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Criminology
W. Morrison
This subject guide was prepared for the University of London by:
u Wayne Morrison, LLB, LLM, PHD, LLD, Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of
London and Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand.
This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that
owing to pressure of work the author is unable to enter into any correspondence
relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject guide,
favourable or unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.
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Criminology page i
Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a subject? What are
you expecting to study? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 The syllabus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.4 Core materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2 Crime, globalisation and the/your criminological imagination . . . . . 11

2.1 Developing a criminological imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Placing criminology in context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 Criminology and the advent of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.4 Other relevant characteristics of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.5 The dilemma of criminological knowledge and personal opinion . . . . . . 17
2.6 Some fundamental concepts in criminology: crime and criminality . . . . . 20
3 Competing traditions? Legacies of classical and positive criminology or the

concept of crime verses that of the criminal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.2 Modernity and the Enlightenment context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.3 Central figures of the two approaches examined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.4 The positive revolution: the imagery of science replacing the moral discourse of
crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.5 Political arithmetic and statistical analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.6 The oral-ethnographic efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.7 The Italian/positivist school . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.8 The return of classicism: populist conservative criminology and contemporary
rational action theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.9 Are the perspectives contradictory or can they be combined? . . . . . . . . 41
4 Sources of criminological data: official criminal statistics and their

limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.2 The dream of criminal statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.3 Durkheim: suicide as the paradigm example of positivism and statistics . . . 48
4.4 Role of NGOs and other to complement criminal statistics . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.5 Using statistics in search for criminality: the case of the Chicago school of
sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.6 Interpreting rises or declines in official statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5 Psychology and crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Introduction: ‘journeying into the mind of the criminal’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
5.1 Historical context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5.2 ‘Nature’ versus ‘nurture’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
5.3 Crime and psychoanalytic theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5.4 Social learning and behavioural theories of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
5.5 Trait-based personality theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5.6 Cognitive theories of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
5.7 Contemporary narrative approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
page ii University of London International Programmes
6 Sociological perspectives – structural and cultural foundations . . . . . 77

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Part A: Classical sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
6.1 Foundational assumptions and the work of Emile Durkheim . . . . . . . . . 79
6.2 Sub-cultural theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
6.3. The work of David Matza: one writer analysed as an example . . . . . . . . 80
Part B: Labelling theory and moral panics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Part I: Labelling, otherwise known as symbolic, or social interactionism or social
reaction theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
6.4 Howard Becker and social interactionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
6.5 Role, status and stigma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Part II Moral panic theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
6.6 The creation of the concept of moral panics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
6.7 Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Part C: Critical criminology, a different view of social structure . . . . . . . . . . . 92
6.8 The rise of critical criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
7 Contemporary cultural criminology and existentialism . . . . . . . . . 97

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
7.1 Directions in cultural criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
7.2 Historical, theoretical and methodological antecedents of cultural
criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
7.3 The method(s) of cultural criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
7.4 Jack Katz and the ‘seductions of crime’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
7.5 Mike Presdee and the ‘carnival of crime’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
7.6 Towards an existential perspective in criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Summing up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
8 Feminist criminology: the challenge of gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
8.1 From statistics to explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
8.2 The feminist critique of criminology: an overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
8.3 Women and the criminal justice system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
8.4 Reflection: what does a feminist analysis mean for criminological theory?
Is it social ideology? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
8.5 Transitions: provocation, an example of gender in question . . . . . . . . 129
8.6 Feminism, criminology, the postmodern moment and globalisation . . . . 131
9 Punishment and its institutional framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
9.1 Philosophy and the aims of punishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
9.2 Understanding punishment: contrasting philosophical and sociological
accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
9.3 Why punish at all? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
9.4 Punishing as a means to an end? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
9.5 Are compromise theories possible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
9.6 Do we live in a penal society? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
10 Conclusion: criminology under globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

10.1 In place of a conclusion: facing globalism and post-modernism . . . . . . 161
10.2 The challenges of globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
1 Introduction
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a subject?

What are you expecting to study? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 The syllabus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.4 Core materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment . . . . . . . . . . 9

page 2 University of London International Programmes
Learning outcomes
By the end of this introduction you should be able to understand:
u the style of the course
u the type of materials you will be provided with and
u the assessment.
Introduction
The doors are opening. There are our murderers. Dressed in black. On their dirty hands
they wear white gloves. They drive us out of the synagogue in pairs. Dear sisters and
brothers, how difficult it is to take leave of such a beautiful life. You who are still alive,
never forget our innocent little Jewish street. Sisters and brothers, avenge us on our
murderers.
Murdered on September 15, 1942.
(Message left in blood on the wall of a synagogue in Eastern Europe where the Nazi forces
had herded Jewish inhabitants before taking them out to be shot. (Lawrence Langer, The
age of atrocity, Boston: Beacon Press, 1978: 40.))
I would like to say ‘Welcome!’ with full gaiety… but of course there is our subject
matter…
Criminology – what is it?
In terms of material: there is a vast range, including, but not limited to, the deliberate
infliction of pain; unnatural death such as homicide, murder and manslaughter; sexual
offences (such as rape – and in some countries the mere fact of sexual orientation);
fraud, burglary; ‘mugging’; drug taking; police corruption; torture; terrorism; drug and
human trafficking; responding to crime via social measures, target hardening and/or
punishment, which seem ‘natural’ but which may have resulted in creating a prison
business; atrocity; ‘industrial accidents’… and institutional selectivity by governments
and the media as regards how what are relevant ‘facts’ and perspectives are presented,
and – finally, but often overlooked – ourselves…
As an academic subject:
It is part of the social or human ‘sciences’ which raises complex questions about
objectivity and subjectivity because, unlike the ‘natural’ sciences in which humans
study inanimate (or ‘soulless’) processes, in the social sciences humans study other
humans and their social and cultural institutions. The social sciences are said to be
morally charged or reflexive, normative and unavoidably political. As opposed to the
study of physical and biological processes, social science studies are more historical
and morally orientated. While adhering to notions of scientific integrity and seeking
factually based arguments, the social science are more sciences of persuasion; they
may be ‘researching’ a particular policy – such as reactions by police and social services
to youth offending – but the findings have an effect. They either confirm, according
to a set of criteria, the efficacy of the current policy or they seek to change the overall
policy or particular aspects.
As a practical task:
You are encountering it as part of your LLB or perhaps BSc studies as a single,
standalone module.
Criminology is increasingly offered as a whole degree, in which case criminology

is broken down into discrete units – presented as a range of specialised modules –
with areas such as crime and the city (perhaps under the title of social ecology) or
psychology or critical criminology as separate modules for study.
However, you are undertaking a standalone module and you will be asked to read
a selection of material from a wide and often conflicting array. There is a very large
Criminology 1 Introduction page 3
amount of material that could (and often does) go into criminology courses. At its
simplest the word ‘criminology’ denotes the ‘logos’, the rational discourse, associated
with crime: crimin-o-logos. As seen by many of the late 19th and early 20th century
writers who are credited with forming it as a discipline, it connects with criminal law
and with penal policy (early texts were often entitled ‘Criminology and Penology’).
Thus it connected to ‘common sense’ arguments about the need for social control and
punishment.
But there are those – like Angela Davis (first exercise: research who she is!) who say we
must break the seemingly common-sense link between crime and punishment (which
in many, many, cases means being sent to prison).
Contrasts in outlooks and mood: ‘Whose side are you on?’

(To paraphrase the famous 1967 article by Howard Becker, ‘Whose side are we on?’)
Throughout this guide, a three-fold distinction will be made between:
1. Criminology, as ‘logos’, in other words, as the ‘scientific’ discipline aiming for

impartiality;
2. You, as the important and subjective element who is to interact with this
discipline and ultimately undergo assessment activities (primarily the summative
examinations); and
3. The world. The world is of course inescapable, it is the context of both the
discipline which seeks to be ‘truthful’ to it and you. The world always escapes being
captured fully and always surprises.
As said above, criminology involves humans commenting on other humans; unlike

doing experiments on physical substances, investigating social life is a changing and
multi-perspective endeavour, one which always involves choices about what to focus
on, where to stand and what perspective to adopt.
With criminology, for example, there are a number of basic distinctions in the
material, such as between seeing it as an applied science in which the aim is to
acquire secure knowledge that overcomes the need for political debate or choice, or
a critical imagination that reveals contingence and choice running through all human
activity, another is between ‘mainstream’ or ‘administrative’ and ‘critical’ criminology.
Mainstream criminology works with the status quo, the existing social structure and
cultural values; even if some of the individuals working as mainstream criminologists
may seek to reform it, they largely work on research agendas as set by the government
(the state) and accept the common-sense definition of a crime and an act or omission
which is subject to punishment (by the state). ‘Critical’ criminology finds the status
quo itself problematic and does not accept the state as the definer or arbiter of what
we should be concerned about as ‘crime’ or social harm.
In the USA, criminology is often taught in schools of Criminal Justice studies, the
students go on to employment in the ‘correctional service’ (such as in prisons), as
Police Officers and the like. In the UK, it is more commonly taught in departments
of general sociology or social policy or as a sub-set or as part of law courses and the
outlook is more generally critical.
Given that this is an individual module, it reflects choices made as to material and style
of teaching; it is also reflective. In other words it asks you to consider your taken-for-
granted assumptions, to ask you to consider your position in society and how much
do you know or analyse about the world. Do the criminal laws of your society reflect
the views of the whole population, or, in the case of at least some of them, a particular
portion? Are there circumstances in which you consider it right to break the law? More
broadly, consider the simple but also complex question: what were the real sources of
harm to humans in the 20th century? And has humanity progressed in terms of social
ordering? Are ‘we’ for example, more humane, more caring, has violence decreased or
increased and so forth. And what are our frames of references?
Consider the historical position:
As noted before, social sciences adopt an historical and morally orientated reading or
positioning of people, societies and places. Traditionally, the writers who contributed
to building up criminology seemed to assume that we were getting more civilised,
that the future would always be better (or that we could make it better). It is a product
of the Enlightenment attempt to replace the claims of tradition, the rhetorical appeals
to passion or the privileges of the aristocracy with a commitment to ‘reason’. That
meant, in practical terms, subjecting human arrangements to rational ordering and
making social changes in light of social statistics, of evidence of what worked, and of a
rational appreciation of the issues that needed to be addressed.
We now live with many of the advances of post-Enlightenment projects – fantastic

buildings, mega-cities, advanced communication technologies, the freedom to desire
and to consume goods from around the world – with many unforeseen consequences,
for example, the nuclear bomb, the holocaust and the genocides of ‘far off’ places such
as East Pakistan leading to the creation of Bangladesh), Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur.
What does that mean for our moral picture of humans? Langer describes a lesson:
One of the most sinister and melancholy discoveries of our era is that men and nations can
kill under certain circumstances without having to face effective censure from civilisation.
The desolate heritage of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Stalinism, fascist Spain, Algeria, Vietnam
– the length of the list grows frightening – is that torture and or atrocities have failed to
offend the sensibilities of men as one might have expected. (Langer, 1978: 46)
He wrote that in 1978, what of today? The message rings even more true today after
the deliberate looking the other way and withdrawal of UN peacekeeping troops in
Rwanda that allowed some 800,000 plus Tutsi to be killed, the abuses at Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq and the USA’s use of torture under President George W. Bush in the
so-called War on Terror and the massacres carried out by the so-called Islamic State in
Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
Yet it is surely an advance to know of these things. In 2016, we live in a globalised

world where our understanding of human existence is mediated by mass media and
we have access (if we want or chose to use it) to an enormous array of information
(and interpretations of that information). This display of information and diverse
interpretations is historically very new and strange but, to those born in the last 30
or so years, it appears so ‘natural’; we can roughly call this expansion in information
a product (and component of) globalisation and a symptom of inhabiting ‘late
modernity’.
Consider language:
Academic criminology has been (and still is) largely language: it is a form of
rational representation, as a disciple it gets organised in particular ways and in
your examination you will be expected to write coherently and use references and
arguments drawn from the ‘academic discipline’.
But is the subject matter capable of rational representation and do we, as consumers
or citizens of the world, deal in rational terms? Or do we distort things when we
package social reality into such a language and system of representation; are we really
wanting something other than dry reason, statistics and so forth?
Consider the issue of trust: should we trust ‘experts’, our instincts, our ‘moral
reactions’? And what of non-academic accounts of crime and motivation?
Many, many people read what could be termed ‘popular criminology’ daily, in
newspapers, in novels and watch a form of criminology on TV and in cinema (whereas
people once thought of Sherlock Holmes as a criminologist, today many would look to
participants in one of the versions of CSI). Larry Lamb, once Editorial Director of The Sun
and The News of the World (‘tabloid’ or mass circulation newspapers in the UK) believed
that ‘The basic interests of the human race are not in music, politics and philosophy,
but in things like food and football, money, sex and crime – especially crime’. (As
quoted in Steve Chibnall, Law-and-order news an analysis of the crime reporting in the
British press, (first edition, Tavistock Publications Ltd).)
In the literary and popular media world we encounter psychopaths, mass murderers,
detectives with heavy drinking problems, politicians who arrange homicides and
make people disappear, societies losing their moral backbone, crooked deals and
heroic deeds; sometimes (as with for example the early 20th century detective stories
of Dashiell Hammett) we encounter implicit large-scale social theories – Hammett
depicted the American dream as in reality a jungle with human predators, yet we see
great contrasts and collisions: personal honour entangled in corruption, opportunity
and the plays of fate. In the Sweden evoked by the author Henning Mankell, his
character Inspector Kurt Wallander lives in the small town of Ystad, but this is a
location that is in the midst of global flows of trafficked women, drugs and terrorists.
Crime fiction excites and sells: much of academic criminology – particularly that of
positivist criminology in the grip of quantitative analysis – is likely to appear boring in
contrast.
Consider who speaks:
As an academic discipline, criminology has been dominated by the writings of

academics based in Europe and North America (with more recent contributions from
Australia and elsewhere). It is not context-free but represents forms of knowledge
produced in particular locations using specific methodologies; however its scientific
ethos claimed a universal message. Writers often claimed to be creating ‘general
theory’ applicable everywhere , conversely others argue that theories built up in
the conditions of the USA should not be simply applied in Hong Kong or Malaysia or
Trinidad without a deep and critical appreciation of local context and culture.
So context is important:
In light of this, as an introduction to thinking about crime, the power of the state,
punishment, and social suffering, this module is necessarily reflexive; we will not only
read about, sometimes watch (i.e. videos on the internet), human activity but try to
think about the status of the ‘secondary’ activity of writing, watching, prioritising,
relating, defining, using power. Certainly, we should not take ‘crime’ for granted as a
settled concept but also ask how it is conceptualised, what are the harms associated
with it and how we understand the social responses to it.
The specific orientation of this module:
Is on criminological theory but this is not context-free nor is it without links to other
projects. Criminology has, for example a close – some say too close – relationship with
criminal justice. Critics may ask why criminal justice? Why not make the link to social
justice? Criminology has often seemed like a servant of the State, a form of discourse
which gives a veneer of legitimacy to the State’s systems of control, of repression, of
classification (and punishment).
While it will be of benefit to you to have outline knowledge of elements of criminal

justice (policing, prisons and punishment) this is not a criminal justice course.
Today – for better and for worse – the criminal justice system mediates between
the individual and the state. It can be abused, for example in some countries forms
of policing work to ‘disappear’ political opponents. The nation state has been (and
continues to be, although losing considerable control under globalisation) the
central organising feature of modernity: it is however, bureaucratic, hierarchical and
formalised. In earlier times, less complex social units treated occasions which we
now regard as crimes (that is as offences that under the criminal law are specifically
liable to punishment by the agents of the state) as either normal features of life, or
sins, nuisances, or as wrongs against the victim entitling him (usually, but sometimes
a her) – or the relatives if he/she was murdered – to compensation. The development
of the present situation (where such wrongs are the concern of the state and where
suspected offenders are processed by police and the criminal courts and if found
guilt are liable to a range of sanctions ranging from discharges through measures
like probation and community service to imprisonment, and even death [capital
punishment] in some states) is a history linked to the rise of the modern state and the
various agencies of the state.
The nation state continues to be the most important entity even in the face of
globalism and transnational law. Domestically it provides the context for your home
(it is your homeland!) and provides a degree of physical, economic, cultural and social
borders; internationally, it is the chief agent in systems of global interdependence
(even the European Union is a Union of Nation States). But ease of travel, international
commerce and new forms of communication means that not only are many of our
problems ‘global’ in reach but we are confronted by evidence of our dependency and
engagement with ‘others’ in far-away places. Our understanding of what crime, social
harm and victimisation is asked itself to become global (to consider ‘state crime’ for
example). Some of those concerns are acknowledged and indicated herein but this
course is necessarily introductory and more questions may be raised than answers
given!
1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a

subject? What are you expecting to study?
To paraphrase above: criminology is a blanket term for interrelated forms of discourse
that represent attempts to set out and critically analyse our understanding of crime
and of the state’s handling of crime and related matters (or failure to respond!). Thus
we are necessarily concerned with trying to comprehend rationally the relationship
of the individual(s) (group?) who breaks the laws of a state and the operation of the
state’s power to lay down laws and to punish for breaches of those laws (and then
we are in trouble if it is a whole state, such as the Nazi state seeking to exterminate
the entirety of the Jewish people: how do we conceptualise that situation?). Studying
criminology within a law degree may give an expectation that it is an ‘applied law’
subject; on the contrary, much of its history is a battle between those who adopted
a primarily legalist approach towards dealing with crime and those who adopted
approaches from the social sciences, namely, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis
and so forth. Thus the criminal law (or lack of it) has given a core focus, placing
emphasis on the problem of breaches of it, and the practical questions of whose
responsibility it is to know about social harm, victimhood and so forth, and then what
to do with the offender who has breached such a law, and the general problem of how
to minimise the overall incidents of offending (the social problem of crime). But again
bigger questions emerge: how do we deal with a ‘criminal state’? What do you do with
transnational ecological disasters, are they ‘crimes’? The study of criminology is an
invitation to take a stance, to challenge your common-sense perspectives and try to
develop more complex world views.
1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it?

There are many reasons for the existence of criminology; but there are also voices
calling for its replacement. On the one hand crimes (and related actions) involve social
harm – some internal critics of the state-focused nature of traditional criminology
would have us replace ‘crime’ with other concepts such as ‘social harm’, ‘breaches of
human rights’ – however, the state-focused core of criminology has been difficult to
move.
Activity 1.1
To see the idea of ‘social harm’ verses ‘criminology’ go to John Moore’s blog,
beginning Wednesday, 27 October 2010: Drug policy harm part one: social harm
theory v criminology at
http://whose-law.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/drug-policy-harm-part-one-social-harm.
html
Read all four parts.
What do you think of his assertion that taking a social harm perspective allows us to
look at all drugs, both legal and illegal within the same paradigm?
On the other hand, crime has become a political and media event. While before the
1970s crime was seen more as something that ‘experts’ could deal with, during the
1970s politicians discovered that waging ‘war’ on crime, or drugs, allowed them
to take the moral high ground, identify an enemy, and mobilise resources. The
consequences are often irrational, putting many people in prison who do not deserve
to be there, and wastes resources and human lives on fighting imaginary enemies
while a more rational approach to the (real) social problems is made difficult because
of the labels used such as war on crime (note the concept of ‘moral panics’ that will be
looked at later). The media have found in crime and associated social harms sources of
fascination, titillation and money making.
Politicians play on crime as a serious social problem and media and social anxiety that
our modern societies are ‘out of control’ in certain key respects.
The existence of so much crime in western societies shows the underside of

modernity’s ‘progress’. The presence of so much desperation and social unrest
complicates the notion that modernity was to create ‘good’ or ‘grand’ societies of
peaceful co-existence and economic plenty in which the conditions for harmonious
social co-existence would be achieved. And the concept of state crime serves to
turn attention on the activities of the power centres of such societies. In addition,
globalisation offers a host of opportunities for new forms of criminal activity:
trafficking of drugs, women, migrants and forms of neo-slavery, not to forget financial
transactions that are increasingly complex and trans-national. Globalisation means
that we cannot ignore issues such as environmental degradation or genocide and this
has led to the development of eco-criminology and the blurring of the boundaries
between crime – as an act internal to the nation-state – and war – as the prerogative of
the sovereign – as the rise of war crimes trials and international criminal justice points
to.
Activity 1.2
Over five days collect a variety of newspapers.
Perhaps you can easily distinguish newspapers in terms of popular or serious (in the
UK this distinction used to be made between tabloids and broadsheets (the second
being the more ‘serious’).
Go through each and count up the number of stories that have to do with ‘crime’.
Then look at them with the following questions in mind:
u What are the headlines?
u What style of languages is used? Can you see any contrasts between informal or
colloquial and more formal and sophisticated?
u What is the length of each article; is there a contrast between newspapers?
u Are there any basic terms which are used and reused?
u What way of describing people is apparent?
u Do any of the ‘crime stories’ involve any notions of economic interdependency,
migration, environmental interdependency, cultural barriers/diffusion, travel
and/or, globalisation?
Take a story: how would you have presented it differently?
Feedback: I have just picked up a copy of a UK daily newspaper I had kept, the
Guardian for early August 2015; there is a two-page story analysing how immigrants
are being presented in many of the newspapers as potential criminals; another is
looking at how other newspapers seem to portray homelessness, that is sleeping in
the streets, as a crime. These are both examples of reflexive media practice where
the newspaper is commenting on other newspaper stories.
1.3 The syllabus

The governing aim of the course is to introduce some of the theoretical issues
involved with the attempts to conceptualise ‘crime’, reflecting on the basic subject
matter (whether it is crime as defined by nation-state or some other concept, such
as ‘harm’), continuing controversies, the methodological and ideological issues
involved in attempting to explain ‘crime’ and justify and legitimise the state’s
response, such as policing, the legitimacy of punishment and imprisonment. Because
of this wide coverage, you will be encouraged to obtain a working knowledge of the
institutions and policies at work in the area but it is not expected that your knowledge
will be equally deep across the syllabus. You will soon realise that there are many
interconnections and a continuity of basic themes. You may wish to specialise in some
issues more than others but keep in mind that there are often general questions,
which are designed to see if you have developed a critical appreciation of the subject
as a whole and are able to see how insights from one part of the course relate to other
parts.
1.4 Core materials
1.4.1 Core texts
Essential reading
You are expected to purchase
¢ Burke, Roger An introduction to criminological theory. (Routledge, London 2014)
fourth edition [ISBN 9780415-501736].
This provides a readable and reasonably comprehensive introduction to
criminological theorising.
Further reading
¢ Walklate, S. Understanding criminology: current theoretical debates. (Buckingham:
Open University Press, 2007) third edition [ISBN 9780335221233].
¢ Morrison, Wayne Theoretical criminology: from modernity to post-modernism.

(London: Cavendish, 1995) [ISBN 1-85941-220-3].
This text considers criminology in the changing context of modernity. It is
detailed in its reading and poses a host of questions for contemporary times.
Note this was written primarily with Master’s level students in mind, but it will
be assumed that you read and digest this text in the course of your study.
1.4.2 Study pack

You are provided via the VLE with a range of articles and book chapters. These are
drawn from an array of texts and you should read these as referred to in the relevant
activities.
1.4.3 VLE and web

There is an array of related materials on the web which are easily accessed by routine
searches. These vary in quality but are a quick source for information and definitions
of concepts and terms. In particular, there are numerous entries on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a freely edited source and the quality of the content varies. While it is not
recommended by many academics, it is, however, usually written in an approachable
style and individual entries have been the subject of some editing.
It is our intention to upload materials from time to time: these may include power
point presentations and podcasts.
1.4.4 Journals, government and NGO material

There are a number of academic journals that publish articles in the field, such as the
British Journal of Criminology; Theoretical Criminology Journal of Law and Society; Law and
Society Review; International Journal of Sociology of Law; New Society.
In the UK the Office of National Statistics produces official statistics and commentaries
on the official ‘state of crime’.
There are a range of NGOs that work in related areas, for example:
u Anti-Slavery International, found at www.antislavery.org.uk
u Amnesty International, found at www.amnesty.org.uk
u Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, found at www.crimeandjustice.org.uk
1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment

The key principle organising this course is alignment: we try to make the assessment
map on to the learning objectives and reflect the activities and materials provided.
To succeed, you should note the learning objectives in each chapter then read the
chapter of the study and then the chapters from the set texts, undertake the activities
and do the additional reading from the study pack.
Formal assessment is by a three-hour unseen examination. You are expected to do four

questions from eight. These are essay-style questions and will map on to the learning
objectives as specified in the different chapters. Examples of actual examination
questions are found in each chapter and you can find examples of past papers on the
VLE.
1.5.1 The examination

If you look at several of the past Examiners’ Reports, you will see the idea of the
candidate’s voice stressed. As emphasised in Chapter 2, we are looking for you to
develop your criminological imagination and that means by the time of assessment
you make arguments that cut through misleading information and opinion and are
supported by criminological knowledge and appropriately referenced. This is crucial!
To quote from the Introduction to the 2011 reports:
This examination is by essay questions only: criminology is an option in the LLB and BSc
programs and draws upon material that has either a sociological, psychological or legal
basis.
Candidates are not expected to have achieved an in-depth immersion in particular

theoretical perspectives, but are expected to cover the material provided in the study
pack, have followed the recent developments and any new material introduced on the VLE
along with the recent developments, and the general themes of the subject guide.
To succeed in the examinations the candidates should:
• Focus their answers on the actual words of the questions asked;
• Adopt a stance towards the questions, which are often a quote followed by ‘discuss’;
• Structure their answer so that the introduction shows the examiner that they have
read the actual question and that the material that follows is organised to address
that;
• Articulate a response to the question using appropriate material and set out an
argument.
Candidates can express themselves in the subject and reflect issues debated in their own
jurisdiction. The main problem displayed in the answers is an overreliance upon common
sense and almost journalistic perspectives rather than the more considered approach that
criminological discourse hopes to achieve. (Examiners’ Report Criminology 2011)
This is also reflected in the Chief Examiners’ reports, for example in 2012:
In many areas of law subjects candidates are used to answering examination questions
by recalling the names of cases by reference to which legal rules and principles are
introduced into law and into their answers. Criminology is not a case law subject; instead
of cases, there are standard key figures whose work is referred to. Names such as Emile
Durkheim, Karl Marx, Cesare Beccaria, Cesare Lombroso, David Matza, Howard Becker, Stan
Cohen, Jock Young, Travis Hirschi, John Braithwaite, or schools (or general approaches
with shared assumptions), such as Classicism, Chicago School, Left Realism, Critical
Criminology and so forth provide focal points for the presentation of theories, hypotheses,
and perspectives on crime, social control, social reaction and punishment. In common
with case law subjects, however, good marks are obtained through the articulate and
persuasive use of language; the ability to communicate to the examiner essential points in
the voice of the student.
There were a range of good answers to this paper and features of these will be examined
in the sections on questions as follows. I hope that you can see in the extracts how
important the way the answers are expressed is and what I mean by communicating in
the voice of the student.
What of poor material? The main weakness in the scripts was a tendency (of some)
to use common sense categories or local media reports as if they were self-evident
or in no need of reinforcement or further explanation. Claims made from appeals to
common sense assumptions and media reports are, undoubtedly, part of the everyday
processes criminology relates to since many of the images and assumptions that people
and policymakers are concerned with come from the media and politicians respond to
popular sentiment. However this must be reflected upon and not uncritically accepted.’
(Examiners’ Report, 2012)
2 Crime, globalisation and the/your criminological
imagination
Contents
2.1 Developing a criminological imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Placing criminology in context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 Criminology and the advent of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.4 Other relevant characteristics of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.5 The dilemma of criminological knowledge and personal opinion . . . . 17
2.6 Some fundamental concepts in criminology: crime and criminality . . . 20

Essential reading
¢ Burke, Chapter 1 ‘Introduction: crime and modernity’.
¢ Morrison, Wayne ‘What is crime? Contrasting definitions and perspectives’

(from Criminology third edition, Oxford University Press, 2013), extracted on VLE,
(specifically used in Activity 2.7).
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, you should begin to appreciate:
u the need to question your own assumptions about crime and the world
u some of the contexts in which criminology has been produced
u central issues around the definition of ‘crime’
u the difficulty in creating a ‘science of crime’
u the need to think globally.
Criminology 2 Crime, globalisation and the/your criminological imagination page 13
2.1 Developing a criminological imagination

We are all located in situations, I am writing from London with my life experiences.
Where are you? What are your life experiences? When you or I read a criminology
text we bring different assumptions. I am, for example, conscious of the years of my
academic career immersed in the subject and of the amount of time and energy
writers have spent over the years discussing the ‘nature’ of the subject and attempting
to lay down basic concepts and methods of study. Criminology has in the main been
defined as ‘the scientific study of crime’ (Hall Williams, Criminology and criminal justice,
1982: 1) but this definition is open to a whole array of qualifications; deeper questions
and explanations as to the nature of crime and what being scientific means in this area
confront one.
For Eryl Hall Williams, events such as the holocaust were to be studied in history, or
politics but not criminology. Thus it disappeared, making it in Baudrillard’s terms ‘the
perfect crime’ (as if it had never occurred). Why did he have such a narrow view of
criminology? In part because of the impact of ‘positivism’ and its link to mainstream
or administrative criminology, so criminology was the study of those things which in
everyday life the state deemed crimes. Today many criminologists refuse such narrow
boundaries!
What are the core concepts and how do they limit or extend a criminological
imagination? Should criminology study ‘crime’ or ‘deviance’ or ‘social harm’ or
‘breaches of human rights’? Or should it study not harm but ‘social solidarity (basically
how social orders hang together)? How should the writer conceive of himself/
herself? Should he or she see themselves as a detached and impartial scientist or an
engaged critical social commentator? In the words of David Matza, should one take a
‘correctional’ perspective (in which one assumes that the reason for studying to be to
ultimately rid ourselves of the object or phenomena) or an ‘appreciative’ perspective
(in which one wants to get close to the object in order to understand it on its own
terms). And what of the role of the state?
As an academic enterprise, criminology has been called a ‘basket’ into which is placed
writings and data from a multitude of disciplines and perspectives, framed with
different assumptions in mind, offering different images. Moreover, criminology is a
subject with a mixed reputation and strangely ambivalent self image. Some writers
may be defined as ‘law and order’ proponents who argue for a strict defence of the
rules of law and identify any rise in recorded crime as the result of societies ‘going
soft’ on responding to deviance or failing to discipline their children and lacking moral
fibre. Others blame crime on the failure of modern societies to achieve social justice
and see crime as a consequence in failings in social solidarity. Some stay at the level
of individual interactions – interpersonal violence for example – while others use
criminology as an entry into wider social criticism, the latter clearly adopt ‘morally
charged’ positions rather than attempt ‘value-free’ social science.
Even within any one grouping individuals differ. Some writers espouse ‘value-free’
science, for example, and see themselves as doing detached social science, while
others may see themselves as applied social engineers aiming to fix the ‘social
problem’ of crime. While they may then seek a criminology of numbers and equations,
others seem to want to provide accounts of offenders that make them out to be
exciting, humane, desperate and totally alive.
Many practitioners of what we might call ‘traditional or mainstream’ criminology

appear to see their role as providing accurate information on crime and criminals
for the administrative officials of the state. Others, more critical scholars, appear to
side with those whom the state is pursuing while possibly attacking the state for
overreaction; some even appear to want to escape the power of the modern state to
control events and replace concepts such as abuse of human rights, or causing social
harm, instead of crime as defined by the state. The enterprise of the first group laden
with statistics and etiological studies of actual and potential ‘offenders’, assumes
the dry mantle of a social science modelled on the precepts of the natural science
and appears boring and submissive from the perspective of the second. The second,
revelling, perhaps, in the grand theories of Marxism, or the micro revelations of

symbolic interactionism, or bringing out the diverse cultural meanings of action or
even basing themselves upon existentialism, appears at times politically suspect or
scientifically over-romantic to the first.
2.2 Placing criminology in context

Criminology is not static. Although some texts are recommended and readings are
supplied on the VLE, there is no possibility of finding a single set text which captures
the essence of criminology. To really appreciate it, you need an historical sensibility
and an ability to understand multiple perspectives. History is essential: the Spanish
philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once said ‘man has no nature, he has only a history’;
so it is with criminology. When one reads criminological texts one is engaged in the
self-conscious study of a history. A history that catalogues the various ways in which
members of modern societies, primarily those of the Western ‘developed’ world, have
sought to understand the nature of these processes of modern society with reference
to the problematics of social control, state power, individual socialisation, crime and
deviance.
But this is also a history of absences. What of slavery, what of war, what of imperialism,
what of colonialism…
Most criminology texts are silent on these big, big historical realities: but to appreciate
it and whether you can learn to ask questions that really matter about the world,
we need to at least consider their absence when thinking about the subject’s formal
history, its socio-political context, and its cultural context.
2.2.1 The formal history of the discipline

In the case of criminology, many criminological works provide a history section in
which a formative distinction is presented between the classical approach and the
positivist. These works present the two approaches as containing a separate set of
assumptions as to human nature and the nature of society with corresponding sets of
policy recommendations.
The classicists (whose heyday was the 18th century and who are represented by names
† Classical determinism: the
such as the Italian Cesare Baccaria and the Englishman Jeremy Bentham) are labelled
theory that every event,
as accepting the notions of the free will of the individual, of rational choice and, most
including every human action,
importantly, of the social contract ideal or metaphor for the structuring of the social
is governed by natural laws.
bond.
Technically, determinism is the
The positivists, arising in the late 19th century and represented by figures such as the belief that a determinate set of
Italians Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri, are seen as accepting human behaviour conditions can only produce
as being determined by causal conditions;† they interpreted the social bond as one possible outcome given
something to be understood ‘naturally’, as if there were natural processes that created fixed laws of nature.
social orders and forms of government. For the positivists, the government of society Many believe this rules out
becomes akin to a technical enterprise, while for the classicists it is a moral–political human freedom.
However, there are at least
activity. The classicist sees breaches of the criminal law largely as offences against
three different positions:
the social contract and the rights of other members of the pact. But is a government
i. Human beings have free will
really to be understood as based on a social contract? When one says this is a moral
because determinism is false
approach perhaps it is better to say it is a normative approach, meaning that one is
(‘libertarianism’).
putting a particular interpretation upon the social order in which it is possible to say
ii. Human beings do not
that some things are right and some thigs are wrong as they conform or move away
have free will because
from the main points of that interpretation.
determinism is true (‘hard
The positivist claims to have no direct normative interpretation but simply to say how determinism’).
things are value free! So, for example, some may say that offending against the laws of iii. Even though determinism is
the society is part of social processes and may be functional in that it either created an true, human beings do have
opportunity for a ceremonial reaffirmation of the social bond or displayed itself as a free will (‘soft determinism’).
‘symptom’ of social pathology.
In many criminological texts the student is presented with a progressive picture of

criminological history as if criminology were gaining a closer and closer approximation
to the ‘truth’ of crime and criminality over time. As Vold, for example, put it in his
second edition:
Classical criminology represents the development and application to thinking about

crime, the ideas and intellectual frame of reference that in Europe preceded the
application of scientific methods and experimental procedure to human behaviour.
The positive school represents the first formulations and applications to the field of
criminology of the point of view, methodology, and logic of the natural sciences to the
study of human behaviour. (Theoretical criminology 1979: 18)
Thus the victory of positivism was presented as a ‘rational advance’ over the
abstractions and politics of classicism. However, the image of criminology gradually
but solidly progressing as a discipline becoming more sure of its knowledge and with
an enhanced ability to make policy recommendations, become problematic in the
1960s and 1970s. In this period, criminology was first criticised by writers such as the
American David Matza for an uncritical belief in ‘determinism’, and then splintered
into a whole series of competing ‘paradigms’ and ‘perspectives’; nevertheless,
positivism remained (and remains) a dominant theme.
The problem with the progressive picture of criminological history is that it seemed
to make criminology self-developmental – as if there was a steady objective world out
there, a set range of things to be investigated, and criminology was slowly refining its
tactics and methodologies in understanding it and coming to understand what to do
to eliminate crime. In other words that there was an autonomous development of
the knowledges of crime and deviance, a growth which was progressive and that the
changes in fashion, or degree of concentration were as a result of the correcting of false
perspectives and slowly ‘getting the correct picture’. This down plays the essentially
pragmatic link between knowledge production and socio-historical location.
2.2.2 The social-political context for the development of criminology as

an intellectual discipline
This traditionally was relatively underdeveloped as most criminological texts
underplayed the impact of politics and philosophical context for the structuring of
social theory (recent texts try to reverse this omission, for example those of Morrison,
Lilly, Tierney, Burke or Garland). Criminology was generally seen either as the work
of individuals, for example Lombroso, or of groups, such as ‘the Chicago school’, as
if the development of social theory were totally responsive to the requirements of
autonomous individuals or like-minded group facing immediate problems insulated
from broader socio-political evolution. However, one should not ignore the political–
social context in which writers work, it is an inescapable factor!
In broad outline it is possible to see that classicism was a doctrine necessarily linked
to the development of ‘rule of law states’ over feudal society, of the rights of the
bourgeoisie over aristocratic privileges, and of the creation of a more free social space
for the abstract ‘market’ to function as opposed to the settled hierarchies and status
interactions of late feudal society. Positivism, likewise, can be seen as responsive to a
different set of demands linked to the spread of political influence into lower social
classes in society. The restoring of neo-classical or ‘new right’ themes in the mid-1970s,
1980s and 1990s can also be seen, in some countries at least, as responsive to the cost
of the welfare state and the apparent paradox that crime rates were increasing at the
same time as the west appeared to be more prosperous than any time in history. Yet,
we also realise that this prosperity masked growing gap between the richest sections
of western societies and the poorest.
The contemporary movement beyond the nation-state can be linked to post-colonial

realities and globalisation. Many feel the need to rethink crime and criminal justice but
the grip of the established systems of thought and social control – what, following Jock
Young, we may call the criminological imagination (see the book of that title, Polity
Press, 2011) – remains strong.
The institutions and organisational motifs that make up the systems of crime and
deviance control in the modern west originated in the grand transformations that
occurred from the 18th century. Thus these systems are basically the product of
‘modernity’, a term which is difficult to define concisely but which designates what is
essentially new and particular about western societies since the Enlightenment. In the
field of criminology, these changes are both the context of criminal justice and have
also shaped the institutional form of criminal justice. We can hint at several that have
shaped criminal justice:
u first, the development of the modern nation-state with its centralised state
apparatus for the formal control of crime, gathering of statistics and the provision
of ‘care’ and ‘welfare’ for its population;
u second, the typologising and differentiation of the deviant and dependent into
separate types, each with particular sets of ‘scientific’ knowledge, expertise, and
group of ‘experts’;
u third, the development of organisational outcomes that segregate the deviants,

criminals, sick and dependants into prisons, juvenile reformatories, asylums,
mental hospitals, and other closed purpose-built institutions for treatment,
punishment, and custody;
u fourth, reactions against welfare and labelling that return responsibility to

the individual and reinforce notions of blame. At the same time, others stress
restorative justice.
2.3 Criminology and the advent of modernity

The idea of modernity reflects the understanding that there is something special
and different about modern societies which demarcates them from the types and
methods of social cohesion and social control which have gone before them. Consider
this description of modernity:
There is merit in the ‘modernity’ of a society, apart from any other virtues it may have.
Being modern is being ‘advanced’ and being advanced means being rich, free of the
encumbrances of familial authority, religious authority, and deferentiality. It means being
rational and being ‘rationalised’... If such rationalisations were achieved, all traditions
except the traditions of secularity, scientism, and hedonism would be overpowered.
(Edward Shils, Tradition, 1981: 288-90.)
The concept of ‘modernity’ is troublesome (of the core texts see Morrison, Theoretical
criminology: from modernity to post-modernism, and Burke, An introduction to
criminological theory). [You may wish to go to the Wikipedia entry on modernity for
some guidance.] Grand theorists who have been concerned with its themes largely
locate modernity in terms of a spectrum of categorisations differentiating between
oppressive and ‘false’ traditions (including religion) and empty, rootless freedom.
Within criminological texts, Durkheim is sometimes used in this way (see Vold and
Bernard, Theoretical criminology, Chapter 9: ‘Durkheim, anomie, and modernisation’.).
Interestingly, many social theorists refer to a social crisis of modernism (using terms
such as ontological insecurity) of which two broad features can be mentioned. First,
we can see many current social problems in terms of a crises of power whereby
modern societies find themselves immersed in a technological ability and knowledge
spiral which gives advances in certain powers, but which outstrip mankind’s ability
to assimilate its consequences and link its meanings (need one mention the present
nuclear capability? or the vast increase in the world’s population and the possibility
of ecological destruction?). Second, the alienating and nihilistic effects of modern
culture on a humanity which has thrust itself free from a context of traditional
positioning and community structures which gave existence meaning, and which
allowed people to live in ways that they assumed were natural and ‘real’. To take a
simple example, most people used to live in rural locations, now cities dominate, or
take Bangladesh where the majority are still living in villages and many are illiterate.
For some of them, modernity means an attack on what they hold natural and, for a
great many, an attack on their interpretations of Islam.
The modern western world, on the other hand, although an urban world where
mankind lives cheek-by-jowl with a multitude of ‘others’, is a place of distance which
demands newer and more complicated forms of social control than previously. For
the modern self-image and self-consciousness, the question of personal identity is
not defined by one’s position in the order of things, some embedment in localised
tradition and custom which ultimately seems some integration of self and cosmos, but
by an insulated individualism mediated by concepts such as authenticity, choice, and
the ‘rationality’ of ends–means relations.
Thus we ‘moderns’ live at a distance from those modes of comprehension and

organisation taken for granted by ‘pre-moderns’. As contrasted to the approaches
which stress the primacy of the group or community, the presuppositions of the ideal
type of our social contract political theory, for instance, is of the normalcy of isolated
individualism, of free and calculating atomistic units.
2.4 Other relevant characteristics of modernity

