Abstract
There have recently been a number of calls for a public criminology – although the term is ill-defined – as if such a criminology were quite new. A vigorous public criminology did indeed once exist in England and Wales but it presented problems to the politician, policy-maker and scholar, and it became largely forgotten. If a public criminology is to re-emerge, it must contend with a spate of presentational difficulties which appear to have been too little considered.
Keywords
Introduction
I want to consider the themes of chronocentrism (Morson, 1994) – the doctrine that the new displaces the old – and public criminology, the character assumed by criminology when it enters the public domain, because they are important, linked topics and a leitmotiv of the 2013 British Society of Criminology conference at which an earlier version of this article was presented. In doing so, I think I should describe myself as extending some feelers into the dark rather than as striding out with manly resolution. Not one of us knows very much about the dash we cut in the wider world, and, if public criminology is to mean anything at all, it would be useful to peer at the ways in which we may be seen. In doing so, I shall, as it were, circle around the theme to inspect it from a number of vantage points rather than pursue one straight line.
By criminology, I understand a polymath, hydra-headed discipline addressed to different audiences and diffusely focused, as Edwin Sutherland (1960: 3) put it, on the ‘study of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting toward the breaking of laws’. It has always been torn between competing aspirations. It received its baptism in 1890, 1 working in the service of the state and practised by lawyers, statisticians and medical men and women; became emancipated as a semi-autonomous discipline in the universities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and then expanded in a number of directions, to become at once an applied social science, an independent scholarly discipline; and a series of hybrid forms combining elements of the two. It may look upon the criminal justice system as a topic or as an end, analysing it or serving it or attempting a meld of the two. Few criminologists have ever managed completely to free themselves from the perfectly honourable impulse to change the world rather than simply to interpret it, whether it is to protect, radicalize, repress, restrain, reform or rehabilitate the law-breaker. After all, we engage directly with serious matters of social harm and social control and it is difficult to remain disinterested. That imperative to intervene has recently been given renewed vitality in the call for an explicitly public criminology. Although we have always been tinged by the professional ideology of the social pathologist, the injunction to turn ourselves into experts with a science that can and should be publicly consequential has again been voiced with some urgency.
The revived discussion about a public criminology came into being in the United States in the slipstream of what has been called ‘the extraordinary event’ (Calhoun, 2005: 355) of Michael Burawoy’s 2004 presidential address on a public sociology to the American Sociological Association (2005). He was to be followed almost mimetically by Todd Clear (2010: 16) who, in his own 2009 presidential address to the American Society of Criminology, called for a ‘public research agenda that can sustain enlightened policy-making and potent innovation’ in debates about crime, criminal law and criminal justice. In this country, the matter has been taken up most notably by Ian Loader and Richard Sparks (2010) in their Public Criminology? which offered, in effect, an inventory of ideal types of professional stances towards the pragmatics and politics of public engagement. Public Criminology? has engendered an interesting conversation about who we are and what we do. But there is, of course, a difficulty that, in looking at how we look at ourselves looking outwards, as it were, we are in fact paradoxically only turning in on ourselves again. We do on the whole tend inevitably, and for perfectly understandable professional and social reasons, to be more preoccupied with the impact we make on one another as criminologists, to be absorbed reflexively in how we think of ourselves, our discipline and our colleagues, rather than with the more complicated and elusive estimation of how we appear to those in the lay world.
It is not a world that has always proved very receptive to us. Chancer and McLaughlin (2007: 157) put it recently that: ‘Criminologists have had to confront the embarrassing fact that in a society saturated with “crime talk”, they have utmost difficulty in communicating with politicians, policy makers, professionals and the public.’ Part of the problem is, of course, that we are somewhat adrift because we do not know much about what is known about us, and it points us towards a set of intriguing questions that really deserve to be addressed, questions that could invert some of the stock ways in which we talk about criminology and its uncertain status as a public discipline.
I should confess at the outset that I am not always sure what colleagues mean when they talk about public criminology. Perhaps, as Michelle Inderbitzin argues, 2 the term is highly indexical, having many situated meanings, there being many criminologies and many publics; perhaps the term has still to acquire – and might never acquire – an accepted definition; but one presumes that it must have something to do with properties of audibility and visibility, because, if it is not that, how can it be said to be public at all? Would it not be useful to ascertain what may be seen and heard of the discipline?
