information both about my professional background and about the habitat of ‘administrative criminologists’ in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. I joined the Home Office Research Unit (HORU) in 1974. The staff at that time consisted of around 25 researchers, split into three groups. I worked in Ron Clarke’s group, which focused on developing approaches to situational prevention for the next five years (e.g. Clarke and Mayhew 1980; Mayhew et al. 1976, 1979). From 1980 to 1985 I also worked with Pat Mayhew to design, analyse and report on the British Crime Survey ¹ (Hough and Mayhew 1983, 1985). With Ron Clarke I also produce a much-cited review of the effectiveness of policing (Clarke and Hough 1984). Ron had taken over the directorship of the unit in the early 1980s, and left not long after the publication of this review, not least because of opposition to its publication among senior Home Office officials. After a spell as a policy official and a further period as deputy director of the Research and Planning Unit, I left the Home Office in 1994, and have worked in academia since then. Running a medium-sized research centre, I have become increasingly promiscuous in my research interests, including work on rehabilitation and penal policy, on drug treatment, and on compliance theories and procedural justice theory, all of which are tarnished with the ‘dispositional’ tendency in criminology that Ron and I complained of in 1980.

In the 1970s, HORU was distinctively different from contemporary government research and analysis departments. It carried out as much in-house research as it commissioned from universities, and it exercised considerable autonomy in setting its research programme. Links with policy divisions of the Home Office were distant, and we saw ourselves as producing ‘big picture’ research to provide a contextual understanding of crime problems, rather than acting under the direction of policy officials to address the questions that they wanted us to address. By current standards these officials were not ‘hands-on’ commissioners of research, but would engage with research (both positively and defensively) when it was presented to them. There was no direct political involvement (as I recall) in the publication process – although, then as now, senior officials took into account the likely reactions of their ministers. Publication in peer-reviewed academic journals, as well as in Home Office reports, was routine.

The ethos of the HORU staff (excepting senior managers) was built around intellectual interest, cynicism about mainstream Home Office business, and an oppositional or at least critical stance to much of the department’s work. We were reluctant civil servants, and viewed HORU as a body that was at one step removed from the Home Office. Taylor, Walton and Young’s (1973) book The New Criminology was for most of us a seminal work. We admired the work of the National Deviancy Conference (NDC) criminologists, and adopted an ambiguous stance towards their criticisms (following C. Wright Mills 1959/2000) of ‘abstracted empiricism’ within mainstream criminology – which was constituted in their eyes centrally by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and HORU.

Some of the Home Office mandarins at that time were, I think, happy to see a unit within the Office that had an implicit role of challenging conventional thinking – or serving a ‘gadfly’ role, as one of them put it. Ron Clarke’s programme of work was precisely such a challenge. Even if it is often now assumed that it must have been under the direction of politicians, or at least of policy officials, this is far from the truth. Several key initiatives were very much driven by RPU researchers. The development of situational crime prevention continued into the early 1980s – against an initial climate of scepticism from policy officials and, indeed, the policy establishment (see Clarke 2012). The British Crime Survey was another RPU-led initiative, in the face of strong opposition from the Home Office Statistical Department and mixed reactions from policy officials (Hough and Maxfield 2007). Finally the programme of work on police effectiveness that culminated in the review by Ron Clarke and myself led to a prolonged battle over publication – followed by Ron’s departure shortly after publication was eventually, and reluctantly, agreed.

Over the 1980s, the unit progressively lost a great deal of its autonomy. A review in the early 1980s by the then Head, John Croft, resulted in a reshaping of HORU into the Home Office Research and Planning Unit (RPU).This started to bring HORU into closer alignment with the Home Office’s main interests, and to establish a clearer ‘customer–contractor’ relationship between policy units and HORU. By the start of the 1990s, ministerial approval was required for all items in the annual research programme, and all publications were subject to ministerial scrutiny. ² Parts of the RPU were separated out from the core and embedded within policy divisions. The latter began to be much more proactive and assertive in demanding specific research projects, and the balance began to shift in favour of commissioned research, with in-house staff acting increasingly just as research managers.

The term ‘administrative criminologist’ has adhered so tightly to government-funded or government-employed criminologists because the connotations of the term – as distinct from Jock’s formal definition – have become increasingly accurate. There is now much tighter political control on the commissioning and publishing of policy research, leaving much less autonomy and ‘voice’ to the researchers involved. Especially since the late 1990s, working on government research reports has typically involved a prolonged tussle over questions of tone and language between researcher and commissioner – the latter keeping a close eye over their shoulder for signs of a ministerial frown. I rarely get the sense that I am engaged in an intellectual partnership when working now on government research contracts. ³ However, very little research done by or for the Home Office or Ministry of Justice is ‘administrative criminology’ in Jock’s original sense, and a considerable amount is clearly in the tradition of liberal rehabilitative ideals – albeit in harness with newer preoccupations about risk management.