These include factors such as the development of industrial society, the capitalist mode
of economic organisation, urbanism, and the advent of liberal democracy and utopian
socialism but there are other features which are both basic and hard to appreciate
such as the handling of time and the notion of change. Modern society is both the
product of dramatic transformations, of immense change and itself in a continual state
of change. There appear to be no settled cannons or structures that remain stable and
fixed for a long period. Instead some of the basic canons – the notion of democracy is
a good example – are cast in such an abstract frame that the substantive content, for
example whether women have the right to vote or whether it is fair to say an election is
democratic when a large proportion of the populace do not bother to vote (as in most
American Presidential elections), can be subject to variation.
Alongside the vast increase in population growth, an inescapable feature is the urban
context of social life – the majority of the world’s population live in cities of 20,000
people or more. As a point of comparison, prior to the 19th century, even in societies
considered urbanised, probably fewer than 10 per cent of the population lived in
towns or cities. London’s population in the 14th century is estimated at around
30,000, and when at the turn of the 19th century it reached 900,000 it was not only
the largest city in the world but dominated England.
The routines of this urban life are set within structures responsive to the changing
demands of economic performance. Many of the competing interpretations on social
life can be traced to defining modern society’s economic basis as either industrialisation
or capitalisation. The attitude that a theorist takes to issues such as class and the nature
of social interaction differ depending on whether he or she adopts a more benign
functional theory of industrial society, or engages with the (not only Marxist!) notion of
capitalist society with its relations of exploitation and domination.
2.5 The dilemma of criminological knowledge and personal

opinion
Criminology can sometimes seem like a matter of opinion, and any intelligent
person can have an opinion on the subject. Indeed, part of the pleasure of studying
criminology is to articulate your own ideas and subject them to testing.
However, there is a dilemma, because criminology is also part of the ‘knowledge

project’ of modernity. It has tried to replace opinion (even ‘educated opinion’) by
reliable facts and scientific knowledge. Its aim – as we see with Beccaria (through
classicism), Durkheim (through sociological positivism) and Lombroso (through
biological positivism) as well as openly utopian writers such as Comte and Saint-Simon
– has been to use criminological knowledge to help construct better societies.
In 19th century France, Comte attempted to develop a positive sociology which would
provide a truly scientific basis for the reorganisation of society. He made positivism
a utopian understanding and shared the optimism of such philosophers as the
Englishman Francis Bacon about the benefits of a positive approach to science for
humanity but was not blind to the extent to which this approach clashed with the
traditional hegemony of the ruling class. The very first words he had published make
this clear:
Rulers would gladly have it taken for granted that they alone can see alright in politics, and
consequently are entitled to a monopoly of opinions in such matters. They have doubtless
their own reasons for speaking in this way, while subjects have theirs for refusing assent to
a principle which, under every point of view, is wholly absurd.
(Quoted in R. Fletcher (ed.) The crisis of industrial civilisation: the early essays of Auguste
Comte, 1974.)
Secure social knowledge was to provide a new basis for developing social structures
and building social relations. The opinions of the rulers would have to give way in a
new form of knowledge–power combination, a position where the organisation of
society would be the responsibility of scientists and the rationality of the knowledge
they produced. Comte proposed a law of three stages through which all human
thinking had to pass: first the theological or fictive, then the metaphysical or abstract,
and finally the scientific or positive. These stages corresponded to the development
of our knowledge of the universe and ourselves, and in the positive stage there is a
clear-cut distinction between science and morals and the operation of all features in
the universe could be gauged by the operation of the positive methodology whereby
science could in time come to control ‘moral’ dilemmas.
Clearly in Comte’s view, Europe was to be the crux of progress and of civilisation, and
the modes of life of Europe were the destiny of the world. The power of the west
has indeed spread throughout the world. But he is confident that the modes of life
which have developed in the west are intrinsically superior to those of other cultures.
Today? Of course the spread of the west has unleashed forces which have corroded
or destroyed many of the features and coherence of the other cultures it has come
in contact with. The metaphysics of progressive evolution has tended to glorify the
dominance of the west as the necessary result of a system of determinate social
evolution; this evolution is judged in terms primarily of technological growth and the
ability to control and change the material environment, and has led to the denial of
the resources of other cultures in favour of the western solution. Thus Eurocentrism
dominates criminological history – it is almost impossible to find any criminology
from the developing world which can challenge the theories and presuppositions
of that of the west. If you come across examples of such writings – use them to your
advantage to challenge the presuppositions of mainstream criminology.
One strand of thought which opposes the Eurocentric domination is the

anthropological perspective which allows us to appreciate the diversity of modes
of human existence on the globe. Much early anthropology was also ethnocentric –
chronicling the weakness and destruction of ‘primitive’ races in comparison to the
west and, if early anthropological study had one theme in the construction project
of modernity, it can be seen as attempting to locate the ‘normal’ mode of human
existence.
The result, conversely, was to demonstrate diversity and difference rather than
uniformity. At the same time, however, the anthropological dimension to modern
thought also illustrates the essential interconnections of the modern world and
the central unity of the human race. It denies the purported ‘irrationality’ of many
primitive practices and demonstrates the richness of non-state institutions, for
example, and there are now no grounds for supposing that those who live in
‘primitive’ societies are genetically inferior to those of the advanced ‘civilisations’.
However, anthropology also demonstrates the complex processes of socialisation
and signification that go to make up the successful ‘normal’ members of any society.
Moreover, the question of ‘social order’ and conformity, of the normal and deviant, is
not placed on some purely ‘natural’ footing by anthropology. Apart from a basic few
measures, such as some protection of life in the ‘in-group’ (the protection of strangers
is certainly not a universal) or of the domain of groups, the ordering of societies differ.
A contemporary example of overturning of the previous narrative of rational

development lies in restorative justice. Instead of seeing crime as a matter for the
state’s criminal justice professionals, of law and punishment, attention is placed on
who has been hurt, what are the relationship and issues of locality, and what kind of
measure and process could be undertaken that would involve the stakeholders so
that causes could be addressed and matter remedied. Changing lenses – A new focus
for crime and justice, written by Howard Zehr (1990), contrasted a ‘retributive justice’
framework where the criminal justice agencies take ownership of the events (the
crime) and a restorative justice framework, where crime is viewed as a violation of
people and relationships. Zehr credits ‘two peoples’ as inspiring this change: ‘the
First Nations people of Canada and the U.S., and the Maori of New Zealand’, stating
that restorative justice represents a ‘validation of values and practices that were
characteristic of many indigenous groups’, but whose traditions had been ‘discounted
and repressed by western colonial powers’. He gives the example of New Zealand/
Aotearoa, where before the arrival of the Europeans, the Maori had a well-developed
system called Utu that protected individuals, social stability and the integrity of the
group. It should be noted however, that indigenous group justice often involved
physical punishments that are at odds with so-called modern ideas of human dignity –
conversely, many indigenous people find imprisonment a torment!
Thus all societies have ideas concerning what normal and deviant behaviour is and
mechanisms for controlling social interaction, each may have particular ‘functions’
or roles in that particular context. Once we appreciate this diversity, criminology
becomes more complicated. It cannot simply be the accumulation of knowledge to
control troublesome people in society, although some criminological knowledge
may aid this. Nor can it be solely the provision of knowledge about social processes to
enable the members of the society to better understand social processes, although
this is a laudable aim. It can also be a form of inquiry about the consequences of what
is, and the possibility of what is not but could be for human existence.
2.5.1 Reflection: labelling, responses and the boundaries of criminology:

is understanding terrorism a criminological issue, political or a
question of ‘war’?
I began this chapter by relating a distinction that used to be common, namely
between politics and criminology. By contrast, today there seem few boundaries
excluding material from a criminological analysis.
In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in the New York in 2001,
the authorities were faced with a choice: did they call the attacks ‘crimes’ or ‘an act
of war’? Some called it both but it ushered in what was termed a ‘war on terror’. Post
the invasion of Iraq, and after early ‘victory’, drawn out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
partial interventions in Libya and Syria, the result seems to be the creation of failed
states and the opening of spaces that defy governance providing havens for terrorists
and actions by western powers that smell of hypocrisy.
Numerous acts have occurred against western targets and tens of thousands of lives
have been lost in actions by the ‘so-called’ Islamic State (or Isis, Isil or Daesh, each
name having different political and cultural symbolisms) in the Middle East while other
‘radical Islamic’ group have engaged in terrorist attacks in Africa, Bangladesh and even
sacred sites in Saudi Arabia (Medina, July 2016).
Currently, the terrorist is the new figure of ‘evil’, the outlaw whose apparent
irrationality and rejection of modernity and civilisation makes him/her seem beyond
normal understanding.
Analysing the factors that contribute to this surge in ‘terrorism’ is now

multi-disciplinary.
Themes common to criminology include utilising Durkheim’s distinction between
mechanical and organic solidarity where the terrorists desires for simplicity and
purity all have some role. Certainly publicly, poverty (at least relative), distrust
(of institutions, of media), frustration (see anomie and status frustration), being
victimised (both by their own governments and by the west in its war on terror), being
marginalised, paranoia, social leaning and differential association theory as developed
by Edwin Sutherland (1939), who proposed that through interaction with others,
individuals can learn the particular criminal behaviour, all contribute.
If modernity was meant to be about the use of reason, education, scientific progress,
rise of humanism, then when we see the extreme cruelty practised currently by Isis,
beheading of hostages, random killings of civilians, destruction of cultural heritage,
enslaving of woman, excessive bravado, it seems difficult for many to treat this
as anything to do with the expression of valid ideas/beliefs. Some consider them
psychopaths, scum of the earth, enthused with irrational hatred and so forth. But such
labelling is in itself a subject of analysis.
In a Daily Telegraph posting by Richard Spencer, from Dohuk, northern Iraq, 04 October
2014, Isil’s reign of terror is rooted in the political culture of Iraq and Syria and, while
Isil’s extreme cruelty and filmic savagery has shocked many, he claims ‘it is not very
different from what leaders of Iraq and Syria – and to some extent their colonial
predecessors – have been doing to local people for decades’. He reminds us of colonial
imagery of atrocities, but sees the current surge in videoed killings in terms of ‘a need
to show a continuous momentum. Success, however horrific, breeds success.’ Of
course, many have made the Hobbesian point that the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq
lead to a situation without a central power to impose order (as Hobbes maintained
was required) but he goes on to highlight the extreme violence that the Iraqi state
has used, thus: ‘The lawlessness… is not just a product of the absence of a state, but
written into the state.’ In both Iraq and Syria ‘ordinary people routinely tell stories
of similarly pointless horrors, that served some political purpose while having little
apparent rationality, from long before the civil war’.
For others, Isis is a throw-back to pre-modern religious positions and we fail to

understand if we only interpret them in terms of modern factors.
See the following article which has as its central claim that ‘Islamic State is no mere
collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs,
among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means
for its strategy – and for how to stop it.’
Read more:
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
See also Burke, Chapter 21 ‘Section terrorism and state violence and terrorism and
postmodernism revisited’.
2.6 Some fundamental concepts in criminology: crime and

criminality
The concept of crime may seem common sense, but it is not. The boundaries
between war, crime and terrorism for example are fluid and open to the plays of
power. Criminology, broadly defined, is the ‘logos of crime’. That is to say it is ‘rational
dialogue concerning crime’.
As said before, in many texts criminology was simply assumed to be the ‘scientific
study of crime’ (Hall Williams, Criminology and criminal justice, 1982: 1); but why should
the only kinds of discourse considered ‘proper criminology’ be those called ‘scientific’?
What are the appropriate roles of scientific perspectives and ‘lay’ or common-sense
claims? What are the limits of each? Further, is the concept of crime a ‘scientific’ or a
‘common-sense’ category?
In the ‘common-sense’ or natural perspective, the content of criminological study is
clear: we study crime and criminals. The law defines what is illegal, people charged
with, convicted and sentenced for criminal offences are criminals and for the most
part there is something naturally anti-social about the kinds of acts/omissions that are
defined as criminal. An important aspect of the certainty about that approach to the
study of crime lies in the creation and affirmation of a world which appears natural, in
which the institutions seem rational and the processes reasonable, outcomes secure
and predictable. Thus we save ourselves from ambiguity, ambivalence and vagueness.
But what are the processes involved when we use the word ‘crime’ in respect to some
Reading You will find it useful
event/activity/omission/aspect of human behaviour?
to consider the issues raised
Does the answer differ depending upon the historical and social context in which it is/ in Morrison, Theoretical
was asked? criminology, Chapter 1:
‘Narrating the mood of the
Is the very reason for criminology so tied up with human fears, emotions and attitudes
times: confusion, self-doubt,
to social life (including notions of progress and trust) that it is impossible to accept
and ambivalence’.
that the understanding of crime and the policies to be used with respect to it should
be in the hands of ‘scientific’ experts?
Ask yourself what your presuppositions in beginning the study of criminology are/
were? Do you believe that ‘crime is a social problem’? If so does that give rise to the
question what causes crime? And is the reason for asking that question to develop
measures to ‘cure’ society of crime?
Are you assuming that there is some natural thing or sets of characteristics, which
constitute(s) the essential element to all crimes? Are you also assuming that there are
‘criminals’ who are different from ‘normal’ people?
Consider what the link is between assuming that ‘crime’ is a natural entity and our
attitude to those adjudged ‘criminals’?
There has been an historical connection between criminological theorising and a

‘correctional perspective’ which saw criminology as a practical discipline, a discipline
that was defined in ‘cause-and-cure’ terms. Thus the terms crime and the criminal
were taken as standing for real, observable entities and it quickly followed that the
policy implication was to remove or at least incapacitate the problem. Of course the
connection between theory and practice is essential to the enterprise but consider
the following statements from leading writers:
Criminology, in its narrow sense, is concerned with the study of the phenomenon of crime
and of the factors or circumstances ... which may have an influence on or be associated
with criminal behaviour and the state of crime in general. But this does not and should
not exhaust the whole subject matter of criminology. There remains the vitally important
problem of combating crime ... To rob it of this practical function, is to divorce criminology
from reality and render it sterile.
(Leon Radzinowicz, In search of criminology, 1962: 168)
The scholarly objective of criminology is the development of a body of knowledge

regarding this process of law, crime, and reaction to crime… The practical objective
of criminology, supplementing the scientific or theoretical objective, is to reduce the
amount of pain and suffering in the world.
(Sutherland and Cressey, Criminology, 1978: 3, 24)
Research in criminology is conducted for the purpose of understanding criminal

behaviour. If we can understand the behaviour, we will have a better chance of predicting
when it will occur and then be able to take policy steps to control, eliminate, or prevent
the behaviour.
(Reid, Crime and criminology, 1985: 66)
‘Let us state quite categorically that the major task of radical criminology is to seek a
solution to the problem of crime and that of a socialist policy is to substantially reduce the
crime rate.’
(Young, ‘The failure of criminology: the need for a radical realism’, 1986)
Are these statements similar? Perhaps not. They also, almost certainly, were only
concerned with crime as a nation state issue, although with only a subtle, yet large,
change in emphasis, we could change the focus to ‘law, crime, and reaction to crime…
as a global concern.
And while crime is a ‘problem’ if one is trying to understand the nature of that
problem then, for me at least, one should escape from an attitude that David
Matza once called correctionalism. David Matza (Becoming deviant, 1969), defined
correctional perspectives as accepting that the aim of study was to achieve the
practical result of elimination of crime and the criminal, further that a commitment to
the methodological principles of positivistic social science was appropriate. Thus one
never could emphasise with the subject, never attempt to see the world from their
point of view.
2.6.1 Crime or deviancy?

Sociological criminologists tended to substitute the concept of ‘deviancy’ for that
of ‘crime’. Why? This was an attempt to control the subject matter: the aim was for
sociologists to talk about a ‘fact’ that sociologists could understand. As the following
extract from Paul Rock illustrates:
A sociological conception of deviancy must dwell on its peculiarly social qualities. As a

significant social entity, the ‘deviant’ is the occupant of a special role which is recognised
and ordered in a process of interaction. If a person is not assigned to this role and not
treated as deviant, he cannot be regarded sociologically as a deviant. No matter how
much he may be assumed by some to be a disturbed, disruptive or atypical individual,
his social meaning is not that of deviancy but something else. Those who would explain
his behaviour do not account for social deviancy or a deviant role, but disturbance,
disruptiveness or atypicality as they conceive it. Deviancy is a social construct (social
constructs are the interpretations which men collaboratively give to the objects and
events around them. They are rather more than interpretations, however, because they
are also the social phenomena which men create through their activities and as a result
of these interpretations) fashioned by the members of the society in which it exists. They
endow it with importance and distinctiveness and they assign it to a special place in the
organisation of their collective lives. As Quinney remarks:
‘a thing exists only when it is given a name; any phenomenon is real to us only when
we can imagine it. Without imagination there would be nothing to experience. So it
is with crime. In our relationship with others we construct a social reality of crime.
This reality is both conceptual and phenomenal, a world of meanings and events
constructed in reference to crime.’
…Deviancy is a part of the social reality which organises people’s lives, and this social
reality must be the primary material of analysis. (Paul Rock, Deviant Behaviour, pp.19–20).
Activities 2.2–2.3
2.2 Can you identify different deviant roles in your society?
a. What are their features?
b. Why are these roles defined as deviant?
c. Whose interests are served in their definition?
2.3 What does the sociological concept of ‘role’ mean? What function does Rock
attribute to deviant roles in society?
No feedback provided.
Activity 2.4: How is the definition of crime constructed?

Read Morrison, Wayne ‘What is crime? Contrasting definitions and perspectives’
(from Criminology, third edition, Oxford University Press, 2013) extracted on the VLE.
Address the questions for discussion found at the end of the chapter.
Activity 2.5: Interrogating your criminological imagination

Please read both the short stories
u ‘Angelic Butterfly’ by Primo Levi from The sixth day and other tales 1990 (on the
VLE) and
u The short story ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’ by Julio Cortazar from A change of
light and other stories 1987 (on the VLE) and
u Watch the short film ‘Unwatchable: is your mobile phone rape free’. Also read
the article ‘Unwatchable: Connecting the UK and rape in the Congo’ in the
huffingtonpost.co.uk by Marc Hawker (the Director).
Re ‘Angelic Butterfly’:
u What is the story about and does it help to know that Primo Levi survived the
holocaust to understand it?
u What is the ‘crime’ in this short story?
u What message, if any, do you think Primo Levi is trying to send to past and
possibly future perpetrators?
Re ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’:
Cortazar is noted as a ‘magic realist’ writer: he wrote ‘Blow-up’ about a photo he
took of a couple in which he thinks a crime occurs; this was made into a film of the
same name. ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’ has the narrator (Cortazar) going on a trip
to Latin America to escape comments about ‘Blow-up’.
u What is the point of the story?
u Why do you think he never told Claudine what was on the photographs?
u Is this connected to ideas about witnessing (a very legal concept) and silence?
Re ‘Unwatchable’:
u What is the meaning of the project?
u Is it similar to Cortzarar’s?
u Why did the director feel the need to film in Oxfordshire?
u Do you consider it successful or...? You may like to read some of the blog posts on
it in the media.
Feedback
Feedback is contained in the lecture on the criminological imagination found on the
VLE.
Sample examination questions

It is premature to try to answer these examination questions at this stage, since you
would need material from the whole of this course just to illustrate the concerns
raised by the questions. However, as you proceed, you may find it is useful to think
about how you would answer these questions.
Question 1 Consider whether criminology is or should be a science.
Question 2 ‘Criminology cannot be a science because its subject-matter, crime is
defined by shifting moral and political concerns.’
Discuss.
Question 3 ‘Why has it proved so difficult to agree on the core concepts of
criminology study?’
Notes
3 Competing traditions? Legacies of classical and
positive criminology or the concept of crime verses
that of the criminal
Contents
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.2 Modernity and the Enlightenment context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.3 Central figures of the two approaches examined . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.4 The positive revolution: the imagery of science replacing the moral
discourse of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.5 Political arithmetic and statistical analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.6 The oral-ethnographic efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.7 The Italian/positivist school . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.8 The return of classicism: populist conservative criminology and

contemporary rational action theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.9 Are the perspectives contradictory or can they be combined? . . . . . . 41

3.1 Introduction
In the 18th century the modern concept of crime and of criminal justice took shape.
In the late 19th century the concept of the criminal as an identifiable type capable of
identification and empirical study developed. The former is identified with classical
criminology, the latter with the development of positivism. The contrast between
classical, positivist, and later non-positivist approaches to the study of crime underlies
much of the discussion of crime and the policy implications of such study. For David
Garland (e.g. in The Oxford handbook of criminology, 1994) Criminology as an academic
subject has been deeply shaped by a rather contingent convergence between a
‘governmental project’ (of which classical criminology is an important strand) and
a ‘Lombrosian project’ of a science of the ‘criminal’ and ‘criminality’. The nature of
these distinctions is clearly linked to the historical development of the discipline; this
chapter outlines the early history of these approaches and provides a foundation for
later study.
Essential reading
¢ Morrison, Theoretical criminology, Chapter. 4 ‘The problem of classical
criminology’, Chapter 5 ‘Reading the texts of classical criminology’ and Chapter 6
‘Criminological positivism I’.
¢ Burke, Chapter 2 ‘Classical criminology’, Chapter 3 ‘Populist conservative

criminology’, Chapter 4 ‘Contemporary rational actor theories’ and Chapter 5
‘Biological positivism’.
Extracts from:
¢ Beccaria, On crimes and punishments, (first published as Dei Delitti e delle Pene,
in 1764) (trans. H. Paolucci) 1963.
Further reading
The list of texts that reference the classical and positive schools is huge.
¢ Lanier and Henery, Essential criminology, 1998, Chapter 4 ‘Classical, neoclassical,
and rational choice theories’.
¢ Vold and Bernard, Theoretical criminology. Chapters. 1, 2, and 3.
¢ Jones, Criminology, 1998, Chapter 5 ‘The Classical and Positive Traditions’.
¢ Walklate, Sandra, Understanding criminology, Chapter 2 ‘Perspectives in

criminological theory’.
¢ Bob Roshier, Controlling crime: the classical perspective in criminology, Open

University Press, 1989.
¢ Jenkins, David, History of criminology: a philosophical perspective.
¢ L. Lilly et al., Criminological theory: context and consequences, Chapter 2.
¢ Taylor, Walton and Young, The new criminology, 1973.
¢ Ferri, E. Criminal sociology, (trans. L. Kelly and J. Lisle), 1967.
¢ Foucault, M. Discipline and punishment: the birth of the prison, Penguin, London,
1977.
¢ Garland, D. Punishment and welfare, 1985.
¢ Jenkins, P. ‘Varieties of Enlightenment Criminology’, British Journal of

Criminology, April 1984.
¢ Mannheim, H. (ed.) Pioneers of criminology, 1960.
¢ Radzinowicz, Leon Ideology and crime (New York: Columbia University Press,
1966).
Criminology 3 Competing traditions? Legacies of classical and positive criminology page 27
Learning objectives
By the end of this topic and the associated reading you should be able to:
u Identify the main features of the classical and positive traditions in criminology
u Give an account of their formation and the major figures involved
u Assess their continued influence
u Be aware of some of the criticisms of positivism and classicism.
3.2 Modernity and the Enlightenment context

The Enlightenment underpins modernity. It denotes replacing the mediaeval
synthesis with its ideas of the natural order of human kind and Christian Europe with
notions of mankind’s need to assert control, to analyse afresh and construct new
practical frameworks such as national states, sovereignty, law and ideas of the human
subject. Instead of an understanding of totality in which the world is conceived as
being created by an outside force – namely God – and mankind as creatures of that
creation whose purpose or ‘telos’ is to serve God’s will and find ultimate happiness
in life after this in heaven, the world is to be analysed on its own basis and mankind
is to be depicted as an operating entity within this new conception of the world.
Two contrasting frameworks for gaining knowledge became clear: that between
rationalism – which held that pure reasoning and building upon foundations that
were by definition true (such as narratives of the natural condition of humans being
that of individual solitary mankind and their use of reason to form social contracts)
gave epistemological security, and empiricism – which held that the only security of
foundations was knowledge of actual substances, such as physical substances (like
rocks) or their human equivalent, humans viewed in the same way that the objects of
the physical sciences were.
Hall Williams (Criminology and criminal justice, 1982) called classical criminology: ‘a
school of criminal justice philosophy’. It is fair to say that philosophy, in particular
the rationalist methodology of constructing intellectual systems, constitutes the
procedures of classicism while forms of reasoning, largely empiricist in nature,
developed with an image of natural science in mind as providing the template for
real science, influence positivism as the pursuit and study of the actual criminal and
criminality as the actual propensity to engage in crime.
The chapters in Morrison should be read closely, even if difficult at first reading. Burke,
may be approached first. For an introductory account of the full range of perspectives
read Walklate.
What does the phrase ‘the modern human subject’ mean? It denotes trying to see
humans as devoid of the religious tradition of created objects; it is a secularity that
underpins a new and secular gaze. The 18th century in Europe worked many changes
in science, religion and the mechanical arts and effectively overturned the settled
notions of the natural order of social and natural life that the medieval period had
given primacy to. However, modern secular social theory did not emerge in one
dominant form. Certainly we can agree with Foucault’s notion of the birth of the
sciences of man that the Enlightenment is characterised by placing man and the
structures of the world as the new frames of reference. But the ways in which it does
this exhibits qualities of both pessimism as well as extreme optimism, is romantic
as well as ‘realist’ on its views of the human condition. It can be either empiricist
or rationalist, indulgent of a priori reasoning and the grappling with ‘essences’ or
determined to be based only of ‘observation’ of phenomenon and inductions therein.
It can be ‘methodologically individualist’ (i.e. assume man as an analytically individual
and complete object of study) or holist (i.e. deny that man can be studied as individual
phenomena but is necessarily social); it can lay stress on man as voluntarist or
determinate objects, to mention only some of the possible contrasts it is possible to
draw.
When we think of the classical tradition we think philosophy. It is the use of reason to
undercut previous position and expose them as myth. Take Thomas Hobbes.
In his classic work, Leviathan (1651), he argues for the need for strong government
and so is to that extent against the revolutionaries and reformers, but he help found
Enlightenment political theory by stripping government of any non-rational defence.
In particular, he sets up social contract theory; thus political authority is grounded in
an agreement (often understood as ideal, rather than real) among individuals, each
of whom aims in this agreement to advance his rational self-interest by establishing
a common political authority over all. In this general contract model (taken up with
variations by Locke and Rousseau), political authority is grounded not in conquest,
natural or divinely instituted hierarchy, or in obscure myths and traditions, but rather
in the rational consent of the governed and officials of the state perform rational tasks.
As the basis, Hobbes takes a naturalistic, scientific approach to the question of how
political society ought to be organised (constantly asking the reader to agree on the
basis that that is how the reader reads mankind in a pessimist rationalist fashion);
Hobbes paths the ways for secularisation and rationalisation in political and social
philosophy.
The early Enlightenment clears the way from mythology and religious belief and
thereby introduces many ethical issues and positions that remain contemporary
today. Instead of religious doctrines concerning God and mankind’s position in the
afterlife (with our highest good and thus also moral duties conceived in immediately
religious terms), we speak in terms of human desires, human wants and needs and
satisfying them in this life. Thus contexts such as industrialisation, urbanisation and
the expansion of education, turn our attention to the contexts and factors influencing
human progress in this world, rather than union with God in the next. Also, the
violent religious wars that devastate Europe in the early modern period (which end
with the Treaty of Westphalia at roughly the same time Hobbes publishes Leviathan)
require a secular, this-worldly ethics, insofar as they indicate the failure of religious
doctrines concerning God and the afterlife to establish a stable foundation for social
and political interaction. If the ancient Greeks had dealt with many Gods (and Gods
that could not be trusted) the development of monotheistic religions (Christianity,
Islam and Judaism) had surpassed classical Greek and Roman ethical systems. Now
there could be no return to the answers on nature and cosmology offered by Plato
and Aristotle. The Platonic identification of the good with the real and the Aristotelian
teleological understanding of natural things are both difficult to square with the
Enlightenment conception of nature. The general philosophical problem emerges in
the Enlightenment of how to understand the source and grounding of ethical duties,
and how to conceive the highest good for human beings, within a secular, broadly
naturalistic context, and within the context of a transformed understanding of the
natural world.
Hobbes founds social order upon individuals, their reasoning and their desires, his
reasoning is nominalisitic and relativist: what is good, as the end of human action,
is ‘whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire,’ and evil is ‘the object
of his hate, and aversion,’ ‘there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any
common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves’
(Leviathan, Chapter 6). Hobbes’ conception of human beings as fundamentally
motivated by their perception of what is in their own best interest demands that
duties of justice and benevolence relate to such individualist material. Man is
reduced to basic drives; this allows only a set of moral duties to be constructed that is
demystified, and almost mechanical.
Writers such as Beccaria and Bentham owe a large debt to Hobbes. After Hobbes, a
crime is not an evil act against God but simply an act or omission which the sovereign
has not allowed. Crime and one’s reaction to it should be understood rationally and
without reference to God. It is often said that classicism is not concerned with the
causes of crime and you may wish to see whether you agree with this. Alternatively,
some argue that classicism clearly acknowledges a link between crime and social
conditions but that writers such as Beccaria were actually conservatives (see Morrison,
Theoretical criminology, and Jenkins, ‘Varieties of Enlightenment criminology’) and
mostly concerned with how criminals should be dealt with in a way that promoted
social stability. Moreover, classicism gives the state the role of defining and mediating
the social conceptions of crime and the reaction and control of it. For classicism, the
state is central, the influence of positivism, conversely, is to lower the attention given
to state power.
Positivism is a subset of the growing empiricist science of man. In its critique of

the social contract theory that Beccaria assumed as the basis of social order, it
re-orientated the focus of study away from questions depicting a hypothetical
origin of society and the ideal social order. It substituted an empirically orientated
inquiry combining a sociological interest in social-cultural development and an
anthropological interest in the structure of human nature. The positivist approach
holds that ultimately science can disclose an objective reality. As Michael Gottfredson
and Travis Hirschi state in a text simply entitled ‘Positive criminology’:
certainly one feature of positive criminology has always been its belief in an objective
external reality capable of measurement. Public disclosure of the understood reality, the
procedures used for its measurement, and frequent independent replication are essential
tenets of this perspective. (Introduction, Positive criminology, 1987, Newbury Park Calif:
Sage.)
You should be careful not to use the term positivism in criminology as simply denoting
individualist approaches. It has also a wide sociological use influenced by Durkheim or
Marx as is apparent in looking at the way criminal statistics are often used to denote
perceived changes in social and economic conditions. However, the individualist
version of positive criminology is characterised by the search to discover, within the
composition of the individual, the causes of criminal and delinquent behaviour. The
scientific method is used to differentiate offenders from non-offenders on a variety of
characteristics. The method of positive criminology assumes that there are identifiable
factors that make people act as they do (the logic of determinism) and that the
variability to be explained is associated with the variability in the casual agents (the
logic of differentiation).
3.3 Central figures of the two approaches examined
3.3.1 Beccaria
It has been common to describe the work of Cesare Beccaria as a reaction to a time
when the criminal law and its enforcement were barbarous and arbitrary and to see
him as a humane reformer. This interpretation stresses a social context of secret
accusations, brutal executions, torture, arbitrary and inconsistent punishments, and
class-linked disparities in punishments.
To depict Beccaria as a humanitarian is to simplify but neither is it sufficient, at least

without unpacking the conception to characterise the classical school as simply
‘administrative and legal criminology’ which ignored all other factors which interfered
with ease of administration.
This image of classical criminology as rationalising the operation of the criminal

justice system captures a wider range of effects than the simple humanitarian model
but we have to be aware of the cultural and political implications and effects which
the acceptance of classical criminology leads on to. Implicit in classical criminology,
for example, is the issue of the limits of criminal justice. How could a criteria of
justice be constructed which could provide legitimation for new social institutions
and withstand the sceptical/critical attitude which philosophers such as Kant had
declared all ‘modern’ institutions had to withstand. Moreover, classical criminology
should be understood within the development of philosophical radicalism and the
full consequences of the developing notion of ‘the rule of law’, the changing political
struggles where a growing middle class sought political power to accompany their
economic power and break down the political monopoly enjoyed in England, for
instance, by the landowning class, and for the hopes of progressive social engineering
epitomised here by the Englishman Jeremy Bentham.
Beccaria considered crime as an injury to society; a notion which fitted well with
the development of a rule of law ideology. It was the injury to society, rather than to
the immediate individual(s) who experienced it, that was to direct and determine
the degree of punishment. Behind this thinking was the utilitarian assumption that
all social action should be guided by the goal of achieving ‘the greatest happiness
for the greatest number’. From this viewpoint, the punishment of an individual for a
crime was justified, and justifiable only, for its contribution to the prevention of future
infringements on the happiness and well-being of others. In today’s world, these ideas
may seem common enough but they needed to be ‘constructed’ to reform the world
of Beccaria and lead on to our own. For example, Beccaria reasoned that certain and
quick, rather than severe, punishments would best accomplish the above goals:
in order for punishment not to be ... an act of violence of one or many against a private
citizen, it must be ... public, prompt, ... the least possible in the given circumstances,
proportionate to the crimes, [and] dictated by the laws. ([1764] 1963: 99)
Torture, execution, and other ‘irrational’ activity must be abolished. In their place,
there were to be quick and certain trials and, in the case of convictions, carefully
calculated punishments. Beccaria went beyond this to propose that accused persons
be treated humanely before trial, with every right and facility extended to enable
them to bring evidence on their own behalf. Note, at Beccaria’s time accused and
convicted persons were detained in the same institutions, and subjected to the
same punishments and conditions. In place of this, Beccaria argued for swift and
sure punishments, to be imposed on only those found guilty, with the punishments
determined strictly in accordance with the damage to society caused by the crime.
It is often said that classical criminology has no idea of the causes of crime but Beccaria
certainly held that economic conditions and bad laws could cause crime. Additionally,
he was clear that property crimes were committed primarily by the poor, and mainly
out of necessity. Moreover, he was aware of what has come to be called opportunity
transfer; that is, when putting a severe punishment on a particular crime could deter
someone from committing it, but at the same time make another crime attractive by
comparison. Beccaria was also aware of the cultural power of severe punishments to
add to the desperation of the populace and encourage them to indulge in violence.
As he put it, laws could promote crime by diminishing the human spirit. A careful
matching of the crime and its punishment, in keeping with the general interests
of society, could make punishment a rational instrument of government. Jeremy
Bentham extended this with his notion of a ‘calculus’ for realising these interests.
Activity 3.1
Read the following extract from Beccaria, Chapter 16 ‘Of torture’.
u What are Beccaria’s arguments against torture? In particular what is the
relationship between torture and truth? Why would the innocent confess to
crimes they did not commit?
u Are they still valid today?
The torture of a criminal during the course of his trial is a cruelty consecrated by custom in
most nations. It is used with an intent either to make him confess his crime, or to explain
some contradictions into which he had been led during his examination, or discover his
accomplices, or for some kind of metaphysical and incomprehensible purgation of infamy,
or, finally, in order to discover other crimes of which he is not accused, but of which he
may be guilty.
No man can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty; nor can society take from him
the public protection until it have been proved that he has violated the conditions on
which it was granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorise the punishment of
a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt? This dilemma is frequent. Either
he is guilty, or not guilty. If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained by the
laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is unnecessary, if he be not guilty, you
torture the innocent; for, in the eye of the law, every man is innocent whose crime has not
been proved. Besides, it is confounding all relations to expect that a man should be both
the accuser and accused; and that pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in
the muscles and fibres of a wretch in torture. By this method the robust will escape, and
the feeble be condemned. These are the inconveniences of this pretended test of truth,
worthy only of a cannibal, and which the Romans, in many respects barbarous, and whose
savage virtue has been too much admired, reserved for the slaves alone.
What is the political intention of punishments? To terrify and be an example to others.

Is this intention answered by thus privately torturing the guilty and the innocent? It
is doubtless of importance that no crime should remain unpunished; but it is useless
to make a public example of the author of a crime hid in darkness. A crime already
committed, and for which there can be no remedy, can only be punished by a political
society with an intention that no hopes of impunity should induce others to commit
the same. If it be true, that the number of those who from fear or virtue respect the laws
is greater than of those by whom they are violated, the risk of torturing an innocent
person is greater, as there is a greater probability that, cæteris paribus, an individual hath
observed, than that he hath infringed the laws.
There is another ridiculous motive for torture, namely, to purge a man from infamy. Ought
such an abuse to be tolerated in the eighteenth century? Can pain, which is a sensation,
have any connection with a moral sentiment, a matter of opinion? Perhaps the rack may
be considered as the refiner’s furnace.
It is not difficult to trace this senseless law to its origin; for an absurdity, adopted by a
whole nation, must have some affinity with other ideas established and respected by
the same nation. This custom seems to be the offspring of religion, by which mankind,
in all nations and in all ages, are so generally influenced. We are taught by our infallible
church, that those stains of sin contracted through human frailty, and which have not
deserved the eternal anger of the Almighty, are to be purged away in another life by an
incomprehensible fire. Now infamy is a stain, and if the punishments and fire of purgatory
can take away all spiritual stains, why should not the pain of torture take away those
of a civil nature? I imagine, that the confession of a criminal, which in some tribunals is
required as being essential to his condemnation, has a similar origin, and has been taken
from the mysterious tribunal of penitence, were the confession of sins is a necessary
part of the sacrament. Thus have men abused the unerring light of revelation; and, in
the times of tractable ignorance, having no other, they naturally had recourse to it on
every occasion, making the most remote and absurd applications. Moreover, infamy is a
sentiment regulated neither by the laws nor by reason, but entirely by opinion; but torture
renders the victim infamous, and therefore cannot take infamy away.
Another intention of torture is to oblige the supposed criminal to reconcile the

contradictions into which he may have fallen during his examination; as if the dread of
punishment, the uncertainty of his fate, the solemnity of the court, the majesty of the
judge, and the ignorance of the accused, were not abundantly sufficient to account for
contradictions, which are so common to men even in a state of tranquillity, and which
must necessarily be multiplied by the perturbation of the mind of a man entirely engaged
in the thoughts of saving himself from imminent danger.
This infamous test of truth is a remaining monument of that ancient and savage
legislation, in which trials by fire, by boiling water, or the uncertainty of combats, were
called judgments of God; as if the links of that eternal chain, whose beginning is in the
breast of the first cause of all things, could ever be disunited by the institutions of men.
The only difference between torture and trials by fire and boiling water is, that the event
of the first depends on the will of the accused, and of the second on a fact entirely physical
and external: but this difference is apparent only, not real. A man on the rack, in the
convulsions of torture, has it as little in his power to declare the truth, as, in former times,
to prevent without fraud the effects of fire or boiling water.
Every act of the will is invariably in proportion to the force of the impression on our
senses. The impression of pain, then, may increase to such a degree, that, occupying the
mind entirely, it will compel the sufferer to use the shortest method of freeing himself
from torment. His answer, therefore, will be an effect as necessary as that of fire or boiling
water, and he will accuse himself of crimes of which he is innocent: so that the very means
employed to distinguish the innocent from the guilty will most effectually destroy all
difference between them.
It would be superfluous to confirm these reflections by examples of innocent persons

who, from the agony of torture, have confessed themselves guilty: innumerable instances
may be found in all nations, and in every age. How amazing that mankind have always
neglected to draw the natural conclusion! Lives there a man who, if he has carried his
thoughts ever so little beyond the necessities of life, when he reflects on such cruelty, is
not tempted to fly from society, and return to his natural state of independence?
The result of torture, then, is a matter of calculation, and depends on the constitution,
which differs in every individual, and it is in proportion to his strength and sensibility;
so that to discover truth by this method, is a problem which may be better solved by a
mathematician than by a judge, and may be thus stated: The force of the muscles and the
sensibility of the nerves of an innocent person being given, it is required to find the degree
of pain necessary to make him confess himself guilty of a given crime.
The examination of the accused is intended to find out the truth; but if this be discovered
with so much difficulty in the air, gesture, and countenance of a man at case, how can
it appear in a countenance distorted by the convulsions of torture? Every violent action
destroys those small alterations in the features which sometimes disclose the sentiments
of the heart.
These truths were known to the Roman legislators, amongst whom, as I have already
observed, slaves only, who were not considered as citizens, were tortured. They are known
to the English a nation in which the progress of science, superiority in commerce, riches,
and power, its natural consequences, together with the numerous examples of virtue and
courage, leave no doubt of the excellence of its laws. They have been acknowledged in
Sweden, where torture has been abolished. They are known to one of the wisest monarchs
in Europe, who, having seated philosophy on the throne by his beneficent legislation, has
made his subjects free, though dependent on the laws; the only freedom that reasonable
men can desire in the present state of things. In short, torture has not been thought
necessary in the laws of armies, composed chiefly of the dregs of mankind, where its
use should seem most necessary. Strange phenomenon! That a set of men, hardened by
slaughter, and familiar with blood, should teach humanity to the sons of peace.
It appears also that these truths were known, though imperfectly, even to those by whom
torture has been most frequently practised; for a confession made during torture, is null,
if it be not afterwards confirmed by an oath, which if the criminal refuses, he is tortured
again. Some civilians and some nations permit this infamous petitio principii to be only
three times repeated, and others leave it to the discretion of the judge; therefore, of two
men equally innocent, or equally guilty, the most robust and resolute will be acquitted,
and the weakest and most pusillanimous will be condemned, in consequence of the
following excellent mode of reasoning. I, the judge, must find someone guilty. Thou, who
art a strong fellow, hast been able to resist the force of torment; therefore I acquit thee.
Thou, being weaker, hast yielded to it; I therefore condemn thee. I am sensible, that the
confession which was extorted from thee has no weight; but if thou dost not confirm by
oath what thou hast already confessed, I will have thee tormented again.
A very strange but necessary consequence of the use of torture is, that the case of the
innocent is worse than that of the guilty. With regard to the first, either he confesses
the crime which he has not committed, and is condemned, or he is acquitted, and has
suffered a punishment he did not deserve. On the contrary, the person who is really guilty
has the most favourable side of the question; for, if he supports the torture with firmness
and resolution, he is acquitted, and has gained, having exchanged a greater punishment
for a less.
The law by which torture is authorised, says, Men, be insensible to pain. Nature has indeed
given you an irresistible self-love, and an unalienable right of self-preservation; but I create
in you a contrary sentiment, an heroic hatred of yourselves. I command you to accuse
yourselves, and to declare the truth, amidst the tearing of your flesh, and the dislocation
of your bones.
Torture is used to discover whether the criminal be guilty of other crimes besides those of
which he is accused, which is equivalent to the following reasoning. Thou art guilty of one
crime, therefore it is possible that thou mayest have committed a thousand others; but
the affair being doubtful I must try it by my criterion of truth. The laws order thee to be
tormented because thou art guilty, because thou mayest be guilty, and because I choose
thou shouldst be guilty.
Torture is used to make the criminal discover his accomplices; but if it has been
demonstrated that it is not at a proper means of discovering truth, how can it serve to
discover the accomplices, which is one of the truths required? Will not the man who
accuses himself yet more readily accuse others? Besides, is it just to torment one man
for the crime of another? May not the accomplices be found out by the examination
of the witnesses, or of the criminal; from the evidence, or from the nature of the crime
itself; in short, by all the means that have been used to prove the guilt of the prisoner?
The accomplices commonly fly when their comrade is taken. The uncertainty of their fate
condemns them to perpetual exile, and frees society from the danger of further injury;
whilst the punishment of the criminal, by deterring others, answers the purpose for which
it was ordained.
Supplementary contemporary viewing

Watch ‘Taxi to the dark side’ the 2007 documentary film which won the 2007
Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The film positions the December 2002 killing of an Afghan taxi driver named
Dilawar, who was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in
extrajudicial detention and interrogated at the Parwan Detention Facility at Bagram
base.
The reality of a modern super power’s (the US) policy on torture and interrogation
in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory
deprivation is examined.
Questions:
u What explains the systematic use of torture by US forces?
u Is the Convention against torture useless?
3.3.2 Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism

