Abstract
As one would expect from Ian Loader and Richard Sparks, this is an engaging, well-crafted book about the public roles of criminologists. It is written by criminologists for criminologists, and will probably have limited reach beyond academic audiences. It is none the worse for that: it is one of the most stimulating academic books I have read for some time. It is a largely descriptive exercise in the sociology of criminology, but at the same time is gently prescriptive about what criminology ought to try to achieve as a discipline. The authors set out a conception of a pluralistic criminology, the different elements of which should combine to help to build a better politics of crime. What marks it apart from other writing on the roles and functions of our discipline is its good manners – a sort of diplomacy aiming to maximize points of consensus in a field that has its fair share of factions and schisms.
The book opens with an analysis of the state of the discipline, tracing the paradox of ‘successful failure’ – a continued growth in academic popularity, as reflected in student numbers, coupled with a waning of influence on policy. It then offers a five-fold typology of approaches to criminological engagement with policy and politics. Identifying oneself in typologies of this sort is always fun, and we are offered the choice between: those who style themselves as scientific experts; those who define their role as policy advisers; those who are academic observers turned players; social movement theorists and activists; and lonely prophets. This is a useful heuristic device: even if the categories are in no sense mutually exclusive, most policy-engaged criminologists will be able to find some sort of reflection of themselves in one or more of these mirrors.
The book then offers an analysis of the processes by which the penal policy climate has become overheated, and describes various positions that criminologists have adopted in response to the new forms of populist penal politics that have emerged over the last two decades. These reactions are presented as ‘cooling devices’:
work to affirm the centrality of legality and justice;
work designed to reclaim penal policy from politics, by building a robust ‘what works’ evidence base using experimental research methods and systematic reviews;
attempts to transcend or replace conventional criminology, as reflected in situational crime prevention and ‘crime science’, applying systems perspectives to crime control policy which do not look to the formal criminal justice system as the main means of controlling crime; and
attempts to re-insulate penal policy from politics by ensuring that there are robust institutions that can operate beyond the reach of politicians and the popular will.
The refrain throughout this interesting analysis is that none of these cooling devices manages to understand and fully engage with the political process. The final chapter sets out the authors’ ideas on an alternative way of doing policy criminology that takes politics seriously, and recognizes the legitimacy of the democratic political process. They suggest that criminology can and should function as a form of ‘democratic under-labouring’ that supports a better politics of crime. The foundations of the discipline remain as the generation of knowledge, through an interplay of theoretical and empirical work; however the democratic under-labourer deploys this knowledge in a way intended to ‘increase the use of and regard for evidence in media and public discourse about crime; to make political game-playing and irresponsibility more difficult than it might otherwise be; and to build a knowledge base for good professional practice’ (p. 125).
This vision is set out in terms that will command assent from criminologists of many colours. The scientist, the policy adviser, the academic turned player and the activist will all say, ‘yes, that’s what I mean to do’. What is distinctive and important, however, is the case that they make for recognizing the legitimacy of the political process. Democratic under-labouring is:
committed to both participating within, and to facilitating and extending, institutional spaces that supplement representative politics with inclusive public deliberation about crime and justice matters, whether locally, nationally or in emergent transnational spaces. In this regard, the public value of democratic under-labouring lies not in cooling down controversies about crime and social responses to it, but in playing its part in figuring out ways to bring the heat within practices of democratic governance. … If one was to encapsulate all the above in a single phrase it would this: intellectual ambition, political humility. (p. 132)
I find this a very elegant and persuasive formulation of what I already do as a criminologist who places himself in the ‘policy adviser’ camp. A test of the value of the book, perhaps, is whether the ‘scientists’, ‘activists’ and others also cheer the authors along in similar fashion. What the book lacks – which would make it easier to locate points of difference and of commonality with the under-labouring role – is any significant discussion of concrete examples of policy criminologists at work. The authors explicitly say that they do not aim to offer a guide on how to do policy-focused criminology, which is fair enough. But I would have welcomed some consideration of the circumstances when the work of criminology succeeds – and fails – in contributing to policy and politics in the ways they envisage. In my own experience, 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; 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.
This said, I am only slightly comfortable with the idea of labelling myself as a democratic under-labourer, and I imagine that others will find the label equally uncomfortable. The term is a good one, in that it reminds of our relative powerlessness in achieving an impact on the political process. Less appealing are its connotations of dependence, and of being directed in our work. I am sure that the authors want their under-labourers to be robustly independent – but we tend to expect subservience from people in subordinate roles. My view of policy-engaged research is that one creates one’s stall, sets it out to be as attractive as possible, and does everything possible to ensure that the products on the stall find their way into the processes of democratic governance. In other words, one can operate as an independent ‘trader’ in ideas and in policies in a way that is fully compatible with the democratic process; the choice whether or not to ‘buy’ a product created by a policy academic ultimately lies within the political process.
There are a few other nits to pick. I found the book’s diplomacy and good manners frustrating at times. In its aspirations to foster a pluralistic, inclusive criminology, it offers only the most gentle of critiques of some of the orientations towards policy work. One senses that the authors have considerably less sympathy for the ‘what works’ experimentalists or with crime scientists than they admit to. Perhaps it is simply that I would have liked to see my own prejudices confirmed. However, I suspect that as part of the process of building a better politics of crime, criminology needs to recognize the complexity of the sorts of ‘wicked problem’ that make crime relatively intractable, and needs to avoid overpromising research solutions to these problems. The most valuable product that criminology can offer policy is perspective – in the shape of middle-level theories about the maintenance of social order. I doubt that we shall ever provide policy with a ‘toolbox’ containing a set of experimentally validated policy spanners crafted in an arena removed from the realm of the political. Well, they do say this, but they pull their punches considerably.
I also failed to see how the first of the four ‘coolant’ devices – asserting the centrality of legality and justice – is necessarily incompatible with democratic under-labouring. The others – the ‘what works’ experimentalism, crime science and institutional re-insulation – are clearly in tension with democratic politics: the aim of each is to reduce the amount of territory that can be politically contested. But the justice system has always required parallel systems of political and legal accountability, and an essential political task is to ensure that these two systems strike the right balance. It was also surprising, incidentally, that procedural justice theory got no mention as a body of work which offers utilitarian arguments to reassert the centrality of legality and justice.
These are minor points, however. The book is a fine achievement that needs to be read by anyone with an interest in criminology as a discipline. Helping to create a better politics of crime is something to which we should all aspire.