The Face of Public Criminology Past
Let me begin by reminding ourselves that there was a time when we did indeed have a remarkably virile, if perhaps limited, public criminology, and it was not so long ago, but we seem somehow to have expunged it from our communal memory. Criminologists from the United Kingdom and overseas did once speak truth to power in this country. There were prominent individuals like Thorsten Sellin, Hermann Mannheim and Barbara Wootton. More importantly, there was an institutionalized public criminology located in two strategically placed organizations, the Home Office Research Unit (HORU) and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. The one was co-founded in 1957 by Tom Lodge, an actuarial statistician, who found little to admire in the academic criminology of his day: ‘we have’, he told Home Office Ministers in floating the idea of a new unit, ‘on only very few occasions been able to induce University departments to set about research with what we regard as sufficient attention to scientific rigour and the use of modern statistical techniques’. 3 He was then allowed to set about establishing an institution whose express aims were to elaborate the methods and ideas of criminology in order to assist management and aid the training of treatment staff. 4
The other organization was the creature of Leon Radzinowicz, and his ambition was just as empirical, political and practical. His Institute would: provide an environment in which systematically planned research on problems of limited scope would in time build up a body of objective information and lead eventually to the solution of more fundamental issues. It would be concerned with such problems as trends in crime, the treatment of offenders, the medical and social aspects of criminal behaviour, the administration and enforcement of the criminal law and the reform both of the substantive criminal law and of criminal procedure. (quoted by Butler, 1974: 6)
That new public criminology of the three decades from the early 1960s to the early 1980s was more than successful. It was conspicuously positioned from the first. One crude indicator of the public stamp it made was the frequency with which it featured in what used to be the newspaper of record, The Times (see Figure 1). The plain and diagonally striped bars are measures of how many of the references to criminology, displayed with vertical stripes, explicitly named the Unit or the Institute, and it may be seen that, in their heyday, they were indeed highly visible, although they began to fade by the 1990s. Their work was done on a large scale and with an originality and a topicality at a time when crime was beginning to trouble politicians and publics, and when its attendant science, criminology, was itself novel and intriguing. The two institutions were large by academic standards and reasonably well funded. By the end of the 1970s, John Croft, Tom Lodge’s successor, whose tenure lasted from 1972 to 1983, had an establishment of 50 and a budget of £1,000,000 a year, perhaps equivalent to £4,000,000 now. 5 His Unit’s work was well publicized, each of the first studies it performed being attentively reported. Its climax was almost certainly the massive evaluation of crime prevention programmes, published as Reducing Offending (Goldblatt and Lewis, 1998). Ron Clarke (2010: 1), the Unit’s sometime Head, reflected that: ‘For much of this period [between 1957 and 1992], the Unit occupied a central role in British Criminology, not least because it was the largest employer of criminologists in the country.’
References in The Times, 1940–1999.
The Cambridge Institute was established in 1959 with Leon Radzinowicz as its director, supported by three Assistant Directors of Research and a number of research assistants, and its work was largely funded by the Home Office. In its opening decade, the government supported a copious programme of research. The founding of the Institute, the appointments that were made there and Leon Radzinowicz’s manifesto for the work that would be done were avidly recorded in The Times. There were reports of lectures delivered at Cambridge – in 1960, for example, by Barbara Wootton on criminal responsibility in homicide cases (and she was to be the criminologist who would later lead the debate on the abolition of capital punishment in the House of Lords). There were reports of the many lectures delivered by Leon Radzinowicz himself as he moved around the country and around the world. There were reviews of his books and the research published by his Institute. The Institute promoted the first national conference in criminology in 1964.
Leon Radzinowicz was, in short, a daemonic driving force, the very incarnation of British criminology for at least three decades, a large figure in a small world, an academic grandee, whose like has not been seen since his departure from the directorship in 1972. He was the perfect public criminologist, a man who had long insisted that there must be a connection between criminology and criminal policy and that the study of criminology, shorn of the study of law and policy, is both arid and dangerous, and particularly dangerous when it ignores the wider questions of social and political values, especially the liberty of the citizen. (Hood 1997: ii)
His primary object, he said, had been to ‘raise the status of criminological studies in general’ (Radzinowicz, 1988: 1), and it was an object that he attained. Figure 2 shows the number of reports he received in The Times as one measure of his prominence as a public figure.
Criminologists name in The Times, 1930–1999.
That pattern is even starker if one searches for references to criminology and criminologists in Parliament, the central political forum with which public criminologists must, presumably, engage (see Figure 3).
References to criminology and criminologists in Hansard, 1870–1999.
Criminology came to feature as a topic and resource in parliamentary discourse with the maturing of the discipline in general and after the establishment of the twin research institutes in the late 1950s, in particular (see Figure 4).
References to criminology, HORU and the Cambridge Institute in Hansard, 1870–1999.
Leon Radzinowicz, Terence Morris and Nigel Walker were the only criminologists to feature at all prominently by name in the deliberations of politicians during that period (see Figure 5).
Criminologists named in Hansard, 1950–1999.
There was prolific reference in Parliament to the work of the Home Office Research Unit and the Institute of Criminology. To be sure, much of what was said dwelt on prosaic administrative matters of funding, plans, curriculum, staffing and the commissioning of research. After all, funding came from the State. But the Research Unit’s publications were routinely reported, and their findings were as routinely deployed in debate, none more consequentially than the timely study of Evelyn Gibson and Stan Klein (1961) on trends in homicide since the passing of the 1957 Act. Their finding that the partial abolition of capital punishment had had no discernible impact on rates of homicides certainly fortified the views of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, although, as a confirmed abolitionist, he might not by that stage have been swayed by contradictory evidence.