New Realism and administrative criminology

In his Left Realist period, Jock was very effectively engaged in policy research designed to persuade Labour politicians that they had to take crime problems more seriously. If he and his colleagues had a primary audience of opposition politicians whose instincts were to avoid populist rhetoric on crime, Home Office researchers at that time were more concerned with the reverse problems associated with moral panics about crime that we took to be led by the tabloid media. Our hunch – confirmed by results from the BCS in the 1980s – was that police statistics were exaggerating the increase in crime and that, for most victims, crime was an irritant more than a catastrophe. Especially in the first BCS report, we argued that worry about crime was out of kilter with the actual risks – flirting with the idea that fear of crime was irrational – without ever saying this explicitly.

‘What is to be done about law and order’ (Lea and Young 1984) was the first major public statement of the Left Realist position. Two years later, in ‘The failure of criminology’ (Young 1986: 23), Jock argued for an accurate victimology, using local crime surveys. Reflecting the political work that it was intended to do, he and colleagues used local crime surveys to show that some people faced very high risks of crime, and their lives were blighted by crime and anxiety about crime. Both Richard Kinsey’s (1984) Merseyside Crime Survey and the Islington Crime Survey (Jones et al. 1986) were significant pieces of empirical work.

The local crime surveys were closely modelled on the BCS, which itself developed the methods used by the US and Dutch crime surveys (see Hough and Maxfield 2007). Of course, using near-identical methods, the local and national surveys produced perfectly consistent results. But reflecting the conflicting underlying political agendas, there were marked differences in emphasis and tone in the reporting of results. The Realist agenda was clearly at odds with ours, to do with the ‘normalisation’ of crime (Jock’s term, not ours.) Our relationships were more oppositional than collegiate; the BCS team had some limited contact with the Islington team and rather more with Richard Kinsey. To market their political message the Left Realists had to differentiate themselves clearly from us ‘administrative criminologists’, and this was done by critique of the BCS. The most irksome of criticisms was that as a national survey it could not provide any sense of variations in risk, and that statements of crime risks nationally were ‘ludicrous generalisations’ (e.g. Lea undated.) The criticism always struck me as unfair, as we had published detailed analyses of variations in risk (e.g. Gottfredson 1984; Hough and Mayhew 1985) prior to publication of the Islington results. There is nothing ludicrous in presenting an average population risk, along with findings on variation in risk.

I felt – and still feel – that the contrarian in Jock resulted in a slower synthesis of our positions on risk and fear than might have occurred had it been possible to establish a better dialogue between us. There was clearly a lost opportunity for mutual learning. It was not until 1996 that I produced a BCS analysis of ‘fear of crime’ (Hough 1996) that concluded that the right people worried about crime, against criteria of risk and vulnerability – but that it was not a sensible research question to ask if they were worrying the right amount.

Of course, the BCS was not an exercise in ‘administrative criminology’ according to his strict definition: there was nothing in BCS reports to suggest that we were uninterested in the causes of crime, and the survey showed quite clearly how risks of crime were socially stratified in a way that clearly implicated socio-economic factors. However, we were undoubtedly playing for the wrong team, by virtue of our location within government under a Conservative administration. It would have rendered the Left Realist message less palatable to its key audiences if Jock and his colleagues had recognised the considerable points of overlap between the national and the local surveys.

If Jock and his colleagues emphasised the differences rather than the similarities between the BCS and the Islington survey, there was genuinely much less common ground between the situational crime prevention agenda and that of the Left Realists. Ron Clarke clearly believed that the search for the social causes of crime was fruitless, and that situational crime prevention was the best way forward. This grated with Left Realists. For my own part, I thought both then and now that situational crime prevention needs to be part of any coherent response to crime – but that it has no particular claim to being the centrepiece of any crime control strategy. Pat Mayhew and I have argued:

We see Ron’s promotion of [situational crime prevention] as a remarkable achievement. The situational approach to crime control has become institutionalised within police forces and [Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships]… In discussions that we have had with Ron on this subject, he takes a more pessimistic view: that take-up of his ideas has been partial and limited. This stubborn pessimism is perhaps a pointer to the reasons for his success. The pessimism reflects ambitions for SCP that were, and remain, very high indeed – and are arguably unachievable. If he had simply promoted SCP as one of several strategies for tackling crime - best deployed in combination with social prevention and rehabilitative work with offenders - few people would have taken issue with his ideas. But probably few would have taken much notice of them, either. (Mayhew and Hough, 2011: 26)