The Englishman Bentham always saw himself as a reformer. He attended lectures
on law and English common law given by William Blackstone in Oxford as a young
man and rebelled against what he considered their uncritical approach. He adopted
Beccaria’s concern for achieving ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, a
criteria of a philosophical approach called utilitarianism that Bentham attributed to
the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Bentham gave precision to this idea, in part,
through a pseudo-mathematical concept he called ‘felicity calculus’. This ‘calculus’ was
intended as a means of estimating the goodness or badness of acts, the only ‘measure
of right or wrong’. Thus Bentham declared the entire notion of indefeasible rights
and contractual limitation on the power of government to be either meaningless or
else confused references to the principle of utility. The basis of government was not
contract but human need, and the satisfaction of human need is the sole justification.
Bentham meant to make the law an efficient and economical means of preventing
crime. Like Beccaria, Bentham insisted that prevention was the only justifiable
purpose of punishment, and furthermore that punishment was too ‘expensive’
when it produced more evil than good, or when the same good could be obtained
at the ‘price’ of less suffering. His recommendation was that penalties be fixed so as
to impose an amount of pain in excess of the pleasure that might be derived from
the criminal act. It was this calculation of pain compared to pleasure that Bentham
believed would deter crime. These ideas were formulated most clearly in his
Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation, first published in 1789:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and
pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine
what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain
of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. (Ch. 1 Sect. 1)
Is Bentham an enlightened reformer? He seeks a scientific approach to government

and this overwhelms the humane or rights based approach – his confidence in utility
enables him to think of justice as a quantifiable conception. While Beccaria kept to
some Kantian notions as to the dignity of man, Bentham would have none of these
limitations upon the scientific reorganisation of utility. For example, Bentham argued
that capital punishment should be restricted to offences ‘which in the highest degree
shock the public feeling’. He went on to argue that if the hanging of a man’s effigy
could produce the same preventive effect as the hanging of the man himself, it would
be a folly and a cruelty not to do so (Radzinowicz, 1948: 381–382). He also suggested
how capital punishments might nonetheless be used to maximum effect:
A scaffold painted black, the livery of grief – the officers of justice dressed in crepe– the
executioner covered with a mask, which would serve at once to augment the terror of his
appearance, and to shield him from ill-founded indignation – emblems of his crime placed
above the head of the criminal, to the end that the witnesses of his sufferings may know
for what crimes he undergoes them; these might form a part of the principal decorations
of these legal tragedies ... Whilst all the actors in this terrible drama might move in solemn
procession – serious and religious music preparing the hearts of the spectators for the
important lesson they were about to receive ... The judges need not consider it beneath
their dignity to preside over this public scene.’ (Bentham, quoted in Radzinowicz, A history
of English criminal law and its administration from 1750, Vol. 1, 1948: 383–384).
The article by Douglas Hay, ‘Property, authority and the criminal law’, in Fitzgerald et
al. Crime and society: readings in history and theory, will give you some idea of the actual
conditions which surrounded the operation of the criminal law in England at this time.
The opening chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and punish, gives a graphic illustration of
the spectacle of public punishment.
Bentham also attempted to radicalise imprisonment, an institution then used mainly

merely to hold persons awaiting trial or debtors. He spent much of his life trying to
convince authorities that an institution of his design, called a ‘Panopticon’, would
solve the problems of correction. For Foucault the panopticon is highly representative
of a new style of penal reason, one concerned with disciplining individuals rather than
punishing.
There were three features to the panopticon. First the architectural dimension; the
panopticon was to be a circular building with a glass roof and containing cells on every
story of the circumference. It was to be so arranged that every cell could be visible
from a central point. The omniscient prison inspector would be kept from the sight
of the prisoners by a system of ‘blinds unless ... he thinks fit to show himself’. Second,
management by contract; the manager would employ the inmates in contract labour
and he was to receive a share of the money earned by the inmates, but he was to be
financially liable if inmates who were later released re-offended, or if an excessive
number of inmates died during imprisonment. Third, the panopticon was to open
to the inspection of the world which would control the manager. Two prisons of the
panopticon design were actually built in the United States, however, the first was
rebuilt seven years after construction, and the second was redesigned before it was
finished. Foucault has used Bentham’s ideas for the panopticon as a prime example of
developing penal rationality which he believes developed into ‘disciplinary power’ in
contrast to ‘judicial power’. For Foucault, the prison became linked to the knowledges
of positivism and together they gave rise to a whole new method of social control.
This was not the control of command and obedience, which he believes is the method
of the law, but the regulation through knowledge and conceptions of normalacy,
where individuals come to internalise perceptions of appropriate behaviour and be
subjected to surveillance and accounting. It is an intriguing exercise to see whether
you can agree with Foucault, whatever your opinion is reading Bentham or Foucault on
imprisonment should give rise to a multiplicity of doubts as to what imprisonment is
meant to achieve.
Several of Bentham’s ideas were in time picked up. He argued strongly for the
establishment of the office of public prosecutor, and he furthered the notion that
crimes are committed against society rather than against individuals. Beyond this, he
argued that many victimless crimes were imaginary rather than real offences, and he
argued for the development of official crime statistics or ‘bills… indicating the moral
health of the country’.
Reflection question: is Bentham a humanitarian reformer or a ruthless servant of

power?
3.4 The positive revolution: the imagery of science replacing

the moral discourse of crime
Modern science is empiricist in nature which means it relies upon observation,
description, and measurement to build up theories and create its image of the
world. Positivism broke with the classical image of free will and the self-determining
individual and suggested that man is a determined entity in the world by his
constitution and his environment and that his behaviour is the result of an array of
biological, psychological or social factors.
Crime does not therefore consist of actions rationally chosen by the offender; the
notion of free will was seen by the positivists as inhibiting the study of the causes
of crime and as diverting attention away from the real causes. Positivism shifted
study away from crime to the criminal and sought the answers in differentiating the
offender from the normal member of society.
But therein lies a danger, for it assumes that the criminal exists as some determinate
entity, or, as Gottefredson and Hirschi (1990) redefined it, that criminality as a stable
propensity of individuals exists. The search for the criminal (type, mind, etc.) and
criminality (as a stable propensity such as rates of self-control) is a constant theme
in individualistic forms of positivism. Positivism is also said to be uncritical in that its
authors often appear to assume a consensual culture where all deviation is simply
attributed to lack of socialisation or deficiency of the individual.
3.5 Political arithmetic and statistical analysis

The 18th century saw a developing interest in secular techniques of governing and
the use of statistics to gauge the makeup of the population and various factors of that
population. Foucault termed this the development of political arithmetic and this has
intensified today with vast networks of statistical analysis on the economy, health and
social interactions.
A linkage between a technical interest in crime control and the positive approach in
criminology was first evident in the work of the so-called ‘cartographic criminologists’
of 19th century Europe, such as the Belgian Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1842), the
Frenchman André-Michel Guerry (1833) and the Englishmen Rawson (1839), Alison
(1840), and Fletcher (1849). Their work attempted to match spatial patterns of crime
and offender rates as visible from the developing ‘criminal statistics’ with other
indices of the ‘moral’ health of the nation (including such mixed features as literacy,
population density, wealth, occupations, nationalities) and the physical environment
(such as climate). Guerry, for example found a correlation of offending rates in France
between 1825–30 with convicted criminals’ age, sex and the season of the year. Rawson
concentrated upon employment and the changing features of urban industrialisation.
Quetelet argued the effect of obvious instances of economic inequalities in small areas.
3.5.1 The work of Adolphe Jacques Quetelet

Quetelet (1796–1874) was trained in mathematics and early success in this field made
him a professor with a large reputation. He applied mathematical techniques to a
range of issues, including astronomy, meteorology, and sociology. He illustrates the
fact that so much criminological data and knowledge is the result of applied study
rather than a concentrated long-standing effort. For Quetelet, scientific evidence
resulted from, and was a reflection of, large numbers of observations rather than
individual occurrences. Quetelet highlighted a fundamental problem with crime
statistics, namely the gap between ‘known and judged offences’ and what statistics
may in commonsense be thought to measure, ‘committed offences’. He was clear that:
‘our observations can only refer to a certain number of known and tried offences, out
of the unknown sum total of crimes committed’ (Quetelet, 1842: 82).
Quetelet argued that in well-organised societies this ratio would be close to unity
for serious crimes, and further from unity for less serious crimes. Thus we could be
relatively certain of the ‘moral statistics of crime’ within these constraints. These
statistics showed that men commit more crimes and thus we could infer that they
have a greater ‘propensity’ for crime than women, and that the young have a greater
propensity than the old. Using findings constructed out of many observations and in a
variety of times and places:
we can enumerate in advance how many individuals will soil their hands in the blood of
their fellows, how many will be frauds, how many prisoners; almost as one can enumerate
in advance the births and deaths that will take place. Society contains within itself the
seeds of all the crimes that are to be committed, and at the same time the facilities
necessary for their development. It is society that, in some way, prepares these crimes,
and the criminal is only the instrument that executes them. (ibid.: 97)
Such patterns were material to work upon to effect improvements. Statistics provided
evidence of a moral condition of society that required remedy:
there is a budget which we pay with a frightful regularity – it is that of prisons, chains, and
the scaffold: it is that which, above all, we ought to endeavour to abate. (ibid.: 96)
3.6 The oral-ethnographic efforts

Rather than seeking to determine hard scientific laws or knowledge for control, the
oral-ethnographic tradition attempts to communicate the human experience and
offer an understanding-based vision of the human consequences of social conditions,
poverty and crime. Using direct observations, life histories, unpublished documents
and a range of first-hand data sources we are offered commentaries on the effects of
socio-economic change on the structure of social relations.
3.6.1 Fredrich Engels

In The condition of the working class in England (1845) Engels used his own impressions
of Manchester to comply a radical and sensitive account of working class life. You
should note that Manchester had been called by a character in Disraeli’s Coningsby
‘the most wonderful city in Modern times’ and was the major city of England that had
come to symbolise the achievement of capitalist industrialisation in all its grandeur
and grimness. Engels used a combination of first-hand observation, economic
data, contemporary accounts, pamphlets and newspapers. The themes of relative
deprivation and of crime as a rational reaction to the visible inequalities produced by
the industrial revolution run through his account:
The worker lived in poverty and want and saw that other people were better off than he
was. The worker was not sufficiently intelligent to appreciate why he, of all people, should
be the one to suffer – for after all he contributed more to society than the idle rich, and
sheer necessity drove him to steal in spite of his traditional respect for private property.
(1845: 242)
Crime was understandable and a taste of justice for the powerful:
Acts of violence committed by the working classes against the bourgeoisie and their
henchmen are merely frank and undisguised retaliation for the thefts and treacheries
perpetrated by the middle classes against the workers. (1854: 242)
Engels saw the growth of criminality not only among the deprived working class
but also in the ‘surplus population’ of casual workers, what Marx called ‘the lowest
sediment’, and others ‘the residuum’. Engels saw the position is starkly determinist
terms:
Apart from over-indulgence in intoxicating liquors, the sexual immorality of many English
workers is one of their greatest failings. This too follows from the circumstances in which
this class of society is placed. The workers have been left to themselves without the moral
training necessary for the proper control of their sexual desires. While burdening the
workers with numerous hardship the middle classes have left them only the
pleasures of drink and sexual intercourse. The result is that the workers, in order to get
something out of life, are passionately devoted to these two pleasures and indulge in
them to excess and in the grossest fashion. If people are relegated to the position of
animals, they are left with the alternatives of revolting and sinking into bestiality. If the
demoralisation of the worker passes beyond a certain point then it is just as natural that
he will turn into a criminal... as inevitably as water turns into steam at boiling point. (1845:
144-5)
This sounds not unlike recent American writings on the ‘underclass’ (see Morrison,
Theoretical criminology, Chapter 17 ‘Contemporary Social Stratification and the
development of the underclass’; Walklate, Understanding criminology, Chapter 6.
‘Crime, politics and welfare’). The emphasis upon faulty ‘training’ early in life is very
familiar if you consider recent writings from the control perspective. However, Engels
is clearly putting this behaviour into a social context, albeit with a reductionism to
environmental determinism, which is missing from much recent conservative writings.
(See the criticisms of the conservative position made by Elliott Currie in Confronting
crime.) Furthermore, Engels located the worthy working class as prospective radicals
whose criminality was an inarticulate and unconscious social rebellion.
In all his work, Engels did not merely describe conditions but chose to interpret his
material. In his work the author’s values are obvious, indeed self-consciously exposed.
His work is deliberately a treatise against capitalism and the absence of any concern
with the general welfare of society or of social justice on the part of the capitalists.
The weakness with his writing is the possibility that the immediacy and purity of the
experience of the subjects being communicated will be distorted and twisted by the
interpretation.
The surplus group (lumpen-proletariat, residuum, and which is currently the focus
of ‘underclass’ writings) became of considerable interest to social commentators of
different persuasions, for example, Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew.
3.6.2 Henry Mayhew

Downes and Rock refer to Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) as one of the ‘shadow
criminologists’ whose work
contains much that is repetitive, conjectural, and fanciful. It also contains a great deal
of valuable material and sensible observation. Properly read, it may be recognised as an
anticipation of the theorising that now passes for the sociology of deviance. (1982: 51)
His ‘street biography’ appears as an early form of social ecology approach to the
study of crime based on observation and description of the social conditions of the
developing urban centres. His four volume London labour and the London poor offered
vivid accounts of the expanding masses which filled the growing cities of Victorian
capitalism. Mayhew was ambivalent, on the one hand he defined criminals as ‘those
who will not work’ (the tile of Vol. 4) while his descriptions captured much of the
reality of social deprivation which characterised his times.
There are thousands of neglected children loitering about the low neighbourhoods
of the metropolis, and prowling about the streets, begging and stealing for their daily
bread. They are to be found in Westminster, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, St. Giles, New Cut,
Lambeth, the Borough and other localities. Hundreds of them may be seen leaving their
parents’ homes and low lodging-houses every morning sallying forth in search of food and
plunder. (Mayhew, 1862: 273)
Beyond the descriptions of the degradation that characterised this period Mayhew
saw the weaknesses of the human self. The problem was seen in terms of defective
socialisation, to a non-conformity ‘to civilised habits’ (Criminal prisons of London, p.386)
and the policy prescription was clear.
It is far easier to train the young in virtuous and industrious habits, than to reform the
grown-up felon who has become callous in crime, and it is besides far more profitable to
the state. To neglect them or inadequately to attend to their welfare gives encouragement
to the growth of this dangerous class. (ibid.: 275)
The demand for reform flows both from fear and self-interest. It is a reaction to the
image of what this failure of socialisation could accomplish but it also reflects an
assumption that a healthy individual is an individual capable of exercising self-control
and rational calculation. The new ideal, implicitly at least, is an individual capable of
disciplining his impulses and planning his life.
But as the following analysis shows, although this was the ideal, Mayhew leads on to
the fact that some are by nature unfitted for the assumption of self-control and self-
motivation. Mayhew is clear on the need to differentiate between individual members
of the working masses:
I am anxious that the public should no longer confound the honest, independent working
men, with the vagrant beggars and pilferers of the country; and that they should see that
the one class is as respectable and worthy, as the other is degraded and vicious.
Mayhew thought that only 5 per cent of these vagrants and pilferers were ‘deserving’
and in general they constituted a ‘moral pestilence... a stream of vice and disease... a
vast heap of social refuse’. They constituted for Mayhew a ‘dangerous class’ and while
he criticised the authorities for not taking step to enable them to practise trades in his
The criminal prisons of London he defined ‘our criminal tribes’ as ‘that portion of society
who have not yet conformed to civilized habits’. What demarcated these tribes was
that their rationality did not control the passions of their bodies and fit them for the
tasks of hard labour.
What has become known as the positive school developed these ideas further.
3.7 The Italian/positivist school

Criminological texts usually refer to a group of scholars from Italy who applied the
positive philosophy of the 19th century to the study of crime as the positivist school
of criminology. Cesare Lombroso, Raffaele Garofalo, and Enrico Ferri argued that the
methods of natural science were the appropriate tools to make the study of criminals
truly scientific. They emphasised the necessity for a controlled investigation of
criminals and non-criminals and, although their own methodologies were extremely
crude and scientifically suspect, by determining that proper criminology had to be
scientific they laid the foundation for the future development of criminological theory.
3.7.1 Cesare Lombroso

Lombroso (1835–1909), who graduated from the same university as Beccaria exactly
100 years later (1858 as compared to 1758) is frequently called ‘the father of modern
criminology’ while these same texts reject entirely his ideas about the causes of crime.
Lombroso once referred to himself as ‘a slave to facts’. His work can be seen to reduce
human nature to the biology of the immediate post-Darwin era, specifically applying
the concept of atavism and the principles of evolution to depict criminals as biological
‘throwbacks’ to a primitive, or ‘atavistic’, stage of evolution. For Lombroso, criminals
could be distinguished from non-criminals by the presence of physical anomalies that
represented a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of person.
Between 1859 and 1863 he served as an army physician in a variety of posts and
examined approximately 3,000 soldiers in a search for the causes of several diseases
in mental and physical deficiencies. Subsequently, he worked as a prison doctor and
conducted hundreds of post-mortems. While conducting a post-mortem examination
of a particularly famous inmate by the name of Vilella, he discovered a depression in
the interior back part of his skull that he called the ‘median occipital fossa’. Lombroso
claims to have recognised this feature as a characteristic found in inferior animals and
thought he had made the breakthrough:
This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all
of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of
the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of
primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the
enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the
palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages,
and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of
orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish
life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.
Consequently, Lombroso conducted thousands of post-mortem examinations and

anthropometric studies of prison inmates and non-criminals, leading him to the
conclusion that the criminal was, in natural reality, a human subspecies, with very
distinct physical and mental characteristics (see editions of L’Uomo delinquente, first
published in 1876). Lombroso constructed a four-fold classification: 1) born criminals,
those with true atavistic features, 2) insane criminals, including idiots, imbeciles, and
paranoiacs as well as epileptics and alcoholics, 3) occasional criminals or criminaloids,
whose crimes were explained largely by opportunity; and 4) criminal of passion who
commit crime because of honour, love or anger. They were propelled by a (temporary)
irresistible force. Later additional categories gave some allowance for the influence
of social factors and he speculated somewhat as to the interaction of genetic and
environmental influences (to some extent, a precursor to modern socio-biological
schemes). Although he went some way to developing a multiple factor approach he
never seems to have moved from his contention that the true or born criminal was
responsible for a large amount of criminal behaviour.
Lombroso’s work was subjected to intensive scrutiny by Charles Goring who published
The English convict in 1913, only four years after Lombroso’s death. Goring had employed
an expert statistician to administer the computations concerning the physical
differences between criminals and non-criminals but after eight years of research and
comparing some 3,000 English convicts with various control group. Goring concluded
that there was no difference between criminals and non-criminals except for statue
and body weight. Although Goring concluded this was evidence that criminals were
biologically inferior he failed to find a criminal type and heavily criticised Lombroso’s
work. Subsequently, the ascription of Lombroso as a founder of modern criminology
is based on the fact that his assertions reoriented modern thinking about crime from
a focus on the offence to a focus on the offender and redirected emphasis from the
crime to the criminal.
3.7.2 Raffaele Garofalo

Born a member of the Italian nobility, Raffaele Garofalo (1852–1934) went on to become
a magistrate, a professor of criminal law, and a prominent member of government.
Garofalo faced up to the epistemological problem that to have a properly scientific
approach to the study of crime it was necessary to have a meaningful definition of
crime in positivistic terms; one that re-positioned crime as a natural phenomena in the
natural world. He distinguished between ‘natural crimes’, to which Garofalo attached
great importance, and ‘police crimes’, a residual category of lesser importance.
‘Natural crimes’ are those which violate two basic ‘altruistic sentiments’, pity
(revulsion against the voluntary infliction of suffering on others) and probity (respect
for the property rights of others). ‘Police offences’ are behaviours that do not offend
these altruistic sentiments but are nonetheless called ‘criminal’ by law. Natural crimes
were important both for being more serious and because the category itself provided
a unifying principle, connecting the criminal law and natural social processes.
In Criminology (1885: English translation 1914) Garofalo criticised Lombroso’s theories

as inadequate as an explanation for the ‘natural crimes’ of ‘true criminals’, although he
concluded that criminals have ‘regressive characteristics’ indicating a ‘lower degree
of advancement’. True criminals lacked the basic altruistic sentiments and were thus
ill-suited for society. They were, in short an evolutionary mismatch and the solution to
this evolutionary problem is elimination.
In this way, the social power will effect an artificial selection similar to that which nature
effects by the death of individuals inassimilable to the particular conditions of the
environment in which they are born or to which they have been removed. Herein the state
will be simply following the example of nature.
While the classical theorists saw the symbolic value of punishments as offering a
means of deterring crime in the general population, Garofalo’s emphasis on Darwinian
reasoning saw society as a natural body that must adapt to the environment and
be protected against crime. The actions of the true criminals indicted their inability
to live according to the basic human sentiments necessary in the society and their
elimination served to protect society, for the lesser criminal incapacitation – by life
imprisonment or transportation would suffice. For Garofalo the society ruled over the
individual and the individual represented just a cell of the social body that could be
removed without much loss.
3.7.3 Enrico Ferri

Enrico Ferri (1856–1929) had a varied career as a university professor, trial lawyer,
Member of Parliament, newspaper editor, public lecturer, and author. He spent a year
studying with Lombroso and became his lifelong friend.
Ferri’s work always emphasised the interaction of social, economic and political
factors which contributed to crime but all of which worked at an individual level on
the predispositions of the person. In Ferri’s Criminal sociology crime was ‘the effect
of multiple causes’ that include anthropological, physical, and social factors. Such
factors produced criminals who were classified as: (1) born or instinctive, (2) insane, (3)
passional, (4) occasional, (5) habitual. The positive ‘science of criminality and of social
defence against it’ was easy to distinguish from the classical tradition.
The science of crimes and punishments was formerly a doctrinal exposition of the
syllogisms brought forth by the sole force of logical fantasy. Our School has made it a
science of positive observation, which, based on anthropology, psychology, and criminal
statistics as well as on criminal law and studies relative to imprisonment, becomes the
synthetic science to which I myself gave the name ‘criminal sociology’.
It is also fascinating to see the ambiguity of the relationship between knowledge

and politics which riddles positivism. While positivism claims to be value-free and
apolitical, when we see it in application as with Ferri, we can see a structure whereby
it is claimed that this knowledge is the ‘truth’ which must therefore be applied and
the strength of this claim overrules moral-political debate. Such a structure can give
rise to dire consequences. For most of his life, Ferri was a committed Marxist and was
a Member of Parliament for many years, he actually lost a professorship because of his
Marxist leanings. But if Lombroso was a slave to facts, Ferri was in awe of the principle
of determinism as in his attempted merger of Marxian and Darwinian principles into
conclusions that today seem highly dubious:
The Marxian doctrine of historical materialism ... according to which the economic
conditions ... determine ... both the moral sentiments and the political and legal
institutions of the same group is profoundly true. It is the fundamental law of positivist
sociology. Yet I think that this theory should be supplemented by admitting in the first
place that the economic conditions of each people are in turn the natural resultant of its
racial energies. (1917, p.118)
Throughout his life, Ferri attempted to integrate his positive science with political
change – he believed wholly in the constructivist project. The various attempts to
change the penal code were rejected because they constituted too great a change
from classical legal reasoning and, disappointed in socialism, Ferri turned to fascism as
the system most likely to implement the type of reforms he thought necessary.
Thorstin Sellin once said that fascism appealed to Ferri because it affirmed the primacy
of the state’s authority over the individual and constrained the excessive individualism
he had often criticised.
3.7.4 Legacy of the positive school

Garofalo and Ferri saw science and the opinions of scientists as the tools by which
society would change itself and rule over individuals. The decisions of panels and
like bodies judging according to their positivist principles would not include the
opinions of those they were evaluating and judging, nor the opinion of the victim or
other members of the public. Part of their legacy was a trend towards classification
and specialised treatment, with a demand for specialised institutions. Positivism may
also be linked to a change from the classical ideas on coercive policies towards the
disreputable poor, to the development of welfare policy patterned by a deep alteration
in conceptions of human nature and social agency. Many recent critics from the
conservative side have blamed forms of positivism for a de-moralising of criminality.
The classical school helped to create the practical and administrative systems for
processing offenders. It created a system capable of handling large numbers and a
process that could adapt to changing social sensibilities. Judges were curtailed in
their ability to dispense discretionary judgments and this protected the offender
from procedural injustice. Classicism provides sets of procedures which aim to ensure
uniformity and predictability – many have argued, however, that the theory does not
really face up to the fact that the criminal laws themselves may be arbitrary and that
equal treatment of unequal circumstances may itself be unjust. Traditional positivism
also did not put the creation of criminal laws onto the questions to be analysed and
it was left until the advent of more critical approaches in the 1960s and 1970s for this
issue to be raised.
3.8 The return of classicism: populist conservative criminology

and contemporary rational action theories
Essential reading
¢ Burke, Chapter 3 ‘Populist conservative criminology’ and Chapter 4
‘Contemporary rational actor theories’.
As you read, consider the meaning of:

u Routine action theory.
u Situation crime prevention.
To what extent does popularist conservativism rely on ‘stylised facts’ and good
theatre?
3.9 Are the perspectives contradictory or can they be

combined?
Classical criminology stresses agency, free will and rational calculation. Positivism
looks for factors outside of the persons’ control. One, relatively recent, attempt to
reconcile the approaches was made by Gottfredson and Hirschi in A general theory of
crime (1990, Stanford University Press).
In their words, the classical tradition began with a ‘general theory of human behaviour,
and quickly narrowed its attention to government crime control policy’. The positivist
tradition began as ‘a general method of research’, but without a theory of behaviour
that would define its dependent variable, it accepted the classical focus on crime. As
a result, positivism became a rather meaningless search for, and analysis of variables
without any overriding connection. While they admitted that in pure classical theory
the persons who committed criminal acts had no particular propensities they derived
from the classical tradition an idea of crime. Crime to them were acts of force or fraud
undertaken in pursuit of self-interest; working analytically through various features
that had been connected with particular forms of crime, they decided to ascribe stable
individual differences in criminal behaviour to the central concept of self-control. Self-
control was seen as a variable propensity of individuals and the lesser the amount of
self-control an individual possessed, the more likely an individual would be to engage
in crime. Note, however, that their characteristics of what crimes are involved the
following. Crimes:
u provide immediate gratification desires;
u provide easy or simple gratification desires; and involve

u acts which were exciting, risky, or thrilling;
u provided few or major long-term benefits;
u required little skill or planning by the perpetrator; but often
u resulted in pain or discomfort for the victim.
Where did they derive these characteristics? From their analysis of criminal statistics.
From their idea of the ‘data’ of events that are recorded as crimes. We look at whether
this is trustworthy in Chapter 4.
Activity 3.2
Address the following questions.
1. What were the background conditions for the rise of classical criminology?
What were the key influences upon Beccaria and how did Beccaria use previous
writers to fashion a new legitimacy for criminal justice?
2. What assumptions concerning human nature underlie classicism? In what way

does the classical perspective believe it is possible to control human behaviour?
Does it seek to eliminate crime or simply manage it?
3. What principles of punishment are inherent in the perspective? Are these still
appropriate today?
4. What accounts for the continuing appeal of classicism? Why do you think we
have seen a redeployment of classical ideas in the last 15 or so years?

1. ‘The differences between the classical and positive schools in criminology are
grounded not only in differing conceptions of human nature but also different
approaches to government.’
Discuss.
2. ‘Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat
them.’
Discuss in relation to the academic development of the classical tradition in

criminology.
3. ‘The classical conception of crime as rational action is unscientific and has

survived only because of its ideological utility.’
Discuss.
4. EITHER
‘Crimes need no fancy explanations: they occur whenever social control is weak
and opportunities present themselves.’
Discuss. [Note: this is a good example of a question that draws upon different
parts of the course, from social control theory, common-sense explanations, and
opportunity theory.]
OR
What makes the assumptions of the classical perspective in criminology so

appealing?
5. ‘Positivist criminology never escaped from the basic assumptions of classical

criminology. It remained wedded to the need to correct crime and was thereby
unable to appreciate the meaning of crime to the offender.’
Discuss.
6. ‘The assumptions underlying the classical criminological conception of crime

as rational action continue to guide the criminal justice system because they
accord to a greater degree than those of positivism with our moral intuitions.’
Discuss.
4 Sources of criminological data: official criminal
statistics and their limitations
Contents
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.2 The dream of criminal statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.3 Durkheim: suicide as the paradigm example of positivism and statistics . 48
4.4 Role of NGOs and other to complement criminal statistics . . . . . . . . 50
4.5 Using statistics in search for criminality: the case of the Chicago school of
sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.6 Interpreting rises or declines in official statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Essential reading
For reading on the topic:

¢ Hope, Tim Criminology (Oxford University Press, 2013) third edition [ISBN
9780199691296] Chapter 3 ‘What do crime statistics tell us?’ on the VLE.
For two activities:

¢ Young, Jock The criminological imagination (Polity, 2011) [ISBN 9780745641072]
Chapter 6 ‘Giuliani and the New York miracle’, on the VLE.
Further reading
¢ Morrison, Wayne, Theoretical criminology (Cavendish, 1995) Chapter 8
‘Criminological positivism III: statistics, quantifying the moral health of society
and calculating nature’s laws’.
Learning objectives
By the end of this chapter and the relevant readings you should be able to:
u discuss the idea of the social construction of data
u locate and understand the crime statistics in the UK and your own country (if
outside the UK)
u discuss the official criminal statistics, the problems with them and alternative
indices
u adopt a critical reading of claims that changing rates of crime in official statistics
are a true picture of the state of crime
u analyse claims made that statistics can demonstrate that particular criminal
justice strategies work or not, with particular reference to the New York
experience
u think about a global picture, that is can we conceive of global crime?
u understand the need for new definitions for events, such as the rise of ‘genocide’.
Criminology 4 Sources of criminological data: official criminal statistics and their limitations page 45
4.1 Introduction
The key issues for this topic revolve around two basic questions:
1. Do we have reliable data on the extent of crime (even as officially defined by law)
and data which can be used to explain crime?
2. What is the nature of criminal statistics and alternative indices?
The issues involved in this chapter are basic to the whole enterprise of criminology.
Specifically, positive criminology assumes:
u crime is a set of ‘facts’;
u through analysing such facts, for example, as presented in criminal statistics, the
criminologist can show the extent of crime and build theories of criminal activity;
u these theories reflect underlying natural states of affairs.
Thus the resulting theory, whether written in terms of social, biological or

psychological states of affairs will involve defining new facts or causal processes
which are based on the original facts analysed. Take, as an example, the over-
representation of black citizens in the official crime statistics of the United States.
This over-representation is itself a fact. But from the over-representation in the
statistics, positivism moves to explain this as a ‘fact of criminality’, as if the statistics
unproblematically reflected an underlying reality, a reality to be explained in terms of
differential socialisation, body size, IQ, or involvement in subcultures of violence and
delinquency to give some examples. However, do the official statistics actually reflect
an underlying reality of crime and criminality?
4.1.1 Criminal statistics and their interpretation

There is a distinction between two main types of criminal statistics:
u Official statistics – this reflects crime as reported to the police and then processed
by the criminal justice system. And alternative indices, such as
u Victim surveys – for example, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW,
formerly the British Crime Survey, BCS). These statistics are based on interviews and
can provide a better reflection of the true extent of crime. For the crime types it
covers, the crime survey can provide a better reflection of the true extent of crime
because it includes crimes that are not reported to the police. The CSEW count
also gives a better indication of trends in crime over time because it is unaffected
by changes in levels of reporting to the police and in police recording practices.
But, of course, victim surveys are focused on crimes experienced by individuals
and excludes corporate victims. Note, however, that commercial or business
victimisation surveys have begun in the UK (e.g. the 2014 Commercial Victimisation
Survey).
England and Wales

Official crime statistics can be found on the Government website for the Office of
National Statistics
https://data.gov.uk/publisher/office-for-national-statistics You can download the

current crime in England and Wales year as PDF documents from the Office of National
Statistics website.
Activity 4.1
Go to the webpage https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/
crimeandjustice/methodologies/crimeandjusticemethodology#user-guides
Open:
1. User guide to criminal statistics
What advice is given there?

How does the guide explain statistics are arrived at and how does this compare
with the CSEW?
Note: Following an assessment of ONS crime statistics by the UK Statistics Authority,
the statistics based on police recorded crime data were found not to meet the
required standard for designation as national statistics. The full assessment report
can be found on the UK Statistics Authority website. Data from the Crime Survey for
England and Wales continue to be badged as national statistics but warnings as to
their reliability have been issued.
Why?
Look at the 16 requirements that are to be addressed to improve the reliability of
the statistics at https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/
images-assessmentreport268statisticsoncrimeinenglandandwale_tcm97-43508-1.pdf
u Do you consider these to be (a) not really affecting the reliability, (b) minor issues
of a technical matter, or (c) very serious issues that must be addressed to ensure
public confidence in the crime statistics?
u What were the two categories of ‘crime’ that the Statistics Authority was most
concerned about ‘under-reporting’?
u What use is made of the CSEW in relation to the crime statistics?
2. Go to the Action Plan to address requirements from UK Statistics Authority
Assessment: Progress update.
Feedback
Since the assessment was carried out, the Criminal Justice Inspectorate has
conducted various inspections of crime recording in police forces in England and
Wales. They also concluded that the level of under-recording of reports of crime
was ‘unacceptable’ (estimating that one in five offences that should have been
recorded as crimes were not) and made a number of recommendations to improve
recording. As of mid- 2015 re-assessment of crime statistics will not be conducted
until sustained and satisfactory evidence of improvements in the quality of police
recorded crime data is approved.
The HMIC (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary) inspections showed
evidence that the police have taken steps to improve recording suggesting that
recent increases seen in the number of crimes recorded by the police reflect
improvements in police compliance with recording standards, particularly in the
categories of violence against the person and sexual offences where the level of
under-recording observed by HMIC was most pronounced.
Further evidence of improvements in police recorded crime is provided through
comparisons with the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). Previous ONS
analysis of variation in crime trends highlighted a growing gap between police
recorded crime and the CSEW between 2007/08 and 2012/13. However, more
recently the gap between the two data series has narrowed, and the release of
crime statistics for the year ending December 2014 showed a further narrowing.
(Look at section 4.2 of the User Guide to Crime Statistics in England and Wales.)
4.2 The dream of criminal statistics

To understand the impact of defects in the statistics on both public confidence and
academic use of them it is necessary to consider their history. Early proponents of
social statistics expected them to be a powerful tool of analysis and policy. Social
technocrats saw statistics as ‘fact-gathering to aid policy’. As Paul Wiles points out
writers such as William Petty and John Graunt hoped as early as the 17th century that
such statistics would be crucial in the making of policy decisions and in judging the
‘moral health’ of the nation. Consequently:
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England, Petty’s hope that his
‘Numbers, Weights, or Measures’ would make ‘intellectual arguments’ about the nature
of government superfluous, had become a cardinal part of the ideas of the political
economists.
Bentham’s scheme for Bills of Delinquency were to be a ‘political barometer’,

‘furnishing data for the legislator to work upon’. Thus criminal statistics were part of
the empiricists
genuine attempt[s] to go beyond the circle of our interpretations, to get beyond

subjectivity. The attempt is to reconstruct knowledge in such a way that there is no need
to make final appeal to readings or judgments which cannot be checked further… [to
obtain] a unit of information which is not the deliverance of a judgement, which has by
definition no element in it of reading or interpretation, which is a brute datum.
(Charles Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the sciences of man’, Philosophical papers, Vol II.)
Writing from within a Marxist perspective, Colin Sumner has pointed to the general
weakness of crass ‘empiricism’ in the traditional development of criminological
theory:
What seems to happen is that when a phenomenon is observed spontaneously, the

observer associates its aetiology with the circumstances in which it appears. For example,
in orthodox criminology, research of an empiricist kind has observed the coexistence
of poverty, criminal behaviour, broken family ties and delinquent juvenile gangs within
working class neighbourhoods. From this sighting criminological researchers have gone
on to correlate crime with poverty, broken homes, working class values etc. Rather than
seeing all these circumstances (including crime) as normal exigencies of life for a class
for a specific position within a particular social structure (and thus comprehending the
connections between social structure and class conditions) the theory-less researchers
took the appearances and attempted to make them explain each other. (Reading
ideologies: an investigation into a Marxist theory of ideology and law, 1979: 180.)
Yet many philosophers of science, such as Charles Taylor, believe that both rationalism
and empiricism fail to achieve such security for knowledge and see social theory as an
endless series of interpretative structures.
The underlying assumption of the project of securing pure statistics is that such
statistics and tables would provide an accurate reflection of real trends. That it would
be a ‘mirror of nature’, to borrow a term of the ‘pragmatic’ philosopher Richard Rorty,
and, additionally, the problem of crime could be reduced in some way to a simple
question of social engineering made easier by the feedback such statistics provided
on the effectiveness of policy. However, in his 1971 essay on ‘Criminal statistics and
sociological explanations of crime’ Paul Wiles opined that the early hopes were in vain:
In spite of comparatively full collection of officially published statistics, the brave hopes of
the nineteenth century have not been fulfilled. Crime in England has proved to be more
than a technical problem of social policy. Although some still cling to the belief that this
failure stems from technical defects in the statistics themselves, the “official” figures
seem doomed to remain very imperfect as instruments of social engineering. (Wiles, 1971:
201, essay in Crime and delinquency in Britain, W Carson & Paul Wiles (eds) London: Martin
Robertson)
Summary
The position we have reached is this:
u official rates of crime or deviance must be interpreted in terms of the processes

that have produced them
u this interpretation is a separate explanation from the explanation of the crime or

deviance itself.
At the least official crime rates arise from the interaction of events that may be
labelled as criminal actions and official reactions, both of which become dependent
variables which combine in different formations to give the end result.
Activity 4.2
Answer the following question: ‘which is the most violent country?’
Murders/year
United States (1999) 15,434
Taiwan (1996) 1785
Estonia (1994) 423
Japan (1994) 770
England & Wales (1997) 725
Figures based on data obtained from http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_

gcgvinco.html
Feedback: at end of next section.
(Note: before doing this do you think there is any problem with the question?)
4.3 Durkheim: suicide as the paradigm example of positivism

and statistics
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the French theorist Emile Durkheim
developed an analysis of suicide that has become a motif in the discussions
concerning constructing positivist theories upon statistical data. Durkheim argued
that suicide, which was considered a personal act of the will of an actor, was actually
highly dependent upon a range of social factors. By measuring the rates of suicide for
various groups and correlating these with indices of social factors, Durkheim argued
he could prove the social laws of suicide. He did not regard the will of an individual as
free but heavily constrained by a set of social factors that flow through him and these
constituted ‘real laws [which] are discoverable’. The subject is constrained by ‘real,
living, active forces, which, because of the way they determine the individual, prove
their independence of him’. (Suicide: a study in sociology, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London, 1970.) There are types of suicide determined by their own configurations of
‘social facts’ (e.g. the ‘egoistic’).
Durkheim built up his distinctions on the basis of treating the official rates as given.
The criticisms of Durkheim mirror those that positivist approaches to criminal
statistics suffered generally.
First, the positivist self-criticism: the data Durkheim analysed was official statistics
from the 1840s to the 1870s and this information is subject to error. Errors of collection
and reportage thus prejudice the analysis through data fault. Similarly, much of
subsequent criminological investigation can be seen as an attempt to explain the
official crime statistics – if these are suspect then the whole analysis is also. The
positivists’ message is to correct such errors and to provide actual data as ‘true
facts’ upon which to join correlations of ‘observable occurrences’. Such alternative
measures as self-report or victim studies are relied upon to correct the picture the
official statistics give.
Secondly, a board criticism that we term the interactionist approach. Such statistics
are never capable of conversion into independent ‘real facts’ or ‘actual empirical data’
at all since the original or basic data involve a process of interpretation and symbolic
construction of meaning which is unable to be analysed by positivist methodology
other than spuriously.
The interactionist approach came to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s and was a
general criticism of positivism and ‘constructionist’ approach to the way social reality
was built up. In understanding suicide, Atkinson concentrates upon the ‘process’ of
categorising deaths as ‘suicide’. He rejects the objectivity of a real rate of suicide that
would provide absolutely secure material for analysis. Instead, coroners interact with
the situations surrounding death and their courts interpret events producing suicide
rates as a result of the interaction of their ‘common-sense’ theories of suicide with the
material presented to them. Coroners bring sets of narrative expectations, or patterns
of cultural history, which if the material fits, mean that a suicide will most likely be
registered. If not then further investigation is called for or no suicide is found. [J.M.
Atkinson, ‘Societal Reaction to Suicide’, in S. Cohen (ed.), Images of deviance, Penguin
Books, Harmondsworth, 1971; and Discovering suicide, Macmillan, London, 1978. In
criminological literature, Aron V. Cicourel does a similar task with juvenile crime: The
social organization of juvenile justice, Heinemann, London, 1976.
As Harold Garfinkel (Studies in ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, 1967) argued, one

ought to ‘treat social facts as interactional accomplishments’. When common sense
may lead us to see certain ‘things’, ‘givens’ or ‘facts of life’ the interactional perspective
presents us with processes and we need to understand the processes through which
the perceived stable features of socially organised environments are continually
created and sustained.
Thus a general message: the categories of crime and criminal are not references
to ‘objective facts’, or mirror images of objective reality but are constructions of
meanings which come out of the interaction of certain situations. Importantly,
the question becomes ‘how do such meanings become generated? How is the
categorisation manufactured?’
Activity 4.3
1. What did Durkheim mean by the social laws of suicide? Can you think of any that
would be a contributing factor?
2. Why do you think there is such inherent trust in statistics and crime rates? Why
don’t people see them more as guides or guesstimates? What are the dangers of
this?
3. Concerning the ‘dark area of crime’, what proportion of sexual offences do

you think go unreported? Do you consider there to be any way of significantly
improving reporting rates? Can you think of other ‘dark areas’ of crime?
Feedback to Activity 4.2

The question asked was ‘Which is the most violent country?’ Now look at a different
table.
Annual murders/100,000 pop.