There was the palpable influence exercised by Ron Clarke and his colleagues on the development and implementation of ideas of situational crime prevention in the 1980s, perhaps one of the most consequential practical applications of criminology there has been, and one whose impact in the form of measures to harden targets represents the principal explanation invoked by many scholars to account for at least some part of the otherwise inexplicable fall in rates of crime across the developed world (for example Van Dijk, 2012). Then too, the Research Unit’s British Crime Survey (now the Crime Survey of England and Wales) quite turned theorizing upside down, introducing a torrent of new information and ideas that led to the partial collapse of radical criminology through its revelation of the class and gender distribution of victimization; a new appreciation of the spatial and temporal dimensions of crime; talk about risks and routine activities and much else.
The new Institute of Criminology and its director also acquired an impressive standing as an authority to be consulted on the aetiology, reporting, character and temporal trends of crime. Their research findings and expert opinions were routinely cited as evidence in debate.
6
They became a kind of criminological touchstone, a source of authoritative information,
7
resort to which conferred legitimacy on political action, and which, indeed, constituted a kind of political act in its own right. For instance, at a time of popular concern about increases in crimes of violence, and when the probationary period for the abolition of capital punishment was about to expire in 1969, the Institute could be invoked by James Callaghan, the Home Secretary, who said that: officials have been in touch with the Director of the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, Professor Radzinowicz, who is known to many hon. Members. I have agreed on a programme of study [of crimes of violence] with him and this is germane to the debate …. I believe that this programme offers the best promise of getting to grips with the problem. (HC Deb 16 December 1969 vol. 793 cc1148–297)
And he received eulogistic support. The Labour Member, Leo Abse, replied: Anyone who knows the work of that institute and of Professor Radzinowicz knows the great debt we owe to it and to him. Nothing that the Home Secretary has done will give a greater sense of reassurance in many directions than the knowledge that he is placing great trust, confidence and money in that institute.
Before the founding of the Institute, it was said in Parliament, we had been in a state of ignorance, in a criminological dark ages, which were now happily dispelled by the new enlightenment of a scientific criminology.
8
Now, in the mid-1960s, William Deedes, a former Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Home Department, believed, it was fortunate indeed that the Institute was on hand to assess the impact of any new legislation. What, he asked: will be the rôle of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge where I think most of the criminal research is oriented? What plans are there for expansion in this respect? Research is the handmaiden of these ideas. Without it we shall not ever learn from our mistakes. I am sure that the Home Secretary accepts that there will be mistakes. It does not matter if there are mistakes provided public safety is not jeopardised. But this makes research absolutely imperative. (HC Deb 12 December 1966 vol. 738 cc52–208)
And there are other markers of the signal impact achieved by that institutional public criminology. Since 1900, there have been 12 Royal Commissions in and around our discipline’s areas of interest, 11 coming to fruition and one abortive, and the last was the 1993 Royal Commission on Criminal Justice under the chairmanship of Viscount Runciman. Only one criminologist proper was ever a member of a Royal Commission, Leon Radzinowicz, and he was part of the 1953 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment as well as of the still-born Royal Commission on the Penal System of 1964–1966. To be sure, Michael Banton, a sociologist of the police, was a member of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure that reported in 1981, and he was there because of his competence as a social researcher; Michael Zander, an academic criminal lawyer, was a member of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice and Gary Runciman, its chairman, was a sociologist; but the representation of criminologists proper was confined to one man, that very public criminologist, Leon Radzinowicz, who was also a member of the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders between 1950 and 1963 and its successor body, the Advisory Council on the Penal System, between 1966 and 1974. He was described by Terence Morris (2000: 16), who played his own role in public criminology, as the ‘engine extraordinary of the development of British criminology … [who had] what no one else did, the necessary combination of vision, tireless energy and Machiavellian wit to make criminology an intellectually and politically respectable discipline’.
If that was not public criminology, what else could it possibly have been? Yet perhaps one should temper what one says. A criminology so heavily dependent on the State, so directed towards its audience in Government, so reliant on officials and politicians to set the questions it answered, had an intellectual price to pay. A compound of professional and policy social science, it had a marked, perhaps inevitable aversion to the more open-ended forms of theorizing. Leon Radzinowicz was, for example, openly hostile in conversation to the radical criminology, symbolic interactionism and phenomenonology which had come into vogue in the last years of his life. He undoubtedly secured a place for a more empirical criminology in Britain, and, for a while, he made his name and a name for the Institute he founded, but it is a little difficult now to list his successes even in his own chosen, limited realm. Perhaps his chief policy achievement, and it may have been ill-judged, was to overturn the recommendation of Lord Louis Mountbatten that prisoners deemed dangerous or escape-prone be confined in a new high-security prison on the Isle of Wight. 9 He was described by Roger Hood, as ‘the most influential person in establishing criminology as an academic discipline in England’ 10 but he is not included in the rather idiosyncratic list of Fifty Key Thinkers in Criminology (Hayward et al., 2009), and his anonymous obituary in The Times of 3 January 2000 asserts that ‘he had little direct influence on criminological thought, and his advice to government was not notably successful’ (The Times, 2000: 19). Chronocentrism has done its work. Hermann Mannheim, Terence Morris and Nigel Walker (and Barbara Wootton and David Canter) are not among the 50 key thinkers. None is a pioneer of modern criminology. 11 They are not often cited now. 12 It seems that the contribution made by Ron Clarke to situational crime prevention is no longer even remembered at the Home Office itself (Mayhew and Hough, 2012: 26).