I should make one further comment on the output of ‘administrative criminologists’ in the 1980s. Crime and Police Effectiveness (Clarke and Hough 1984) was a piece of administrative criminology neither in the narrow sense as Jock defined it, nor in the wider sense of being conducted in the service of political administrations. What we were critiquing was the then widespread ‘rational/deterrent’ neo-classical model of policing which assumed that the criminal actor was best envisaged as Homo economicus. The evidence was clear that changes at the margin in policing volume or policing style achieve at best only a very marginal impact on crime. Ron may have seen the review not only as a piece of useful policy research, but also as an opportunity to clear more space in the policy landscape for situational crime prevention. My own attachment to the theme of the review was that it pointed to the complexity and symbolic nature of the police function: it suggested that whatever impact the police achieved, it was through normative rather than instrumental mechanisms. (I and colleagues have returned to gnaw this same bone almost thirty years later – see Hough et al. 2010, 2013a, 2013b; Jackson et al. 2012, 2014a, 2014b.)

At the time, the Left Realist project of the mid-1980s seemed an important and welcome one. Whatever the BCS may have said about average risks of crime, it was clear both from the national survey and from local surveys that those most at risk tended to live in Labour heartlands, and that crime was a serious problem for those living in disadvantaged communities – and one that grew, into the mid-1990s. It was equally clear that at the time Labour politicians were instinctively averse to deploy ‘get tough’ rhetoric on crime, and that many failed to recognise the impact of crime on their traditional voters. I don’t know of anyone who has actually produced an audit trail showing the progressive impact of the realist message on Labour politicians, ⁴ but it seems clear that an impact had been made, at least by the time that Tony Blair became shadow home secretary in 1992. The slogan ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ hardly marked the end of the ‘aetiological crisis’ in criminal policy, but New Labour were relentless in their tough rhetoric on crime – and effectively so, when it finally came to the 1997 election. Unsurprisingly, Left Realist calls for politicians to take crime seriously became muted from 1992 onwards – and no fair-minded commentator could hold New Realists responsible for the excesses of New Labour’s penal populism (see Allen and Hough 2008).

Datasaurs in The Criminological Imagination

Jock’s embrace of quantitative research methods in his New Realist phase did not continue into the 1990s and beyond. There is a sustained but problematic attack on quantitative research methods in The Criminological Imagination (Young 2011). The problems have been elegantly pointed out by reviewers, such as Elliot Currie (2012) and David Garland (2012). Elliot Currie pointed gently to the lability in Jock’s arguments, whereby criticisms of bad quantitative research are inappropriately generalised to all quantitative research. Jock was prepared to retreat from the strong (generalised) version of his argument when confronted with intelligent quantitative research. ⁵ David Garland dismembered Jock’s critique of quantitative methods in a more thoroughgoing manner: that he was selective in the examples of quantitative research; that the targets of criticism were often unidentified; that the limitations of quantitative methods were overstated and presented as fatal flaws.

The substance of the criticisms is familiar territory. Quantitative work does indeed suffer from a range of problems: creating a sample of the universe that one wishes to study is usually problematic; securing compliance – if the sample involves humans – is inevitably complex; quantification is necessarily a form of reductionism, and subtlety and depth is lost in the process of translating reality into numbers. This is the stuff of basic research methods classes. So too are the strengths of the quantitative method: properly done, measurement can be valid and reliable, and thus replicable and testable; and properly done, quantitative research can help test theories that involve relationships that are hard to detect by simple small-scale observation. I shall return to this in the final section of the paper.

However, the part of Jock’s critique that I find offensive is his caricature of the quantitative researcher as a ‘datasaur’:

…a creature with a very small head, a long neck, a huge belly and a little tail. His head has only a smattering of theory, he knows he must move constantly but is not sure where he is going, he rarely looks at any detail of the terrain on which he travels, his neck peers upwards as he moves from grant to grant, from database to database, his belly is huge and distended with the intricate intestine of regression analysis, he eats ravenously but rarely thinks about the actual process of statistical digestion, his tail is light and inconclusive. (Young 2011: 15)

Anyone who has seen Jock doing his ‘datasaur’ turn will know that – provided you are not personally a potential target – it is witty and engaging, with the different dimensions of derision neatly elaborated. ⁶ It is worth spelling out what these are, involving as they do a mix of methodological and personal critique.