United States (1999) 5.70
Taiwan (1996) 8.12
Estonia (1994) 28.21
Japan (1994) 0.62
England & Wales (1997) 1.41
Figures based on data obtained from http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvinco.

html
So in these figures, the USA drop down to third and Estonia has an extraordinarily
high murder rate. One message would be that raw crime numbers do not permit
comparisons between places or over time. Crime rates (the number of crimes per
unit of population per year) do.
What of later figures?
United States (2010) 4.2

Taiwan unavailable
Estonia (2010) 5.2
Japan (2009) 0.37
England & Wales (2009) 1.16
Figures from www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violent-crime

Rates had fallen; in the case of Estonia dramatically. Therefore, a research question
arises, what was the situation in Estonia in the early 1990s that caused such a high
rate of violence?
However, return to the original question, it is cast in a common-sense point of view
but it is actually very narrow. Why is violence to be measured in homicide rates
only? Consider suicide and the USA: in 2014 the USA recorded 16, 108 homicides but
41,143 suicides. Guns were involved in around 15,000 of the homicides and 30,000
of the suicides.
There are other indices, such as those used in the annual Global Peace Index (GPI)
which measures the ‘peacefulness’ of nations based on levels of safety and security
in society, the extent of domestic and international conflict and the degree of
militarisation.
Their latest report (2015) concludes that the world has become less peaceful over
the course of the last eight years, with the gap between the most and least violent
widening. It estimates a world spending of $14.3tn (£9.1tn), or 13.4 per cent of global
GDP, as a result of violence in the last year – a figure which incorporates military
spending, losses from crime, internal security costs and losses from conflict. The
10 least peaceful nations on earth are 1. Syria; 2. Iraq; 3. Afghanistan; 4. South
Sudan; 5. Central African Republic; 6. Somalia; 7. Sudan; 8. DR Congo; 9. Pakistan; 10.
North Korea. In each, it is difficult to separate out ‘crime’ from terrorism, civil war,
external influences (in the case of the first three, the ‘war on terror’ by the USA and
others).
4.4 Role of NGOs and other to complement criminal statistics

The above example of the Global Peace Index (GPI) is only one example of the need
constantly to bear in mind the international dimensions to criminological issues.
The question of the adequacy of the official criminal statistics to correctly ‘picture’
victimisation and even the adequacy of ‘crime’ as an indicia of victimisation and harm
is a global issue. Anti-slavery International, for example, argues that slavery continues
today in one form or another in every country in the world. Its website lists the
following: from women forced into prostitution, children and adults forced to work in
agriculture, domestic work, or factories and sweatshops producing goods for global
supply chains, entire families forced to work for nothing to pay off generational debts;
or girls forced to marry older men, the illegal practice still blights contemporary world.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), around 21 million men,

women and children around the world are in a form of slavery.
Slavery exists when people are forced to work – through mental or physical threat;
owned or controlled by an ‘employer’, usually through mental or physical abuse or
the threat of abuse; dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as
‘property’; physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of
movement.
The term ‘slavery’ may not be used but it is found in forced labour and bonded labour;
human trafficking; descent-based slavery; the worst forms of child labour; forced
labour in supply chains; forced and early marriage and the exploitation of migrant
workers in conditions amounting to slavery.
Activity 4.4
Search online for the Official Criminal Statistics for your country.
How easy are they to obtain?
Now search for explanatory notes and criticisms?
Make notes on particular criticisms of your country.
Now search for international statistics? Where does your country rank in various
comparisons?
4.4.1 The spread of victim surveys

Victim surveys have spread around the world.
Do a web search for your country. How recent are they, i.e. when were they
introduced?
Most of these surveys demonstrate the internationalisation of the criminological

methodologies developed in Great Britain and the USA. For example, the first victim
survey in New Zealand was the New Zealand National Survey of Crime Victims 1996.
The survey drew heavily upon the techniques of the British Crime Survey. Respondents
were asked to report on, and provide detailed information about, particular forms of
criminal victimisation experienced by members of their household, or by themselves
personally, since 1 January 1995. The household offences the survey focused on were
residential burglary and vehicle offences, while the individual offences comprised
sexual offending, all forms of assault, threats, robbery, arson and wilful damage, and
other forms of theft.
Such surveys seek to ascertain the incidence of offending. The NZ survey estimated
a total of offences committed in 1995 (more than two million) far in excess of those
officially reported. Violent offending and sexual offending, including threats, made up
almost two-thirds of total offences disclosed in the survey; damage offences, which
would usually be described as vandalism, were the next most common category. In
terms of other property offending, homes and vehicles were targeted with about
equal degree of frequency, making up a little under 10 per cent of total offending.
One of the interesting calculations that it is possible to make is one of generalised risk,
thus the data suggest that, on average:
u one house in 14 will be burgled each year;
u one woman in 16 will be sexually violated each year; and
u one person in five will be the victim of some type of assault (excluding threats)
each year.
The particular ‘individualised’ risk of a person varies with locality and lifestyle. For
grievous assaults, other assaults and threats, the survey distinguished between
violence by those known well to the victim (including family violence) and violence
inflicted by casual acquaintances or strangers. Grievous assaults were roughly evenly
divided between the two groups. Other assaults and threats, on the other hand,
were almost three times more likely to be committed by those known well to the
victim than by strangers or casual acquaintances. This is a highly significant but not
unexpected finding; it demonstrates that, despite media preoccupation with violence
by strangers, people are in fact just as likely to be seriously injured by those they know
well and are much more at risk of violence from them.
What does one make of the high incidence of offences against the person? Did that
mean that this society was a particularly violent one? It should be noted that over a
third of such offences involve threats of violence or threats of damage to property,
which clearly vary enormously in seriousness and significance. Another third involve
sexual offences that have a large sampling error. These were both omitted from the
British Crime Survey. If these are excluded from the count, then assaults, wounding
and robbery make up 24.7per cent of total offences, only slightly above the figure of
20.8per cent reported in the 1996 British Crime Survey.
How did that survey make the comparison between survey offences and police
statistics?
One of the purposes of victim surveys is to identify what is commonly called the
‘dark figure’ of crime – offences which are unreported or which are reported but go
unrecorded. This was achieved by a comparison of the offences disclosed by survey
respondents with the police offence statistics over the same period. It is clear that
there was a large gap between the survey’s estimated offences and adjusted police
offence statistics. Indeed, police statistics were only 12.9 per cent of the offences
revealed in the survey.
There were two reasons for the gap between police statistics and the number of
offences disclosed in the survey. First, only a little over 40 per cent of the cases in
which we were able to collect information on reporting came to the notice of the
police, although this varied from a reporting rate of nearly 90 per cent in relation
to the theft or unlawful taking of a motor vehicle to a rate of only 33 per cent for
non-domestic assaults and 27 per cent for damage. Secondly, only about one third of
the offences which were reported ended up being recorded, although again the rate
varied substantially from one offence to another.
How does one relate to the picture offered by such surveys? Common to these
surveys the NZ survey disclosed that while the official statistics on some offences – for
example vehicle theft – seem to mirror the reality of offending experienced by victims
quite closely, they appear to grossly understate the incidence of other offending. In
particular, there appeared to be a vast amount of hidden sexual offending, assaults
and threats; most of these are unreported, out even when they are reported, they
often seem to fail to get into the official statistics, either because they are not
recorded at all or because they are recorded as something different from what our
respondents’ accounts suggested to be appropriate. The sexual offending data, of
course, are subject to substantial sampling error and might be questionable on that
ground. The data on assaults and threats, however, are much more robust and cannot
be dismissed as a product of the survey methodology. Does this mean that New
Zealand is confronting a law and order crisis? Again qualifications must be made.
Each country will vary in the defining of offences and the methodology for recording
events under categories. Thus although the proportion of total offences comprising
assaults, for example, in the NZ survey is greater than in the British Crime Survey, the
NZ practice of recording some discrete incidents as multiple offences undoubtedly
resulted in the counting of some assaults which in Britain would have been
encompassed within some other more serious offence.
Again, average incidence rates such as those so far discussed imply that crime is evenly
distributed. It is not; victimisation is, in fact, very unevenly distributed. As might be
expected, some socio-demographic groups are, on average, more at risk of being
victimised than others.
Victim surveys represent all incidents that are capable of being interpreted as
involving a criminal offence. In reality, the definitions are very wide, so that an
enormous range of conduct is captured. Assaults and threats, for example, encompass
a wide range of conduct, much of which is relatively trivial or could be regarded
as a normal (albeit undesirable) feature of everyday social interaction which most
people cope with without difficulty and stress, and which they would probably not
regard as the appropriate business of the police or the criminal justice system. Even
robbery (which had a surprisingly low reporting rate) may range from something as
comparably minor as one school pupil taking some lunch from another with some
implicit threat of force involved to something as serious as armed bank robbery.
In other words, technical definitions of offences are very broad; practical limitations
upon their scope are imposed not only by the working rules of the police but
also by the common-sense definitions which members of the public apply to the
conduct of others. It is thus by no means certain that respondents would define
as criminal at least some of the behaviour that they subsequently told the later
surveyor. Sometimes, they often believe that the matter is best handled without
official intervention. The researchers interpreted this to imply that ‘there seems to
be considerable support amongst victims for alternative processes and strategies for
responding to crime; the criminal justice system is seen, at least by some, as a last
resort and the offending which comes to its notice is only a small proportion of the
behaviour which could potentially do so’.
The next survey was held in 2001 and in 2006 it was renamed and re-organised
as New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey, reflecting a growing emphasis on risk,
personal security and sees ‘crime’ as one aspect of experiencing harm and threats
to well-being. By 2016 the emphasis on gauging the ‘harm’ of crime fitted in with a
government approach that sought data on where to engage in a social investment in
criminal justice. The statistical analysis was to fit into an Integrated Data Infrastructure
(IDI) governed by a social investment approach. The IDI linked administrative and
survey data at an individual level, giving information about the circumstances and
experiences of New Zealanders – for example, the experience of crime as victim
or perpetrator – and their use of public services, including education, health,
employment and income support. The aim was to achieve a person-centred picture
and to provide longitudinal data on individual circumstances and experiences giving
an image over the lifetime of individuals. This, it was hoped, would enable analysis
and monitoring of well-being and harm trajectories and support identifying high-risk
groups and the factors that confer risk and in turn help to assess the impact of social
interventions. (See ‘Review of the New Zealand crime and safety survey and other
statistical information about the social impact of crime: 2016’, found at http://www.
stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/crime_and_justice/review-
nzcss-social-impact-crime-2016.aspx)
4.5 Using statistics in search for criminality: the case of the

Chicago school of sociology
4.5.1 The city of Chicago

The Chicago school of sociology has exerted a huge influence in criminology. Chicago
was a place of immense change: in 1810 it was an insignificant frontier outpost
distinguished only by the presence of the backwater military station. However, the
crude settlement was situated in the middle of the great water-highways of the mid-
continent and, consequently, Chicago played an important role in the opening up
of the west. Chicago’s prime position resulted in a staggering gravitation of people,
industry and capital to the city. Business capital steadily poured into the city as
commercial enterprises benefited from Chicago’s role both as a ‘prairie seaport’ and
as the epicentre of a vast rail and canal network. People from all walks of life rushed
to share in the city’s prosperity and as a result, its population grew at a phenomenal
rate (the city population alone increased almost tenfold from 30,000 to 299,000
between 1850 and 1870). In just over a century Chicago had been transformed from an
insignificant trading post of some 300 people into one of the world’s greatest cities,
with a population exceeding 3 million. One of the striking features of this phenomenal
expansion was that Chicago became home to a panoply of ethnic groups: not only
was the city a point of gravitation for migrating African Americans keen to escape the
poverty and repression of the rural south, but it was also a destination point for large
numbers of European immigrants. Consequently, by 1900 Chicago was an amalgam of
disparate social worlds and conflicting identities. In this and many other ways, Chicago
came to represent the quintessential metropolis. Certainly no modern city was more
radically transformed by the processes of 19th century modernisation. Consequently,
nowhere is the rupture with the Old World more glaringly apparent.
Based at the University of Chicago, the Chicago school attempted to characterise the
modernity that was writ large in the streets of their city, and to identify the underlying
patterns and continuities that they believed were hidden amid the turmoil of urban
change. In particular, for Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and the other key members of
the school, the social effects of rapid industrialisation and population expansion were
central to the way they set about theorising the link between crime and the social
environment. (In this sense, their work always remains suspended between the social
and the environmental.)
Generally speaking, the importance of the work of the Chicago school of sociology
lies in two key features. First, their assertion that urban social problems – in particular
crime – were largely a result of the combination of environmental factors and social
conditioning, and not a product of racial, biological or genetic predisposition,
marked a major step forward in criminological thinking (see Gould 1981). Secondly,
the research methods developed and employed by the Chicagoans mixed statistical
analysis with fieldwork and ushered in a new era of systematised ethnographic social
science research.
The starting point for the Chicago school was Robert Park’s ‘theory of human ecology’.
Derived from the observations of early plant ecologists, Park postulated that human
communities were closely attuned to any natural environment in that their spatial
organisation and expansion was not the product of chance, but instead was patterned
and could be understood in terms analogous to the basic natural processes that occur
within any biological organism. Thus, Park maintained that the city could be thought
of as a super-organism; an amalgamation of a series of sub-populations differentiated
either by race, ethnicity, income group or spatial factors. Accordingly, each of these
groups acted ‘naturally’ in that they were underpinned by a collective or organic unity.
Furthermore, not only did each of these ‘natural areas’ have an integral role to play in
the city as a whole, but each community or business area was interrelated in a series
of ‘symbiotic relationships’. Close observation of these relationships enabled Park to
conclude that, just as is in any natural ecology, the sequence of ‘invasion-dominance-
succession’ was also in operation within the modern city. This bio-environmental
analogy extended to the Chicagoans’ lexicon, and phrases such as ‘symbiosis’, ‘social
ecology’, and ‘organism’ became their primary mode of expression.
To quote Robert Park:
The city may be regarded as a functional unit in which the relations among the individuals
that compose it are determined, not merely by the city’s physical structure, nor even by
the formal regulations of a local government, but rather more by the direct and indirect
interaction of the individuals upon one another. Considered from this point of view, the
urban community turns out to be something more than mere congeries of peoples and
institutions. On the contrary, its component elements, institutions, and persons are so
intimately bound up that the whole tends to assume the character of an organism, or to
use Herbert Spencer’s term a super-organism. (Park 1952: 118)
Park’s thoughts on the social ecology of the city were developed by his colleague,
Ernest Burgess (Park et al. 1925), who contended that modern cities expanded radially
from their inner-city core in a series of concentric circles. Burgess identified five main
zones within Chicago, each two miles wide. At the centre was the business district,
an area of low population and high property values. This in turn was encircled by the
‘zone in transition’; a place typically characterised by run-down housing, high-speed
immigration and emigration and high rates of poverty and disease. Surrounding that
zone, in turn, were zones of working-class and middle-class housing, and ultimately
the affluent suburbs. Of greatest importance to the Chicagoans, however, was the
zone in transition. This was the oldest section of the city and was comprised primarily
of dilapidated, ghetto housing that was unlikely to be renovated because of its
proximity to the busy commercial core. The affordability of accommodation in these
neighbourhoods ensured that the zone served as a temporary home for thousands
of immigrants too poor to afford lodgings elsewhere in Chicago. A pattern quickly
emerged whereby immigrant families remained in the zone only for as long as it took
them to become sufficiently economically established to move out and ‘invade’ an
area further from the business district. Consequently, this was an area of great flux
and restlessness – a place where pre-existing communal ties and traditional shared
folkways were undermined and impersonal relations prevailed. Such neighbourhoods
were sometimes described as ‘socially disorganised’, and it was within these
unintegrated urban spaces that the members of the Chicago school sought to unearth
the substantive causes of crime and deviance.
4.5.2 Shaw and the statistical challenge

Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (Shaw 1930; Shaw and McKay 1932; 1942; Shaw et
al. 1929) set about statistically testing the assumption that crime was greater in
‘disorganised areas’ than elsewhere in the city by plotting juvenile delinquency
court statistics onto Burgess’s concentric circle model. Their findings had immense
implications for criminology. Simply stated, they found that delinquency rates were
at their highest in run-down inner-city zones and progressively declined the further
one moved out into the more prosperous suburbs. Of critical importance, they
also identified that this spatial patterning of juvenile crime remained remarkably
stable (often over very long periods of time) irrespective of the neighbourhood’s
racial or national demographic composition. These findings allowed Shaw and
McKay to conclude that delinquency was a product of sociological factors within the
zone of transition rather than individual pathology or any inherent ethnic or racial
characteristics. This was a momentous breakthrough that did much to dispel earlier
criminological theories which located the root cause of crime within the individual.
Having established this important position, Shaw and McKay went on to claim that
socially disorganised neighbourhoods perpetuated a situation in which delinquent
behaviour patterns are ‘culturally transmitted’. In contrast to orderly neighbourhoods
where community integration is strong and ‘conventional values’ are deeply ingrained,
in disorganised environments – because of the paucity of supervision and the collapse
of community provisions – the prevailing value system is likely to be both conducive
to, and supportive of, delinquent behaviour. In other words, criminal conventions and
delinquent traditions are ‘transmitted down through successive generations of boys
much the same way that language and other social forms are transmitted’ (1932: 174).
This observation, along with Edwin Sutherland’s (1942) related theory of differential
association, was an important strand in subsequent criminological theories that
attempted to account for crime by reference to deviant subcultures.
As Finestone summarised:
Shaw was innovative. First, he had succeeded in discovering a sociological idiom for the
depiction of delinquent behaviour. The issue for sociological research was no longer
that of searching for some nebulous behavioural identity entitled delinquency, but of
describing and accounting for certain distinctive patterns of group behaviour. (Finestone
1976: 80)
Second, the innovative nature of the fieldwork methods employed by the various
members of the Chicago school ushered in a new era of social science research
practice. For, not only statistical studies but the school’s reliance upon personal
experience and the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of modern social life
raised the profile of ethnography and other related qualitative research practices
within the developing field of sociological inquiry.
The Chicagoans assiduously set about researching the city’s many social problems. The
initial impetus for this approach was provided by the aforementioned Robert Park, a
former newspaper journalist and advocate of first-hand data-collection. His followers
quickly took up the challenge, proceeding from the premise that the best way to
identify the root causes of social problems such as crime was by close observation
of the social processes intrinsic to urban existence. To facilitate this task the school
developed innovative new research methods such as participant-observation, the
individual case history and the focused first-hand interview. Such techniques enabled
the Chicagoans to ‘enter the world of the deviant’ and compile ethnographic data on
everything from hobos and taxi-dance girls, to racketeers and street-gang members.
The result was a series of stunning qualitative studies that not only provided great
insight into many diverse urban subcultures, but also went a long way to establishing
a theorised methodology for studying social action. This methodological approach,
initially oriented to the city environment, became generalised as the ‘appreciative’
tradition (see Matza 1969: 24–40, 70–73). (The influence of this method can clearly be
seen in subsequent writers of the labelling perspective, such as Howard Becker: see
Chapter 6 of this subject guide.)
Because of the strides made in these two key areas, the work of the Chicago school
has had a considerable influence on the development of criminological theory.
In particular, and as stated earlier, it helped give structure to the then fledgling
discipline of sociology. By developing innovative research methodologies, the school
laid the foundations for a new type of ‘appreciative’, reflexive qualitative analysis.
More importantly, by identifying the important relationship between environmental
factors and crime, the school greatly compromised the (then still popular) belief
that criminality was a product of innate biological or pathological factors. Vitally,
it established the importance of detailed appreciation of the social life-worlds of
individuals for understanding the meaningfulness of their behaviour. Despite its many
achievements, however, the school has not been without its critics.
4.5.3 Criticism of the ecological model

A common criticism, challenging the usefulness of the ecological model is that the
theory of human ecology contained certain fallacious assumptions – not least that the
work of the Chicagoans (in particular that of Shaw and McKay) implied that individual
action can be explained solely by the larger environment in which that individual
resided. This later famously became known as the ‘ecological fallacy’. Similarly, the
key concept of ‘social disorganisation’ has been questioned on the grounds that it
was held by the Chicagoans to be both the cause of delinquency, and the proof that it
existed. This tautological ‘like-causes-like’ fallacy today is recognised as fundamentally
flawed.
Major reservations have also been expressed about the wisdom of basing empirical
research into juvenile delinquency upon official statistics. Aside from the obvious
criticism that Shaw and McKay consistently failed to acknowledge that crime rates are
always the product of social construction, the ‘delinquency areas’ scrutinised in their
research were often locations in which delinquents resided and thus not necessarily
the same neighbourhoods in which they committed their crimes.
A further criticism concerns the failure of the Chicagoans to place the everyday world
of crime and deviance into the wider economic or political context (see Schwendinger
and Schwendinger 1974; Snodgrass 1976; Sumner 1994). So concerned were Park and
his followers with the day-to-day processes of urban life and the ways in which these
concerns impinged upon and contributed to crime in the city that they neglected to
consider fully the underlying forces of capitalist development that also played a major
role in shaping social life and determining patterns of urban segregation in Chicago.
References
¢ Finestone, H. Victims of change: juvenile delinquents in American society
(Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1976).
¢ Matza, D. Becoming deviant (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969).
¢ Park, R.E., E.W. Burgess and R.D. McKenzie (eds) The city (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1925).
¢ Park, R.E. Human communities (Glencoe, I.L.L.: The Free Press, 1952).
¢ Schwendinger, H. and J.R. Schwendinger The sociologists of the chair: a radical

analysis of the formative years of North American sociology (New York: Basic
Books, 1974).
¢ Shaw, C.R. The jackroller: a delinquent boy’s own story (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1930).
¢ Shaw, C.R. and H.D. McKay Social factors in juvenile delinquency (Washington D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1932).
¢ Shaw, C.R. and H.D. McKay Juvenile delinquency and urban areas (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1942).
¢ Shaw, C.R., F.M. Zorbaugh, H.D. McKay and L.S. Cottrell Delinquency areas: a study
of the geographic distribution of school truants, juvenile delinquents, and adult
offenders in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929).
¢ Snodgrass, J. (1976) ‘Clifford R Shaw and Henry D McKay: Chicago criminologists’

British Journal of Criminology 16 (1) 1–19.
¢ Sumner, C. The sociology of deviance: an obituary (Buckingham: Open University

Press, 1994).
¢ Sutherland, E. Principles of criminology (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1942).

4.6 Interpreting rises or declines in official statistics
4.6.1 Case study: New York
Essential reading
¢ Young, The criminological imagination, Chapter 6 ‘Giuliani and the New York
miracle’. Extracted and available on the VLE.
Background:
After several decades of rising crime and a growing rhetoric of either ‘nothing works’
or the need to ‘get tough on criminals’, crime rates in the USA and Europe have had a
decade and more of real decline. What processes are at work?
New York City has come to stand as an indicator of broader trends.
In the late 1990s New York City recorded less than 1,000 murders in a year for the first
time in over two decades; reported crime fell more than 43 per cent in the city in the
later 1990s, and it has been noted that New York City alone, with 3 per cent of the
American population, accounts for a large part of the national plunge in crime. While
New Yorkers may not fear murder on a day-to-day basis, something they do constantly
fear — car theft — shows an equally astonishing drop from 147,000 in 1990 to 60,000 in
1996, and a further 20 per cent drop in the first quarter of 1997.
There is considerable variation in accounts for this decline. Among candidates:
u the decline of crack cocaine use;
u the economic upturn; and
u a change in the policing strategy involving more aggressive policing strategies and
the rise of ‘zero tolerance’.
Economic upturn seems only to explain a small change, the growth in the American
economy was gradual but sustained over a number of years, for most of which crime
increased. Moreover, there was not much of an economic upturn in New York City
for the unskilled and less educated who contribute most to crime. Indeed, the city’s
unemployment rates have remained persistently high, much higher than the national
average. But both the decline of usage in crack cocaine and changes in policing may
have had a large effect.
A great deal of effort was put into explaining this in terms of a new policing strategy
implemented in New York supposedly based on a theory called the ‘broken windows’
theory. First expressed by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George
Kelling in an article for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, the theory holds that if someone
breaks a window in a building and it is not quickly repaired, others will be emboldened
to break more windows. Eventually, the broken windows create a sense of disorder
that attracts criminals, who thrive in conditions of public apathy and neglect.
The theory was based on a 1969 experiment conducted by Stanford University

psychologist Philip Zimbardo. He took two identical cars, placing one on a street in a
middle-class Palo Alto neighbourhood and the other in a tougher neighbourhood in
the Bronx. The car in the Bronx which had no licence plate on it and was parked with
its bonnet up was stripped within a day. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for a week,
until Zimbardo smashed one of its windows with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours
it was stripped.
James Q. Wilson, a professor of public policy at UCLA and leading proponent of Right
Realism presented the case thus: ‘There are two sources of disorder: offenders and
physical disorder. [Both] lead people to believe the neighbourhood is run down. The
central problem for police is to take the small signs of disorder seriously and deal
with them. That could be dealing with small-time offenders, or dealing with physical
disorder, or some combination of both.’
In the mainstream account of NY, former Commissioner Bratton used this approach
when he was commanding the New York Transit Police. Bratton wrote in an article for
the Journal of Law and Policy, in which he claimed that because subway police did not
focus on ‘low-level crimes’, ‘subway disorder and subway crime exploded in the late
1980s. Chronic fare evaders, violators of transit regulations, aggressive panhandlers,
homeless substance abusers and illegal vendors hawking goods on station platforms
all contributed to an atmosphere of disorder, even chaos, in the subways. Thus he
claimed to be ‘convinced that disorder was a key ingredient in the steeply rising
robbery rate, as criminals of opportunity, including many youthful offenders looked
upon the subway as a place where they could get away with anything.’
Bratton called on all transit police to enforce ‘quality of life’ laws and by targeting
fare-beaters – people who jump subway turnstiles without paying. It turned out that
the people who broke the law by jumping turnstiles were often the same people who
broke the law by robbing subway riders. The claimed result: a dramatic drop in crime
on the subway.
Certainly there was a real and perceived increase in feelings of security. From this
experience the task appeared to widen out the process: the claim was that you could
stop the major offences by catching minor offenders. Another expression for this was
to show ‘zero tolerance’ on minor offences so that the larger offences would not then
take place.
In January 1994, newly elected New York Mayor Rudolp Giuliani put Bratton in charge of
the NYPD. Giuliani hired Bratton because of his interpretation of the broken windows
theory and NY was now seen as a social experiment in policing.
Five thousand more police were put on the street, and officers were told to enforce
nuisance laws: under this zero-tolerance campaign, ‘quality of life’ patrols snared the
drunks, drug users and taggers. Police identified ‘hot spots’ of gun violence by using
crime maps. In those areas, special teams came in to enforce nuisance laws, frisking
everyone for the slightest infractions in an effort to find the people with the guns.
There were twice-weekly strategy sessions, known as Comstat, which focused the
strategy of the department’s top command on street crime patterns. Each precinct
was questioned about its crime-fighting strategy every five weeks, and precinct
captains were grilled if their crime rates went up.
The rhetoric was for top police executives to pay attention to street-level crime and was
held to be a success. But in other cities where police departments have applied versions
of the broken windows theory – usually choosing to target physical disorder, rather than
petty criminals – it has not proven to be a great success. The resulting programmes went
by a host of names: Weed and Seed, Clean Sweep Operation CLEAN. Typically, they share
the strategy of one-time sweept through high-crime areas during which the obvious
drug and prostitution arrests are made. The area having thus been ‘weeded’, is then
‘seeded’ by a range of city agencies, which fix streetlights, tear down vacant buildings
haul away abandoned cars and make other improvements to the physical environment.
The general claim is that it is a holistic approach, but others claim it only focuses on the
symptoms of social disorder without addressing basic conditions.
It is also an approach that takes the broken windows theory quite literally: by fixing
the windows, you deter crime. When the sanitation workers and the code enforcers
and the maintenance workers leave, the windows tend to get broken again. Targeted
areas tend to deteriorate quickly. Dallas police, for example, abandoned their
Operation CLEAN strategy in 1991 because crime rates in six of the seven target areas
rose inexorably after an initial, hopeful drop. Baltimore housing police have seen the
same thing happen in the city’s eight public housing high-rises since they instituted
a similar strategy. Their statistics did go down but then the housing authority put
its spruced-up buildings in the hands of a private security firm, and the drug dealers
quickly moved back in.
However, the defenders of broken windows and zero tolerance say that the basic
problems are not problems local policy can solve, but local efforts can tackle local
conditions of everyday life and in doing this also deter more serious criminals.
We can, however, be sceptical that police work alone is responsible for what the
headlines have called a ‘suddenly safer New York’; complaints against the police also
increased dramatically. Since other cities then showed similar, though less spectacular,
drop in reported crime, a general consensus formed around the notion that urban
America was going through a crime correction, much like the stock market. Driven by
the aberrant violence of the crack cocaine industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
crime just got too high, by this theory. What goes up must come down.
Other experts are critical of New York’s tactics; citizen complaints of police abuse had
drastically increased. Civil libertarians claimed that the courts became backlogged
because the NYPD was locking up unlicensed vendors and others accused of
extremely minor offences. Were they just making problems for later? As Jerome Miller,
executive director of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, a non-profit
organisation that opposes the nation’s rising rates of incarceration, put it: ‘This broken
window theory can quickly deteriorate into the broken head theory. And don’t kid
yourself that that’s not what’s going on. Making all these arrests is going to give a large
number of criminal records to large numbers of poor people. So you make people less
employable. And that is going to come back to haunt them later.’
Other commentators are also not impressed with the NYPD’s interpretation of the
broken window theory either. There are complaints of rigged figures, and that it has
been a self-promoting, publicity driven exercise.
To each of these arguments, New York police retorted. In 1993, one out of every 438
subway fare-beaters arrested was carrying a loaded gun. By 1998, only one out of
every 1034 was armed – evidence, it is claimed, that the bad guys are leaving their
guns at home. Indeed, the New York strategy may have been too successful. In the end
Bratton resigned amid rumours that Giuliani forced him out because he was getting
all the credit for engineering the drop in crime. He and Maple, a top deputy, have since
accepted posts in the private sector.
Is the city they left behind really safer? The statistics say it is. And the police certainly
seem happier. Many residents also seem to be satisfied.
The local government claimed the credit for these results. Mayor Giuliani successfully
traded upon the reduction in crime when he sought reselection. However, what of
changes elsewhere?
There has been a shift nationwide to more community policing; but the strategies vary
and the broken windows idea is only one of the policing strategies. Crime rates also
fell in other cities (for example, San Francisco) where alternative strategies are used.
In general, the move to community policing with some versions of broken windows
seems an attractive theory. Even if it does not reduce serious crime, it contributes to a
better environment.
But there have been other changes in policing and crime control that make it difficult
to pinpoint one cause for the lower crime rates.
And there have also been other changes, owing nothing to government but to changes
in business practice. Criminologists call this ‘routine action’ theory, such as the decline
in the use of cash and the rise of plastic money – and citizens taking more precautions
with their property (car alarms, household security).
Activity 4.5
Read Young, The criminological imagination, Chapter 6 ‘Giuliani and the New York
miracle’.
Answer the following questions:
1. Do you find the broken window theory persuasive? Why?
2. Do you think a zero tolerance approach would improve crime rates or make
them worse because people who would previously not have records would
now be considered criminals and so are more likely to commit crime than they
otherwise would?
3. In the New York case study, do you believe that the city was safer, i.e. no
‘hookers’ (street prostitutes) on Lexington Avenue etc., or do you think the
rise in the number of police patrols and other measures lulled people into a
perceived or false sense of security?
4. Why do you think mainstream American criminologists only look at local trends
rather than crime as a worldwide phenomenon?
5. Why does Young suggest that mainstream criminologists only use cultural
explanations as a last resort?
6. In light of the revelations made by Young on the grouping of ethnicities and

races, do you consider popular terms such as ‘black on black crime’ to be myths?
7. Why do you think the UK did not react as the USA did to its dramatic fall in crime
rates?
8. What are the dangers, in terms of accurate statistics, associated with defining
deviancy up?
9. Do you think crime rates are indeed linked to anti-social behaviour? If so, to
what extent? Is there a point at which they no longer converge?

1. What purposes are served by measuring crime? Do the official criminal statistics,
together with Crime Surveys, achieve these desired goals?
2. What problems are there in using official crime statistics as a basis for
criminological explanations? Can these problems be alleviated?
3. To what extent is it prudent to base criminal justice policy on the official

statistics? Do alternative measures remedy any problems with using the official
statistics?
4. ‘Official crime statistics give so distorted a view of the real trends and patterns
in criminal behaviour that they can be of no use in criminological explanation.’
Critically assess this claim.

5 Psychology and crime
Contents
Introduction: ‘journeying into the mind of the criminal’ . . . . . . . . . 62
5.1 Historical context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5.2 ‘Nature’ versus ‘nurture’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
5.3 Crime and psychoanalytic theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5.4 Social learning and behavioural theories of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
5.5 Trait-based personality theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5.6 Cognitive theories of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
5.7 Contemporary narrative approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Introduction: ‘journeying into the mind of the criminal’

In Chapter 3 we stressed that modern criminology developed in the contrasting
assumptions of the classical school and the positivist tradition. The classical school
held an image of the offender as a rational calculator, the offender was a chosen
subject of the law and therefore was able to be held responsible for their choices.
But it has been long accepted that sometimes some people simply are not in a fit
mental state. Texts on legal history point out that some form of ‘insanity’ has always
been recognised by the law as depriving individuals of the rationality required for
the system to hold them properly accountable for their actions. In his history of
insanity and the criminal law, Walker (1968, Crime and insanity in England: the historical
perspective. vol.1,) points out that in Norman times insanity was not seen as a defence
in itself but a special circumstance in which the jury would deliver a guilty verdict and
refer the defendant to the king for a pardon. (The famous work of Bracton in the 12th
century contains a plea that describes the ‘insane’ as ‘without sense and reason’ and
thus they could ‘no more commit a tort or a felony than a brute animal’.)
Modern legal systems find no conceptual difficulty in allowing a plea of insanity

as either a defence or as a mitigation: note that while not criminally liable or only
partially liable, the person is then sent to a different regime of control, in most cases
a secure mental hospital or an institution for the criminally insane usually for an
indeterminate period.
In England, the famous case of M’Naghten (M’Naghten’s Case [1843] All ER Rep 229)
resulted in a set of ‘rules’ that have provided – with some modifications – a test
for criminal liability in relation to mentally disordered defendants in common law
jurisdictions ever since. If satisfied, the court may return a verdict of ‘not guilty by
reason of insanity’ or ‘guilty but insane’ and the sentence may be a mandatory or
discretionary (but usually indeterminate) period of treatment, either in a secure
hospital facility, or otherwise at the discretion of the court.
The conditions under which such individuals are held has also been a subject of
concern for reformers. Asylums have, unfortunately been all too often dumping
grounds for a wide range of people with mental illnesses that were hard to define or,
in some case, people who were social misfits and did not fit into ‘normal’ categories.
It is also clear that many people who end up in prison are suffering from some form of
mental illness.
In the 1960s and 1970s attention turned to the consequences of ‘labelling’ individuals
and institutionalising them. On a cultural level see, for example, the film ‘One flew over
the cuckoo’s nest’ (1975, based on a 1962 novel of the same title).
But, if academically, we accept that the boundaries between ‘normal’, ‘bad’ and
‘mad’, are difficult to rationalise and the use of concepts such as good’ and ‘evil’ is
unstable, they are thrown out and developed in public discourse in films, television
programmes, novels and newspapers, blogs and other mass media sites. Following
on from Jean Baudrillard (and others such as Umberto Eco), it has become common
place to refer to the present as a time of hyper reality, where it becomes difficult to
differentiate fact from fiction. Media studies of infotainment and faction demonstrate
the power of the various forms of mass media and Brown (2003, p.53) states ‘[i]t is the
televisual which has above all reduced the apparent gap between “news” and “fiction”
in its generic cross-dressing…This is a multifaceted phenomenon as the “news and
fiction” undergo a rapidly accelerating process of hybridization.’
For others, such as Richard Rorty (Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 1989) humans have
always been storytelling creatures and social solidarity is achieved as much by the
way humans and their dilemmas are presented in stories as any academic enterprise.
For Rorty, rationalising questions such as ‘what is it to be human?’ are dangerous as
they allow us to rationalise that some people are to be considered less than human
(as Aristotle defended slavery, Hitler defined the Jews as sub-human), thus justifying
cruelty to those people. But to define a person as ‘less than human’ we need a
metaphysical ‘yardstick’ by which to measure their prototypical humanness. Rorty
seeks to deprive us of this yardstick by destroying its claims to objectivity; instead we
Criminology 5 Psychology and crime page 63
face a contingency of language. Some language use dehumanises, some humanises.

Rorty deals predominantly with books which he classifies into those ‘which help us
become autonomous’ and those ‘which help us become less cruel’, the latter include
‘books which help us see the effects of social practices and institutions on others’ and
‘those which help us see the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others’. Some
books (and media generally) simply offer relaxation while some supply novel stimuli
to action.
Such warnings are apt; consider the images of good and evil, victims and perpetrators
in crime fiction and television series such as ‘Law and order’. Crime fiction sells in
the hundreds of million copies a year. In the 1990s for example Scandinavian writers
developed a Nordic noir that went worldwide; Jo Nesbo, for example, in a relatively
short writing period has sold over 20 million copies in various languages of the Harry
Hole series. These are violent stories in which Hole, a sometimes barely functioning
detective (always battling alcoholism) of the Crime Squad and later with the National
Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos) pits his wits against serial killers, assassins and
corrupt policemen against the backdrop of a wars and all Oslo with other locations of
Australia, Hong Kong and even the Republic of the Congo. Hole confronts seemingly
unconnected cases, always involving extreme violence and repressed knowledge, but
also spends a significant amount of time in introspection battling nightmares and his
own demons.
In Nordic noir, we continually confront the consequences of closed communities

obeying what might be termed a ‘law of silence’: burdens from the past from
covering up things, of not talking about things, until finally, one day, everything
unravels because of that repression. We engage with family loyalty, obsessions, harsh
environments, with violence, often seemingly coming from repressed, primitive
parts of people. The detective hero confronts the unknown, and finding the missing
links entails confronting what is missing inside him; the psychological conflicts of the
‘guilty’ are often a reflection of the psychological conflicts within the hunter. These
detectives have few friends, perhaps their only real workplace relationships are with
the forensic experts, crime scene investigators, pathologists and psychologists.
The public are fascinated by criminal psychology. Images of forensic crime analysis,
the study of psychopathic or mentally impaired serial killers, and accounts of the
work of various well-known offender profilers have all served to create the image
that psychology is somehow capable of identifying and understanding ‘uniqueness’,
of recognising whom we should trust and whom we should fear. The Nordic noir
mentioned above is but a very small part of a huge industry with best-selling books
like Thomas Harris’ Silence of the lambs and Red dragon, Bret Easton Ellis’ American
psycho (unable to be sold to anyone under the age of 18 in many countries) or films
such as ‘A clockwork orange’, ‘American psycho’ and TV (see Robbie Coltrane’s
compelling portrayal of the forensic psychologist Fitz in the British Television series
‘Cracker’). Each evokes a compelling mixture of fear and fascination often around
the idea of the psychopath, the serial killer, the person who may look normal but
who is truly different but we are usually reassured that psychology holds the
key to understanding that difference. In these accounts, criminal psychology is
frequently portrayed in a very favourable light; its practitioners as capable of feats
of identification and detection that far exceed the laboured efforts of the police and
other state agencies.
But how accurate are these filmic and literary representations? Are serial killers really
that common? Is the psychopath a real entity? And what of the portrayal of forensic
psychologists, to what extent do they really reflect the role played by psychologists
in understanding and interpreting crime and deviance? What is the real relationship
between psychology and criminology?
Activity 5.1
Take a film or a book that has a supposed ‘psychopath’ as it central character (for
example: American psycho or A clockwork orange), research its creation, plot and
messages.
Question: To what extent is, for example A clockwork orange, an example of public
criminology?
For an interesting analysis of A clockwork orange see
A clockwork orange – in-depth analysis by Rob Ager (2010) at
http://www.collativelearning.com/ACO%20chapter%2001%20.html
Feedback. An analysis of A clockwork orange as criminology will be placed on the
VLE.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and the relevant readings, you should be able to:
u recognise and understand the main psychological theories explaining criminal
behaviour
u outline the relationship of criminal and psychology by use of four of the main
psychological explanations of criminality
u understand the ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ debate
u undertake a basic critique of the psychological approach to the study of crime.
Essential reading
¢ Burke, Roger, Chapter 6 ‘Psychological positivism’.
¢ Morrison, Wayne, Chapter 7 ‘Criminological positivism II: Psychology and the

positivisation of the soul’.
Further reading
See the webpages Criminal psychology – everything about it at
http://www.e-criminalpsychology.com/
¢ Einstadter, J. Werer and Stuart Henry Criminological theory: an analysis of
its underlying assumptions (second edition, 2006) ‘Individual positivism ii:
personality theories’.
Only in case of doing an essay

¢ Ainsworth, P.B. Psychology and crime: myths and realities (London: Longman,
2000).
¢ Blackburn, R. The Psychology of criminal conduct: theory, research and practice

(Chichester: Wiley, 1993).
¢ Bartol, C.R. Criminal behaviour: a psychosocial approach (Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 2002).
¢ Hollin, C.R. Criminal Behaviour: A psychological approach to explanation and

prevention (London: Falmer Press, 1992).
¢ Hollin, C.R. Chapter 2 ’Criminological psychology’ in M. Maguire et al. (eds) The

Oxford handbook of criminology (Oxford University Press, 2012) fifth edition.
¢ McGuire, J. (2004) Understanding psychology and crime, Maidenhead: Open

University Press.
5.1 Historical context

Generally speaking, psychology and criminology emerged as distinct disciplines
at a very similar historical moment – the latter half of the 19th century. Typically,
one associates the birth of modern criminology with the work of Cesare Lombroso
(1835–1909) and his fellow members of the Italian positivist school (see Chapter 4;
Lombroso would still be considered the father of criminal profiling). At this point, of
course, criminology was still preoccupied with matters relating to the individual actor,
the so-called ‘criminal person or type’. But soon it broadened its horizons to include
wider social, environmental and economic factors in accounts of crime. Psychology,
meanwhile, had begun to coalesce around the early experimental research of the
German, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) – the first person to call himself a psychologist –
and the American, William James (1842–1940).
Such simultaneous development is perhaps not surprising for both disciplines can be
seen as clear products of modernity’s faith in enlightened science and philosophy (see
Morrison 1995). If modernity was about anything it was about the belief that society’s
failings would be overcome or at least managed (controlled) by the careful, scientific
pursuit of relevant knowledge and the application of this knowledge to a specific set
of problems. The then fledgling disciplines of criminology and psychology exemplified
such ideals; protagonists of both ‘sciences’ steadfastly believing that rational scientific
analysis could ‘make sense’ of human behaviour by identifying flaws and categorising
traits and types. No longer would there be talk of humans possessing a ‘soul’ or a
‘spirit’ – or indeed of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Instead, the psychologist and the criminologist
would be the objective recorder of ‘personality’ and ‘criminality’ respectively.
(As you read through the rest of this chapter, you may want to keep the basic question
in mind: can either criminology or psychology truly be called a ‘science’?)
5.2 ‘Nature’ versus ‘nurture’

Perhaps the most enduring controversy within psychology has been the ‘nature
versus nurture debate’. In simple terms, the controversy revolved around the origins
of individual human behaviour and personality. Carlson and Buskist (1997) neatly
summarised the debate, whilst also pointing out that, as with various other aspects
of psychology, what initially appeared to be clear-cut distinctions were in fact rather
blurred:
‘Is it [personality] caused by biological or social factors?’ ‘Is it innate or learned?’ ‘Is it
a result of hereditary or cultural influences?’ ‘Should we look for an explanation in the
brain or in the environment?’ Almost always, biology, innateness, heredity, and the
brain are placed on the ‘nature’ side of the equation. Society, learning, culture, and the
environment are placed on the ‘nurture’ side. Rarely, does anyone question whether these
groups of items really form a true dichotomy… most modern psychologists consider
the nature-nurture issue to be a relic of the past. That is, they believe that all behaviours,
talents, and personality traits are the products of both types of factors: biological and
social, hereditary and cultural, physiological and environmental. The task of the modern
psychologist is not to find out which one of these factors is more important but to
discover the particular roles played by each of them and to determine the ways in which
they interact. (Psychology: the science of behavior pp.99–100)
Most workers in the field now believe that the debate should be over: ‘I believe human
behaviour has to be explained by both nature and nurture’ (Matt Ridley in Nature via
nurture). Such is also the case with certain psychological understandings of criminality.
From almost the inception of the discipline, psychologists have been drawn to various
physiological and biological explanations of human behaviour – including biological
explanations that claim to account for individual involvement in crime in terms of
their inherent criminality. The attraction of these accounts is that they appear to offer
the promise that, if humans were examined like other animals, the ‘laws of nature’
that govern ‘human behaviour’ could be established and accounted for. Under this
perspective, human behaviour is determined by factors that, while universal to the
species, reside to a greater or lesser extent in the constitution of the individual.
Prominent examples of this – now largely discredited – approach to the study of crime
include:
u the attention given to the ‘XYY Syndrome’ in the 1960s (a chromosomal abnormality
that was controversially linked to violent crime) (see Sandberg et al. 1961);
u William Sheldon’s famous (1942) attempt to link the delinquent personality with
body-build (or ‘somatotypes’);
(Twin studies are important because monozygotic twins share all their DNA, and
are thus identical in terms of heredity. If MZ twins are brought up in different
environments (which does happen, if rarely) then it is possible to evaluate how far
their behaviour and abilities vary due to nurture differences compare with those of
MXZ twins raised together. This gives a picture of the relative impact of nature and
nurture.)
u the German physician Johannes Lange’s work in the 1920s on ‘twin studies’, where
the criminal records of identical and fraternal twins were contrasted. Work
continues in this area today;
u research into biochemical and hormonal imbalances and criminality in the 1920s
and 1930s (this was very popular, now seen as also dangerous);
u the link between testosterone and aggression.
Each one of these examples, of course, should be seen as classic illustrations of the
‘nature’ dimension of the ‘nature/nurture’ debate.
Despite considerable criticism of such approaches, there are still those today who
continue to try and reinstate constitutional factors. In their controversial but well-read
work Crime and human nature (1985), Wilson and Hernstein devote several pages
to reproducing diagrams and photography used by Sheldon, and conclude that
‘wherever it has been examined, criminals on the average differ in physique from the
population at large’.
However, while, numerous psychologists have, over the years, sought to identify a
single biological (i.e. ‘nature’) explanation of crime such attempts have born little fruit.
Simply stated, this body of work is plagued by exactly the same problems encountered
by the Italian positivists; specifically, it is constantly hampered by its inability to
control for complex and interacting environmental and social influences. Thus, all
informed scholars who claim that biology plays a strong role in criminality now no
longer talk in terms of a dominating role; rather a picture is drawn of behaviour
resulting from the interaction of the biological makeup of the organism with the
physical and social environment. To put it more bluntly, few psychologists still cling
to the idea that certain individuals are somehow predetermined into a life of crime.
Instead, the ‘nature/nurture’ dichotomy is seen to be less an absolute distinction and
more an interacting framework for thinking about causal factors in the commission of
crime.
Activity 5.2
The idea that criminality can be inherited has appealed to many people, but why?
Draw up a list of arguments in favour of this, and another list of arguments against.
What explains this appeal?
Now consider mental states: while classical criminology assumed a coherent rational
calculator, criminal justice later had little problem in dealing with the criminally
insane, those not of sound mind who acted in the grip of that abnormal mental
state. Such persons are regarded as not truly criminally liable, while they may pose
a danger to others in society they are to be treated by medical professionals, not
correctional staff. What is more problematic is the ‘normal’ person who somehow
does not think ‘normally’, or whose criminal behaviour appears the result of a
normal leaning process. But are these categories mutually exclusive?
Important works referred to

¢ Wilson, J.Q. and R. Herrnstein Crime and human nature (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1985).
5.3 Crime and psychoanalytic theory

Although most have heard of the Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), few
will be aware of the impact his thinking had on criminal psychology. In reality, Freud
himself had little to say about crime, however, his ideas served as the cornerstone
for a whole host of theories that sought to understand crime and deviance by
recourse to psychoanalytic techniques – even though many of these subsequent
so-called ‘psychoanalytical theories’ of crime very often represented something of an
adulteration (or more charitably, an augmentation) of classic Freudian psychoanalytic
theory (see Freud 1935).
Freud’s great achievement was to highlight the way that innate desires and repressed
emotions shape individual human behaviour. To fully appreciate this perspective, one
must first understand how Freud perceived the human mind. In simple terms, Freud
argued that the mind was comprised of three provinces:
u The id represents the primitive, instinctive, animalistic portion of the ‘unconscious

mind’. It is here that primeval human desires such as innate sexual urges and the
drive for life (Eros) reside. The goal of the id is simple: to gratify instincts at all costs.
u The ego relates (primarily) to the ‘conscious mind’, and acts as a sort of ‘mediating
device’ between the two opposing mental forces of the id and the super-ego.
Because of the conscious recognition within the individual that ‘every act has a
consequence’, Freud claimed that the ego was driven by the ‘reality principle’.
u Finally, the (largely conscious) super-ego is the ‘repository of moral values’ and
the seat of guilt within the individual. Perhaps the best way to perceive the
super-ego is as a sort of internal ‘nagging parent’ or moral or ethical guardian.
Importantly, especially for psychoanalytical theories of crime, the super-ego
develops as a result of a series of early social experience(s) (and, for Freud at least,
admonishments) that serve to engender in the individual an internal ‘source of
self-criticism based on the production of guilt’.
In crude terms, Freud maintained that human behaviour should be thought of as a