The public life of a public criminologist can be brief and it is often inconsequential. A criminologist that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. Leon Radzinowicz seemed to know it. In his review of the course of criminology, published just before his death in 1999, he said that ‘The stark fact stands out that, in the field of criminal justice, in spite of the output of criminological knowledge, a populist political approach holds sway’ (1999: 469).
Perhaps there are two remaining legatees of that public criminology in the United Kingdom, and both are linear descendants of the Unit and the first incarnation of the Institute. There is the interdisciplinary Jill Dando Institute
The Institute’s heavy emphasis on the utilitarian and the applied tends to raise the kind of sneer that once disfigured the lips of those who talked about trade. Gloria Laycock (2011: 721) herself remarks in her review of Public Criminology? That: I am not and never have been a trained criminologist. I have, however, been consistently frustrated by the lack of interest, at times bordering on downright hostility, to my view of the crime world by criminologists, by the lack of interest in teaching environmental criminology, research methods or experimentation.
It is a sneer that has been reciprocated. It has been said of Ron Clarke that ‘he is scathing of criminological papers that are inaccessible and self-indulgent, and that ultimately serve no practical purpose’ (Tilley and Farrell, 2012: xx). It is an unhappy relation between branches of the discipline whose history has still to be written.
The other legatee is the Cambridge Institute. Its new director, and the incumbent of Leon Radzinowicz’s Wolfson Chair, is Lawrence Sherman, who says that he would be proud to be called a public criminologist (email, 23 September 2012). His colleagues include Alison Liebling, P-O Wikström and Heather Strang, all of whom engage with the public on the political and policy dimensions of crime. Friedrich Lösel (2009:11), its recent director, listed a range of quite clearly applied research studies in his introduction to a recent history of the Institute. But the Institute is also, I believe, now more firmly in the central, catholic, academic tradition of criminology, marked less by an overriding commitment to practicality and more to a diffuse pursuit of scholarship. 14 And, again, it is my impression that those who talk about the prospect of a public criminology do not, for some curious reason, ever allude to the contemporary work of the Cambridge Institute. If they do not have in mind what goes on there and at the Jill Dando Institute, I cannot imagine what it is they can intend by the term. It is almost as if we cannot recognize the thing when we see it. Maybe, like le bourgeois gentilhomme, we have actually been speaking public criminology all the time and are trying to create a thing that already exists.
The golden age of public criminology in Britain did not last and we have omitted effectively to chronicle it or write about its fall. Indeed, we have been so incurious about what happened that it is impossible now to give any well-evidenced account of its decline. One contribution to its demise may have been our own manifest lack of competence as experts on crime. If we are to be judged by our understanding of critical trends, it should be recalled that we did not predict the fall in crime rates across the developed world since the mid-1990s; we did not understand the fall when it occurred (see Zimring, 2007); and we falsely predicted that the fall would be reversed with economic recession. But we are certainly not alone. Sociologists failed to foretell the reappearance of militant religions; political scientists the end of the Soviet Union; and economists the great crash of 2007–2008. Like everyone else, we have always been better at predicting the past. And it also seemed for a time that one of the principal contributions of public criminology to evidence-based policy making was a discrediting of the very idea of the utility of intervening in the criminal justice system. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pauline Morris and Kevin Heal (1981), Stephen Brody (1976) and others at the Home Office Research Unit flagged how the work of the police, courts and prisons seemed to make little difference at the margins to rates of offending. We certainly appeared to have discovered more about the limits of action, but beyond that there was fog and darkness. In the words of Lyn McDonald (1976: 15), published at much that time, ‘there is now a whole literature showing that rehabilitation programmes do not rehabilitate and prevention programmes do not prevent’. John Croft (1983: 61), the former head of the Research and Planning Unit at the Home Office, said in the mid-1980s that: research carried out in the last twenty years or so suggests that penal ‘treatments’ … do not have any reformative effect whatever other effects they may have … are these resources simply to be abandoned on the basis of the accumulated research evidence?
There are, to be sure, reasons to suppose that all that pessimism may have been overwrought, unduly influenced by the impact of Robert Martinson’s (1974: 48) death sentence on penal treatment in the USA, a death sentence that was delivered in his argument that: ‘With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.’ Chris Nuttall (2003: 281), who played a central role in the Home Office Research Unit in the 1980s and 1990s, certainly believes that there was a tendency to overlook ‘a clear treatment effect’ in the work, say of Margaret Shaw, but it was ‘done at the wrong time and in the wrong climate and [its results were] cognitively dissonant’.
The half-life of rehabilitation and the treatment ideology had apparently been spent by the mid-1980s. Negative findings proliferated. New ideas like situational crime prevention were only just coming into vogue. And policy officials began to despair. David Faulkner (2010: 58–59), the Head of the Criminal Department and the Research and Statistical Departments at the Home Office between 1982 and 1990, said that: disillusion came quite quickly …. The existing policies based on what was thought to be evidence, seemed not to be working…. Crisis management, rather than long-term policies based on evidence and principle was the order of the day …. in government research was not thought to have much to contribute.