The first is ‘small-brained and atheoretical’. It is true that some quantitative research is conducted within the commonsense conceptual frameworks of everyday life. Obvious examples include most of the British Crime Survey analyses, and those of the Islington Crime Survey. There is often a need within criminology for basic descriptive information, involving for example the nature of crime, offenders’ offending rates, the risk to victims, the trends in crime types and victims’ reporting. Other creatures in the Jurassic research forest all feed off this information, and often forget the extent to which quantitative research findings of this sort frame criminologists’ thinking. This point has been neatly made by Rod Morgan:

It can never be stressed too often that those authors who engage in more abstract theorizing about the social construction of crime and the different reactions to it are dependent for most of their insights on the wealth of empirical data that [government research] has largely been responsible for amassing. These data, collected through processes too often derided, are the clay and straw that produce the bricks which both make for an accountable criminal justice system and permit it to be effectively challenged and analysed. (Morgan and Hough 2008: 63)

If atheoretical research can be of value, the idea that quantitative researchers never engage in theory development and theory testing is obviously unsustainable. I am sure that, if challenged, Jock would not want to defend his corner on this point, to which I shall return.

The second critique is about greed – for grants and for quantitative data. It is generally true that academic researchers cannot build large data-sets – and certainly cannot mount large-scale surveys – without grants. It is also true that in the period at the start of the New Labour administration when large grants were readily come by, some researchers, myself included, grabbed what was available. One should remember, however, that greed can be the dark side of insecurity. The world of contract research in criminology is for most people a highly insecure one, and I certainly would never blame a quantitative researcher (who, by the way, is likely to be young, female and poorly paid) for moving ‘from grant to grant’ to avoid unemployment. And those of us who have set up and run grant-supported research centres can find themselves on a treadmill of grantsmanship, under pressure to preserve the institutional capacity that they have built up, and to keep their junior colleagues in work. ⁷ I find some irony in the fact that critical criminologists typically enjoy much more job security as permanent state employees than most policy researchers, who progress (if lucky) from short-term contract to short-term contract, competitively tendering for work in an austere financial environment that is increasingly gruelling.

There are additional connotations to the ‘greed’ critique, to do with integrity. Greedy people will do anything for the next meal. There are some real dilemmas here for researchers who rely on grant income to enable them to ‘speak truth to power’. To do this, the truth often has to be couched in terms which will engage the powerful. This is especially the case when the truths are published and available for all to see. The processes of negotiation around content and tone of publications is part of the territory of being a policy researcher, whether quantitative or qualitative. There are obviously lines that can be crossed in self-censorship and in saying things simply to keep the customer happy (and thus open to the possibility of repeat business). However, the fact that ethical issues of this sort exist in grant-funded research does not mean that it is intrinsically unethical. Diplomacy need not necessarily be craven.

Jock’s final sideswipe is at the tail of the datasaur – which is ‘light and inconclusive’. This is a problem that besets all modes of criminological research. Most research is not especially original; most research does not offer a real jolt to people’s assumptions and habits of thought; much of it is poorly written; some is plain dull. We have all from time to time been ‘lost in a gloom of uninspired research’. I shall simply assert that the best quantitative research is as insightful as the best qualitative work.

I am sure that by now I shall have exasperated some of my readers – ponderously picking over a lighthearted critique of the work of some forms of criminological research. ‘Can’t he take a joke?’ My response would be, ‘Not very well, not this joke, not from this joker’ – because Jock was an enormously influential figure within criminology, and generations of young criminologists have taken – and will probably continue to take – at face value this pastiche of quantitative criminologists and policy researchers as dumb, greedy and intellectually second-rate. This is bad news for criminology as a discipline.

The Prospects for Quantitative Criminology and Policy-Focused Criminology

The Criminological Imagination did not seriously propose a criminology without numbers, but it certainly does not offer a vision of criminology in which quantitative methods play an important part. To my way of thinking, a thriving quantitative criminology is an essential component of the discipline. Over the last ten years, there have been two striking developments in criminology. The first is the rediscovery ⁸ of the normative. One can see this both in macro-level theories, notably institutional anomie theory (Messner and Rosenfeld 2001, 2009), and in meso- or micro-theories, such as procedural justice theory (Tyler 2011a, 2011b) and the ever-growing interest in desistance perspectives on crime (see Farrall et al., 2011) and in restorative justice. The second is the emergence of methodologically robust (or robust enough) comparative research – typically across states in the US, and across countries in Europe. There seems to be some progress in the development of integrated theoretical perspectives (e.g. Wikström et al. 2012).