‘struggle between the internalised psychic forces of the id and the super-ego’ – with
the ego constantly striving to maintain a suitable balance. It is this checking and
controlling process that is of vital importance to Freudian psychoanalysis. Over time,
and largely formed through learned behaviour, the ego strives to undertake a complex
mental balancing act between the primeval desires of the id and the internalised
conscience of the super-ego, whilst all the time seeking to work out the best way in
which to actually ‘serve’ the id by meeting some of its requirements.
But what does all this mean in terms of understanding criminal behaviour? The key
thing here is the process by which the super-ego is formed. As mentioned above, a
well-developed super-ego is the result of early social interactions with parents (or
with those acting in loco parentis). Consequently, for proponents of psychoanalytical
criminology, criminal behaviour can be understood as an expression of buried internal
(mental) conflicts that are the result of traumas or deprivations experienced during
childhood.
The first to apply such psychoanalytical models to the study of crime was the
former schoolteacher August Aichorn (1925). Aichorn postulated that traditional
environmental factors were not sufficient in and of themselves to account for
individual involvement in criminal activity. Instead, he argued that many of the
delinquent children he studied exhibited what he described as latent delinquency
– an ‘underlying predisposition’ which psychologically conditions the child ‘for a
lifetime of crime’. In other words, a failure to establish productive early emotional
relationship resulted in a breakdown in the socialisation process, ‘allowing the latent
delinquency to become dominant: a state which Aichorn describes as ‘dissocial’. The
criminal behaviour is therefore the result of a failure of psychological development,
thereby allowing the underlying, latent delinquency to govern the behaviour’ (Hollin
1989: 35). Aichorn’s remedy was thus straightforward: delinquent children must be
provided with a well-supervised, pleasant social environment that will encourage the
type of emotional relationship which, in turn, will help develop a well-established
super-ego.
Perhaps the most influential figure in this field, however, was the British
developmental psychologist, John Bowlby (1907–1990). Bowlby’s achievement was
to solidify the link between maternal deprivation and antisocial behaviour (Bowlby
1944). Of central importance for Bowlby was the close, loving relationship between
mother and child. Consequently, any rejection or separation between mother and
child during early child development is likely to prove highly problematic. Indeed,
according to Bowlby’s sample groups, such ruptures in familial relations will be
disproportionately represented in serious cases of delinquency in later life.
Bowlby’s writings, along with other related research, proved extremely effective in
terms of influencing governments and generating policy initiatives. Not least, ideas
about maternal deprivation and other later so-called ‘broken home theories’ were
a central element in the rehabilitative ‘welfarist’ movement in youth justice of the
1960s and 1970s. However, these early forays into the psychology of the offender
did not sit well with everyone. Many commentators strongly objected to the lack of
scientific rigour associated with this early psychoanalytical criminology (specifically the
‘tautological’ and ‘untestable’ nature of the intra-psychic Freudian approach). Others
meanwhile questioned the extent to which the psychoanalytical approach relied upon
the interpretative expertise of the analyst in teasing out the particular link between the
criminal act and the hidden unconscious drive – a link that, for many, was simply too
convoluted and contingent. That said, the psychoanalytical approach to deviance, and
other subsequent theories derived from psychoanalysis, went on to exert considerable
influence within both psychology and criminology for many decades to come.
Illustrative texts
¢ Bowlby, J. Separation: anxiety and anger. Volume 2 of Attachment and Loss
(London: Hogarth Press; New York, 1973).
¢ Kline, P. Psychology and Freudian theory (London: Metheun, 1984).
5.4 Social learning and behavioural theories of crime

In contrast to theories of crime that suggest the root cause of deviance lies with
primitive instinctive drives and internal psychodynamic struggles, behavioural and
social learning theories – as the name clearly implies – assert instead that crime and
deviance are learned responses. Much of the thinking behind this work can be seen as
stemming from the work of the Chicago school (see Chapter 4) and in particular Edwin
Sutherland’s renowned sociological theory of ‘differential association’ (1947).
For Sutherland, behaviour – including crime – is a social product, a result of different

interactions and patterns of learning that occur in the intimate personal group and
surrounding social circumstances that encapsulate the individual. According to
Sutherland, such groups teach ‘definitions’ – including special skills, motivations,
norms and beliefs – either ‘unfavourable’ or ‘favourable’ to the violation of the law.
Despite criticisms of differential association (not least questions about why, under
shared conditions, individuals still tend to behave very differently from each other)
Sutherland’s work ushered in a whole host of subsequent theories that sought to
prove that the determinants of behaviour reside outside the individual.
While this line of thinking inevitably chimed loudly with the shift already underway
within American psychology towards ‘behaviourism’ (see e.g. Watson 1913 for an
early example), it was the research of B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), and especially his
principles of ‘operant learning’ (1938,1953). Crudely stated, operant learning suggests
that ‘behaviour is determined by the environmental consequences it produces for the
individual concerned’. Put another way, behaviour that leads to ‘awards’ will increase
(i.e. is ‘positively reinforced’); behaviour that produces an unpleasant stimulus (i.e.
is ‘punished’) is avoided: ‘Any such behaviour, driving a car, writing a letter, talking
to a friend, setting fire to a house, is operant behaviour. Behaviour does not occur
at random; environmental cues signal when certain behaviours are liable to be
reinforced or punished… the Antecedent conditions prompt the Behaviour which in
turn produces the Consequences – the ABC of behavioural theory’ (Hollin 1989: 40).
Note how this fits with the assumptions of classical criminology: here the offender has
learnt the benefits of crime, it is in this sense a reward-based theory.
Among the first to suggest that criminal behaviour could be understood in terms of
operant learning was C.R. Jeffrey (1965) and his theory of differential reinforcement
(see also more latterly Akers 1985). By combining the principles of Skinner’s operant
learning with Sutherland’s differential association, Jeffrey maintained that, although
criminal behaviour might well be the result of pervasive socio-cultural norms and
attitudes within a given locality (à la Sutherland), it is also greatly affected by the
particular consequences (or ‘reinforcements’ in Skinnerian terms) that deviance
produces for the individual. For example, ‘The majority of crimes are concerned with
stealing where the consequences are clearly material and financial gain: the gains
may therefore be seen as positively reinforcing the stealing’ (Hollin 1989: 41). Such
an approach has the advantage of overcoming the main problem associated with
differential association. By focusing on individual learning histories (i.e. unique reward
and punishment experiences), differential reinforcement theory explains how, despite
shared environmental conditions, individual actors ultimately behave very differently.
While Skinner and Jeffrey did not wholly discount the role of internal mental processes
in their particular brand of behaviourism, neither did they feature prominently in their
analyses. The first to actively integrate ‘internal processes’ into learning theory was the
psychologist Albert Bandura (1973,1977). Bandura’s ‘social learning theory’ hypothesis
was an uncomplicated one: individual behaviour is something learnt at the cognitive
level by observing and then imitating the actions of others. Most famously, Bandura
conducted an experiment in which a group of infants watched a film depicting an
adult violently attacking an inflatable rubber ‘Bobo’ doll. In subsequent tests, this
group were significantly more likely to repeat the aggressive behaviour toward the
doll than were the members of a control group who had not been exposed to the
film – indeed, this second group behaved more passively throughout the whole
experiment. Because of the emphasis Bandura placed on ‘learnt aggression’, his
findings quickly found support within criminological psychology.
Such experiments suggested that, not only does social learning take place at the
familial and sub-cultural level, but also via the observation of cultural symbols and
media ‘role models’ (see Chapter 8 of this subject guide). ‘For example, a child may
learn to shoot a gun by imitating television characters. He or she then rehearses and
fine tunes this behavioural pattern by practicing with toy guns’ (Bartol 2002: 128).
Naturally, just like other operant behaviour, cognitively learned behaviour is further
‘reinforced’ or ‘punished’ via the process of socialisation. ‘The behaviour is likely to be
maintained if peers also play with guns and reinforce one another for doing so’ (ibid.).
While behavioural and social learning theories continued to develop by the end of the
1970s most criminal psychologists had turned their back on this approach, choosing
instead to pursue a very different course based around theories of criminal behaviour
concerned with the identification of individual personality traits.
Activity 5.3
1. Identify an everyday example of a situation where social and behavioural
learning seems to determine people’s behaviour. Are there any factors which
would prevent such learning take place?
2. Think about some of your own characteristics, traits and behaviours. To what
extent have these behaviours been learned, either via ‘positive reinforcement’,
‘differential association’ or via the observation of cultural symbols and media
‘role models’?
Important classic text

¢ Skinner, B. F. Science and human behaviour (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
5.5 Trait-based personality theories

‘Trait-based personality theories’ set out to identify and classify particular personality
characteristics, and to empirically measure how these traits become assembled
differently in different people. The central figure in this shift towards understanding
human behaviour via ‘psychometric’ statistical testing was Hans Eysenck (1916–1997)
(Eysenck 1977; Eysenck and Gudjonsson 1989).
Eysenck had little time for the ‘sociological turn’ in the study of crime and deviance.
Instead he stressed the fundamental role of inherited genetic predispositions
(especially in relation to the cortical and autonomic central nervous systems) in
determining the way each individual responds to environmental conditioning.
In other words, Eysenck subscribed to the view that an individual’s personality –
including those personality traits that he considered constitutive of the criminal
personality – was largely the product of their genetic make-up. Yet, this was no simple
return to biological determinism (see above), rather Eysenck’s theory was a fusion of
biological, socio-environmental and individual factors.
Because Eysenck spent much of his life’s work constantly retesting and augmenting his
theory of crime, his key assertions are not easily summarised. However, the following
passages by Lanier and Henry provide a succinct general synopsis (for more detailed
summaries see Eysenck 1984; Bartol 2002: 70–85; Hollin 1989: 53–59).
Eysenck claimed to show that human personalities are made up of clusters of traits.
One cluster produces a sensitive, inhibited temperament that he called introversion.
A second cluster produces an outward-focused, cheerful, expressive temperament
that he called extroversion. A third dimension of personality, which forms emotional
stability or instability, he labelled neuroticism; to this schema he subsequently added
psychoticism, which is a predisposition to a psychotic breakdown. Normal human
personalities are emotionally stable, neither highly introvert or extrovert. In contrast,
those who are highly neurotic, highly extroverted, and score high on a psychoticism
scale have a greater predisposition toward crime, forming in the extreme the
psychopathic personality. Eysenck explained that such personalities (sensation
seekers) are less sensitive to excitation by stimuli, requiring more stimulation than
normal, which they can achieve through crime, violence and drug taking. These people
are impulsive, being emotionally unstable. They are also less easy to condition and
have a higher threshold or tolerance to pain. Low IQ can [also] affect the ability of such
personalities to learn rules, perceive punishment, or experience pain, as in biological
theory. (Lanier and Henry 1998: 119).
Taken at face value, Eysenck’s theories seem convincing. Yet, a trawl through the
mass of empirical research undertaken in an attempt to test his propositions reveals
a more ambiguous picture – not least because many of these studies point to a
number of significant methodological and theoretical flaws. Crucially, while there
is general support for his contention that offenders will score highly on both the
psychoticism and neuroticism dimensions, there is little evidence to support the
crime–extroversion connection. Furthermore, a common charge often labelled at
the trait-based approach is that it is inherently tautological: ‘Stealing may be taken
as an indicator of impulsiveness and impulsiveness given as the reason for stealing.
Thus a recurrent criticism of trait-based theories is that they represent correlational
rather than causal connections’ (ibid. 121). Or as Gottfredson and Hirschi put it: there
is ‘an obvious conceptual overlap of the personality dimensions and in the inability to
measure them independently of the acts they are meant to produce’ (1990: 111).
These and various other criticisms aside, the wider influence of the trait-based
approach to deviance can be seen in the continued growth of psychometric
questionnaires and other related diagnostic devices that have emerged out of
this field of research. Basically, the idea here is that specific personality traits can
be measured and assessed by asking the individual a battery of specially designed
questions (or more recently by testing responses to a series of visual scenarios). Such
assessments are then used to predict, prevent and treat future deviant behaviour.
Inevitably, many commentators have pointed out the intrinsic problems associated
with statistical attempts to measure anything as complex and multifaceted as
personality (see most famously, Taylor et al. The new criminology, 1973: 44–61) – not
least, the all too familiar methodological pitfalls associated with self-report studies.
Yet, most of this type of psychology has proceeded virtually oblivious to such
methodological criticism and has continued to embrace empirical psychometric
methods and other forms of quantitative analysis. This unflinching faith in psychology
as a positivist science, coupled with the continued emphasis placed by Eysenck and his
followers on the importance of biological factors in the development of personality,
served to drive a deep wedge between psychology and criminology. For almost at the
same moment that Eysenck’s influence was being felt most acutely in psychology (the
late 1960s and 1970s), criminology was dramatically affected by a new wave of Marxist-
inspired research, as announced by Taylor, Walton and Young in the ground-breaking
work The new criminology (1973). As (the majority of) criminology turned down the
road towards theories of crime couched firmly in sociological and political economic
terms, mainstream psychology continued down the experimental, empirical path. As
Hollin explains: ‘To appreciate the differences between Taylor et al. and Eysenck, is to
see that at the time, there could be no point of contact between the new criminology
and mainstream psychology (of which Eysenck was a leading figure)’ (2002: 155). Such
disharmony between the disciplines would only intensify, as psychology embarked on
its next theoretical stage.
Activity 5.4
Could you make the argument that psychology is not really a science?
Important classical text

¢ Eysenck, H. Crime and personality (London: Routledge, 1977).
5.6 Cognitive theories of crime

Cognitive theory ‘has as its major theme how mental thought processes are used
to solve problems – to interpret, evaluate, and decide on the best of actions. These
thought processes occur through mental pictures and conversations with ourselves’
(Lanier and Henry 1998: 126). More simply, it is an attempt to understand the way
people think via investigations of such concepts as intelligence, memory structure,
visual perception and logical ability.
The first major cognitive study to make an impression on criminology was Yochelson
and Samenow’s infamous The criminal personality (1976). In an expansive three-volume
work, Yocheslon and Samenow set themselves the ambitious task of ‘mapping the
criminal mind’. The positivist zeal with which they undertook this task is made clear in
the following quote by Samenow:
I shall expose the myths about why criminals commit crimes, and I shall draw a picture for
you of the personality of the criminal just as the police artist draws a picture of his face from
the description. I shall describe how criminals think, how they defend their crimes to others,
and how they exploit programs that are developed to help them. (Samenow 1984: 5)
All this from a sample group of only 240 offenders, each one of whom had been
adjudged ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ and who, at the time of study, were
institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital in Washington D.C. After several thousands
of hours of qualitative interviewing, Yocheslon and Samenow identified ‘52 errors of
criminal thinking’ or ‘problematic thinking styles’ that, they claimed, taken together
constituted ‘the criminal personality’. These included inter alia ‘chronic lying’,
‘irresponsible decision-making’, ‘super optimism’, ‘distorted self-image’, and ‘a lack
of empathy for others’ (a trait that has since been made much of in contemporary
cognitive-behavioural programmes for sex offenders; see below). According to
Yochelson and Samenow, such ‘cognitive distortions’ ensure that ‘[C]riminals think
differently from responsible people’ and, moreover, that ‘Crime resides within the
person and is “caused” by the way he thinks, not by his environment’ (Samenow
1984: xiv, cited in Lanier and Henry 1998: 127, emphases added). Naturally, such
assertions have implications in terms of how one treats the offender. Indeed, it is
within the sphere of contemporary treatment programmes that the influence of
cognitive theory has been greatest. In the meantime, it is worth pausing to reflect
on some of the much-voiced criticisms of Yochelson and Samenow’s The criminal
personality, as these critiques also serve to illustrate many of the problems associated
with various other types of empirical psychology concerned with statistically
measuring or ‘mapping’ the complexities of the human criminal personality.
To start with, little distinction is made between the various types of criminal studied.
Thus their assertion that all criminals share the same thought patterns/processes is
highly problematic – does a violent offender, for example, share the same cognitive
distortions as an embezzler? Secondly, by focusing so intently on internal thought
processes and dysfunctional cognitions, Yochelson and Samenow downplay the
importance of both psychobiological and socio-environmental influences. Thirdly,
theories of crime that stress cognitive irregularities are seen as tautological in that
certain behaviours are said to be indicative of cognitive processes, while these same
cognitive processes are then used to explain away the behaviour. Fourthly, and
perhaps most obviously, Yocheslson and Samenow’s sample was comprised only of
incarcerated offenders. Yet, while one cannot deny the existence of these and several
other theoretical and methodological flaws, it is hard not to be drawn to some of their
ideas about cognitive reasoning, especially in relation to interpersonal relationships.
Unsurprising, then, that many other psychologists have chosen to pursue this line of
inquiry and in doing so have developed a body of work that, not only greatly augments
Yochelson and Samenow’s research, but which has since gone on to be enthusiastically
received by practitioners working in the treatment arena.
A central assumption of The criminal personality is that a criminal’s erroneous thinking

can be corrected if they are first taught to construct a ‘moral inventory’ of their
everyday thoughts, and then, by working with a practitioner, to identify and ultimately
eradicate any dysfunctional cognitions (Samenow 1984: 6–7). Although something
of an over-simplification, this is the rationale behind the majority of cognitive
therapeutic interventions that seek to correct problems experienced by offenders in
their everyday lives. For example, such programmes typically concentrate on cognitive
considerations such as insufficient levels of self-control; an inability to feel empathy
for others – especially victims; deficits in basic social problem-solving skills; problems
in the interpretation of visual and situational cues; and an inability to distinguish
between which facets of personal life are subject to internal control (i.e. are governed
by one’s own actions) and those which are subject to external control (i.e. are
governed by the actions of others).
Cognitively inspired treatment programmes are currently very popular within the
UK criminal justice system, being employed in increasing numbers both within the
prison setting and as an alternative to custody. However, while these correctional
programmes have often proved successful at reducing certain forms of persistent
offending, ultimately they remain fundamentally limited in scope – primarily in the
sense that they never really offer a full and inclusive explanation of why someone
becomes involved in criminality (or, for that matter, decides to stop). That said,
perhaps this is not really the point. These cognitively inspired programmes make
no attempt to consider traditional criminological concerns such as the inequalities
associated with class, race, gender and socio-economic deprivation. Instead, the
goal is the distillation of crime and criminality to semi-rigid ‘narratives of feeling’ and
formalised, reductionist understandings of the social world. Only when this process
is complete will the individual offender then be in a position to assume responsibility
for his or her actions. Such psychotherapeutic practices represent the new wave
of governmental and institutional weapons in the fight against crime, a discourse
preoccupied solely with strategies of pacification and control (see Garland 1997, 2001
for a more general introduction to criminological thinking in this area) – with the
psychologist as independent arbiter of acceptable behaviour and intention.
Activity 5.5
Is crime and deviance simply a product of ‘bad thinking’? If so, can these errant
thought processes be corrected?
Using online sources explain what ‘narrative therapy’ is?
(See also next section.)
Important classic text

¢ Samenow, S. E. Inside the criminal mind (New York: Times Books, 1984).
5.7 Contemporary narrative approaches

For an account of use of narrative therapy in forensic psychology see Dr Gwen
Adshead, ‘Their dark materials: narratives and recovery in forensic practice’ at:
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/Their%20Dark%20Materials.%20narratives%20and%20
recovery%20in%20Forensic%20Practice%20Gwen%20Adshead.x.pdf
Narrative therapy builds on the understanding that our sense of self is very much tied
up with the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and how we see the situations
we live in. Adshead emphasises how narrative therapy has assumed a large role in the
recovery and change process in mental health. Our narratives are the stories we tell of
ourselves, our choices and experiences that make up our identities. These narratives
change and develop over the course of a lifetime, this dynamic quality means that
intervention is possible by working with the person to redevelop the way they
perceive themselves and the conditions they are in. Narratives are complex, layered,
and integrate different perspectives of the self and social roles; they acknowledge that
we may see things differently over time, and how we see ourselves may not be what
others see.
What is termed the ‘recovery movement’ in mental health services has placed
emphasis on narratives for a number of reasons. First, it emphasises the importance
of the personal lived experience of people living with mental illness or injury, as
opposed to the case history record with its emphasis on diagnostic labels and results
of observations and investigations. Secondly, telling one’s story has always been an
important part of the recovery process, as exemplified by the recovery process in the
Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous (arguably the first example of the
use of the language of recovery in the psychological context). Finally, the concept of
recovery implies the possibility of change, as opposed to fixed or rigid categorical
ways of defining people: the story of how a person lives with schizophrenia is likely to
change over time, where the bald diagnosis does not.
Activity 5.7
In popular psychology and in many people’s estimation of what criminology is (or
should be in their eyes) the field of forensic psychology and tacking down the serial
killer predominates. And who or what is the serial killer? Here we often regard
the figure of the psychopath (or sociopath) as those without conscience, cold and
seemingly without emotion (but note that even those doctors who believe in those
who are unable to empathise with other human beings. But does the psychopath
exist?
Certainly there is a large amount of circular reasoning at play: psychopath is a broad,
not medically recognised term that usually denotes a person without a recognisable
mental illness that killed someone for no apparent reason. Popularly conceived:
‘Sociopaths are unable to see anything through their victims eyes. It is all about them.
To a sociopath, killing someone does not seem a bad thing if it is going to produce a
favorable result for them. Most know that it is not socially acceptable and don’t. Others
try to get away with it. They usually are unable to understand that it ends that person’s
life and instead can only see it gave them satisfaction to kill a person. Someone else
getting angry, sad, happy, etc. are completely not understandable to them. They often
have the delusion that their entire world is created by them and they are the only real
things in it. They also may suffer from delusions of grandiosity or persecution.’
There is a large market for books such as Without conscience: the disturbing world of the
psychopaths among us by Robert D. Hare PhD; The sociopath next door by Martha Stout;
Snakes in suits: when psychopaths go to work by Paul Babiak.
Consider this ‘book description’ for Without Conscience...
Most people are both repelled and intrigued by the images of cold-blooded, conscienceless
murderers that increasingly populate our movies, television programs, and newspaper
headlines. With their flagrant criminal violation of society’s rules, serial killers like Ted Bundy
and John Wayne Gacy are among the most dramatic examples of the psychopath.
Individuals with this personality disorder are fully aware of the consequences of their
actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet they are terrifyingly self-
centered, remorseless, and unable to care about the feelings of others. Perhaps most
frightening, they often seem completely normal to unsuspecting targets – and they do not
always ply their trade by killing. Presenting a compelling portrait of these dangerous men
and women based on 25 years of distinguished scientific research, Dr Robert D. Hare vividly
describes a world of con artists, hustlers, rapists, and other predators who charm, lie, and
manipulate their way through life. Are psychopaths mad, or simply bad? How can they be
recognized? And how can we protect ourselves? This book provides solid information and
surprising insights for anyone seeking to understand this devastating condition.
Question: Are we really at risk? Or is this a cultural ‘fiction’?
An example: assessing Charles Manson

Charles Manson is a cultural icon and incarcerated mass killer (although he
personally never did the actual killing but directed others to do so).
Start with the Wikipedia entry and watch interviews with him.
He is sometimes referred to as pure ‘evil’, is such a term useful or apt?
If so, was Manson made evil by the juvenile ‘reformatory’ system?
Does Manson make sense?
Is Manson a psychopath? If not, who is…?
Review questions
1. Outline the main differences and similarities that exist between the four
psychological explanations of crime outlined above.
2. Draw up a list of diverse crimes that range in seriousness from petty street crime
through to murder. Which of the above theories do you think best accounts for
each type of crime?
Summing up
Psychological research is seen by many as holding the key to explaining crime but
some claims are usually overstated. Psychology has certainly contributed to our
understanding of crime and criminality but many of the popular myths and ‘media-
created’ assumptions about criminological psychology are unfounded. The collection
of theories gathered together here is anything but exhaustive. Numerous other areas
of criminal psychological research exist that for reasons of space could not be included
here.
Finally, while this overview has focused on some of the more prominent psychological
theories that have sought to explain crime and deviance, one should bear in mind that
criminal psychology also has a central role within the sphere of criminal justice, with
psychologists playing key roles in virtually all aspects of the criminal justice system –
from assisting police forces in the creation of offender profiles, to pre-trial assessment
of mentally disordered offenders, from offender rehabilitation to psychological
research into eyewitness testimony. See Bartol and Bartol (1994); Kapardis (1997); and
Adler (2004) for general introductions.
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male’ Lancet 262: 488–9.
¢ Sheldon, W.H. The varieties of temperament (New York: Harper 1942).
¢ Skinner, B.F. The behaviour of organisms (New York: Appleton, 1938).
¢ Skinner, B.F. Science and human behaviour (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
¢ Sutherland, E. Principles of criminology (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1947).
¢ Taylor, I., P. Walton and J. Young The new criminology (London: Routledge1973).
¢ Watson, J. B., (1913) ’Psychology as the behaviorist views it’, Psychological review.
¢ Wilson, J.Q. and R. Herrnstein Crime and human nature (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1985).
¢ Yochelson, S., and S. Samenow, The criminal personality (New York: Jason
Aronson, 1976).
6 Sociological perspectives – structural and cultural
foundations
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Part A: Classical sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
6.1 Foundational assumptions and the work of Emile Durkheim . . . . . . . 79
6.2 Sub-cultural theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80
6.3. The work of David Matza: one writer analysed as an example . . . . . . . 80
Part B: Labelling theory and moral panics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85
Part I: Labelling, otherwise known as symbolic, or social interactionism or

social reaction theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
6.4 Howard Becker and social interactionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
6.5 Role, status and stigma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Part II Moral panic theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
6.6 The creation of the concept of moral panics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
6.7 Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Part C: Critical criminology, a different view of social structure . . . . . . 92
6.8 The rise of critical criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Introduction
Sociological perspectives from Durkheim, through to Merton and labelling theory
onto radical or critical criminology has largely provided the bedrock of mainstream
criminology.
This chapter follows three ideas on the social order providing the contextual
foundation of law:
1. Relative social consensus,
2. Social interaction, and
3. Conflict. The father figures are Emile Durkheim, George Herbert Mead and
Karl Marx respectively.
Part A: Classical sociology
Essential reading
¢ Burke, Roger, An introduction to criminological theory, Chapter 7 ‘Sociological
positivism’.
¢ Morrison, Wayne, Theoretical criminology: from modernity to post-modernism,

1995, pp.175–188, Chapter. 12 ‘Criminology and the culture of modernity’ and
Chapter 13 ‘Culture and crime in the post-modern condition.
Further reading:
¢ Extracts from Durkheim, The rules of sociological method, as on VLE.
¢ Robert Merton ‘Social structure and anomie’, 1938 article, as on VLE.
¢ Downes, David and Paul Rock Understanding deviance, fifth edition, Chapter 5
‘Anomie’, as on the VLE.
Learning objectives
By the end of this part and associated reading you should be able to:
u Appreciate the dominance of sociological understandings.
u Be able to discuss the influence of Durkheim upon criminology and be familiar
with the work of Robert Merton and David Matza.
u Define and use anomie theory.
u Reinterpret anomie theory for contemporary conditions.
u Appreciate the restraining and criminogenic effects of culture.
u Not understand jokes about sociologists.
Criminology 6 Sociological perspectives – structural and cultural foundations page 79
6.1 Foundational assumptions and the work of Emile Durkheim

There is no one sociological perspective, indeed for much of the 20th century
sociology simply was the governing paradigm for criminology, and the question then
was ‘what kind of sociology?’ This is still largely the case. Our concentration here is
on anomie, culture and control. American literature often distinguishes between
strain theory and control theory. In strain theory, it is assumed that individuals would
normally conform to the social norms and thus their infraction is because of some
strain or pull otherwise. In control theory, it is assumed that infraction is actually
normal and naturally occurs when there is an absence of social control. As indicated
in a Chapter 4 section 5 on statistics and criminality, the Chicago School popularised
the notion of social disorganisation theory whereby processes internal to city growth
lead to disruptions in the processes which normally control behaviour. In attempting
to gain a precise grip on these processes, American literature in particular talked
of sub-cultural theory, of status theory and opportunity theory. The work of Matza
is associated with neutralisation theory that holds that while most of us hold to
the norms and values of our society, some of us learn to rationalise infractions and
therefore neutralise the binding force of norms. Blending psychological studies and
social location socialisation theory concentrated upon the family situation and the
learning of roles.
In giving a foundational personality to sociological perspectives special attention can

be paid to the work of Emile Durkheim.
First, along with Karl Marx and Max Weber, he is regarded as one of the three father
figures of modern sociology. Durkheim was actually the first professor of sociology
anywhere in the world.
Secondly, he set out a framework for doing sociology (sociological positivism) which
has structured much of what has subsequently developed as sociology. In particular,
he argued for building sociological theories up from clear data.
Thirdly, his specific writings of crime, suicide and anomie have provided a great deal of
stimulus for criminology.
Durkheim is a rich writer who was for some time regarded as out of fashion having
committed the sociological sins of being too functionalist and having neglected power.
However, Durkheim is not such an absolutist writer as his critics have made out and we
can only scratch the surface of his work. In criminology he is famous for three things:
i. the notion that crime is normal;
ii. the legacy of anomie theory;
iii. the argument that in conditions of advanced division of labour the basis of moral
obligation and social solidarity will become increasingly problematic.
Crime as normal. This is part of Durkheim’s functionalist account of deviance.

Deviance is required for society to work its labelling processes and demarcate the
sacred from the profane, the acceptable from the unacceptable.
Anomie. This comes from the concept of normlessness or, alternatively, valuelessness;
it is the condition of instability resulting from the breakdown of norms and values.
Note the duality of anomie.
Anomie comes out of a fundamental difference between physical and social needs.
Physical needs can become fulfilled naturally, for example, physical hunger can be
satiated and then the body itself will resist additional food. Social needs, however,
such as wealth, power, prestige, are regulated externally through the constraining
forces of society. Our social desires are therefore without natural limits or forms, they
are an ‘insatiable and bottomless abyss’. As a consequence, freed from regulation the
human experience becomes meaningless, it is social interaction that defined the limits
and forms of our humanity. ‘It is not true, then, that human activity can be released
from all restraint… Its nature and method of manifestation... depend not only on itself
but on other beings, who consequently restrain and regulate it.’
However, just as an absence of regulation can cause anomie, a pathological over-

regulation also causes anomie. Throughout all Durkheim’s work there is a concern
with the mean. Social processes span a continual tension between over-regulation
and under-regulation, between integration and isolation, between socially provided
identity and individuality.
In criminology, an essay published in 1938 by Robert Merton (‘Social structure and

anomie’, American Sociological Review, 3: 672–82), and usually referred to as the most
famous essay in the history of sociology, was a direct application of anomie theory. This
lead onto work on subcultural theory, gang studies, and onto theories that highlighted
a different set of lower-class values to the mainstream middle class.
The source of moral obligation and social solidarity
Durkheim’s work alerts us to the more complex nature of social solidarity in modern
societies of advanced division of labour.
At its broadest, Durkheim alerts us to the problematic of modernity – to the necessity

for a public philosophy which links together the diverse ethnic and social groupings.
6.2 Sub-cultural theory

This came into prominence with American writings such as Albert Cohen’s Delinquent
boys, Cloward and Ohlin’s Delinquency and opportunity, and Walter Miller’s theory of
lower-class culture. Miller, for example, sees lower-class culture as a distinct tradition
many centuries old with a structure of its own. He argues six focal concerns constitute
the traditions:
u Trouble. Thus lower-class men have a preoccupation with trouble and associated
fighting, drinking and sexual conquests.
u Toughness. A macho image stressing hardness, fearlessness, and skill in physical

prowess.
u Smartness. A capacity to outsmart others.
u Search for excitement. Brought on by the extreme fluctuations which characterise

lower-class work cycles.
u A resignation to fate. This enables fatal outcomes, such as violence and perhaps
prison for trouble to be accepted.
u An ambivalent desire for autonomy.
Socialisation theory. The question of whether faulty upbringing or inadequate

supervision links to delinquency has been tied in with issues of the broken home or
forced separation from the mother or father. Here we are in the interconnections of
sociology and psychology. What is the influence of being brought up in a one-parent
family will obviously be determined by the social context of that family. Much early
literature does not take this into account however. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990: 97–
105) pointed to the huge influence that the family has in child rearing through factors
such as the attachment of the parent to the child, parental supervision, recognition of
deviant behaviour, punishment of deviant acts and parental involvement in crime. In
their analysis, it was the impact on developing self-control that had the lasting effect.
Other factors lie in the young person gaining social, economic and personal capital.
6.3. The work of David Matza: one writer analysed as an

example
As we have seen when positivism became a force within criminology, a determinist
view of human nature was accepted as required in the name of science. Within
American writings of the 1960s, an anti-deterministic current surfaced. From
the control perspective came the argument that strain theories over-predicted
delinquency. If the root cause of crime was found in slum life, criminal traditions
and differential learning, lack of legitimate opportunity and the emphasis upon
property acquisition, how was it to be explained that most of the individuals living
in such situations did not appear to indulge in persistent criminal or delinquent
behaviour? David Matza replaced ‘hard determinism’ by the concepts of ‘drift’ and
‘soft determinism’.
First, at odds with the structure of doing criminology as it then was, Matza asked
criminology to begin its theories with a notion of crime which saw it as an ‘infraction’
and to take seriously the empirical features which characterised infractions (what
we might call crime). For Matza an infraction entailed going against what had been
socialised as the moral code of the society and the empirical features of crime
were that it was often transient (rather than permanent), intermittent (rather than
pervasive), characterised not by commitment or compulsion but looser factors and
represented something which most delinquents simply grew out of with age.
Secondly, in a latter 1969 work, Becoming deviant (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall)
Matza drew a contrast between ‘correction’ and ‘appreciation’ as differing stances
to deviant phenomenon. Matza claimed that ‘the goal of ridding ourselves of the
deviant phenomenon, however utopian, stands in sharp contrast to an appreciative
perspective and may be referred to as correctional.’ The overriding concern with
causation or ‘etiology’: ‘systematically interferes with the capacity to empathize and
thus comprehend the subject of inquiry. Only through appreciation can the texture
of social patterns and the nuances of human engagement with those patterns be
understood and analyzed.’ (1969: 15)
The appreciative attitude is on the other hand a subjective view; it demands a

commitment to render the phenomenon with fidelity and without violating its
integrity.
It delivers the analyst into the arms of the subject who renders the phenomenon, and
commits him, though not without regrets or qualifications, to the subject’s definition
of the situation. This does not mean that the analyst always concurs with the subject’s
definition of the situation; rather that his aim is to comprehend and to illuminate the
subject’s view and to interpret the world as it appears to him. (1969: 25)
Contrary to these two themes, Matza found that criminological positivism accounted
for too much delinquency. Taken at their terms, delinquency theories seemed to
predict far more delinquency than actually occurs. In the 1950s Sykes and Matza (1957)
had criticised the total determinism of sub-cultural theory arguing that even the
most obvious ‘criminals’ or delinquents were not committed to an alternative set of
cultural values but were actually conventional in their beliefs. Why then were they not
restrained by that powerful instrument of self-control in the modern west, namely
the conscience and the feelings of guilt (as opposed to shame which is engendered
by considering what others feel about our actions)? Should not guilt be aroused in
the psyche of an individual when that individual contemplated the performance of an
anti-social action?
Sykes and Matza highlighted the process whereby the offender while not invincible
against guilt has strong avoidance mechanisms that they termed ‘techniques of
neutralisation’.
Sykes and Matza claimed that the delinquent did not live in some different or
inverted world where the norms and values were the opposite from those prevailing
in conventional society. Instead, we are told he/she shares the values of the larger
society. Theories of delinquent subculture over-predicted crime and over-stressed
the difference between ‘delinquents’ and ‘non-delinquents’. This raised the issue to
be explained in terms of why individuals who accepted the conventional morality
and who were essentially integrated into the society and respectful of its regulations
violated its conventions? Sykes and Matza argued that while learning the conventional
values of the society, individuals could also learn certain excuses or techniques of
neutralisation which temporarily at least neutralised conventional norms and thus
permitted violations in specific cases and under certain circumstances without

necessarily rejecting the norms themselves.
Five distinct techniques are developed, all of which have some basis in the society at
large.
u Denial of responsibility. The offender has learnt to take the words of the social
scientist or humane jurist or social worker who sees him as a product of his
environmental; he presents himself as the helpless object of social forces (slum
neighbourhood, bad parents, and peer group pressure). Thus guilt cannot be
aroused since the deeds are not his own. Thus his deeds are not his, but the
product of orders, the product of the forces of the society, the country the military.
Ultimately he can saw it wasn’t really me that did it.
u Denial of injury. The delinquent argues that the behaviour has not really caused
any harm. Thus vandalism is only ‘mischief’, car theft is ‘borrowing’, and stealing
is ‘getting paid’ and done to those who could afford it anyway, gang fighting is
a ‘private quarrel’. Psychologically the spatial distancing of modernity aids this,
consider a computer fraud.
u Denial of a victim. Like the solider who is only fighting the enemy the delinquent is
facing a victim who is also guilty. In other words ‘they had it coming’ so why should
the offender care for what happened? It is the victims who are the wrongdoers.
u Appeal to higher loyalties. The delinquent presents himself as torn between two
groups, those who were the victims and the smaller group to which he belongs
and owes some allegiance, demonstrates loyalty towards, defends his belonging
to. The needs of this smaller group, the army unit, the family, the gang, the country
in the hour of need, serve to change the nature of the acts he would not otherwise
normally do. What was regrettable, perhaps evil, because it was required by loyalty
to this group now becomes justified, perhaps obligatory.
These four defences do not appear to be positive forces, they appear to have the
impact of shielding the actor from the consequences of his/her acts. As avoidance
mechanisms they prevent the self-esteem of the offender being washed away
and serve to present him as someone worthy of respect and appreciation. The
fifth technique serves to deflect the shaming powers of the others who are in
communication with the offender.
u Condemnation of the condemners or rejection of the rejectors. ‘The delinquent

shifts the focus of attention from his own deviant acts to the motives and
behaviour of those who disapprove of his violations’. This time, the other who is
to be viewed as the enemy if guilt is to be avoided is the whole class of those who
disapprove of the behaviour in question. The captors are either hypocrites, actually
deviants in disguise, or impelled by personal motives.
Sykes and Matza go on to suggest that ‘the delinquent has picked up and emphasised
one part of the dominant value system, namely, the subterranean values that coexist
with other, publicly proclaimed values possessing a more respectable air’. (1961: 717)
These subterranean, or latent, values include a search for adventure, excitement,
and thrills, and are said to exist side by side with such conformity inducing values
as security, routinisation, and stability. Citing the work of Arthur Davis and Thorsten
Veblen, Sykes and Matza argue that delinquents are actually conforming to society
rather than transgressing it when they put the desire for ‘big money’ central to their
value system. Overall, subterranean values make delinquency desirable, while the
techniques of neutralisation allow this desire to take direction and become effectual.
6.3.1 Drift theory

In Delinquency and drift, (1964, New York, Wiley) Matza specifically built an alternative
picture of the delinquent under the dictates of soft rather than hard determinism.
The image of the delinquent that I wish to convey is one of drift; an actor neither
compelled not committed to deeds nor freely choosing them; neither different in any
simple or fundamental sense from the law abiding, nor the same; conforming to certain
traditions in American life while partially unreceptive to other more conventional
traditions; and finally, an actor whose motivational system may be explored along lines
explicitly commended by classical criminology – his peculiar relation to legal institutions.
Matza’s appreciation leads not to romanticism or heroics. We are dealing not with the
sensational committed criminal of the media reports, nor the heroic fighter against
the status quo that Marxist accounts sometimes appeared to suggest. Instead, Matza
stresses the mundaneness of delinquency, its pettiness and its transitoriness. He also
puts central the ambiguity of the moral order. Arguing that the contact and experiences
of the juvenile with the correctional system is itself a criminogenic factor. The concept of
human nature used by Matza is much more open than how the positivists viewed it; note
that neutralisation only makes delinquency possible, as Matza put it:
Those who have been granted the potentiality for freedom through the loosening of social
controls but who lack the position, capacity, or inclination to become agents in their own
behalf I call drifters, and it is in this category that I place the juvenile delinquent.
Matza did not consider delinquency as some natural or steady state that overtakes
an individual with the correct propensities once controls are relaxed but something
that is involved in processes. Two processes acted as triggering factors, namely the
combination of preparation and desperation.
u Preparation was the process whereby a person discovered that a given infraction
could be successfully accomplished by someone, and that the individual had the
ability to do it himself and that the fear or apprehension connected with the event
could be managed. Thus even if the person realised that a delinquent infraction
could be managed, it might not occur unless someone learned that it was possible,
felt confident that he or she could do it, and was courageous or stupid enough to
minimise the dangers. If these processes did not interact, the possibility would not
become a reality.
u Desperation came into play when the self-experienced a form of fatalism, a feeling
that the self was overwhelmed and felt a consequent need to violate the rules of
the system so as to reassert individuality.
Where does this direction lead the criminologist? In Theoretical criminology, Morrison
suggested that it lead into existentialism, a perspective downplayed by traditional
criminology – see Chapter 7.
Activity 6.1
Assessing the relationship between culture and crime as proposed by anomie
theory
Essential reading
¢ Robert Merton ‘Social Structure and Anomie’, 1938 article, as on the VLE.
¢ Downes, Understanding deviance, Chapter 5 ‘Anomie’, on the VLE.
6.3.2 Merton’s theory of social structure and anomie

The tradition of anomie theory owes a lot to the contribution of Robert Merton’s
theoretical analysis of ‘Social structure and anomie’ (1938; 1957).
Durkheim analysed suicide; Merton developed a general theory based on sociological

assumptions about human nature. Durkheim gave men generally insatiable passions
and appetites (from Hobbes); Merton assumes human needs and desires are primarily
the product of a social process: i.e. cultural socialisation. Relativism: particular
societies have particular cultural values. In the USA cultural values emphasise material
goals thus individuals will learn to strive for economic success.
Merton builds on Durkheim but takes us back to Hobbes and a reinterpretation of
‘felicity’, the constant striving to satisfy desires that are in their nature ongoing. For
Merton, all Americans, irrespective of their position in society, are exposed to the
dominant materialistic values, moreover the cultural beliefs sustain a myth that
anyone can succeed in the pursuit of economic goals.
Anomie, for Durkheim, referred to the failure of society to regulate or constrain the ends
or goals of human desire. Merton, on the other hand, is more concerned with social
regulation of the means people use to obtain material goals. First, Merton perceives a
‘strain toward anomie’ in the relative lack of cultural emphasis on institutional norms
–the established rules of the game – that regulate the legitimate means for obtaining
success in American society. Secondly, structural blockages that limit access to legitimate
means for many members of American society also contribute to its anomic tendencies.
Under such conditions, behaviour tends to be governed solely by considerations of
expediency or effectiveness in obtaining the goal rather than by a concern with whether
or not the behaviour conforms to institutional norms.
Together, the various elements in Merton’s theoretical model of American society add
up to a social environment that generates strong pressures toward deviant behavior
(1957: 146, emphasis in original):
[W]hen a system of cultural values extols, virtually above all else, certain common success-
goals for the population at large while the social structure rigorously restricts or completely
closes access to approved modes of reaching these goals for a considerable part of the same
population,…deviant behavior ensues on a large scale.
This chronic discrepancy between cultural promises and structural realities not only
undermines social support for institutional norms but also promotes violations of
those norms. Blocked in their pursuit of economic success, many members of society
are forced to adapt in deviant ways to this frustrating environmental condition.
1. How does Merton’s theory of anomie differ from Durkheim’s?
2. To what extent does Merton consider society as in constant flux and what role does
that play in the causation of deviancy?
3. Explain how the following table positions adaptations to these environmental

pressures? Discuss fully the analytical typology of individual adaptations to the
discrepancy between culture and social structure in American society.
Merton’s typology of individual adaptations to environmental pressures

Type of adaptation Cultural goal Institutionalised means
I. Conformity + +
II. Innovation + –
III. Ritualism – +
IV. Retreatism – –
V. Rebellion + +
Note: + signifies acceptance, – signifies rejection, and + signifies rejection of prevailing
goal or means and substitution of new goal or means.
Further reading
¢ Morrison, Theoretical criminology: from modernity to post-modernism, pp.175–183,
Chapter 12 ‘Criminology and the culture of modernity’, especially pp.273–281;
Chapter 13 ‘Crime and culture in the post-modern condition’.
Review questions:
1. Why does Durkheim speak of crime and being ‘normal’ in society? What does he
mean by ‘anomie’? Do you agree that human desires are essentially insatiable and
regulated only by cultural messages?
2. In what way(s) is Merton’s adaptation of anomie theory different from Durkheim’s?