For all the investment in policies, programmes and research, crime rates had continued to rise. It was a pessimism and defeatism that did not sit well with a new breed of politician eager to secure tangible results in the 1980s and 1990s and beyond – a breed, confronting crisis and impatient of cautious advice, that was anxious to transform what were seen to be sluggish, conservative policy officials into compliant service managers who would strive, in the new business language, to deliver outcomes and reach targets. Richard Wilson (1999), the Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, formerly Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, one of the agents of that transformation, pronounced at the end of the century that ‘“no change” is not an option. The Civil Service has to face the continuing challenge of change and modernisation … we now require senior officials to be good managers and good leaders and know how to get results.’ It was all to culminate in the stance described by the erstwhile Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the man who accelerated the transition, in 2013: I came to the conclusion that the traditional skill set of the Civil Service is not what really is required if you want to drive change. There is an inherent dysfunctionality in the gap between what we really want those systems to do today – implementation, delivery, performance – and what they are traditionally geared up to do, which is analysis and policy advice. (Sylvester and Thomson, 2013)
Cautious public criminologists could play little part in such a brave new world, and they were obliged either to quit the stage or moderate their aspirations. Ron Clarke’s (2010: 8) verdict was that ‘after “nothing works”, they had nothing to offer crime policy, which allowed the tabloids and ambitious politicians to fill the void’. Cautious civil servants were purged. The old mandarins, Loader’s (2006) ‘Platonic guardians’, the men and women who had been receptive to criminology, were shunted away to be replaced by those who were younger, keener, less experienced, less cautious and less knowledgeable, known to some criminologists as ‘the teenagers’. Gloria Laycock recalled that ‘it is not only the criminologists that have changed. They were talking to the civil service of Sir Humphrey with professional civil servants like David Faulkner who were prepared to listen’ (email, 26 September 2012). It was, after all, David Faulkner who had organized a discussion group of ‘civil servants, practitioners and academic criminologists’ to discuss penal policy, and they included Bill Bohan, Philippa Drew and Mary Tuck from the Home Office and Rod Morgan, Andrew Rutherford and David Downes from the academy (see Downes, 2012: xv–xvi). Like was then talking to like in a liberal, technocratic world hopeful about the power of reason to shape reform. But now they have gone, although their departure has also not been properly chronicled.
The Home Office Research Unit was dismantled, and its staff were scattered, although I am not aware of any formal record of how it was lost and what the consequences have been. Government funding of academic criminology fell into decline, although it is difficult to secure information about how and why that happened. British government, in short, has largely turned its back on public criminology and looked to business consultants, market researchers and special advisers instead. Ron Clarke’s epitaph was that: ‘The demise of research at the HO is very sad’ (email, 19 September 2012).
But we also turned our backs on ourselves. After all, public criminology required a resort to a set of agreed methodologies, analytic frameworks and a lingua franca that policy-makers, politicians and academics could share. It had to be mediated by argument that was focused on the small in scale and succinct in its presentation (no more than two sides of A4); timely – that is, available for use precisely when the administrators and politicians wanted it for practical purposes; unburdened by what would be considered irrelevant preamble and context; unequivocal, clear and simple; not too outré; numerate (because, as Simmel reminded us, numbers are the universal currency of evaluation), although not too technical statistically; uncluttered by footnotes and endnotes, neologisms and the standard presentational trappings of the academic paper (being literate or ‘good on paper’ was a skill prized in the civil service for a time); empirically rather than theoretically grounded; pragmatic and practicable; and, where possible, supportive of proposals that were being taken forward at the time. (Tim Hope (2004: 302) has talked about how government has a propensity to ‘be on the look out for ideas, evidence, even legitimacy, to substantiate its promise’.) One who should know, Gloria Laycock (2002: 209), put it that: research papers that are written in obscure technical language, permeable to the chosen few, and covering reams of paper, are less likely to influence policy than a concise, crisp few pages which summarize the important points and spell out the implications for policy. Some researchers are distinctly uncomfortable with this scenario.
Chris Nuttall, the sometime head of the Home Office Research and Statistics Directorate, recalled in an email that: ‘Our effort was to get useable research … I told people to cut out the theoretical justification stuff. The policy makers believed the researchers knew what they were doing.’ Public criminology, in short, required its compromises. We could not speak truth to power in our own untrammelled tongue, working as we chose and without a deference to standards imposed by those whose interests, modes of thinking and priorities were not our own.