One could just about make a case that for micro-level theories on the sources of normative compliance and cooperation, qualitative research can garner more insights than quantitative work. But one would have to be fairly bone-headed to resist the arguments for multi-method approaches. In my own area of current interest, procedural justice theory, it makes sense to deploy both qualitative research (e.g. Hough 2012) and quantitative research (e.g. Jackson et al. 2011, 2012) to try to nail down the relationships between policing styles, public trust in justice, public perceptions of institutional legitimacy and compliance.

For macro-level theories, I cannot imagine how progress can be made without quantitative analysis. There is a set of central questions for criminology about the relationships at a national level, about the linkages between socio-economic structure, culture and norm maintenance or transmission. How destabilising of established social norms is a rapid shift to market economies? Are the income inequalities that appear to come with neo-liberal economic policies inherently criminogenic? Is rapid inflation a driver of crime? Does unemployment haveonly a secondary role? These questions cannot be answered by ethnographic or observational research. As a discipline, criminology has two choices: to deem these questions as unanswerable, or to embrace the comparative – and necessarily quantitative – methods that offer some promise of enlightenment. To resist the second option strikes me as Luddism.

This is not to deny that there are some serious challenges in quantitative comparative research. All the limitations to the processes of quantification identified by Jock in The Criminological Imagination are real, but this is not a justification for an ‘impossibilist’ stance. (One might as well rule out further research on climate change, given the limitations of available data.) There are also problems about the communication – or, perhaps, translation – of the results of sophisticated multivariate modelling. Most UK criminologists are uncomfortable reading the output of a logistic regression or structural equation model, and are not in a position to assess the validity of individual pieces of work. One option is simply to trust the peer review process as a form of quality assurance and to accept the summaries of results that are almost always to be found, couched in moderately accessible terms. The other is for criminology to recognise that these methods are a central aspect of the discipline, and to set about ‘skilling up’ practitioners and students. The sensible way forward is a combination of the two approaches: quantitative researchers need to take more care in ‘translating’ their findings into everyday language, and criminological audiences need to recognise that the discipline now requires quite a high level of numeracy. In his review of The Criminological Imagination, Currie neatly sets out what is needed:

I think we are best served by what we might call a ‘big tent’ definition of social science – one that does not reject science or equate it with ever less intelligible equation-spinning: one that understands that science is nothing more or less than the use of all tools to shed light on a necessarily complex and elusive reality. (Currie 2012: 430)

What of the interlinked problems associated with the low status of policy research within criminology? Clearly not all policy research in this field is quantitative, and not all quantitative criminology is applied, or has a policy focus. But it is clear that government funders place a particular value on numbers, and that they define the research questions that they want answered within the ‘commonsense’ conceptual frameworks of political discourse. They do not appreciate being told that they are asking the wrong question. ‘Number-crunchers’, for their part, are sometimes theoretically unsophisticated, uncritical of the issues with which they are grappling and reluctant to set their findings within the existing body of knowledge about the topic. These tendencies are most marked in the work of private sector consultancies, but can also be found in some academic work. This is a serious problem, as our knowledge of crime and offending is cumulative, and research needs to build on earlier work. The processes of contract research culture work against this.

The case for greater involvement of academic criminologists in policy research is precisely that their background should enable them to locate a specific research problem within the broader body of criminological knowledge. But what are the preconditions needed to make this happen? First, more needs to be done to confront the presumption within many sectors of academic criminology – at least in the UK – that working for government or for criminal justice agencies threatens academic integrity. As discussed above, there are ‘bottom line’ considerations in running policy research centres that are reliant on grant income, and it is possible to cross the line that separates ‘professionals’ from ‘mercenaries’. But this does not necessarily mean that all grants and contracts from government are tainted. But at present there is rather limited discussion about the professional standards required of policy research in the social sciences, and the conditions under which policy work in the social sciences can be a respectable and decent enterprise.

Not enough is known within academic criminology about the ‘craft’ of policy research. Most academic criminologists do not understand what is involved in making an impact. To achieve some leverage on policy as a ‘public criminologist’, one requires various skills that are only loosely linked to academic qualities. Of course, there is a large element of luck and happenstance in determining when research achieves an impact, and when it sinks like a stone. Having something coherent to say is, of course, a precondition. To be able to say it with authority is also important. Timing is a critical factor, and scale can be important. Having non-academic allies – or, at least, sympathetic listeners – is critically important, whether these are politicians and their advisers, civil servants, non-government organizations, criminal justice agencies, non-departmental public bodies or journalists. What is undeniably the case – and what is very obvious to anyone who has engaged with policy for any length of time – is that criminologists are indeed minor players with small voices in the policy arena, and that their research will achieve little if they fail to foster, in some way or other, forms of reach into the political process. I fear that Jock’s view of quantitative research and policy research reduces the chances of this actually happening.