What have been the main criticisms of Merton’s work? Are these justified?
3. Do you accept that there are overriding cultural messages of success in modern
society? Do all people share or accept these messages?
4. Are the cultural messages of contemporary conditions much more complex than
Merton allowed for? What are they? Does it make any sense to talk in terms of
individuals having a different location in social structure? Do some people feel
‘strain’ more than others, or are contemporary cultural messages so mixed that
strain occurs across the social ‘order’?
Part B: Labelling theory and moral panics
Part I: Labelling, otherwise known as symbolic, or social

interactionism or social reaction theory
Essential reading
All criminological texts contain a section on labelling theory. Sometimes, as
with Einstadter and Henry, Criminological theory: an analysis of its underlying
assumptions (2nd ed. 2006: Rowman & Littlefield) it is put under Social Process
Theories.
¢ Burke, Roger, An introduction to criminological theory, Chapter 8 ‘Labelling
theories’.
¢ Morrison, Wayne Theoretical criminology: from modernity to post-modernism,

1995, Chapter 14 ‘Labelling theory and the work of David Matza’.
Further reading
¢ S. Cohen, Folk devils and moral panics (Oxford, 1980) second edition.
¢ E.M. Lemert, Human deviance, social problems and social control (Englewood Cliffs,
1967).
¢ K. Plummer, ‘Misunderstanding labelling perspectives’ in Downes and Rock,

(eds) Deviant interpretations (Oxford, 1979).
Introduction
Secular modernity freed humans from the notion that they had been created by
a creator’s will and had a telos in finding happiness in doing what the creator had
willed for them. The self was free, free to follow their own desires. But what is the
self? In radical forms, the modern self is empty or, as existential perspectives claim,
pure possibility and no given content. In the late 1880s, the American theorist George
Herbert Mead developed a theory of the social-self using the concepts of ‘self’, ‘me’,
and ‘I’. Mead pushed forward this idea of a social-self arising from social interactions,
such as observing and interacting with others, responding to others’ opinions about
oneself, and internalising external opinions and internal feelings about oneself. The
self was therefore not the slave of biological factors or inherited traits but a relatively
open possibility developed over time from social experiences and activities. Language,
play, and games are important areas in which roles, opinions, attitudes, responses to
others are developed.
In 1938 Frank Tannenbaum – himself once the once an imprisoned radical – wrote on
the ‘dramatization of evil’ in his great text Community and crime...
The process of making the criminal, therefore, is a process of tagging, defining, identifying,
segregating, describing, emphasizing, making conscious and self-conscious; it becomes
a way of stimulating, suggesting, emphasizing and evoking the very traits that are
complained of...The person becomes the thing he is described as being...
The criminal was the product of social interactions, not a destined being.
6.4 Howard Becker and social interactionism

In the 1960s a famous quotation from Howard Becker shows how this was picked up:
The central fact about deviance [is that] it is created by society. I do not mean this is the
way it is ordinarily understood, in which the causes of deviance are located in the social
situation of the deviant or in ‘social factors’ which prompt his action. I mean, rather, that
social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance
and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. From
this point of view. Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits but rather a
consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’. The
deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behaviour is
behaviour that people so label. (The outsiders: 8–9.)
6.4.1 The overall context

By the 1960s sociology as a discipline was said to be free from social philosophy.
It claimed to be a science and there was no doubt about its dedication to scientific
methods and objectivity: sociology, it was said, was value-free. This was now
disputed…
To those who wanted to break away from a social consensus view, sociology, they
argued, was still contaminated by the bias and subjectivity of particular interest group
in society. The claim to the cool neutrality of science was a sham.
To recap on the three contrasting views on social structure and power (including the
power to make the laws):
1. Functionalism and consensus: here the criminal law reflected the social consensus
and institutions were analysed in terms of the functions they were said to play in
the overall operation of the social body.
2. Diverse social group and power: here people in positions of power were seen as
motivated largely by their own selfish interests.
3. Conflict and class struggle: here the social structure was viewed in terms of
historical development driven by contradictions – as between technology and
ideology – and society divided into social classes opposed in interests and power
relations.
In terms of scientific methodology, there was scepticism towards any individualistic

theory of crime causation: not merely biological theories and psychological theories
of personality maladjustment but also sociological theories that were dependent
on notions of the individual’s ‘defects’ due to inadequate socialisation or peer group
pressures. Labelling theory asked why some persons and not others are stigmatised
with the label of ‘criminal’ in a social process. The American theorist Austin Turk
voiced this disquiet: ‘If preconceptions are to be avoided, a criminal is most accurately
defined as any individual who is identified as such.’ The criminal self could be any of us:
and a variety of self-report studies showed most people had engaged in activities that
if caught could have involved criminal prosecution.
A developing ‘critical’ take on criminal justice asked for attention to be placed on the
agencies of social control: what were the motives behind the actions of the agencies
that deal with crime? Classical criminology with its images of due process accepted
that the criminal justice system, or as social dynamic approaches termed it – the
criminal-processing system – was often harsh and unfair, and, it was clear that the poor
and members of minority groups suffered from an acute disadvantage (the revolving
door analysis of prisons for example). The critical approach when aligned with Marxist
analysis looked at the criminal law and its enforcement as instruments deliberately
designed for the control of one social class by another.
What of data? Radicals questioned whether official criminal statistics showing the real
picture of crime. Instead attention was paid to unseen crime, such as soft and hard
corruption, white collar crime, etc. Both interactionists and radicals could accept that
the crime rate was, in part at least, a construction of police activities, and the actual
amount of crime was unknown and other measures to get a better picture were
required. But an emerging critical take went further: In his 1991 book, The problem of
crime: a peace and justice perspective, Richard Quinney changed the question to ‘why
societies and their agencies report, manufacture, or produce the volume of crime that
they do.’ (1991: 122) This was both methodologically reflective and a reflection of a loss
of trust in authority: while the legitimacy of the rules embedded in the criminal law
was no longer taken for granted, neither was the credibility of the government that
reported on their violation. Legal realists and interactionists could continue to look
for inaccuracy in terms of system mistakes, chance error or simple bias, but radicals
claimed there was a systematic distortion that is part of the machinery for social
control.
Criminology and criminal justice contributed to the social understandings of ‘ideology’

that kept the coercive aspects of this arrangement hidden through claims of value-free
science and accepting the labelling of those who challenged the system as ‘deviants’
or ‘criminals’ when such labels carry connotations of social pathology, psychiatric
illness and so on. Criminal justice and criminology contributed to social processes
which aroused distaste for the rule-breaker as ‘bad’, anti-social, enemies of society
and so forth while the official statistics can serve to create a sense of a more direct and
personal danger in the form of a crime wave that will convince many people (including
many of the people in the lower classes) that draconian measures are justified (crises
of law and order).
All of this was part of a wider questioning of the relationship between the political
order and nonconformity, thus revitalising one of sociology’s most profound themes,
the relationship between the individual and the state.
The consequences of the above position range from potentially devastating to the
whole positivist tradition of investigating ‘crime’ and the ‘criminal’, to merely adding
another area of study.
The attack on positivism flows from the reinterpretation of language which the
philosophical perspective underlying the labelling approach gives. Words such as the
offender, the criminal, dangerousness, indeed all ‘naming words’, are now seen not as
a reflection of a natural reality, but as a snapshot of a social process. Let us, however,
be clear. The radical analysis of labelling is not dominant, it has been accommodated
within the mainstream sociology of deviancy without, it seems, upsetting the
confidence of empirical work.
Remember the confidence of positivism: a belief in a determinate external reality out

there that it is possible to measure accurately. The labelling perspective is part of an
alternative position, a perspective that states we can never get to this reality. It claims
reality is linguistically constituted, therefore, we can say that the limits of our world
are the limits of our language.
What is the self in a non-positivist conception? It is an existential self. A self that

owes its character to no innate ‘human nature’, no given or fixed biological character
is recognised. Instead, for us, as Pascal said, ‘there is nothing that cannot be made
natural; there is nothing natural that cannot be lost’. As we construct our own
selves, society constructs human nature. The role of instinct, or natural drives, is
lessened through the inescapable sociality of mankind. The structure of socialisation,
of learning, is the structure of the human self. Our ability to be plastic, to learn
throughout life, enables our culture also to learn. To hold a cumulative technological
power that transforms the environment we live in as a species. The ability to socially
label, to create typologies, categories and in turn to use the definitional power of laws
is part of this cultural technology. Culture replaces ‘natural instinct’ as the means of
human survival.
The reality humans face is a cultural one; our descriptive terms, our arrangement,
the divisions we find ourselves thrust into, constitute our cultural heritage. Culture,
the tool by which humanity surmounts natural reality becomes the world, humanity
confronts and becomes the reality which creates the pressures and demands of social
human existence. Thus the crude empiricist image of reality, a presence out there
which we can safely perceive through our senses, gives way to the realisation that
all senses of reality are culturally channelled and induced. Freed from nature, man
becomes the subject of culture. Dependence on nature is replaced by dependence on
culture. As the anthropologist Geertz put it, a person abstracted from culture would
be:
functionally incomplete, not merely a talented ape who had, like some underprivileged
child, unfortunately been prevented from realizing his full potentialities, but a kind of
formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self control, a chaos of
spasmodic impulses and vague emotions. (Geertz, C. The interpretation of cultures, New
York, Basic Books, 1973: 99.)
The reality of social life is therefore a linguistic reality. And, since language is one kind
of symbolic system, a set of conventionalised sounds and signs, we can say that our
reality is primarily based on symbols. The external world is for us a world clothed in
symbols. These symbols identify or indicate certain aspects of the environment to us
and structure our responses to them. All objects can wear several sets of identifiers,
different meanings, and, therefore, be different objects. Social objects may be viewed
in incompatible ways. One thing can be given different meanings, or one concept can
refer to a variety of things (just think of the variety of things that are called ‘law’). We
create our social world as a bonded whole since things only exist socially in so far as
they have meaning, interest, value, purpose, function, for us. For the social world we
can say that the only way we recognise things in the world is by conferring meaning
or value on them. We endow the world with symbols and respond to the meanings
contained in them. So there are as many things in the world, and only such things, as
we have meanings for at any one time.
Language and other symbolic systems codify these meanings. In using language,
or other kinds of signs such as gestures, we impose a sort of grid on reality. Since
language and other symbolic systems are social products, this is a socially constructed
grid. Thus Alasdair MacIntyre has said that ‘the limits of action are the limits of
description… the delineation of a society’s concepts is therefore the crucial step in the
delineation of its life’. (MacIntyre, A., ‘A mistake about causality in social science’, in P.
Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds), Philosophy, politics, and society, Oxford, Basil Blackwell,
1962.)
6.5 Role, status and stigma

I have claimed language is a major determinant of reality for a culture. Age, sex,
race, class subdivide this reality into a series of smaller realities setting up a series of
subcultural realities. But on an everyday level even these sub-cultural realities tend
to become too large for most individuals. The working-class Conservative for instance
is someone who appears to have stepped out of a confusion of status; as a worker he
‘should’, in class terms, vote Labour, the party of the worker. But class status is only one
element in the structuring of an individual’s self-position. His relation to the kind of
job he has and aspires to, his schooling, the home life he enjoys, the life lived among
friends and neighbours, his sporting contacts, all provide a range of role-playing in
which various and perhaps conflicting experiences are possible. Various statuses
engaged.
Being young or old, being a woman, is to have a particular social status. So is being
married or unmarried; being a teacher or parent, a neighbour or taxpayer, a prisoner,
an offender, a mental patient or a disabled person. Each status carries with it a set of
expectations and reactions, an ensemble of rights and obligations, a package of social
relations, which both carry stress, and which the living in accordance with constitutes
the performance of a role. A role is the dynamic aspect of status – it tells us how to
think, feel and behave in ways appropriate to a given status. Thus a set of behaviours
appropriate for sets of status has been prepared – a mother is caring and exhibits
the behaviour of care, a soldier brave and preforms bravely, a patient submissive and
obedient to the doctor. To occupy a particular status is to slip into a role as into a suit
of clothes tailored for the occasion. The role is binding on both actor and audience. It
is a reciprocal relationship. It can constrain behaviour more directly and more forcibly
than either language or class.
6.5.1 Labelling and the ascription of roles

This is a process which you may wish to think about. Where do you get your own sense
of self-identity and your image of the roles available for you? We do not invent our
roles but find them latent in the statuses we occupy, waiting to be actualised by our
performance. The script has been largely written for us before we appear. As opposed
to a stage actor, however, we largely learn our parts unconsciously, unaware of the
social script. Yet the most apparently spontaneous and personal behaviour, when we
feel most ourselves, often turns out to be a replaying of the lines of a symbolic script
written long ago.
6.5.2 Focusing attention onto the power of the authorities to ascribe

criminal identities
As well as the quotation of Becker consider the flavour of:
I propose to shift the focus of theory and research from the forms of deviant behaviour
to the processes by which people come to be defined as deviant by others. Such a shift
requires that the sociologist view as problematic what he generally assumes as given
– namely, that certain forms of behaviour are per se deviant and are so defined by the
‘conventional’ or conforming members of a group. (Kitsuse, J., ‘Societal reaction to deviant
behavior’, in Rubington and Weinberg (eds), Deviance: the interactionist perspective, New
York, 1968: 19–20.)
The critical variable in the study of deviance is the social audience rather than the
individual actor, since it is the audience which eventually determines whether or not an
episode of behaviour or any class of episodes is labelled deviant. (Erikson, K., ‘Notes on the
sociology of deviance’, in Becker, (ed.), The other side, New York, 1964: 11.)
6.5.3 Important terms of labelling theory

The labelling or symbolic interactionalist approach was taken as resting upon three
simple premises:
u Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have
for them.
u The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction
that one has with one’s fellows.
u These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process
used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters. (Blumer, 1969: 2)
6.5.4 Criticisms
u To those on the left, radicals, it seemed a half-way house and was not critical
enough of the state and the class motivations behind applying the labels.
u To those on the right, it seemed to accept the deviant as one who was just being
normal until some label was forced on them.
u Methodologically, although it seemed to fit common-sense understanding of social

interaction, how was it to be ruthlessly tested?
u While it seemed to explain secondary deviance – that is actions taken as a

consequence of the label – it did not explain the initial actions that the individual
engaged in and which led to the labels being applied in the first instance.

1. How adequate is labelling theory as a general account of crime?
2. Is labelling theory only applicable to marginal forms of deviance?
3. ‘The irony of formal state intervention in social control is that labelling offenders
as criminals leads to more crime being committed but society needs this
labelling in order to affirm its central values.’
What assumptions lie behind this statement and do you agree with its analysis?
4. Critically assess the legacy of the labelling perspective.
5. ‘The theoretical implications of labelling theory undercut the rationale for much
of the official criminal justice system. Either labelling theory was wrong or it had
to be ignored for the criminal justice system to continue to expand.’
Discuss.
6. ‘Labelling theory was a reflection of the anti-establishment mood of the 1960s

and left no lasting theoretical legacy.’ Do you agree?
Part II Moral panic theory
6.6 The creation of the concept of moral panics

It is now 30 years since the publication of the classic text that made the concept
‘moral panics’ part of the sociological cannon by Stanley Cohen. In an often quoted
passage he stated:
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A
condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as
a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and
stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors,
bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people. (1973: 9)
The term had been first used by his friend Jock Young in his study of drug takers in
Notting Hill (a now extremely expensive part of London but then very much a
transitional area with many immigrants). Those panics are apparent in contemporary
society and in the past, occasioning the historian Macaulay’s remark that there is ‘no
spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality’.
Perhaps the classic case was witchcraft in the middle ages in Europe (and later in what
is now the USA), and modern times have centred on entities and activities as diverse
as the perceived threat to social values and social order said to arise from reading
comics, online paedophiles (or offline paedophilic clergy and policemen), Satanists in
kindergartens, 1950s rock and roll, pachinko, ‘mods and rockers’, 1920s jazz, engineers
and other ‘wreckers’ in the 1920s and 1930s Soviet Russia and the communist threat,
homosexuality, fin de siècle hooligans, ‘white slavery’, electronic games or the
addictive internet (many refer the perceived threat of Muslim extremists post 9/11 as a
moral panic).
In Policing the crisis: mugging, the state and law and order (1978), Stuart Hall and his
colleagues studied the reaction to the importation of the previously American
phenomenon of mugging into the United Kingdom. Employing Cohen’s definition
of moral panic, Hall et al. theorised that the ‘rising crime rate equation’ performs an
ideological function relating to social control. Crime statistics, in Hall’s view, are often
manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging)
could thereby be ignited to create public support for the need to ‘police the crisis’. The
media play a central role in the ‘social production of news’ to reap the rewards of lurid
crime stories.
Goode and Ben-Yehuda give moral panics the following features:
1. Concern: there must be awareness that the behaviour of the group or category in
question is likely to have a negative impact on society.
2. Hostility: hostility towards the group in question increases, and they become ‘folk
devils’. A clear division forms between ‘them’ and ‘us’.
3. Consensus: though concern does not have to be nationwide, there must be

widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to
society. It is important at this stage that the ‘moral entrepreneurs’ are vocal and
the ‘folk devils’ appear weak and disorganised.
4. Disproportionality: the action taken is disproportionate to the actual threat posed

by the accused group.
5. Volatility: moral panics are highly volatile and tend to disappear as quickly as they
appeared due to a wane in public interest or news reports changing to another
topic.
Moral panics are often accompanied by a number of institutional processes:
1. Official inquiries (including reports by Royal Commissions and Parliamentary

Committees in Australia, New Zealand and Canada).
2. Denunciations of the stigmatised activity and representatives by ‘community

guardians’ such as senior police, clergy, pundits and journalists.
3. Passage of new legislation and strengthening of existing legislation – sometimes

implemented with inadequate regard for legal protections or notions of human
rights exemplary investigations and prosecutions, which are often protracted and
do not uncover evidence of substantial abuse or other ills but may destroy the
careers, lives or health of targets such as schoolteachers.
4. Diversion of public and private resources from action that provides a substantive
response to real problems.
The Australian commentator Margaret Talbot identified a moral panic over sex
offences (which among other things resulted in a proliferation of Offender Registers)
which included:
1. Inflated statistics;
2. Dismissal of countervailing evidence;
3. Dubious research;
4. Indiscriminate merging of crime categories;
5. Diversion of attention and resources from more prevalent forms of child abuse
(e.g. emotional and physical neglect, physical abuse, abandonment and poverty).
In the UK, Kenneth Gagne’s 2001 dissertation Moral panics over youth culture and video
games noted that moral panics are usually expressed as expressions of outrage rather
than unadulterated fear and framed in terms of a dominant morality threatened by
the activities of a stereotyped group (children, migrants, schismatics).
One consequence is that consumption of stigmatised commodities (such as comics

and electronic games) may be reified, with attention by the mass media and by
authority figures demonstrating to consumers that what they are doing is noteworthy.
Leaders in the community address the group from a supposed moral high ground,
‘treating’ the panic with solutions that more often than not reinforce the stereotype
and fail to produce any real resolution. Eventually, the stereotype fades of its own
volition, to be replaced in a few years by another moral panic, perhaps when the
original entertainment form and the response to it change, creating a panic that is a
variation on the original.
A moral panic is a panic over what is seen as deviant. The subject of the panic is usually
not a suddenly new phenomenon, but something which has been in existence for
many years, and suddenly comes to society’s and the media’s attention.
6.7 Studies
Cohen’s seminal work is:
¢ Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the mods and rockers (St Albans:
Paladin, 1973; revised edition Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
See also:
¢ Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral panics: the social construction of
deviance first edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), second edition (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009).
Material on the internet to read
¢ Goode, Erich and Nachman Ben-Yehuda Moral panics: The social construction of
deviance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) first edition, Chapter 12 ‘The American drug
panic of the 1980s’.
Material on the VLE to read
¢ Goode, Erich and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral panics: The social construction of
deviance second edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Chapter 2 ‘The moral
panic an introduction’.
¢ Thompson, Kenneth, Moral Panics (London: Routledge, 1998) Chapter 3 ‘Moral

panics about youth’.
Part C: Critical criminology, a different view of social structure
Essential reading
¢ Burke, Roger, An introduction to criminological theory, Chapter 10 ‘Conflict and
radical theories’, Chapter 12 ‘Critical criminology’, Chapter 18 Left realism’.
There is discussion of critical or radical criminology in any criminology textbook,

such as:
¢ Downes, D. and P. Rock, Understanding deviance, Chapter 10 ‘Radical
criminology’.
The classic British texts were very much a product of the 1970s and full of idealist
critique and hope:
¢ Taylor, Walton and Young, The new criminology, 1973.
¢ Taylor, Walton and Young, Critical criminology, 1975.
¢ Later texts such as Taylor, Ian Crime in context: a critical criminology of market
societies. (Polity Press, 1999) largely focus on the criminogenic effects of mass
consumerism and the international market-place. Taylor structured his last book
before his death by placing ‘crime and fear’ in the context of the massive social
transformations of the late 20th century.
¢ Young, Jock The exclusive society. (Sage, 1999) analyses the rise of a society
of plenty in which a significant portion is excluded. Young’s work is the
culmination of an intellectual journey from the neo-Marxism of The new
criminology (1973) through ‘left realism’ into this pragmatic but committed
analysis of the complexity of late modernity and the need for social justice.
Perhaps his thesis can be summed up by his final paragraph:
Crime and intolerance occur when citizenship is thwarted; their causes lie in injustice, yet
their effect is, inevitably, further injustice and violation of citizenship. The solution is to be
found not in the resurrection of past stabilities, based on a nostalgia and a world that will
never return, but on a new citizenship a reflexive modernity which will tackle the problem
of justice and community, of reward and individualism, which dwell at the heart of liberal
democracy.
6.8 The rise of critical criminology

As stated earlier, the 1960s and 1970s saw a dramatic change in the study of crime.
For critical voices, it was a movement from accepting a consensus view of social
order to one where social order was riven by conflict. (You may find it interesting
that the first edition of Vold published in 1958 was regarded as radical in that it
openly espoused a ‘conflict’ perspective. Therein Vold stated that he saw social order
as ‘congeries of groups held together in a dynamic equilibrium of opposing group
interests and efforts. The continuity of group interaction, the endless series of moves
and countermoves, of checks and cross-checks… in an immediate and dynamically
maintained equilibrium… provides opportunities for a continuous possibility of
shifting positions, of gaining or losing status, with the consequent need to maintain an
alert defense of one’s position… Conflict is viewed, therefore, as one of the principal
and essential social processes upon which the continuing on-going society depends’.
(Theoretical criminology, 1958: 204).)
It drew on a variety of roots from Marxism to labelling. For most of the 20th century,
a positivist approach dominated criminological development, focusing upon
‘criminal behaviour’ rather than criminal law, on the supposed determining causes
of such behaviour, and on the differentiating of criminals from non-criminals. The
1960s labelling theory movement placed focus on the role of the criminal law in
generating legal labels that constitute the demarcation between the criminal and the
non-criminal.
In part, the drive behind the new or critical approach in criminology was an attempt to
expose the background assumptions and structural biases in the traditional research
which leave unproblematic the definition and meaning of crime. As Wiles put it in
1976:
Laws and rules, rather than defining the boundaries of criminology, now have to be
included within criminological explanations. Criminology was forced to encompass the
political nature of deviance and its control, and so examine the relationship between
theory and ideology. (1976: 17)
This developed aspects of the interactionists labelling theories (see Part B). However,
one of the consequences of radical interactionism is an invitation into an existentialist
world, a world where many realities are acknowledged and no monopoly on any is
claimed. The world of radical interactionism is emergent and capricious, defined and
structured through direct experience and is essentially a human creation, thus, it is
said only humans can understand it. But in the late-modern world the multiplicity
of life experiences and images threatens to overwhelm the individuals’ ability to
comprehend with the alienating result of creating a domain of abstracted individuals.
Critical criminology however, seizes upon a deep structural analysis, a holistic
approach which attempts to go beyond experience and tells us of the foundational
pressures which constrain and produce the bedrock conditions of possible knowledge
and of law making processes. The usual mode of analysis here is Marxist in derivation.
In general, the new criminology stepped outside of the traditional boundaries of

criminology refusing to accept the products of the legal enforcement mechanism
as its data. Instead, the processes of criminalisation, of state power, of historical
development, of the development of legal ideologies, are brought directly into the
picture. We are asked to consider the human price of modernity and to face up to the
radical disparities beneath the formal equality and liberty of the liberal subject. The
rule of law is seen in the Marxist tradition as an ideology hiding the ‘alienation of man
in modern bourgeois (or industrial) society’. The separation of men and women from
humanity via technology, via visions of worth according to property, via ethnicity, via
gender is at issue. Formal legal and political equality concealed and even made greater
real social and economic inequality. Behind the operation of the free market, lies
the rule of the productive system (the factory); behind the freedom of trade lies the
subjection of colonies and now the third world; behind the freedom to be yourself lies
the ideological packaging of what it means to be a desirable and successful ‘modern’.
The now ‘classical’ British text of the new criminology is The new criminology: for a
social theory of deviance, by Taylor, Walton and Young. Their approach to knowledge
is expressly one of ‘praxis’, a combination of theory and practice. The criminologist is
a committed member of his/her society, a person who lives the struggle to create a
more human and free society:
...one of the central purposes of this critique has been to assert the possibility – not only of
a fully social theory – but also of a society in which men are able to assert themselves in a
fully social fashion. With Marx, we have been concerned with the social arrangements that
have obstructed, and the social contradictions that enhance, man’s chances of achieving
full solidarity – a state of freedom from material necessity, and (therefore) of material
incentive, a release from the constraints of forced production, an abolition of the forced
division of labour, and a set of social arrangements, therefore, in which there would be no
politically, economically, and socially induced need to criminalize deviance. (1973: 270)
The authors of The new criminology are clear as to their values, a normative
commitment to the abolition of inequalities in wealth and power, and the creation of
the kind of society in which the facts of human diversity are not subject to the power
to criminalise. (The new criminology: 282; Critical criminology: 44).
We can see that this perspective differs fundamentally from the view of human nature
which underlies the pessimistic liberalism of 18th century writers such as Thomas
Hobbes. As H. Collins summarises it, Marxist philosophy contains an image of moving
beyond the institutions of law:
The supposition that law will always be necessary rests upon beliefs about certain
constant qualities of human nature such as greed and selfishness. The theory of
alienation includes the assertion that the materially determined constant of the
human psyche may be fundamentally transformed; under the communist relations
of production a novel type of personality will emerge which will be exempt from
egocentric lusts for power and wealth. Accordingly the usual reason given by liberal
political philosophy for the existence of coercive systems of behavioral control like
law will be no longer be extant. Men will naturally agree about the proper standards
of behaviour and conform to them without the need for sanctions. (Marxism and Law,
1982: 120)
This line of thinking has been labelled left idealism. Here the law is viewed as an
expression of ruling class interests and working class behaviour necessarily violates
these interests expressing a set of requirements of the working class or ‘proletariat’.
The existence of crime is not the normal state of society and a never to be overcome
phenomena but the positive result of the current structures of capitalism in particular
the emphasis on property:
a society which is predicated on the unequal right to the accumulation of property

gives rise to the legal and illegal desire to accumulate property as rapidly as possible.
(Taylor et al. 1975: 34.)
The British writers Taylor, Walton and Young were not specifically advocating a naive
socialism but capitalism was clearly represented as criminogenic. In his 1980 text,
Richard Quinney stated that ‘crime control and criminality’ were to be ‘understood in
terms of the conditions resulting from the capitalist appropriation of labour’. Thus:
The only lasting solution to the crisis of capitalism is socialism. Under late, advanced
capitalism, socialism will be achieved in the struggle of all people who are oppressed by
the capitalist mode of production…
The essential meaning of crime in the development of capitalism is the need for a
socialist society. (Class, state and crime, 1980: 67-68.)
When, however, what would appear a natural empirical assumption of this approach,
i.e. that crime is a form of class warfare and largely inter-class, is subjected to empirical
analysis it appears open to doubts. Crime is largely intra-class, committed by people
of similar socio-economic background on others largely as opportunity arises (true
even of white collar fraud). Left idealism turns to complex notions of ideology and
the division of working class perceptions to account for this at the expense of making
their position untestable, unfalsifiable, and thus regarded as unscientific by many.
Its optimistic position is also out of touch with the late modern times which has
witnessed the ‘end of communism’ in Eastern Europe and new positions of reformism
and left realism have gained currency.
For some commentators, while it is essential that critical criminology raises the issues
of power, exploitation and human subjection, the task is to face up to some of the
empirical issues about what is actually to be done to increase the life chances of the
powerless. This is what the new left realism attempts to do on a local pragmatic level.
(On left realism see Roger Burke, Introduction to Criminology theory, Chapter 18 ‘Left
realism’).
6.8.1 An illustrative text: Jock Young, The exclusive society

Our present times certainly no longer believe that it is sufficient to follow Marx and
place private property at the root of all evil, instead a more complex and greater
appreciation of the problems are to see alienation as rooted in the technological
foundations, organisations and scale of modern society. Left realists try to confront the
huge inequalities of our present time in a pragmatic but focused manner. One theme
of recent discussions in the UK concerns the idea of the exclusive society. Jock Young’s
The exclusive society is the topical text.
Young’s thesis is that the last third of the 20th century witnessed a transformation in
the lives of citizens in the advanced industrial societies. The golden age of the post-
war settlement with high unemployment, stable family structures, and consensual
values underpinned by the safety net of the welfare state gave way to a new world. A
social ordering characterised by structural unemployment, economic precariousness,
a systematic cutting of welfare provisions and a growing instability of family life
and interpersonal relations. Pluralism and individualism replaced a social order
displaying a relative consensus of values. A world of material and ontological security
from cradle to grave is replaced by precariousness and uncertainty and whereas
social commentators in the 1950s berated the complacency of a comfortable ‘never
had it so good’ generation, those of today talk of a risk society where social change
becomes the central dynamo of existence and where anything might happen. Key
driving factors are changes in market forces that have transformed both the spheres
of production and of consumption. The move from Fordism to post-Fordism involves
the unravelling of the world of work where the primary labour market of secure
employment and safe careers shrinks, the secondary labour market of short-term
contracts, flexibility and insecurity increases as does the growth of an underclass of
the structurally unemployed.
For Young, a criminogenic culture is generated in that market values that encourage
an ethos of every person for themselves fits on top of a more unequal and less
meritocratic society. At the same time the force of informal social control weakens as
communities are disintegrated by social mobility or left to decay as capital finds more
profitable areas to invest and develop. Families are stressed and fragmented by the
decline of communities systems of support, the reduction of state support and the
more diverse pressures of the changing patterns of work. As the pressures that lead to
crime increase, the informal forces, which control it, decrease.
The very nature of order is problematised in that rules are both more readily broken
and their status questioned. Exclusion in the market gives rise to exclusion and
divisions within civil society; but the responses of the state have repercussions in
reinforcing and exacerbating the exclusions of civil society and the market place.
Highlighting the downside of contemporary capitalism is not enough for the realist,
one must seek at least to identify some aspects which can be used to build new
communities. The rise of neoliberal economics in the 1990s and 2000s reflects
and further contributes to global flows of capital and results in the destruction of
traditional working-class jobs and communities. In the face of this there is a need to
rebuild face-to-face solidarity, refashion organic communities of living social bonds
and commonly shared beliefs and interests. Although this is also dangerous: in the face
of growing complexity and loss of control by governments over the economy, various
forms of popularism and ‘othering’ rise and new enemies, such as migrants are seen as
fit to label. Many of the left recognise the bondage of family, status, and religion that
prevailed in these ‘simpler’ societies. The new right in current social theory wishes a
return to traditional deference of authority, of socialisation into the need to work, into
the image of secure societies.
The issue is not to return to some simple traditional social ordering of the supposed
past but to think creatively for the future! To construct vibrant perceptions for
pluralist, multi-ethnic and participatory societies of the future.

1. Radical criminologists have disputed the assumptions of the positivist theorists.
What new insights or perspectives, if any, have emerged from their theorising
about the causes and distribution of crime in society?
2. ‘Modern capitalist society is inherently criminogenic.’
Do you agree?
7 Contemporary cultural criminology and
existentialism
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
7.1 Directions in cultural criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
7.2 Historical, theoretical and methodological antecedents of cultural

criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
7.3 The method(s) of cultural criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
7.4 Jack Katz and the ‘seductions of crime’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
7.5 Mike Presdee and the ‘carnival of crime’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
7.6 Towards an existential perspective in criminology . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Summing up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Criminology 7 Contemporary cultural criminology and existentialism page 99
Introduction
Criminology, as has been emphasised, is a contested space. In Chapter 6 we saw
that David Matza introduced a key contrast between a correctional attitude and an
appreciative stance. To restate a quote therein used:
the goal of ridding ourselves of the deviant phenomenon, however utopian, stands in
sharp contrast to an appreciative perspective and may be referred to as “correctional.” The
overriding concern with causation or ‘etiology’: systematically interferes with the capacity
to empathize and thus comprehend the subject of inquiry. Only through appreciation can
the texture of social patterns and the nuances of human engagement with those patterns
be understood and analyzed. (Matza, 1969: 15)
What is at stake?
Consider the German 19th century writer Fredrick Nietzsche, who in Thus spake
Zarathustra (originally published in 1883) has a challenging section called ‘On the pale
criminal’.
Here Nietzsche confronts the institutions of justice and self-governance. Zarathustra

speaks of the pale criminal, a man brought before the court charged with robbery and
murder. While the court ends up with a normal exchange Nietzsche evokes layers of
meaning, the thinking before the act, the doing of the act and later the image of the
act:
But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the
wheel of causality does not roll between them. An image made this pale man pale. He was
equal to his deed when he did it; but he could not bear its image after it was done. …
If this appears ambiguous, Nietzsche calls to the judge not to dwell with the
superficial, but the judge cannot:
Listen, O judges: there is yet madness, and that comes before the deed. Alas, you have not
yet crept deep enough into this soul.
Thus speaks the red judge, ‘Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to rob.’ But I say
unto you: his soul wanted blood, not robbery; he thirsted after the bliss of the knife. His
poor reason, however, did not comprehend this madness and persuaded him: ‘What
matters blood?’ it asked; ‘don’t you want at least to commit a robbery with it? To take
revenge?’…
The judges decide he is a robber who committed murder as a factor in the main crime;
in other words, they ignore the motivations of the body and rationalise them away.
They do not, they cannot, enter into the world of the man who thirsted for the thrill of
the knife. And yet, speaks Zarathustra, the reality of the man’s situation is chaos:
What is this man? A heap of diseases, which, through his spirit, reach out into the world:
there they want to catch their prey.
What is this man? A ball of wild snakes, which rarely enjoy rest from each other: so they go
forth singly and seek prey in the world.
Behold this poor body! What is suffered and coveted this poor soul interpreted for itself: it
interpreted it as murderous lust and greed for the bliss of the knife.
We must interpret: not only for academic reasons but as social actors. When we
confront the victims of crime – particularly major crimes – we try to provide some
meaning amid the sorrow. We overlook what Jack Katz has called the foreground
feature of crime, its thrill, its emotions, and its transgressive dynamics. (Read Morrison,
Chapter 15 ‘Crime and the existential dilemma’ and note the contingency of the
interactions in the extracts from the extreme crimes recounted.) Everyday life involves
emotions of shame, rage, humiliation and what Nietzsche called resentment where
feelings of failure in oneself lead to blaming external forces and others.
In ‘On the pale criminal’ Zarathustra is not happy with the failure to look at the appeal
or thirst for the knife, he condemns the state of denial of both the pale criminal and
the judge because the judge believes himself to be good based on the old laws of
religion and morality and the criminal cannot be true to himself. Zarathustra actually
prefers the ‘heap of disease’ to the judge for the criminal has at least separated himself
from the prevailing traditional teaching and sought to do a now act, even if he is
incapable of understanding his real position. For Katz, the offender often has worked
through ‘a dialectic processes through which a person empowers the world to seduce
him to criminality’ (1988: 7).
To some criminalists, this ignores the greater social and economic context as we
encounter the sheer positivity of the act: emotions, projections of the self, anxiety,
fears: all of these are in motion, a ‘ball of wild snakes’. What of the revenge Nietzsche
has Zarathustra speak of? If traditional criminology discounted this as a mere
subjective feeling of little consequence appreciating the actuality of the offender’s
world, is anything now beyond being included in factors that criminology may
consider?
A ‘post’ or ‘late’ modern theory of crime (see Henry and Milovanovic 1996; Mugford
and O’Malley 1994; Morrison 1995; Stanley 1996; Ferrell et al. 2004) implies that one
grand narrative of theorising will not suffice: now we must elude the parameters and
limitations of dry definition, break free of some of the constraints of the discipline
and capture the living reality of offending. Currently, a revised cultural criminology
attempts to do this alongside consideration of emotions, of the lived experiences of
crime (as victims and perpetrators) and of existential perspectives.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and the relevant readings, you should be able to:
u understand some of the main interfaces that exist between certain forms of
crime/criminality and contemporary culture
u recognise and understand the main theories and ideas associated with cultural
criminology
u recognise and understand the key methodological approaches of cultural
criminology
u understand Jack Katz’s ideas concerning ‘the phenomenology of transgression’
u understand the notion of crime as ‘carnival’
u relate the idea of an existentialist perspective in criminology.
Essential reading
¢ Ferrell, J., K. Hayward and J. Young Cultural criminology (London: Sage, 2008)
Chapter 1 ‘Cultural criminology: an invitation’.
¢ Morrison, W. Theoretical criminology: from modernity to postmodernism, (London:

Cavendish, 1995) Chapter 13 ‘Culture and crime in the postmodern condition’
and Chapter 15 ‘Crime and the existentialist dilemma’.
¢ Presdee, M. ‘Cultural criminology: the long and winding road’ in Theoretical

criminology (2004) Volume 8, Number 3, pp.275–283.
Further reading
¢ Katz, J. Seductions of crime: moral and sensual attractions of doing evil, (New York:
Basic Books, 1988).
¢ Ferrell, J. and C.S. Sanders Cultural criminology (Boston: Northeastern University

Press, 1995).
¢ Ferrell, J. (1999) ‘Cultural criminology’ American Review of Sociology, 25 395–418.
¢ Ferrell, J. ‘Crime and culture’ in C. Hale, K. Hayward, A. Wahidin and E.