Those who practised public criminology were roundly accused by others of trahison des clercs. As soon as the discipline reached a critical mass in the universities of the 1970s, it underwent a process of fission, a divorce between the radical activist (who could be labelled a public criminologist of a different stamp, see Fitzgerald (1977) for example) and the impeccable theorist, on the one hand, and the more conventional public criminologist, on the other. Public criminologists were belittled as not much more than administrative criminologists, voodoo criminologists, official criminologists, positivists and empiricists (see Mayhew and Hough, 2012: 17), lickspittles and lackeys, towards whom some began in the early 1970s to entertain feelings that, in Stan Cohen’s (1971: 15) phrase, ‘ranged from distrust at its orientation towards administrative needs and impatience with its highly empirical, anti-theoretical bias, to simply a mild lack of interest in the sort of studies that were being conducted’. It was, said Ron Clarke (2010: 6), all quite ‘demoralising to the [Home Office Research] Unit’s researchers, who were labelled as “administrative criminologists”, supposedly undertaking plodding, atheoretical work serving the government’. One highly distinguished and self-labelled public criminologist said to me ‘Trahison des clercs! What a powerful idea, regardless of whether it was a convenient scapegoat for the Great War. I live with it daily as a public criminologist who risks calumny for being as different … as Salman Rushdie was.’ Many British academic criminologists were by training, ideology, intellectual bent and temperament quite ill equipped to be public criminologists. They were not all numerate (Wiles, 2002, 2004). They were disinclined to enter into a compact with Leviathan or strengthen what they defined as an oppressive system (see Box, 1983; Mathiesen, 1974). They either never entered or else withdrew from the field.
And even those who remained have tended to be overshadowed by the real titans of the criminal justice system, the judiciary, police and Bar, and their relative impotence highlights at least two properties of what passes in criminal justice circles for authoritative knowledge: for practical purposes what counts is the assent and co-operation of the institutions and agencies of crime control to whatever may be proposed, for without them nothing can be done. What counts too is the anticipated judgement of the mass media and an electorate which have their own folk criminologies. They have power. Criminologists do not. To paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions does criminology have? What criminologists or other experts say may amount to little because they have no practical sanctions or inducements to offer. More, in a country still wedded to the empirical, the experiential and the pragmatic, a country mistrustful of the intellectual, a country where, in the judgement of Stanley Baldwin, the difference between a man of intellect and an intellectual is the difference between a gentleman and a gent (http://www.thenation.com/article/zones-disengagement, accessed October 2012), the word of the seasoned practitioner has tended ever to carry greater public weight. It is what the Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (ACPO, 1979) lauded when it: urge[d] great caution with the representations from groups who believe that matters of crime and justice are their special intellectual province, the government of which they claim to be a highly intellectual business demanding an expertise which they alone possess, and who will not countenance the voice of reality and practical experience.
And the claims of the experiential may have a case. Although as social scientists we have tended continuously to traduce common-sense reasoning, lay theorizing is not without its merits (see Douglas, 1971). Consider the many silly things we have said over the decades, our neglect of the victim; our disparagement of the pains of crime; our assumption that the fear of crime is mere false consciousness; the argument that property crime is a progressive tax on the bourgeoisie; our hopes that the criminal and the prisoner are primitive rebels; our argument that football hooligans are alienated class warriors; our contention that crime is little more than a dispute between neighbours for which public sanctions are inappropriate; and our belief that crime will wither away into socialist diversity.
The Phenomenology of Criminology Present
If there are those who would wish to pick up the pieces and start all over again, perhaps on a very different footing, not wishing to return to the kind of professional identity established by the Research Unit and the Cambridge Institute in the 1960s and 1970s, we need to know what we can make of ourselves in public. The renewed calls for a public criminology must surely demand that we understand something of our public appearance but my supposition is that we have been quite unselfconscious about the matter. We simply do not know how we look to officials, practitioners, politicians, pressure groups, students, lay people, the mass media and any of our other audiences, and if we do not know that there is no way in which we can construct a viable public criminology of any kind.
I suggest that, instead of thinking about how we view our enterprise and its possible role in society, we should attempt to take the role of the significant others who populate different regions of public space to see what we can of our own looking-glass selves. We have surveyed the public continually about its experience of victimization and criminal justice; its fear of crime and conceptions of risk; its patterns of offending; and its reading of crime trends and the seriousness of crime; but we have almost no idea of how we ourselves are publicly identified as criminologists (if indeed we are so identified) and what, if anything, is made of us. And if we do have no such idea, the very notion of a renewed public criminology must itself be still-born.
Take the world of everyday life. We have not even started to address the most obvious questions about the social construction of our discipline. What typifications of criminology and the criminologist are in currency there? How, if at all, are ideas about criminology formed? What, to paraphrase the title of another work by Loader and Sparks, is the condition of criminology in middle England? Is it, for instance, and quite plausibly, constituted in part or whole by an imagery of criminalists, criminalistics and CSI? Certainly juries in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States are now routinely warned by counsel not to imagine that policing resembles the methods of CSI. But do they also imagine that those are our methods?
It would be easy enough for outsiders to form that notion. The most immediate and accessible bank of typifications is the internet, and popular representations of our craft may well be shaped by what is to be discovered there. On the very first page unfurled by Google, criminologists are said to: work with and often for law enforcement offices (both local and federal), analyzing the behavior and methods of criminals for a variety of reasons: to increase the chances of criminals being apprehended; to predict patterns and motives for behaviors in certain demographic groups; and to assess the responsiveness of crime to various methods of law enforcement. (http://www.princetonreview.com/Careers.aspx?cid=47, accessed November 2012)
And it rapidly becomes evident that that is a stock theme repeated again and again in near identical definitions of who and what we are. Naïve enquirers may find it hard to quarrel with the force of such a designation, there are few countervailing descriptions on offer, and we have not even begun to explore how powerful and widespread they are, whether that is how lay people really do regard us in practice – if they regard us at all – and how it affects conceptions of what criminology might be, recruitment to academic courses, the career aspirations of the would-be criminologist and much else. To be sure, those web-pages are American, but, in these globalized days, they crop up promiscuously on British screens without qualification or warning, the casual inquirer might not know or care that that they supply portraits of a profession that may have a greater application elsewhere, a matter of criminology-transfer, as it were, and I do recall how Tony Doob once talked about the manner in which Canadians, incessant viewers of US television programmes broadcast from just across the border, sometimes confidently plead the Fifth Amendment in their criminal courts.
That is one tier of questions. There are others. It would be interesting to learn who it is that personifies criminology in the popular mind, if indeed it is ever personified by anyone at all. Who stand as the archetypes of our trade, the public criminologists de nos jours? Philip Rawlings, an academic lawyer and crime historian, believes that there is a significant current in our discipline which flows from those whom he calls popular criminologists, and that it has its own strong and peculiar forms, themes and conventions: it covers, he says, a wide range of apparently factual material, but is, usually, concerned with a particular crime or criminal and the process of detection. It is aimed at a non-specialist market, is cheap, easily available and easy to read. Popular criminologists use techniques familiar to journalists and crime novelists to heighten the tension and to get the pages turning. (http://www.britsoccrim.org/volume1/010.pdf, accessed October 2012)
Is it that which most people confront when they try to conjure up our likeness? It is certainly likely that they do not question that popular criminology and its authors as we might choose to do (see Katz, 1987: 61).
Perhaps, however, they think instead of the criminologists who would once have been called pundits or ‘telly-dons’, the small platoon of academics and near-academics who are most prominently in the public eye. A Canadian blogger (and we are, are we not, squarely in the domain of the blogger here) called them the ‘quasi-celebrity academics and writers who work and publish in the high circles of top universities in the U.K. and the U.S., but also try to reach the general public by filming documentaries and appearing regularly on the TV circuit’ (http://winnipegpublibrary.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/watching-the-telly-dons/consulted in October 2012). He or she may have been a little generous, because the pool from which the criminologist-pundits are recruited is larger than he or she supposes. It would presumably include Roger Graef, who entered the world of public criminology sideways, as it were, through the making of a number of important television documentaries on crime and criminal justice, and Police, his 1982 series on the Thames Valley Police, above all; the former police officer, Mark Williams-Thomas, whose website tells us that he ‘features regularly on the BBC, ITV, Sky News, GMTV and other television channels as a criminologist and child protection expert’ (http://www.williams-thomas.co.uk/?q=content/about-mark-williams-thomas, accessed November 2012, emphases in the original); David Wilson, ‘Britain’s leading criminologist and arguably its most controversial’ (http://www.professorwilson.com/, accessed November 2012); and David Canter, ‘the internationally renowned applied social researcher and world-leading crime psychologist’ (http://www.davidcanter.com/, accessed November 2012).
It is that last candidate, David Canter, who almost certainly had some of the most impressive media coverage, especially after his association with the apprehension and conviction of John Duffy, the so-called Railway Killer, in 1988, and the publication of his book, Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer (1994). At a time when the film, The Silence of the Lambs, released in 1991, was making a stir, and when serial killers and those who hunted them had become new folk devils, he became the very beau ideal of the criminologist-criminalist hero (see Warwick, 2006: 555), the scientific sleuth, the psychological profiler, who worked on what he called ‘behavioural fingerprints’ and the routines of notorious murderers, themselves would-be celebrities (see Haggerty, 2009), men like Colin Ireland (see Duce, 1993). He undoubtedly promoted his celebrity, having published, and been the topic of, numerous newspaper articles about his own work and the promise of the new criminology he was bringing to life. 15 It is worth noting in parenthesis that David Wilson, the ‘real life “Cracker”’ (http://www.channel5.com/shows/killers-behind-bars, accessed July 2013) himself published a book and presented a series of television programmes on serial killers, another celebrity criminologist securing a reputation by writing about the most newsworthy of crimes (see Gekoski et al., 2012) and their celebrity criminals (Wilson, 2007).
How do other criminologists enter the public domain and in what ways do they embody the discipline? What organizations, official, unofficial, political, campaigning and educational, do they join? In the past, criminologists like Terence Morris were to be found visibly in alignment with fellow-reformers like CH Rolph, Gerald Gardiner and Louis Blom Cooper in the Howard League and the movement for the abolition of the death penalty. Phil Scraton was for a long time an active and effective member of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (Scraton, 1999 and http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/the-independent-panel/, accessed October 2012). Tim Newburn was engaged with the Guardian newspaper in studying the urban riots of 2011 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2011/dec/14/reading-the-riots-investigating-england-s-summer-of-disorder-full-report, accessed December 2012). Joanna Shapland played a major role in the reconstruction of the criminal justice system of Northern Ireland (http://www.nio.gov.uk/review_of_the_criminal_justice_system_in_northern_ireland.pdf, accessed December 2012). Tank Waddington was a member of the International Panel convened by Mr Justice Goldstone to advise the new democratically elected government of South Africa on public order law and police practice in South Africa. Lawrence Sherman is the eminence grise of British and US policing, quite dramatic in his impact on a number of areas, and on training and the police response to domestic violence in particular (Sherman and Cohn, 1989).