Wincup(eds) Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
¢ Ferrell, J., K. Hayward, W. Morrison and M. Presdee Cultural criminology unleashed

(London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2004).
¢ Hayward, K.J. City limits: crime, consumer culture and the urban experience
¢ Hayward, K.J. and J. Young (2004) ‘Cultural criminology: some notes on the
script’ Theoretical criminology Volume 8, Number 3, pp.259–273.
7.1 Directions in cultural criminology

The American criminologist, Jeff Ferrell (1999: 396) stressed that contemporary cultural
criminology was ‘less a definitive paradigm than an emergent array of perspectives
linked by sensitivities to image, meaning, and representation in the study of crime and
crime control’.
As an emergent orientation in sociology, criminology, and criminal justice,

cultural criminology explores the convergence of cultural and criminal processes
in contemporary social life. Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies,
postmodern theory, critical theory, and interactionist sociology, and on ethnographic
methodologies and media textual analysis, this orientation highlights issues of image,
meaning, and representation in the interplay of crime and crime control. Specifically,
cultural criminology investigates stylised frameworks and experiential dynamics of
illicit subcultures; the symbolic criminalisation of popular cultural forms; and the
mediated construction of crime and crime control issues. In addition, emerging areas
of inquiry within cultural criminology include the development of situated media and
situated audiences for crime; the media and culture of policing; the links between
crime, crime control, and cultural space, and the collectively embodied emotions that
shape the meaning of crime. (ibid.: 395 see also Ferrell 2005)
Put more simply, its remit is to keep ‘turning the kaleidoscope’ on the way we think
about crime, and importantly, the legal and societal responses to crime.
More recently, cultural criminology has been picked up in the United Kingdom where
writers such as Keith Hayward and the late Jock Young were keen to add a more critical
dimension to the field. They sought to stress the following five themes – many of
which, of course, cross cut with the kind of ideas outlined by Ferrell above:
1. To bring back sociological theory to criminology; that is to integrate the role of

culture, social construction, human meaning and creativity to the criminological
project;
2. To introduce notions of passion, anger, joy and amusement as well as tedium,

boredom, repression and elective conformity to the overly cognitive account of
human action and rationality;
3. To re-energise aetiological questions of crime by replacing the bias toward rational

choice and sociological determinism with an emphasis upon the ‘lived experience’
of everyday life and existential parameters of choice within a ‘winner-loser’
consumer society’;
4. To seek to understand the ways in which mediated processes of cultural

reproduction and exchange ‘constitute’ the experience of crime, self and society
under conditions of late modernity;
5. To confront the posturing of value and political neutrality within much

contemporary criminology with a critical emphasis on the ideological
commitments of the terms by which we frame problems of crime, inequality
and criminal justice. Such themes we hope, when elucidated, will serve to
further define the arrival of cultural criminology as a major development within
contemporary criminology.
A third key definitional principle associated with cultural criminology is its strong
emphasis on the relationship between crime and everyday life within late modern
society (see 7.4), a point made clearly by the late British criminologist, Mike Presdee in
a quote that also nicely captures cultural criminology’s considerable scepticism about
crime statistics and dry empirical data.
Cultural criminology uses the ‘evidence’ of everyday existence, wherever it is found and
in whatever form it can be found; the debris of everyday life is its ‘data’. It uses cultural
artefacts whenever and wherever they present themselves, examining the cultural ‘trail’
they leave behind. Life histories, images, music and dance, all have a story to tell in the
unravelling of crime. Such stories tell us more about the nature of crime than a report full
of statistics... (Presdee 2000: 15).
In sum, then, one might say that within cultural criminology the phenomenology of
transgression (see 7.4 on Jack Katz) is fused with a sociological analysis of ‘post’ or ‘late’
modern culture to reposition thinking about crime (both the act itself and the way it
is represented), transgression and crime control. Furthermore, criminal behaviour is
reinterpreted as a technique for resolving certain psychic conflicts, and these conflicts
are regarded as indelibly linked to various features of contemporary life (Morrison,
1995; Presdee 2000; Hayward 2004). While it is undoubtedly the case that many of
these themes can be found elsewhere in the criminological tradition (most notably in
the writings of Robert Merton and David Matza (see Chapter 6, and, to a lesser extent,
in the work of Tony Jefferson and the fellow members of the so-called ‘British school’
in their various attempts to develop ‘imaginary solutions’ to the contradictions and
conflicts of capitalist society (see 7.2), it is clear that this new body of work offers
something new, not least because of its engagement with debates on the transition
into postmodernity.
Finally, cultural criminology should not be thought of as simply oppositional to the

more mainstream criminological enterprise. Rather it should be seen as a means of
reinvigorating the study of crime. As Ferrell and Sanders have commented: ‘bending
or breaking the boundaries of criminology... does not undermine contemporary
criminology as much as it expands it and enlivens it’ (1995: 17).
7.2 Historical, theoretical and methodological antecedents of

cultural criminology
As mentioned above, although a recent development that ‘turns’ around many of
the shifts and transformations underway within contemporary society, cultural
criminology actually draws heavily on a rich tradition of criminological work, from
the early ideas of the Chicago school (see Chapter 4 to the more critical Marxist
criminology of the 1970s (see Hayward and Young 2004: 260–1; Ferrell 1999: 396–99).
The following is a very brief (and rather schematic) sketch of some the more important
theoretical frameworks that underpin contemporary cultural criminology:
7.2.1 The Chicago school

Much of the thinking that inspired the Chicagoans has obviously had an influence on
contemporary cultural criminology. In particular, the emphasis placed by the Chicago
school on early socio-cultural explanations of crime (such as cultural transmission and
differentiation association), and their pioneering ‘appreciative’ research methods that
stressed the importance of entering ‘inside’ the lifeworld of the deviant while also
locating this life-world in social context (see for example P. Cressey The taxi-dance hall
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932); and later works such as N. Anderson The
hobo: the sociology of the homeless man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) ).
This point will not be developed in any detail here, instead the major influence played
by sub-cultural theory on cultural criminology should be noted – sub-cultural theory,
of course, having originally been developed by early Chicago school researchers.
7.2.2 Sub-cultural theory

Cultural criminologists draw heavily on the subtle, situated dynamics of deviant and
criminal sub-cultures, and the importance of style in shaping sub-cultural meaning
and identity. In this respect, much contemporary cultural criminology can be seen as
an extension of both early sub-cultural studies such as Cohen (1955) and Cloward and
Ohlin (1966) and the later work of the British Birmingham school of cultural studies
(e.g. Hall and Jefferson 1977; Willis 1977, 1990; Hebdidge 1979, 1988; McRobbie 1980).
Cohen’s 1955 study of delinquent youth had taken us into a mixture of emotions,
feelings and sub-culture where working-class young males worked out their ‘status
frustrations’, their humiliations and rejected the class-based traditional morality.
In the British studies, youth culture is seen as a hive of creativity, an arena of magical
solutions where symbols are bricolaged into lifestyles, a place of identity and
discovery and, above all, a site of resistance. Deviance is an inappropriate label when a
contingent mix.
7.2.3 The radical phenomenological tradition

Theorists like Kitsuse and Lemert supplemented by the social constructionist work
of writers such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann can also be seen as having an
influence on cultural criminology. Especially insofar as this body of work involved a
stress upon the existential freedoms of those ‘curtailed’ and ‘oppressed’ by the labels
and essentialism(s) of the powerful. This was never truer than in David Matza’s book,
Becoming deviant (1969), with its concepts of ‘naturalism’, ‘drift’, pluralism, ambiguity
and irony, on the one hand, and crime as transgression on the other (see Chapter 6;
and 7.4 on Jack Katz).
7.2.4 Critical criminology

Cultural criminology also emerges in many ways out of the rich tradition of radical and
critical British criminology (e.g. Taylor et al. 1973, 1975). Of particular importance in this
body of work was the research undertaken by such figures as Stan Cohen (1972), Jock
Young (Cohen and Young 1973), Phil Cohen (1972), Ian Taylor (1971) and Geoff Pearson
(1975) into how deviant sub-cultures were both created by the actors involved, and
mediated and constructed through the mass media and the interventions of the
powerful. Hence cultural criminology’s enduring interest in symbolic interactionism.
7.2.5 Symbolic interactionism

One of the key sociological orientations to underpin cultural criminology is the
interactionist tradition within the sociology of deviance and criminology (e.g. Becker
1963: Pfohl 1986). Jeff Ferrell (1999: 398) explains:
Cultural criminologists also trace the manifold interactions through which criminals,
control agents, media producers, and others, collectively construct the meaning of crime.
In so doing, cultural criminologist attempt to elaborate on the ‘symbolic’ in ‘symbolic
interaction’ by highlighting the popular prevalence of mediated crime imagery, the
interpersonal negotiation of style within criminal and deviant subcultures, and the
emergence of larger symbolic universes within which crime takes on political meaning.
7.2.6 Postmodern theorisation

With its emphasis on the insights of cultural studies and on current explorations
of identity, sexuality, and social space, along with its commitment to understand
and account for the ongoing transformations and fluctuations associated with
hypercapitalism, cultural criminology should very much be seen as an attempt to
create a ‘post’ or ‘late’ modern theory of crime (see Henry and Milovanovic 1996;
Mugford and O’Malley 1994; Morrison 1995; Stanley 1996; Ferrell et al., 2004). Clearly,
this is a something of a sweeping statement, and one that bears greater examination
than can be offered in the space provided here (for more on this point see Morrison
(1995) Chapters 13 and 18 and Hayward (2004) Chapter 2). However, in a bid to illustrate
this point, at least in one specific area – postmodern mass mediated (re)presentations
of crime and criminality (see Greer, 2004; Cunneen and Stubbs, 2004; Schofield,
2004) – the following quote by Jeff Ferrell is useful in that it attempts to highlight how
postmodern intellectual orientations infuse much cultural criminology:
In place of the modernist duality of form and content, and the modernist hierarchy that
proposes that form must be stripped away to get to the meaningful core of content,
cultural criminology operates from the postmodern proposition that form is content,
that style is substance, that meaning thus resides in presentation and re-presentation.
From this view, the study of crime necessitates not simply the examination of individual
criminals and criminal events, not even the straightforward examination of media
‘coverage’ of criminals and criminal events, but rather a journey into the spectacle and
carnival of crime, a walk down an infinite hall of mirrors where images created and
consumed by criminals, criminal subcultures, control agents, media institutions, and
audiences bounce endlessly off one another. Increasingly, then, cultural criminologists
explore the ‘networks… of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalised
interface’ (Baudrillard, 1985: 127: see Pfohl, 1993) out of which crime and crime control
are constructed, the intertextual ‘media loops’ (Manning, 1998) through which these
constructions circulate, and the discursive interconnections that emerge between media
institutions, crime control agents, and criminal subcultures (1999: 397).
Activity 7.1
Why do many of its critics state that there is nothing inherently new about cultural
criminology? How would you cultural criminologist challenge such criticism?
7.3 The method(s) of cultural criminology

Jeff Ferrell suggests, ‘cultural criminology’s melange of intellectual and disciplinary
influences also surfaces in the methodologies that cultural criminologists employ’
(ibid.: 399). The most commonly utilised methods have been infused in recent years by
developments in postmodern theorisation, existentialist thought, and the practices
associated with cultural and critical studies.
First, there is a significant tradition of ethnographic research within cultural

criminology, reflecting a long-standing attentiveness to ‘precise nuances of meaning
within particular cultural (and sub-cultural) milieu’. In this sense, the inspiration for
much ethnographic cultural criminology can be seen as stemming from the rich
history of symbolic interactionism (see 7.2.5), and such classic studies as Becker
(1963), Polsky (1969) and Willis (1977). This, then, is an ethnography immersed in
culture and interested in lifestyle(s), the symbolic, the aesthetic, and the visual. Yet,
cultural criminology is anything but a simple rehash of these classic ethnographies.
Instead, it adds a considerable extra range of ingredients to the mix, including recent
reconsiderations of field method from such disciplines as anthropology (Kane, 1998,
2004), feminist methodology (Fonow and Cook, 1991), cultural studies (Denzin, 1992,
1997), and social psychology (Nightingale, 1993). Ferrell explains: ‘together, these works
suggest that field research operates as an inherently personal and political endeavour,
profoundly engaging researchers with situations and subjects of study. These works
thus call for reflexive reporting on the research process, for an “ethnography of
ethnography”, which accounts for the researcher’s own role in the construction of
meaning’ (ibid.: 400). Thus, Jeff Ferrell and Mark Hamm (1998) talk of the methodology
of attentiveness, of a criminological verstehen (1978: 4-5) where the researcher is
deeply immersed within a culture. (This phrase ‘attentiveness’, of course, reminds
us of David Matza’s (1969) ‘naturalism’, the invocation to be true to subject – without
either romanticism or the generation of pathology; see Chapter 6.)
A second major methodological strand associated with cultural criminology concerns
the scholarly reading of the various mediated texts that circulate images of crime and
crime control within late modern society, including (from Ferrell 1999: 400):
u local and national newspaper coverage of crime and crime control
u filmic depictions of criminals, criminal violence, and criminal justice
u television portrayals of crime and criminals
u images of crime in popular music
u comic books, crime, and juvenile delinquency
u crime depictions in cyberspace
u the broader presence of crime and crime control imagery throughout popular
culture texts.
Many of these studies utilise conventional content analysis techniques to measure the
degree of crime coverage, the distribution of source material, or the relative presence
of crime imagery. Others incorporate les formal, descriptive accounts of prominent
media constructions, or illustrative case-by-case comparisons among media texts.
Still others, often influenced by feminist methodology and epistemology, develop
imaginative readings, counter-readings, and sociological deconstructions of crime and
criminal justice formations. (Ferrell 1999: 400–01).
Importantly, however, one should not see these two key methods of cultural
criminological research as antithetical – quite the contrary. Rather, ‘a number of
scholars have in fact begun to produce works that usefully integrate these two
methodological orientations’ (ibid.). As Hayward and Young have stated, one
of the great strengths of cultural criminology is its ability to meld together the
methodologies of ethnography and media analysis, often in the very same moment.
Indeed, they argue that this is the best way to ‘make sense of a world in which the
street scripts the screen and the screen scripts the street’ (2004: 259): ‘cultural
criminology stresses the mediated nature of reality in late modernity; subcultures
cannot be studied apart from their representation, and ethnography and textual
analysis cannot be separated. Because of this, the orthodox sequence of first the mass
media and then its effects cannot be maintained’ (ibid.: 268).
Criminal events, identities take life within a media-saturated environment and thus exist
from the start as a moment in a mediated spiral of presentation and representation …
Criminal subcultures reinvent mediated images as situated styles, but are at the same
time themselves reinvented time and time again as they are displayed within the daily
swarm of mediated presentations. In every case, as cultural criminologists we study
not only images but images of images, an infinite hall of mediated mirrors. (Ferrell and
Sanders, 1995, p.14)
Finally, it is important to point out that, from a methodological perspective,

cultural criminology is meant to run counter to the methods and research practices
associated with much mainstream contemporary criminology, which, increasingly
appears ‘shaped toward scientific efficiency in such a way as to dehumanise both its
practitioners and those it is designed to investigate and control’ (see Ferrell, 2004). As
Patricia and Freda Adler (1998: xiii) make clear, while much of the classic criminology
of the 20th century ‘emerged out of an idiosyncratic, impressionistic approach to
ethnographic inquiry’, the situation today is very different, with the majority of
criminologists being trained in what Jeff Ferrell wryly describes as a tradition of survey
research and related ‘methodologies designed, again quite explicitly, to exclude
ambiguity, surprise, and “human error” from the process of criminological research’
(Ferrell 2004: 297). In this sense, cultural criminology’s attitude to quantitative analysis
invokes Feyrabend’s (1978) methodological injunction ‘anything goes’ (see also Young
2004, and relatedly Hayward 2004: Chapter 3):
quantative data must be dislodged from claims of scientific objectivity, precision, and
certainty. Such data must be reconceptualised as an imperfect human construction and
carefully situated in time and place. And, in a significant inversion of orthodoxy, it is noted
that ‘they can perhaps sketch a faint outline of [deviance and criminality] but they can
never fill that outline with essential dimensions of meaningful understanding (Ferrell and
Hamm, 1998:11) (Hayward and Young, 2004: 268).
Activity 7.2
In what ways are the methods employed by cultural criminologists different
from more mainstream empirical criminological research?
Having discussed both the theoretical and methodological basis of cultural
criminology, let us now turn to two prominent examples of this approach in action.
7.4 Jack Katz and the ‘seductions of crime’

One of the central texts in the recent reconstruction of aetiology is Jack Katz’s The
seductions of crime (1988). As the title of his book suggests, the central contention of
Katz’s theory of crime is that there are ‘moral and sensual attractions in doing evil’ and
that a truly inclusive account of ‘anti-social behaviour’ has to start from this premise.
However, as Katz stresses from the outset, while the subject of crime has been
approached from numerous perspectives, very few of these explanatory accounts
have focused on the varied emotional dynamics and experiential attractions that are
an integral element of much crime. Consequently, the ‘lived experience of criminality’
rarely features in traditional criminological and sociological explanations of crime and
deviance:
Somehow in the psychological and sociological disciplines, the lived mysticism and
magic in the foreground of criminal experience became unseeable, while the abstractions
hypothesised by ‘empirical theory’ as the determining background causes, especially
those conveniently quantified by state agencies, became the stuff of ‘scientific’ thought
and ‘rigorous’ method. (ibid. 311–2).
For Katz, causal explanations of criminality that stress the importance of structural,
environmental, genetic or rational choice factors, over and above the emotional and
interpretative qualities of crime, are often guilty of stripping away and repressing
key individual emotions such as humiliation, arrogance, ridicule, cynicism, (and
importantly) pleasure and excitement; emotions that, in many cases, are central
to the criminal event. In doing so they ‘turn the direction of inquiry’ around, so
that the focus of criminological attention falls on the ‘background’ rather then the
‘foreground’ of the criminal act (ibid.: 9). Thus, Katz poses a fundamental question
that many criminologists either take for granted, or completely ignore: namely ‘why
are people who were not determined to commit a crime one moment determined to
do so the next?’ (ibid.: 4). The solution, he claims, can be found only by going beyond
background factors and delving deeper into the criminal act itself. He argues that the
various mechanisms which move actors between ‘background factors and subsequent
acts’ have been a kind of ‘black box’, assumed to have some motivational force but
left essentially unexamined (ibid.: 5). Katz proposes to retrieve and prize open the
contents of this ‘black box’. In short, one might say that Katz’s work can be seen as
an attempt to reclaim the ‘unexamined spaces in criminological theory’ (Henry and
Milovanovic 1996: 60).
Using an eclectic array of sources, Katz builds up a picture of the sensual, magical
and creative appeals of crime. Evoking the notion of the Nietzschean superman, Katz
asserts that deviance offers the perpetrator a means of ‘self transcendence’, a way of
overcoming the conventionality and mundanity typically associated with the banal
routines and practicalities of everyday ‘regular life’. At the subjective level, crime is
stimulating, exciting and liberating. To think of crime as either another form of rational
activity or as the result of some innate or social pathology is to totally miss the point.
If emotions are major contingencies in the ‘lived contours of crime’, Katz’s broad
cross-section of crimes offers many resonances for anyone attempting to devise a
theory of youth crime. The ‘sneaky thrills’ of juvenile shop-lifting are discussed, from
the ‘sensual metaphysics’, pleasure, and ‘ludic’ quality of the act itself, to the shame
and embarrassment felt on apprehension. Robbery is also discussed at length. Katz
builds up a picture of robbery as a spontaneous, chaotic and often hedonistic act. Also
emphasised is the ‘sense of superiority’ involved in the act of ‘stickup and the pride
that robbers take in their defiant reputation as ‘badmen’. Katz even examines the
lived sensuality behind events of cold-blooded, ‘senseless’ murder. In particular, he
charts the role of ‘defilement’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘righteous rage’, ‘vengeance’ and ‘hedonism’
– emotions that are frequently at the root of most ‘non modal homicides’. Katz’s
work on the thrill of transgression can easily be extended to include a range of other
criminal activities, especially those perpetrated by young people, and to oppose any
simplistic diagnosis in terms of immediate financial or practical benefits. Teenage
criminal practices such as vandalism, theft and destruction of cars, fire starting,
hoax emergency service call-outs, car ‘cruising’, peer group violence, and drug use –
probably the most prevalent of all youthful criminal transgressions – all have much to
do with youth expression and the search for exhilaration (see Hayward 2004: Chapter
5). Such examples serve to illustrate that, in many cases, individuals are seduced by
the existential possibilities offered by criminal acts – by the pleasure of transgression.
And hence, a key advantage of this approach is that it help us to understand why it
is that criminality is not the sole preserve of those groups who are economically and
socially disadvantaged. These groups may well be over-represented in the criminal
justice system but – to make a familiar point – this may have more to do with the social
construction of criminality than higher actual rates of criminal participation (see
Chapter 2).
Activity 7.3
Draw up a random list of crimes and identify the emotions that are integral to each.
How does each crime differ in terms of specific emotions?
7.5 Mike Presdee and the ‘carnival of crime’

Despite drawing closely on Katz’s ideas about the inherent pleasure and excitement
involved in many forms of transgressive behaviour, Mike Presdee’s work – in
particular his monograph Cultural criminology and the carnival of crime (2000) – is
more concerned with ‘the social context in which crime comes into being and is
played out’. In particular, his concern is with the ways in which, and the reasons why,
culture and certain forms of ‘oppositional’ cultural practice are both censured and
regulated by state agencies and society in general. In this sense, Presdee can be seen
as representing a somewhat more critical brand of cultural criminology than that
proffered by Katz.
Evoking Weber’s modernist ideas on the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy and rationalisation,
Presdee asserts that, in an effort to curb the apparent increase in youth crime, western
governments have enacted a series of measures that add up to what he describes as
‘the creeping criminalisation of everyday life’ (on this point see also Ferrell 2002 and
Hayward 2002). The result, he argues, is that, in certain social settings, ours is a world
in which ‘dominant and seemingly rational logics’ act upon us and constrain us: ‘As the
individual becomes more and more trapped by applied science and the rational, so
we become more and more enmeshed and oppressed within the so-called scientific
measurement of our lives’ (Presdee 2000: 159). Such a situation inevitably provokes
a response. According to Presdee, this response comes in the form of ‘a widespread
desire for extreme, oppositional forms of popular and personal pleasure’. It is at this
point that Presdee evokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) notion of ‘carnival’, and the way in
which carnival-related practices contribute to what Bakhtin calls the cathartic ‘second
life’ of illicit pleasure.
It is from the second life of the people that the majority of ‘transgressions’ emanate.
It is here that we find the genesis and rationale for behaviours that anticipates the
ability to destroy, disrupt and dissent. The second life of the people is that part that
is inaccessible and untouchable to the ‘official’ world of the scientific rationality of
modernity and its politics, parties, and politicians. It is the realm of resentment and
irrationality par excellence and also the realm of much crime. It is the part of social
life that is unknowable to those in power and which therefore stands outside their
consciousness and their understanding. They cannot understand it or indeed even
‘read’ it as realm life, but only as immoral, uncivilised, obscene and unfathomable
social behaviour. (Presdee 2000: 8)
Presdee draws together a wide variety of examples of postmodern carnival, including:

‘the living out of carnival desires on the streets through joyriding, street crime and
antisocial behaviour, and in private via the internet’, the commodification of hate,
hurt and humiliation in various forms of popular culture and high art, and, in a truly
memorable account, ‘the popularisation and criminalisation of sadomasochism and
dance music culture’. In each case, his aim is to further emphasise the paradox that the
more the state imposes rationalising rubrics, the more it provokes in its citizens/subjects
not compliant rationality, but rather heightened emotionality: ‘…we respond with
irrational emotions derived from desire, pleasure and the sensualness of a postmodern
commodity culture’ (ibid.: 29). Hence a spiral in which this ‘irrational response’ provokes
further punitive/rationalising moves from the state. Culture, therefore, becomes at once
the site of excitement and social contestation, of experimentation and dissonance: ‘It is a
world full of contradictions, inequalities and struggle, yet it is a world where... the pursuit
of pleasure is potentially antagonistic to the state’ (ibid.).
Activity 7.4
What does Mike Presdee mean when he talks about the ‘carnival’ of crime? Provide
some examples.
Essential reading
u Hayward, K.J. ‘The vilification and pleasures of youthful transgression’ in
J. Muncie, E. Hughes, and E. McLaughlin (eds), Youth justice: critical readings
(London: Sage, 2002).
u Presdee, M. Cultural criminology and the carnival of crime (London: Routledge,
2000).
7.6 Towards an existential perspective in criminology

Is existentialism a cultural movement or an identifiable philosophical position?
By an existential perspective I am not tying myself to any one figure (such as Sartre
or Nietzsche) but am claiming that there is a relatively discernible and distinctive
family of problems and issues about thinking (or living) through ‘existence’ in general
that asks for more than science, that states that our – human – existence requires
categories and concepts that are not found in the historical cannon of philosophy
or social science. We are humans; this means we cannot be reduced to substances
with fixed properties, nor are we just subjects interacting with a world of objects. We
are more; indeed the religious traditions claim this but always in relations to a god,
or gods. One can be a religious existentialist, or a secular one: what is common is
the contention that to understand ourselves all the ‘truths’ that the natural sciences
and much of the social science (such as psychology) could tell us are insufficient.
Whether the ‘truths’ come from a dualist who holds that human beings are composed
of independent substances – ‘mind’ and ‘body’ – or the physicalist, who holds that
human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical
constituents of the universe (the mind is just chemicals, etc.). To be an existentialist
is not to deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and
the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism,
development, motivation, and so on). No. it is to say that we human beings cannot
be fully understood in terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by
supplementing our scientific picture with a moral one. Categories of moral theory
such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture
important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral thinking (governed by
the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of
truth) suffices.
No, a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary

to grasp human existence. We, and I cast myself as one, are against the reductionist
implications of natural science, against determinist, against the a priori structure
of moral reasoning, against Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of reason. We espouse passion and
urgency, deny that one write in a disinterested manner and emphasise themes
of living life – dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment,
nothingness, and so forth. Contingency, openness, always the ability to escape…and
dread…
Activity 7.5
Read the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101.
Essential reading
u Browning, Christopher Ordinary men: reserve police battalion 101 and the final
solution in Poland, Chapter 1 ‘One Morning in Jozefow’ (Penguin Books, 1998).
Extracted and on the VLE.
u Hopkins Burke, R. An introduction to criminological theory, Chapter 16
‘Situational action theories’ (Routledge, 2014).
Questions
1. What factor do you consider contributed most to the participation of so many?
2. Is this different to other types of massacres, if so, how?
3. Many stated that during the operation, their nerves did not last. Many were
concerned about their own wellbeing and yet still did not feel remorse towards
their victims. What do you believe this reflects in regard to their sense of
morality?
4. Do you believe Browning when he states; ‘After Jozefow, nothing else seemed so
terrible’?
5. Were you surprised to know that many of the participants were offered a way to
avoid committing these acts? Why do you think more did not take up the offer?
6. Many perpetrators explained that the reason they carried on was for fear of not
wanting to look cowardly. How would their definition compare to your own
definition of cowardly?
7. Do you believe those who managed to avoid committing the shooting by

volunteering as transport or hiding in the forest felt less guilt?
8. In the section where one perpetrator describes how he always shot the children
after someone else had shot the mother as he knew that child would not survive
without them, what do you believe this reflects in terms of choice? Was it a case
of making the best out of a bad situation? Or was it more a case of making a
choice first and then justifying it ex post facto?
9. Why do you think there is such a discrepancy when asked about the shooting of
infants?
10. In the section where one participant describes the effects of his neighbour
incorrectly positioning his bayonet, why do you think this had such a profound
affect? Do you think it brought the repercussions of his actions too close? Is it
easier to choose to kill if it is a ‘clean’ kill?
Summing up
This chapter has introduced cultural criminology and discussed both its theoretical
antecedents and some of its main methodological approaches. It has also introduced
more formally the idea of existentialism. In doing so, the aim is to enable you to
understand or at least think through some of the complex interfaces that exist
between contemporary culture and the current crime problem. Such work, then,
represents some of the ways in which cultural criminology seeks to counter
mainstream criminology’s modern (allegedly) ‘scientific methods’. Although in no way
a comprehensive summary of cultural criminology’s diverse alternative and exciting
approaches, this chapter – it is hoped – does provide a forceful account of the rationale
and ethos underpinning the ‘cultural approach’.
Review questions
1. Using a series of examples, assess the ways in which it can reasonably be
suggested that social deviance is a cultural phenomenon.
2. Discuss the connections between violence and culture.
3. What does Jack Katz mean when he suggests that much criminality can be
understood as an ‘array of reactions against mundane, secular, society’?
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Notes
8 Feminist criminology: the challenge of gender
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
8.1 From statistics to explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
8.2 The feminist critique of criminology: an overview . . . . . . . . . . . 121
8.3 Women and the criminal justice system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
8.4 Reflection: what does a feminist analysis mean for criminological

theory? Is it social ideology? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
8.5 Transitions: provocation, an example of gender in question . . . . . . 129
8.6 Feminism, criminology, the postmodern moment and globalisation . . 131

Introduction
Feminism was and is not a ‘perspective’ but a movement, perhaps the only successful
social revolution of the 20th century. If modernity was about self-assertion, about
freeing up the ‘individual’ to pursue his desires and wants for a long time it was indeed
a ‘his’. Women were the secondary, the male was privileged. If the modern world was
one of male power plays, of male writings, what was the role of women subject or
object, to be yet included or the permanently secondary?
Are there significant correlations between gender and crime? This has been the
narrowly posed criminological question at stake in looking at crime rates: why do
women seemingly commit so much less crime than men? For a long time this question
was dealt with by male criminologists in a traditional, administrative criminological
fashion. The arrival of feminism changed not only the questions but how to view the
terrain. Sometimes the results were reflexive: is masculinity at stake in particular
sorts of crime, or crime in general? These questions and others will be examined in
this chapter. However, far more is at stake. What is radical about feminist criminology
is what is also radical about class-based and race-based interrogations – they all
put the criminal justice system within the context of wider systems of power and
they all understand criminological theorising as itself linked into such systems. This
means that feminist criminology is part of critical criminology, critical in the sense of
political but also in the sense of being reflective about how knowledge comes to be
constructed – that is reflexive about the process of knowledge production – and how
different parts of social ordering are connected.
The feminism of this chapter – as is the majority of this guide – western; for many
feminism has been an especially western movement and yet the demand for feminism
may be most felt in the rest of the globe. To really interrogate that question is
another project, herein we will remain somewhat narrow – although you are free to
extrapolate to your location. The work herein is of course time related, Smart writes in
the 1970s, Morrison’s chapter is 1995, Kathleen Daly 2008, Burke’s latest edition 2014.
This chapter will use a classic article by Smart to describe the birth of feminist
criminology in the 1970s (continuing into the 1980s) in the form of a critique and then
go on to outline where the debates and areas of focus developed subsequently.
The point here is not merely to know about the range of information and perspectives
but also to understand how the critique shaped what happened subsequently. Finally,
we then consider if we are in a post-feminist era.
However, first, this chapter asks you to investigate the gender and crime question in a
way that draws on the lessons of earlier chapters about how criminology constructs its
knowledge: the ‘positivities’ that are produced as facts in need of explanation.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
u explain how statistics on gender differentiated patterns of crime have generated
competing explanations of male and female criminality
u critically engage with official statistics on woman and crime/criminal justice
system
u assess the feminist critique of traditional criminology
u critically analyse the impact of feminist perspectives in criminology and
methodologies used
u explain how feminist approaches changed our understanding of masculinity and
crime.
Essential reading
¢ Burke, Roger Chapter 8 ‘Women and positivism’; and Chapter 11 ‘The gendered
criminal’.
Criminology 8 Feminist criminology: the challenge of gender page 117
Further reading
¢ Morrison, Wayne, Theoretical criminology: from modernity to postmodernism
Chapter 16 ‘Modernity, gender and crime: from the biological paradigm into
feminist interpretations’ pp.383–416.
¢ Smart, C. (1977) ‘Criminological theory its ideology and implications concerning

women’, British Journal of Sociology Vol. 28 (1), extracted and on the VLE.
¢ When you read, remember it was written in 1977; this is a famous article (in part
summarising the bite of the book the author published a year earlier) putting
forward in large part a critique of ‘malestream’ criminology (i.e. traditional
criminology, written by men).
¢ Daly, Kathleen ‘Feminist perspectives in criminology: a review with gen Y in

mind’, Eugene McLaughlin and Tim Newburn (eds), The handbook of criminal
theory especially p.8 onwards ‘Feminist Perspectives in Criminology: A Brief
Chronology’, etc. www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/198251/KD-
FINAL-paper-29-Sept-08-formatted-updated-by-GPS-10-March.pdf
Read this second; note this is 2008, Kathleen is writing with generation Y (post-
feminist) in mind. If you are aged less than 30 then it is you she has in mind!
INTERNET RESOURCES
Feminism is a movement with many perspectives, it is united in the idea that
previously the social world has been dominated by men and in strategies that seek to
make women’s oppression visible and to look to strategies to combat that. Feminist
criminology is a site of discourse and action where individuals make criticisms
of traditional criminology, propose new approaches and seek to make practical
interjections into social life. There is a considerable amount of relevant websites:
¢ Feminist Majority Foundation – www.feminist.org/rrights/index.asp
¢ Here is also some of their publications which may include some criminology
elements – www.feminist.org/research/fmf.asp
¢ A Feminist Perspective on Women and Crime – this is the closest I could find –
http://sociologytwynham.com/2011/04/20/feminist-perspectives-of-crime/
¢ Feminista – http://ukfeminista.org.uk/
¢ IGC Women’s Net – www.womensnet.org.za/
¢ Ken Mentor’s Feminist Criminology Page – http://kenmentor.com/courses/

crimtheory/module9.htm
¢ Meda Chesney-Lind’s Home Page – http://chesneylind.com/
¢ National Organization for Women – http://now.org/
¢ Paul’s Justice Page on Integrating Criminologies by Gregg Barak –

http://paulsjusticepage.com/IntegratingCrim/index.htm
¢ Rutger’s Center for American Women & Politics – www.cawp.rutgers.edu/
¢ Sociological Theories of Deviance – www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/

boundless-sociology-textbook/deviance-social-control-and-crime-7/
theories-of-crime-and-deviance-61/sociological-theories-of-deviance-371-10205/
¢ Third Wave – Could be third wave feminism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Third-wave_feminism) or a social experiment called the third wave (https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave)
¢ U.S. Dept. of Justice study on Female Offenders (pdf) – www.bjs.gov/content/

pub/pdf/wo.pdf
Other webpages/online PDF’s on feminist criminology:
¢ Feminist Criminology Journal – http://fcx.sagepub.com/
¢ Feminism in Criminology – Engendering the Law – http://m.jthomasniu.org/

class/781/Assigs/fem-crim.pdf
¢ The Status of Feminist Theories in Criminology – www.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/

Miller_06.pdf
8.1 From statistics to explanations

There is no gender ‘question’ in criminology until some actual questions are posed.
Equally, there is no point in out-of-context examinations of theories about women
and crime: theories in the abstract are meaningless until they are used to answer
specific questions. Being aware of both questions and answers is a key methodological
rubric for a sound critical-reflexive understanding of criminology, and it certainly
applies to issues concerning gender and crime. At the same time, it is important to
remain acutely conscious that neither questions nor answers come ‘out of the air’,
from random ideas or inspirations. Rather they are produced through standardised
practices of the discipline, the specific methodologies that criminology has adopted as
distinctive. (By the same token, challenges to such methodologies are what keeps the
discipline alive and helps it to evolve.)
Gender and crime issues have been (and remain) framed to a large extent by
criminology’s dominant mode of question-formation: looking at crime statistics or
other measurements associated with criminality. Taking such ‘positivities’ of crime –‘
facts’/‘phenomena’/‘data’/‘given’) – is standard, including endless disputes about the
accuracy of the facts that constitute the starting point. This was a central point in
Chapter 3. But here, let us start from that conventional starting point: official crime
statistics.
England and Wales, Number of offenders (thousands)

1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
INDICTABLE OFFENCES
Violence against the person
Males 35.5 33.9 26.4 27.3 31.3 33.3 32.1 31.6 31.9 33.9 34.2
Females 3.4 3.7 2.8 2.8 3.3 3.7 3.6 3.7 3.4 3.8 3.9
Sexual offences
Males 4.3 4.4 4.6 4.4 4.5 4.5 4.3 3.9 4.0. 4.3 4.3
Females 0.1 0.0 0.1 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.1 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.1
Burglary
Males 39.2 37.0 34.4 31.3 30.7 2 28.2 25.2 23.7 25.4 24.4
Females 1.0 1.0 1.0 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.1 1.0 1.1 1.3 1.3
Robbery
Males 4.8 4.5 4.8 5.5 5.1 5.1 5.2 5.4 6.2 6.9 6.5
Females 0.3 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.8 0.8
Theft and handling stolen goods
Males 99.5 99.1 94.9 93.6 96.1 101.2 105.1 102.1 101.2 100.7 93.6
Females 22.1 22.5 21.2 20.9 22.3 24.5 26.1 25.9 25.8 26.6 25.5
Fraud and forgery
Males 13.6 14.2 13.4 12.6 12.9 14.5 14.7 13.8 13.1 12.9 12.9
Females 3.9 4.2 3.8 3.7 4.1 5.3 5.6 5.4 5.2 5.3 5.1
Criminal damage
Males 8.6 9.2 8.8 9.0 9.6 10.0 9.9 9.3 9.6 9.8 10.1
Females 0.8 0.8 0.8 0.9 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.2 1.2
England and Wales, Number of offenders (thousands)

1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Drug offences
Males 19.9 25.3 28.5 30.4 36.3 43.7 43.5 40.1 41.2 44.3 46.1
Females 2.0 2.5 3.1 3.7 4.4 5.1 5.2 4.6 4.5 4.7 5.1
Other (excluding motoring offences)
Males 34.2 35.5 38.2 39.2 42.4 43.9 42.4 39.3 38.7 42.1 44.6
Females 3.6 3.8 4.0 4.3 5.1 5.7 5.5 5.3 5.3 5.9 6.8
Motoring offences
Males 10.3 11.4 10.7 9.4 8.9 8.5 7.6 7.2 7.3 7.8 8.2
Females 0.5 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.5
TOTAL
Males 269.8 274.6 264.7 262.5 277.8 294.4 293.0 277.8 276.8 288.3 284.9
Females 37.8 39.5 37.5 38.0 42.2 47.3 49.0 47.7 47.4 50.0 50.2
SUMMARY OFFENCES(2)
Offences (excluding motoring offences)
Males 307.0 308.4 295.2 335.0 315.4 353.2 339.2 359.2 325.5 356.8 370.6
Females 146.1 146.3 114.8 153.4 101.2 109.6 94.4 131.6 116.6 130.4 122.9
Motoring offences
Males 597.5 573.6 576.7 579 575.5 586.6 556.2 530.7 509.7 517.5 575.0
Females 67.2 65.2 65.7 69.5 73.7 78.6 76.6 76.8 73.7 78.3 87.5
TOTAL
Males 904.4 882.0 871.9 914.5 890.9 939.7 895.5 889.9 835.2 874.3 945.7
Females 213.3 211.5 180.5 222.9 174.9 188.3 171.0 208.3 190.2 208.7 210.5
ALL OFFENCES
Males 1,174.3 1,156.6 1,136.6 1,177.0 1,168.7 1,234.2 1,188.5 1,167.7 1,112.1 1,162.5 1,230.5
Females 251.1 251.0 218.0 261.0 217.1 235.6 220.0 256.0 237.6 258.8 260.7
Table 2.6 Offenders found guilty at all courts by sex and type of offence, 1993–2003
Source: This table is adapted (i.e .the information is identical but the presentation has been
rearranged to make Males and Females more directly comparable) from Criminal statistics
England and Wales 2003.
Activities 8.1 – 8.3

1. Reading the table: the overall picture.
i. Do you notice any trends over the years?
ii. What body collects these statistics?
iii. Do these figures give all crime committed in England and Wales in those
years?
iv. What alternative sources provide crime figures for this jurisdiction?
2. Male:female crime ‘ratios’
i. Based on this table but without calculating, what is your sense of the
broad proportion male:female crime – re all offences? Indictable offences?
Summary offences?
ii. Now you need to calculate these proportions more accurately.
a. The easiest and most generally comparable form of expression is to

state what percentage each contributes to the overall crime rate (i.e.
comparing each part to the whole) e.g. women contributed X per cent to
the overall number of criminal convictions, while men contributed Y per
cent. So calculate now what these percentages are in relation to the 2003
figures for all offences, indictable offences and summary offences.
b. Alternatively, the ratio male:female crime can be expressed as an

‘internal’ relation (i.e. comparing part to part) e.g. the male:female crime
rate is A times B.
Is there any crime category where women outnumber male offenders? Or

where the ratio is significantly different from the overall ratios?
3. A key exercise: track down comparable official statistics for a different

jurisdiction and perform the same calculations.
Following these methods, conventional criminology thus had a prima facie starting
point: the huge gap in the crime rate between male and female crime rates. However,
there were two mainstream responses to this statistical gender differential: (1) accept
the statistics and move onto the next stage (explanation i.e. answers) or (2) reject the
statistics.
Option 1: take the statistics as correct
On this basis, the key question facing criminologists was what could explain this major
difference between male and female crime rates? There were secondary questions as
well, relating to those areas where women had comparable or higher rates of crime
than men but the overall gap has been the primary issue. Is there something about
women that makes them predisposed against crime?
It was this question that drove Cesare Lombroso (with Guglielmo Ferrero) in the
(infamous) text La donnna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (1893),
translated into English under the title The female offender in 1895. As with his
previous work on men (see Chapter 4 of this guide) it was based on extensive bodily
measurements (criminal anthropometry) ‘revealing’, in the case of women no
significant differences between ‘normal’ women (i.e. without any criminal convictions)
and ordinarily delinquent women but huge differences between these and women
who were prostitutes.
Lombroso’s answer was that women were by nature conformist: their passivity and
domestic life meant that they were less cut off from the external influences that led
men to evolve – for better and for worse. By now he had abandoned his earlier theories
of atavism (criminals as ‘throwbacks’ to an earlier evolutionary period and moved
to accept that degenerate pathological adaptation was the source of criminality.
However, he considered that prostitutes linked to degeneracy and in a sense were
doubly deviant.
Is The female offender just a late 19th century theory, typical of its times – or did it lay
down precedents for later criminologists who would express the same views in more
modern dress? In addressing this below, we must consider not only the explanations
offered but the questions asked: for the ‘gender differential’ has remained perhaps
the key question, not only for conventional criminology but for many feminist
criminologists as well.
Option 2: query the statistics
A small number of criminological writers (the minority stance), notably Otto Pollak in
The criminality of women (1950), argued that women were actually just as numerically
significant lawbreakers as men but that this was hidden from public visibility by a mix
of factors, beginning with a powerful ideology that saw women as pure, innocent,
dutiful, loving, etc.
Pollak’s key claim: at all stages from crime reporting to police processing to
prosecutorial decision-making about seriousness of crime charging or even
proceeding with prosecution through to sentencing, there is a tendency to minimise,
dismiss or evade the facts of female crime. Even if convicted women were less likely
to receive custodial sentences (far less the death penalty where available); indeed
women’s prisons were said to be far ‘softer’ than men’s; when women go wrong,
they are treated as objects of compassion (mercy/emotion) rather than judgement
and blame. Secondly, women’s domain was the home, treated as a separate and
private realm, and, so it was claimed, the legal system was reluctant to intervene,
thus providing a realm of scrutiny-free opportunities for crime. Finally, women had a
deceitful nature. Consequently, official criminal statistics were totally unreliable – with
the key exception of crimes perceived to go against women’s nature (e.g. child abuse)
where women were likely to be treated more harshly (an echo of Lombroso here: the
double deviance of women who do commit crime).
What is your reaction to these claims?
Certainly, Pollak was and still is not alone in querying the accuracy of criminal statistics.
Also, the view that women who commit crimes are treated more ‘leniently’ by the
criminal justice system than male law breakers – often called the ‘chivalry thesis’ – is
a popular belief that has given rise to numerous studies. But what is important here
is how his arguments constitute a structure of criminological questions and answers.
Rejecting the accuracy of the statistics, he thus totally rejects the gender – crime
differential as a significant question. As far as frequency of committing crime goes, he
assumes that men and women probably commit crime at equal rates, although the
nature of the crime will vary with the opportunities typically available to them (public
versus private). So, what is his question? What is it that he sets out to explain? His
question simply is, what masks the true crime rate? His explanations are essentially
devoted to positing and explaining the ‘dark figure’ of female crime.
Activities 8.4 – 8.5

The second (minority) criminological stance on the gender question disputes the
facts as provided by criminal statistics on conviction rates; the gender differential is
not the key starting point; women commit just as many offences as men (although
they may be more localised in the home).
8.4. Referring back to earlier chapters in this subject guide – why might official
criminal statistics on conviction rates be a poor basis for establishing the
overall facts about crime? How do these arguments relate to Pollak’s?
8.5. Reversing the hypothesis: what aspects of male crime might be

underreported?
8.2 The feminist critique of criminology: an overview

What was traditional criminology?
In Roger Burke’s An introduction to criminological theory, Chapter 8 ‘Women and

positivism’, note the way that Burke begins – with the statistical difference, his chapter
then is rather strange – at least to me! To me, it reads as if he has never accepted the
feminist critique of positivism!
In the UK, Carol Smart’s book Women, crime and criminology (1976) may be taken as the
key point of reference. The article we supply you with is only a year later and is a good
summary of many of the points of her book.
¢ Namely: Smart, C. (1977) ‘Criminological theory its ideology and implications

concerning women’, British Journal of Sociology Vol. 28 (1).
The feminist critique of criminology was very much a product of its times. On the
one hand, in academic criminology, the British National Deviancy annual conference
(NDC, starting in 1968) was a gathering point for radicals mobilised around social
interactionism and labelling perspectives and soon to be channelled into debates
about Marxism – the perspectives that converged in Walton, Taylor and Young’s The
new criminology (1973). On the other hand, feminist pressure was mounting, not least
in pressure for legal reforms. The 1970s saw the passing of the Equal Pay Act (1970)
and Sex Discrimination Act (1975). Yet between these two movements there seemed
almost no connection. The NDC was almost totally focused on male activities; so the
supreme irony was the fact that the NDC, so self-consciously radical, and embodying
many of the above ideals for criminology, was so deeply indifferent to the question of
women. While the dominant areas of feminist activities were either focused on the
civil sphere of jobs and services, the ‘private’ domain of sexuality or the overarching
domain of theorising: women’s crime and deviancy did not appear on the agenda –
although there was a growing emphasis on women as victims of crime, especially the
paradigmatic crime of rape.
What the feminist critique of criminology did was to bring these movements together
in a ‘symptomatic’ critique. (‘Symptomatic’, by analogy with medical diagnosis, means
a critique that operates at different levels – immediate presenting symptoms and an
underlying cause or pathology). A range of factors were criticised:
u ‘Neglect and distortion’: women were hardly visible in criminology and, where
they were discussed, it was in stereotypical and denigrating stereotypes,
‘mythologies’ about women. Women were presented as variously: less evolved,
irrational, deceitful, child-like, neurotic, driven by their hormones, divided into
two extreme types: ‘Madonna or whore’ i.e. chaste virgin/mother or degenerate
prostitute; similarly, women’s deviancy or dissent chastised as ‘unfeminine’.
u Criminological theory and the criminal justice system has thus served as an
ideological relay, recycling popular clichés and biased images of women – but
lending them weight and legitimation by being repeated in the context of
scientific theory and legal authority. Criminology and criminal justice thus
contribute to the broad pattern of beliefs that support gender injustice across the
social world.
u Judgmentalism/censure: where criminological theory, as ‘science’ claimed to be

morally neutral or as, committed criminology, on the side of the ‘underdog’, by
contrast subjected women to moral scrutiny. A manifestation of sexist double
standards, and also of social controls applied to women.
u Discredited criminological theory good enough for women: approaches that had
long since been rejected in the study of male criminality – especially biologically
based theories – lived on in the study of women. Here criminology showed
marked sexist double standards – and also was complicit with the pathologisation-
individualisation-sexualisation complex (see immediately below).
u Biologistic/psychologistic explanations.
u Pathologisation of women/‘mad not bad’ (or bad because mad): by contrast to the
significant silence in criminological theory, much was to be found about female
criminality in medical journals. This was also true institutionally: women’s prisons
often had psychiatric wings or approaches, while sentencing often involved not
prison but parole with psychiatric social work supervision. A significant indicator of
social controls applied to women.
u Sexualisation of women, especially young women: delinquent girls were typically

scrutinised for promiscuity where delinquent boys were not. Again sexist double
standards in operation plus a significant indicator of social controls applied to
women.
u ‘Individualisation’ of female criminality: radical trends in criminology condemned

the pathologisation (of males) as ‘individualising’ criminality, thereby denying
broad social factors as criminogenic. Hence the emphasis on ‘society must change,
not the individual’. Yet when it came to women this was ignored – another instance
of sexist double standards as well as a significant indicator of social controls
applied to women.
u Female victims of crime, especially rape, were also subject to the same routines:
judged and divided by their sexual lives, regarded as unstable and prone to lying.
Sexist double standards and a significant indicator of social controls applied to
women.
u Re female victims – domestic violence was not taken seriously enough, it was
hidden behind the veil of the private realm.
Summary
The feminist critique of traditional criminology provides:
u An effective indictment of criminology and the criminal justice system as sexist:
operating with double standards and circulating myths about women, rather
than portraying the actuality of women’s lives and experiences.
u It also gives very strong indications that criminology and criminal justice
participate in wider social control regimes for women that appear to be different
from those applied to men – an important sociological insight.
A note on categories of feminism