Criminologists teach and train practitioners and officials inside and outside the academy. That work is surely an appreciable public criminology in embryo, but little enough has been written about what has been done and what effects it has achieved, as if it were no more than a side-engagement or a shadow activity that runs in parallel to our real and more solid professional lives. I know too of no enquiry that had been conducted into the direct and indirect impact made by the some 166 MSc. Criminology degree programmes apparently on offer in the United Kingdom (http://www.findamasters.com/search/courses.aspx?Keywords=criminology), or by Cropwood Conferences, Ditchley Conferences and the like, on the thinking of policy-makers and the politics of law and order. Nor do I know of any studies of the influence wrought by criminology in the professional training of practitioners.
Lawrence Sherman defined a public criminologist as ‘someone whose work influences public policy for what history may judge to be the better, whether or not it occurs in public’. It is possible, he suggests, that we may have ‘elide[d] the distinction between criminology IN public and criminology FOR the public … In this country, publicity and power have rarely mixed well for experts. The effective civil servant is the one who is unknown, but can move mountains. (email, 1 October 2012)
Perhaps one may find there the makings of a reinvigorated public criminology in that latter sense, a discreet criminology, a discipline sub rosa – one that has not been trumpeted – which we have failed to recognize, objectify, describe, develop or systematize. Certainly, David Downes reflected that: many of us spend [time] taking part in pressure groups, penal reform efforts, political discussion groups of a criminal justice character with a policy aim, and the like. … It may all be to no avail, but it is a form of public criminology. (email, 24 September 2012)
If that is so, it might be well to acknowledge its presence and, if it is true that it succeeds largely through the exercise of discretion, to acknowledge that too in any analysis we make of our discipline. Public criminology may work as often mediately, quietly and in private conversation. The paradox, and the pathos, of an effective public criminology may then be that it may not be public at all. Like the Howard League, Ryan’s (1978) acceptable pressure group, like Victim Support in the 1970s and 1980s (Rock, 1990), success may be achieved only by not trumpeting our presence and achievements.
We might ask further how we are recruited or how we promote ourselves to be seen in the public realm. Some academic criminologists, like Tim Newburn, are highly visible, doing, he estimates, about 50–75 television and radio interviews a year, and there are others who are busier still. What do gatekeepers controlling access to journals, newspapers, radio and television want of us, know about who we are and know where to find us? How do they judge our performance and under what circumstances would they come back to us again? Why, if my impression is right, do they nevertheless often take us to be little more than second or third rank experts whose forms of knowing are inferior to those of people who can convey more immediate impressions of an event – the victims, witnesses, practitioners and journalists? Crime news and crime programmes are still doggedly dominated by tales of the personal and the emotional, by the human interest story (Hughes, 1940), where there is a preference for the authenticity of vivid feeling conveyed very soon after the event rather than dispassionate analysis wrought by experts in later tranquillity. Experiential knowledge about egregious crime over and again trumps the disinterested and the scholarly in the public forum, and it is unclear what effect it has on popular understandings of crime. It may well have translated our picture of crime and crime news into a near-random scatter of unrelated and emotionally explosive events without history, framing, context and pattern (see Marsh, 1991; Sheley and Ashkins, 1981). It may be a matter of little wonder then that people across the world stubbornly refuse to accept that crime rates have declined (60 per cent of people interviewed in the 2010–2011 British Crime Survey, for example, were said to believe that crime in the country as a whole had increased over the last few years (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb1811/hosb1811?view=Binary, accessed December 2012.) It may explain why, as Gloria Laycock put it, criminology has not had much impact on the popular and prevailing belief that the police control crime (despite the best efforts of Ron Clarke and others), and that the best way to control it is to arrest offenders and put them somewhere, or do something to them. (email, 26 September 2012)
Conclusion
We talk about a public criminology, but are seemingly quite incurious about our past record and present appearances. If we are ever to move beyond what Elliott Currie (2007: 175) called our ‘distressingly little impact on the course of public policy toward crime and criminal justice’, we should, one suspects, pay greater heed to what the world made of us in the past and makes of us now. There was a forgotten time when Britain did have an energetic and consequential public criminology. It came with a price which many were loath to pay. If it is ever to return – and if politicians and policy-makers are ever moved to start listening to us again – we must first attentively consider how our public appearances are actually constructed and, second, whether the costs of working in the policy world, producing the kind of ‘large-scale, publicly-funded, state-sanctioned, evaluation-oriented research projects’ (Hillyard et al., 2004: 383) which some find so hard to support, might have to be borne because we are so much the junior participant in any negotiations about knowledge production that may take place, the role-takers rather than the role-makers. It may be that that is a price that some will believe is not worth paying, but it is a question that does not seem yet to have been confronted by those who wonder at our lack of political import.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ron Clarke, David Downes, Gloria Laycock, Tim Newburn, Chris Nuttall, Larry Sherman, Tank Waddington and the anonymous reviewers of Criminology & Criminal Justice for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.