Sometimes textbooks and websites list different feminist positions under headings
such as ‘liberal feminism’, ‘radical feminism’, ‘Marxist feminism’, ‘psychoanalytical
feminism’ etc. Although these categorisations are genuine political and theoretical
positions, it is dangerous to try to understand everything through this classification.
To take the example of legal reform, although associated with ‘liberal feminism’,
anti-discrimination legislation was supported by all schools of feminism although
they differed significantly in how sceptically or optimistically they backed it. To take
another, more complex example: some of the types of analysis that would come to be
seen as ‘postmodern’ were first advanced through radical feminists who in many ways
oppose postmodernism.
At the risk of generalising, feminist approaches reject the idea of law as a neutral
system of regulation and dispute resolution or that its rules reflect social consensus;
they attack its concepts of ‘universalism’, ‘objectivity’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘rationality’.
They differ in their background assumptions and their policy implications.
Liberal feminism: This tradition is usually traced back to the suffragettes who fought
for votes for women in the 19th and early 20th century and are labelled ‘middle class’.
(The UK was notably backward in as compared to the ex-colonies of New Zealand
and Australia.) Liberal feminists strove for equality in the public domain through law:
women had not been treated equally with men and the solution was to establish
equality. Anti-discrimination provisions were the starting point but it may not be
sufficient merely to put in place formal equality, what of the whole underlying social
structure? And what of oppression in the ‘private realm’?
Radical feminism: This tradition can be traced back to philanthropists and radical
campaigners in England who focused on prostitutes and sexual issues concerning
working class women; women’s suffrage campaigners often sought to dissociate
themselves from such sensationalist sexual issues but it must also be remembered
that these ‘radical’ campaigners largely wanted to reform prostitutes. In the late 20th
century, radical feminism retained the focus on sexuality but now in a more systematic
way that this was the central cause and locus of women’s oppressed, disadvantaged
position, and therefore that the private domain rather than the ‘public’ world of
employment or citizenship is the key to women’s oppression. Sexuality in turn was
understood largely in terms of violence with rape the paradigm of heterosexuality and
prostitution. Also violence is emphasised as the way to understand sexual offences
against women and also women’s sex work: this is increasingly important today in
terms of how to understand global sex work trafficking.
A well know writer in this area is Katherine MacKinnon. Among her themes are those
of dominance and power, the attempt to situate women’s struggles in a grand theory
of social order and the role of sex/sexual violence/rape. She is often confrontational in
her writings as in the following quote: ‘instead of asking, what is the violation of rape,
what if we ask, what is the non-violation of intercourse?... Perhaps the wrong of rape
has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has
been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult
to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance’ MacKinnon Signs, Vol. 8, No.
4 (Summer, 1983) p.646.
One of her themes is the construction of sexual difference to women’s disadvantage:

thus:
‘when law is most neutral and objective, it is most male, speaking from the viewpoint of
POWER’.
The law is most male [patriarchal] when it is at the height of its aperspectivity – or
allegedly most neutral’…Male dominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious
system of power in history, … it is metaphysically nearly perfect. Its point of view is the
standard for point-of-viewlessness, its particularity the meaning if universality.
¢ MacKinnon, Katherine A. Method and politics, in: toward a feminist theory of the
state (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) pp.133 and 114.
She champions the consciousness raising: ‘the collective critical reconstitution of the
meaning of women’s social experience as women live through it.’ (p.83 MacKinnon
1989.)
Marxist feminism: On the one hand, always a minority voice although in terms of
gender and criminology quite powerful. On the other hand to the extent that
‘Marxism’ stands for an emphasis on power and powerlessness, and economic analysis
women are in a different position than men. Often the bread winner, but often
needing to be analysed in more depth than assumptions made about men.
Postmodern feminism moves against essentialism and questions the idea of any
one truth, including that of women’s oppression. All fixed categories and universal
concepts are rejected, instead multiple truths and the effects of discourse and
symbolic representations are called on to be examined. So such concepts as crime,
justice, deviance, the public and the private all socially constructed. Deconstruction,
a technique borrowed from Derrida works to reveal internal contradictions of
apparently coherent system of thoughts. Postmodern feminism is open to the
criticism that it is better at destroying theories than building them, which many see as
not useful to feminism in a long run. Also, as postmodern feminists are highly sceptical
about the category of ‘women’ as a basis of grounding theory or political action, many
feminists have attacked postmodern feminists as precluding political action and
reaching the goal of ending women’s oppression.
In addition, new perspectives under the names of black feminism and critical race
theory brought the experiences of black woman and woman of colour into focus.
Intersections of race and class show that woman occupy many, many, differentiated
positions.
A comment on essentialism
Essentialism is a common term evoked in feminist research. My own understanding
is this: once (Plato) there was an image where every word had a pure form, so the
word woman/women was shorthand for referring to a form that a certain set of
characteristics that defined it. Thus the task of science and philosophy was the
uncovering of those characteristics and their expression; conversely, as I hope has
been apparent in this guide, I am more pragmatic. For me, it is a question of social
existence and the opportunities and resources social position allows. Essentialism,
conversely, states that it is simply the case that categories of people, such as men/
women and heterosexual/homosexual, are as they are. Their essence is timeless,
and socially indeterminate. Categories of people just have intrinsically different and
characteristic natures or dispositions.
Do women have a fixed essence? (For me, personally, as a pragmatist the question
is wrongly put, however, this is how the question is usually put.) In much traditional
thought – and a lot of common sense! – women’s essence is assumed to be given and
universal, and is intrinsically linked to her biology and natural traits. Of course, this
restricts the possibilities of change and basically ignores development. It seems to
imply that it is ‘wrong’ for a woman to act in a manner contrary to her ‘essence’. In
criminology, the implication was that the good woman is pure and moral, the bad
woman is biologically defective, or more male than female.
Essentialism thereby was conservative: fixed characteristics, given attributes and

ahistorical functions meant that change and social re-organisation produced ‘images’
of women that were actually wrong! (Thus women could not escape their essence.)
There are also instances where women’s essence is seen to reside in psychological
characteristics such as nurturance, empathy, support, and non-competitiveness
(see the tradition of cultural difference, note the work of Carol Gilligan). Within the
prison setting, such psychological characteristics are highly desirable and valued by
correctional professionals and are at the core of rehabilitative programs.
The cultural difference position also attributed intuitiveness, emotional responses,

concern and commitment to helping others as features of women’s moral voice. Thus
radicals considered them as retreating to essentialism! What of offending? When
viewed through essentialist lenses, women’s offending (action?) was viewed in such a
way that agency was ignored. Instead women’s ‘offending’ (social resistance?) was put
into a physiological and/or psychological profile that cast her as abnormal, a victim of
her feminine form.
8.3 Women and the criminal justice system
Activity 8.6
Download the document ‘Women and the criminal justice system 2013’. This is
published by the Ministry of Justice (November 2014) and follows on from an earlier
‘Women and the criminal justice system 2009–10’ (November 2012).
This is a substantial document – the executive summary pp.9–17 should be enough
for our purposes but note that the first paragraph of the Introduction proper p.18
states:
Section 95 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 states that:
The Secretary of State shall in each year publish such information as he

considers expedient for the purpose... of facilitating the performance of those
engaged in the administration of justice to avoid discriminating against any persons
on the ground of race or sex or any other improper ground...[emphasis added].
How does this document differ from the more ‘traditional’ presentation of statistics
we have used earlier in this chapter?
Hint: look at p.9, Table A.01: Overview of women and the CJS: proportion of
individuals in the CJS by gender compared to general population.
Answer: the presentation tries to put a general picture forward. The document
is produced with advice from several organisations over time, including an
Independent Women’s Organisation.
In part, the Ministry of Justice have tried to take on board an array of feminist-
inspired empirical studies of how the criminal justice system (both in the UK but
especially the USA) dealt with women accused of crime. Their studies covered the
whole process from crime reporting to police response to charging by the state
prosecutor through the trial process, sentencing and the nature of the different
‘disposals’ from fines to probation to imprisonment. A variety of methodologies
were used, from statistical studies to interviews with criminal justice officials and
women charged and convicted to court observation of trials.
The outcomes of many of these studies were concentrated in offering an answer to
the ‘chivalry thesis’/‘leniency thesis’ which was introduced above; in other words,
‘discriminatory practices’.
8.3.1 Feminist responses to the ‘chivalry thesis’
Essential reading
¢ Morrison (1995) pp.390–394.
Morrison takes us through a number of quantitative statistically based studies of

women and crime statistics that have been offered in relation to the provocatively
named ‘chivalry thesis’ or (equally provocative) ‘leniency thesis’ that asserts that
women receive less severe sentences when they commit the same crimes as men. This
theme has not only been repeated by some criminologists (see Pollak above) but is
also a popularly held view.
Investigating this claim actually involves some difficult methodological questions

about how to compare like with like – and also some sociological questions about
whether ‘like with like’ comparisons are always appropriate. Morrison’s array of studies
can thus be ordered more systematically and a more in depth study would lead
you to follow through many of the studies. In general, however, even when a gross
comparison in studies would seem to indicate that women received lighter sentences
than men for the same offences, it appeared that this method of comparison was
inadequate because it did not include all the factors that sentencers normally and
legitimately (i.e. per sentencing guidelines) take into account: notably (i) seriousness
of the offence and (ii) past convictions.
Keynote: any comparison of sentencing must consider the standard elements taken
into account by sentencers. It is a major mistake – although this does relate very
strongly to populist views – to assume that we have a simple tariff-based system.
Comparing unlike with unlike: ‘leniency’. Where women were differentially tracked
through alternatives to custody, such as social work supervision, especially with a
medical/psychiatric component, is this really more ‘lenient’ as it involves more intense
surveillance and more intrusive demands to ‘open up’ psychologically?
u Where women’s prisons were depicted as generally ‘less severe’ than men’s, in fact
they were found to be either: a) old, overcrowded and bleak; b) organised in terms
of tighter disciplinary control than men’s and/or c) highly psychiatric and/or d)
newer and based on ‘family’ models.
u A classic work is Hilary Allen Justice unbalanced.
Studies which did attempt to quantify sentencing differences (but ignored interaction
in the courtroom) came up with somewhat conflicting results.
Roger Hood’s study (1992) was one of the few to have compared the sentencing of
men and women at the Crown Court using multivariate techniques. He found that
women were less likely to be sentenced to custody than men when purely legal factors
were taken into account and when socio-demographic factors (e.g. unemployment)
were controlled.
Hood also succinctly explains why various authors, such as Seear and Player (1986),
Carlen (1988) and NACRO (1991), have misinterpreted prison statistics when they
argue that women are more likely to receive custody than men. He points out that
these statistics, which show that the sentenced female prison population contains
proportionately more first offenders than the male population, are an inappropriate
basis from which to draw conclusions about sentencing as they concern those in
prison, not those being imprisoned. In fact, more recently, analysis of an Offenders
Index sample of 21,000 offenders convicted of a serious offence in 1991showed that

women first offenders were half as likely to be given a sentence of immediate custody
as male first offenders – 4 per cent compared with 8 per cent. Those with previous
convictions were also less likely to go to prison than equivalent men (Hedderman and
Hough, 1994).
Sentencing outcomes
On the issues of sentencing and chivalry, the research question pivots around whether
women offenders receive more lenient treatment than their male counterparts. Earlier
studies found that women were treated preferentially in court; yet other research
counters these findings suggesting that women are in fact treated more harshly. Still
other researchers conclude that women offenders receive equal treatment; or that
disparities in sentencing are diminishing.
Even when the data are controlled for offence type and prior convictions, the results
are unclear, so it may be apt to conclude with Morris (1987) that it is difficult to
ascertain whether sexual discrimination occurs in the criminal justice system and that
simple allegations of chivalry or sexism can obscure our understanding of the complex
nature of the sentencing of both male and female defendants.
Various manifestations of essentialism can be seen in explanations of female offending

over the last century. Thus the masculinity hypothesis fed into later discourses of
pathology, sexuality and familial control. The chivalry thesis shifts focus but holds fast
the principles of the female as the weaker sex, in need of male protection and lenient
treatment from police and the courts. Aberrant women were flawed biologically,
mad and abnormal. The liberation theory espouses women’s changed role within
the domestic sphere and blames feminism for the new breed of female offender.
What these accounts share is an unquestioned framing of women as either victims
or offenders. Women offended due to circumstances beyond their control. Women’s
aberrance was never perceived as a deliberate act of agency, rather an anomaly of the
true essence of woman.
More specifically, a number of studies identify clear gender-stereotypes in sentencing

when exploring the category of ‘woman offender’. Some researchers have observed
that women may be treated more leniently than men when they act in an approved
feminine role, but that they seem to receive no advantage, and may in fact be treated
more severely, if engaging in ‘unfeminine’ crimes (i.e. crimes of violence) or in
untraditional roles. For example, Wilczynski’s (1995) study demonstrates that gender
plays an important role in determining the nature of the criminal justice response
to those who kill. The criminal justice system views men as bad and normal and to
be treated in accordance with the legal/punishment model. Women, on the other
hand, are constructed as mad and abnormal and in need of the welfare/treatment
model. Further, Wilczynski states that while criminal justice processes predicated on
traditional gender stereotypes can be oppressive to women, at times women benefit
from them (Wilczynski, 1995).
Women as victims
Another moment of the feminist critique of criminology was to make connections
between how women were treated as lawbreakers and how they were treated
as victims of crime: the key finding was that, even though these would seem to
be opposite poles of the criminal justice system, the determinants were actually
identical: namely how far women complied with stereotypes.
Rape, the media and courtroom

Many studies have commented on how the media divides rape victims into ‘innocent’
victims and others. ‘Innocent’ victims are definitely not prostitutes and ideally are
virgins although they may also be monogamous, faithful partners. Similarly, wearing
‘provocative’ clothing or engaging in risky activities such as hitchhiking are explicitly
or implicitly deemed ‘asking for it’, to use a colloquial way of speaking. For the feminist
critique, such categorisations amount to a form of policing women’s conduct, an
informal social control mechanism.
How far are these stereotypes and social control mechanisms reproduced in the
formal criminal justice system? This is a hard question to pose, requiring a certain
understanding of the legal process. For example, it is often said rhetorically that
‘the rape victim is on trial’ – and yet is that not due to the general structures of the
adversarial system in which all ‘victims’ occupy the category of witnesses – as if
witnesses to something external to you and you have an abstract, objective view.
To paraphrase Katherine Barlett, asking the ‘Woman question’ means looking

for gender implications of rules and practices that otherwise appear to be
neutral. Relevant questions include, why and how women have been omitted or
misrepresented in the legal rule or practice; whether, why and how legal rules and
practice perpetuate subordination of women, and how to change rules and practices
so to include women’s experiences and not to perpetuate women’s subordination.
See Katherine Barlett, ‘Feminist legal method’, in: Hilaire Barnett (ed.), Sourcebook on
feminist jurisprudence.
Standpoint epistemology encourages legal storytelling that is woman expressing
their situation(s) as outsiders in and outside the courts. (See Regina Graycar and Jenny
Morgan, The hidden gender of law (Sydney: Federation Press, 2002) second edition,
Chapter 4, pp. 74–76.)
Nils Christie includes rape victims in his account ‘The ideal victim’ In: From crime policy
to victim policy. reorienting the justice system. Edited by Ezzat A. Fattah. London. The
Macmillan Press Ltd, 1986. pp. 17–30.
Domestic violence, rape and policing

Here the gender question has not been focused directly on women’s behaviour or
even men’s but how gender is implicated in cultural constructions of privacy and the
public/domestic distinction.
Feminism has had a very significant impact in the field of women’s victimisation. Rape
and intimate violence have been central concerns; women’s victimisation is more
likely to be personal, in other words they are closely connected to their victimiser.
Women face specifically gendered violence. Most texts now routinely contain sections
on rape and intimate violence, the domestic arena is no longer a private realm of
domination.
8.4 Reflection: what does a feminist analysis mean for

criminological theory? Is it social ideology?
What does criminological theory seek to explain? How free is it from presuppositions?
Under the feminist critique the heritage of criminology as biologistic and
psychologistic was clear, these were very much linked in with social control.
8.4.1 The after-effects of critique

The obvious question in the light of the feminist critique was: what would a non-sexist
criminology look like? Where should we go from here? The key themes of the feminist
critique were:
1. ‘redressing the balance’, including feminist empiricism;
2. social constructionism versus ‘biologism’;
3. ‘not the individual but society must change’; and
4. making visible the webs of social control.
Activity 8.7
Read:
¢ Daly, Kathleen ‘Feminist perspectives in criminology: a review with gen Y in
mind’, Eugene McLaughlin and Tim Newburn (eds), The handbook of criminal
theory, especially p.8 onwards ‘Feminist perspectives in criminology: a brief
chronology’.
Are you generation Y? Does feminism have any relevance for you?
A response:
We need to recognise that ‘feminist’ is a political term. One of its catchcry’s was
that the personal was political. In other words, there was and is no hiding from
the political nature of being. Feminism opened up space for a critical stance on
gender relations and behind the birth of feminist criminology in the 1970s was both
wider theoretical analysis of the role that women had been assigned in modern
(and indeed traditional) society and a sense of injustice very much fuelled by the
politics of inequality, sex discrimination and ‘redressing the balance’. Thus, when
considering if it has done its task and we should move on, remember it was a wider
social critique beyond the specific terms of criminology. Feminist criminology
was never purely criminological: the claims – and they were correct – of failings
of theory, the separate biological vision when that of male offenders had moved
on was biased. However, the claims of unfairness in the criminal justice system,
put forward as examples of the sexism of society at large mediated by ideational
artefacts – images of women, stereotypes – that allowed gender injustice to
be operationalised may have been overdone and disingenuous. Did it move
criminology on? Certainly the underpinnings of theory were shown up, the need
to find redress was made apparent, and questions were opened that have not yet
been answered.
Moreover, it showed the need for radical reflexivity. To develop criminology thus
requires a reflective stance, being able to think about how arguments get put
together and why.
8.5 Transitions: provocation, an example of gender in question

In rethinking gender and justice, the second phase of feminism was one that sought to
put forward not only a critique but to put forward women’s’ point of view/standpoint
epistemology; thus criminal law had been built on the male standpoint, one task was
to have it recognise the specificity of women’s’ position.
The defence of provocation has been subject to much feminist analysis and pressure
for reform where this has been attempted as a defence for women who have killed
their husbands after years of physical abuse (‘cumulative provocation’). Provocation
is one of three defences to murder, the other two being diminished responsibility
and self-defence. Whereas the effect of a successful provocation defence is that the
accused person is found guilty of manslaughter and hence is eligible for (although
will not necessarily receive) a non-custodial sentence. (A murder conviction carries a
mandatory life sentence.)
Provocation is legally defined in terms of a ‘sudden and temporary loss of self-control’

caused by an action of the victim and it must be of a quality that would have made
‘the reasonable man’ lose self-control. ‘Reasonable’ is often glossed as meaning in
the first instance not what would make a highly irascible and bad-tempered person
(i.e. a person with weak self-control) lash out in response. Since the famous case of
Camplin (the so-called ‘reasonable boy’ case, DPP v Camplin [1978] AC 705), there have
been issues raised has to how far one can assume a universal reasonable person. It is
important to realise that there are two aspects of this question: 1) what degree of self-
control can be expected – in the case of ‘battered women’, can it be legally accepted
that their capacity for self-control has been eroded after years of suffering violence?;
2) what counts as a provocative act (which includes words spoken) for one person may
not be for another. Usually what is discussed are cultural variations, with the (absurd)
example often given of throwing a pigskin slipper at a Muslim, whereas the more
real-life instance would be a Muslim father who kills the non-Muslim boyfriend of his
daughter. In the case of battered women, the issue tends to focus around gender and
power inequality in the relationships.
The instance of battered women also comes up against the fact that ‘sudden’ is taken
to mean that the response to the provoking words or actions must be immediate,
whereas in some of these cases there has been a delay. Finally, the whole defence is
governed by a ‘proportionality’ requirement, i.e. that the response (killing the person)
is not too excessive in scale to what provoked it (there is a line of commentary on the
incoherence of this with the idea of ‘loss of control’ but that is not central here).
Provocation has traditionally been a defence that is more successful when raised by
men. Why is that? Feminist critical analysis argues this is because it is an implicitly
masculine defence. This is an important type of analysis that belongs ultimately to
the wider critique of enlightenment values and their modern day successors such as
universal human rights. It consists of a scepticism about abstraction, emphasising that
abstraction is a process whose product will always ‘betray’ (here meaning contain
elements of/still be oriented by) its concrete origin and point of view. Thus: what are
the fact situations in which the defence of provocation first started being recognised
by law?
u Male strangers ‘meeting at the crossroads’;
u The rise of the code of honour in 17th century England;
u Men coming across their wives committing adultery in flagrante delicto.
The third instance might seem the most relevant one from a feminist point of view
because it is clearly about men and women/husbands and wives and what is taken
as ‘naturally’ causing a man to lose self-control. Focusing on this, the question would
be: is the same understanding applied to wives in the parallel situation? (In relation
to cumulative provocation, certainly there are striking discrepancies: ‘nagging’.)
However, for this line of analysis it is really the first two examples that are more
relevant or are equally relevant – one can quickly see how provocation reflected a
purely male social experience.
Case study: Kiranjit Ahluwalia (born 1955) is an Indian woman who came to England in
an arranged marriage. In 1989 she set fire to her husband who died. Her claim was that
her actions were in response to 10 years of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse.
Her English was poor and she was initially convicted of murder and sentenced to life in
prison.
Her case was taken up by the Southall Black Sisters (SBS), a non-profit all-Asian
women’s’ group based in Southall, West London, England. Originally established in
1979 in the aftermath of the death of anti-fascist activist Blair Peach, the group aid the
struggle of Asian women in the fight against racism, but became increasingly involved
in defending the human rights of Asian women who are the victims of domestic
violence and in campaigning against religious fundamentalism.
Ahluwalia’s conviction was later overturned on grounds of inadequate counsel and

replaced with voluntary manslaughter. Although her submission of provocation failed
(under R v Duffy [1949] 1 All ER 932 the loss of control needed to be sudden, which this
was not), she successfully pleaded the partial defence of diminished responsibility
under s.2 Homicide Act 1957 on the grounds that fresh medical evidence (which was
not available at her original trial) may indicate diminished mental responsibility.
The film ‘Provoked’ (2006) is a fictionalised account of Ahluwalia’s life. Discussion of

the film and sections are on the internet.
Reflexion: masculinity and crime
Essential reading
¢ Morrison (1995) pp.409–412 and in particular comments on the crisis in
masculinity.
¢ Burke (2014) Chapter 11 ‘The gendered criminal’, Crime and masculinities.
The feminist critique provoked a reflexion onto masculinity itself. In the work of R.
Collier and Tony Jefferson, masculinity became a question rather than an assumption.
Although it would seem that the maleness of criminology was a relentless focus of
feminist critique, suddenly it seemed that what this ‘masculinity’ involved had been
taken as given. Hence, the alleged masculinity of systems of authority: the existing
critiques of law and the criminal justice system began to seem too crude, sometimes
conspiracy theories but, even when presented in terms of ideology, the mechanism of
the effect of ‘images’ and what seemed institutional masculinity required analysis.
Key UK text: Richard Collier Masculinities, crime, and criminology (Sage, 1998).
In this book, Richard Collier examined criminological, media, and political

interpretations of the relationship between men, masculinities, and crime. Rejecting
the widely held idea that masculinity is ‘in crisis’, he argued for an alternative
approach to theorising the ‘maleness’ of crime and calls for a reappraisal of the
conceptual tools with which the relationship between masculinities and crime has
traditionally been understood.
Main ideas: corporeality, sexed subjectivity, and the materiality of men’s crimes.
Method: focuses on the sexed bodies and subjectivities of men – as offenders, victims,
agents working within the criminal justice system, and criminologists seeking to
explain crime.
He highlighted the limitations of the concept of masculinity, called for a reassessment

of the crimes of men based on a critical re-focusing on questions of heterosexuality,
childhood, the family, and the ‘social’.
8.6 Feminism, criminology, the postmodern moment and

globalisation
Burke (p.238) asks – and this has been an examination question in the past – is there a
feminist criminology?
What he means by this is that, to feminists, criminology was so compromised that a

feminist criminology was a contradiction in terms.
However, globalisation and postmodernism to some extent renders such a question

redundant. The future cannot be one of theoretical isolation but confrontation with
global issues and corresponding local issues in which the local and the global are
intermixed.
This was, perhaps, recognised by many feminist writers, for example, consider the
following from Patricia Smith:
We don’t need a final unified vision of society and gender to argue against oppression,
disadvantage, domination, and discrimination. We do not need to know beforehand
the nature of good society or ideal person so long as we know what prevents a society
from being minimally good or prevents individual from realizing the basic potentials of
personhood. We do not need an ultimate vision when we have not yet met threshold
conditions for minimally just society. The commitment to foster open dialogue that allows
the expression of diverse views and gives particular attention to eliciting views not usually
heard is a unifying thread among feminists that attempt and represent the commonality
of fundamental values without misrepresenting the plurality of experience.
Patricia Smith, ‘Introduction: feminist jurisprudence and the nature of law’ in: P. Smith
(ed.) Feminist jurisprudence (1993).
The complex conditions of contemporary globalisation intensify the need for

contextual analysis. It is not only that theoretical understandings need constant
positioning and re-positioning but that both the position of women and the nature
of criminal justice have radically altered. For instance, there are now far, far more
women in English prisons (not only absolutely but as a proportion of convicted female
lawbreakers) than there have ever been before. Does this reflect a form of ‘equality’?
Is it an instance of the ‘new punitiveness’? Who are these women? Issues such as
international drug trafficking and sex trafficking come to the fore.
We will consider these issues briefly in our concluding chapter.

Notes
9 Punishment and its institutional framework
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
9.1 Philosophy and the aims of punishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
9.2 Understanding punishment: contrasting philosophical and sociological

accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
9.3 Why punish at all? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
9.4 Punishing as a means to an end? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
9.5 Are compromise theories possible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
9.6 Do we live in a penal society? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Introduction
Once there was a very close relationship between criminology and ideas on
punishment; most early texts in criminology had titles such as ‘Criminology and
penology’. It seemed a natural connection, for, as has been stated at the early part of
this guide, criminology began with a ‘correctional’ attitude and thus the institutional
structures and frameworks associated with punishment seemed another branch
of criminology and was termed penology. The term ‘penology’ combined the Latin
poena, ‘punishment’ and the Greek suffix -logia, to give the study of punishment both
theoretical and applied.
Criminology, however, lost that close connection. In part, because in the 1970s
the critique of what institutions were actually doing in the name of reform and
rehabilitation showed not only that little worked (the ‘nothing works’ cry was always
overdone) but that the claims of humanitarian progress in penology obscured new
and often unaccountable plays of power.
If you can, watch ‘ A clockwork orange’ (the 1971 film based on the 1962 novella) or
‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’) a 1975 film based on a 1962 novel) for somewhat
anti-establishment critiques of the hidden power of institutions supposedly based on
rehabilitation and reform. (An earlier and disturbing film is ‘Shock corridor’ in which a
journalist gets himself committed to a mental institution in order to track down the
truth about a murder, he does so but goes insane in the process and stays indefinitely.)
Criminology also developed in diverse ways, such as appreciative, that were far
removed from the correctional beginnings. In fact, within criminology, the rise of a
penal society, or vast network of disciplinary or imprisoning institutions is feared.
This chapter will focus on the coherence or otherwise of the idea of punishment and
its justification. We will read one chapter form the recommended textbook
¢ Burke, Chapter 23 ‘Living in penal society’.
There is a vast reading on the philosophy of punishment; it has been a much discussed
issue since writing began (some references are given later in the case study section of
this chapter). The outstanding contemporary book on social theory and punishment is
¢ Garland, David Punishment and modern society (Oxford University Press, 1990).
But we will use this only as background material.
Further reading
¢ Carrabine, Eamonn et al. Criminology: a sociological introduction (Routledge:
Oxon. 2014) third edition, Chapter 15 ‘Thinking about punishment’ and Chapter
18 ‘Prison and imprisonment’.
Learning objectives
By the end of the associated reading you should be able to:
u Discuss the philosophical justifications for punishment’.
u Juxtapose justifications and consider issues of coherence and contradiction.
u Differentiate the philosophical accounts of punishment from sociological
accounts.
u Discuss in outline the relationship between punishment and the institutional
framework that operates in its name.
u Discuss in outline the use of prisons and ideas of imprisonment.
u Discuss the idea of the penal society and hold an opinion as to the future role of
punishment in our different societies.
Criminology 9 Punishment and its institutional framework page 135
9.1 Philosophy and the aims of punishment

The philosophy of punishment attempts to propose rational justifications and logical
structures that will provide normative direction to the power to punish.
Punishment is clearly defined by classical writers such as Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy
Bentham as an evil. They are clear that it is pain, moreover it is pain deliberately
inflicted upon a person adjudged by courts of the nation to be an offender and
provided under the institution of the law. For utilitarians, punishment is one of the
instruments of government to be applied for the greater good. Critics of liberal
capitalist modernity, such as Karl Marx, have sometimes denied absolutely that there
is any moral right to punish in contemporary societies. For them only in an absolutely
just society would a moral right exist.
The philosophical approach that underlined the period of classical criminology mixed
ideas of retribution and deterrence. Punishment was either required as a form of
‘just desert’, a suitable form of retribution for a crime regardless of future outcomes
(and thus required simply to do ‘justice’), or was an instrument of deterrence (where
the future outcome was to be the factor guiding). Positivism, with its notions of
differentiation and determinism (or pathology and the illness model) introduced
notions of reform and rehabilitation that were viewed as the most progressive
justification for most of the 20th century. In fact we should not actually talk of
rehabilitation or reform as a justification of punishment since these perspectives
sought to make punishment redundant in favour of corrective measures of treatment
of the offender, sometimes on the model of crime as a sickness.
It is possible to list at least seven official purposes of sanctions imposed on offenders:
u restraint or incapacitation: to stop the particular behaviour at issue;
u individual or specific deterrence: using punishment to reduce the likelihood that

the particular offender will repeat the offence in the future;
u general deterrence: punishing one person to reduce the likelihood that others will
commit a similar offence;
u reform or rehabilitation: imposing a sanction (which may be exactly the same

thing as a punishment) called a corrective measure or treatment to correct what
was wrong with the individual who committed the crime;
u moral affirmation or symbolic action: punishment is used to affirm certain social

values and to demarcate the acceptable from the unacceptable, so drawing the
moral boundaries of the society;
u retribution: the punishment is expected to match the harm done, to return justice
to a balance;
u restitution or compensation: where the sanction seeks to regain a balance

through restoring the value of goods taken or compensating the owner for the
loss.
It is a debatable point whether the actual things done in the name of these
justifications actually achieve them. For example, were prisons ever ‘treatment
institutions’?
9.2 Understanding punishment: contrasting philosophical and

sociological accounts
The questions or issues you should bear in mind here are:
u What is the role of the philosophy of punishment?
u Is it to rationalise and justify social activities so that they have the appearance of
legitimacy?
u Or does the philosophy of punishment guide social action and put acceptable
limits on our activities?
u How do we understand punishment socially?
Perhaps we can distinguish between punishment as a philosophical concern and

punishment as a concern of social theory, i.e. of sociology. The general idea I suggest
would be that a philosophy of punishment is one of the mechanisms whereby a
normative framework is established for how society is governed, while sociology is a
means by which society is understood. In this way the philosophy of punishment is a
part of the process of providing a philosophical foundation for the domestication of
power. Legitimacy is essential.
As Bauman puts it:
In all order-building and order-maintenance endeavours legitimacy is, by necessity, the

prime stake of the game and the most hotly contested concept. The fight is conducted
around the borderline dividing proper (that is, unpunishable) from improper (that is,
punishable) coercion and enforcement. The ‘war against violence’ is waged in the name of
the monopoly of coercion. (Bauman 2001: p. 201)
9.2.1 The backdrop to the discussions on punishment: the development

of modern society
Shall we question whether societies progress in moral as well in technical terms? At
least until recently this was the accepted explanation of penal change. Our societies,
we were told, had moved from times where the criminal law was an instrument of
repression and arbitrary power to a time where the operation of the criminal law
and the power to punish was rational, humane and just. But a widespread doubt has
come over the issue of whether human societies always progress in moral as well in
technical terms.
In the first two chapters it was stressed that reflection and developing a criminological
imagination are sought for. Some of you may have actual criminal justice experience
– for many, however, the actual reality of what is done in the name of punishment
may be an abstraction. Personally, I (WJM) was for a brief time a part-time educational
officer in two UK prisons and my PhD was intended to be on prions but developed
into an analysis of the philosophy and institutions of punishment instead. I have been
fascinated and repelled by prison.
Consider this statement about capital punishment: ‘Capital punishment is the most
premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated, can be
compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a
criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible
death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for
months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.’
What do you make of this? Do you consider this a rational comment or emotive?
It was made by the rather existential French writer Albert Camus – termed once ‘the
conscience of the West’ and awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature for in part
illuminating ‘the problems of the human conscience in our times’ in his 1957 essay
‘Reflections on the guillotine’ (Réflexions sur la Guillotine, can be found online and in
The plague, the fall, exile and the kingdom and selected essays Albert Camus (Everyman’s
Library Contemporary Classics, 2004).
The guillotine had been produced in the Enlightenment as the effective, clean method
of execution and was used up until the death penalty was abolished in 1981.
Camus opens with a personal reflection concerning his father who goes to see the
execution of a murderer...
Shortly before World War I, a murderer whose crime was particularly shocking (he had
killed a family of farmers, children and all) was condemned to death in Algiers.
He was an agricultural worker who had slaughtered in a bloody delirium, and had
rendered his offense still more serious by robbing his victims. The case was widely
publicized, and it was generally agreed that decapitation was altogether too mild a
punishment for such a monster. I have been told this was the opinion of my father, who
was particularly outraged by the murder of the children. One of the few things I know
about him is that this was the first time in his life he wanted to attend an execution. He
got up while it was still dark, for the place where the guillotine was set up was at the other
end of the city, and once there, found himself among a great crowd of spectators. He
never told what he saw that morning. My mother could only report that he rushed wildly
into the house, refused to speak, threw himself on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit.
He had just discovered the reality concealed beneath the great formulas that ordinarily
serve to mask it. Instead of thinking of the murdered children, he could recall only the
trembling body he had seen thrown on a board to have its head chopped off.
For Camus ‘Justice of this kind is obviously no less shocking than the crime itself, and
the new “official” murder, far from offering redress for the offense committed against
society, adds instead a second defilement to the first’.
Camus is angry at our – humans generally – acquiescence in forces that dehumanise,

humiliate and ultimately destroy us, the biggest fear is that we do not recognise when
we acquiesce. We are in systems of thought that obscures ‘reality’. Is Camus correct, or
is his sort of outburst that of an estranged person? (Alternatively, it could be both! The
estranged person is the one who can see through the obscurity!)
This century has seen vast technical progress but not only has the connection between
technical and moral progress become untenable, further we have seen clear examples of
moral regression (the Nazi regimes stand as an obvious example). Furthermore, the scale
of some of the problems the human race faces currently are so vast that any assertion
that they have progressed morally seems somewhat doubtful. The imperfection of
human society and of the international order are painfully obvious at a time where we
appear to have gone full circle in terms of a risk society. Having moved from the naturally
precarious existence of primitive life through the growth of nations, the ‘civilizing
process’ and the development of modernity to a stage of new threats to the survival of
the human race that owe their foundation to our own cultural creations (for example,
ecological disaster, nuclear proliferation and the state of the developing world on a
supranational level, the state of the inner cities and the crime problem on a national
level).
In the face of this, one tendency is to foreclose on the possibility of progress. Give
up the notion of the perfect society, or the utopian order of things. But it seems
dangerous to give up on the notion of progress for the image of the possibility of
progress is both an important rallying banner and also instinctively plausible.
In a world of uncertainty, in a world where nobody knows all the answers, and where
all claims to truth may be considered contingent or methodological, it is important
to preserve both the critical perspective and the conditions of change. Put another
way, it is important to keep our societies open (as a group of liberal writers are fond
of saying). The possibility of progress, therefore, implies the necessity of social and
political change. And change is strongly driven by the phenomena of hope, by, that is,
the spark which a new vision of possibility, the encountering of a new opportunity, the
realisation that old boundaries were not as impenetrable as had been thought. That
is, a vision of the different: of new and improved life chances which turns latent desire
into action and thus into change. The banishing of hope amounts to a weakening of
the critical attitude and lowers the possibility of change, for whoever has given up
hope has in actuality accepted the conditions around him.
9.2.2 Identifying opposing views on the philosophy of punishment

It is important to be able to define in general terms what punishment means to us.
Consider a representative quotation:
Punishment is viewed as a social act. That is, it takes place in the context of, and with the
active and passive participation of, communities of people. Punishment has a symbolic
character which is oriented toward denouncing what are deemed to be harmful or socially
repugnant activities. It thus has the function of establishing what is ‘right’ and what is
‘wrong’ behaviour by providing a public disapproval of an offender and/or their offensive
behaviour. Punishment has been said to resonate at a psychological and emotional
level in that the administration and rituals associated with punishment provide a focal
point for the expression of deeply felt emotions. A feature of punishment therefore is
symbolically to draw the lines in terms of acceptable behaviour or conduct, and following
of appropriate rules. Furthermore, it functions to reaffirm certain forms of authority and
belief. That is, the authority of any particular governing regime is in part based upon how
punishment is organised and carried out in practice. (White, R. and Perrone, S. Crime and
social control: an introduction, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p.138.)
Punishment involves the infliction of some unpleasantness on the offender, or

deprives the offender of something valued. ‘But punishment is not just the infliction of
something unpleasant on the offender: the imposition is made to express disapproval
or condemnation of the offender’s conduct which is in breach of what is regarded as a
desirable and obligatory standard of conduct’ (Ten 1987: p.2).
As Golding explains, philosophical discussions differentiate levels of questions:
u What is the general justification of punishment?
u Who may justifiably be punished?
u How – or how much – may someone be punished?
(Golding in Cedarblom, J.B. and W.L. Blizek, (eds), Justice and punishment, Ballinger
Publishing Company, 1977: p.89.)
Particular approaches may be more relevant to one or other question. Retributivism,

for example, may be more relevant to the second question than to the first. To
the question: ‘on whom may punishment justifiably be imposed?’ a relevant and
retributivist answer would be ‘only on deserving offenders’. But retributivism may
have little, and perhaps next to nothing, of relevance to say about the general
justification of punishment (Golding, 1977). This particular question is concerned
with why a society should have the institution of punishment in the first place, why it
should have penal laws at all (i.e. laws that prescribe or forbid various kinds of conduct
and that threaten punishment for violations). On this issue, deterrence answers appear
more apt: a society has penal laws because it wants to deter people from doing, or not
doing, certain things. But deterrence may have a lesser relevance to the question ‘who
may justifiably be punished?’ than it has to the general justification of punishment.
Many writers recognise this (Golding, for example, states that the classical theories of
punishment should be construed as answers to different questions rather than as rival
answers to the same question).
The philosophical debate on punishment has traditionally broken up into two

main camps. On the one side are those who adopt a deontological approach (that
something simply is right to do in itself, for example, the retributionists, where
punishment is right to inflict because it is required in order to do justice). On the
other are those who adopt a consequentialist approach (for example, utilitarianism,
or deterrence theories where punishment is a lesser evil required because the
consequences of inflicting it are better than the consequences of not inflicting it).
Activity 9.1
Ask what the emotions associated with punishment are, are they capable of being
fitted into the justifications? Or is the philosophy of punishment a way of achieving
a reasoned approach without emotions?
Can you see links? For example, retributionism is often said to reflect the desire for
vengeance.
9.2.3 Consequentialist or utilitarian philosophy

In classic Greece, Plato had Protagoras state:
In punishing wrongdoers, no one concentrates on the fact that a man has done wrong
in the past, or punishes him on that account, unless taking blind vengeance like a beast.
No, punishment is not inflicted by a rational man for the sake of the crime that has been
committed (after all one cannot undo what is past), but for the sake of the future, to
prevent either the same man or, by some spectacle of his punishment, someone else from
doing wrong again. Plato, Protagorus)
In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes set out a sentiment picked up in classical
criminology:
In revenges or punishments, men ought not look at the greatness of the evil past, but the
greatness of the good to follow, whereby we are forbidden to inflict punishment with any
other design than for the correction of the offender and the admonition of others (Farrar).
In this approach, since punishment is itself an unpleasant experience for the offender
who is punished, the infliction of punishment can only be justified if it prevents
greater suffering.
The deterrence model was developed by the classical school of criminology during
the 18th and 19th centuries. Taking a rationalist view of man as a pleasure seeking,
pain-avoiding creature, the objective is to construct and depict the institutions that
deal with crime in such a way that they give a strong message to potential offenders of
the consequences of offending. The appropriate penalty will deter potential offenders
from committing crimes (Grupp 1971: p.7). As Bentham states:
When we consider that an unpunished crime leaves the path of crime open, not only to
the same delinquent but also to all those ... entering upon it, we perceive that punishment
inflicted on the individual becomes a source of security to all. That punishment which
considered in itself appeared base and repugnant to all ... is elevated to the first rank of
benefits – not as vengeance but rather, as an indispensable sacrifice to the common safety
(Bentham: p.396).
Bentham suggests that punishment may prevent the occurrence of offences in three
ways: by making it impossible or difficult for the offender to break the law again,
at least in certain ways; by deterring both offenders and others; by providing an
opportunity for the reforming of offenders. Emphasis placed on potential offenders
is secondary deterrence and deterrence of the offender themselves is primary
deterrence (Bentham: p.396).
The utilitarian theory therefore, is based on the premise that it justifies punishment
solely in terms of its beneficial effects or consequences. Many utilitarians subscribe
to the idea that the main beneficial effects of punishment is to be viewed in terms of
the reduction of crime, and believe that punishing offenders will have the following
benefits:
u punishment acts as a deterrent to crime;
u deterrent effects can be both individual and general; punishment deters the
offender who is punished from committing similar offences in the future, and it
also deters other potential offenders, this is achieved by first
u the offender who is punished is supposed to be deterred by his experience

of punishment and the threat of being punished again if he re-offends and is
convicted (the individual deterrent effect) and second
u general deterrent effect works through the threat of their being subjected to
the same kind of punishment that was meted out to the convicted offender.
In addition, punishment may have reformative or rehabilitative effects. The offender

who is punished will be ‘reformed in the sense that the effect of punishment is to
change his values so that he will not commit similar offences in the future because
he believes such offences to be wrong. But if he abstains from criminal acts simply
because he is afraid of being caught and punished again, then he is deterred
rather than reformed and rehabilitated by punishment. So the effects of individual
deterrence and rehabilitation are the same, however, the distinguishing feature lies in
terms of the difference in motivation’ (Bentham: p.396).
The incapacitate effect provides a third consequence. Simply put, the offender
cannot reoffend if dead or under penal restraint, for example, in prison, irrespective of
whether the person is at all deterred or reformed by punishment.
Incapacitation appears justified particularly for those who are not deterred or ‘beyond
treatment’. However, on a general level, consequentialist arguments appear best
able to support the whole structure of law enforcement. Regardless of the prevailing
crime rates, it is assumed that many persons are in fact deterred; were it not for the
operation of the deterrent machinery, the crime rates would still be higher. In this
case, punishment of many offenders is morally justified on grounds of deterrence
alone. While there are some that argue against this position, it can be argued that
deterrence is the primary purpose of the state’s sanctions (Grupp 1971: p.7).
Thus for the deterrence theory, the minimal aim of punishment is the protection of
society. It would achieve this purpose in two ways: by preventing the offender from
repeating his offence and by demonstrating to other potential offenders what will
happen to them if they follow his example.
9.3 Why punish at all?
9.3.1 De we need the threat of punishment?

For the 20th century liberal philosopher H.L.A. Hart, the case for punishment as a
general social practice or institution, rested on the prevention of crime. People
are punished because we thereby deter potential offenders from becoming actual
offenders, and therefore it is not to be found either in the inherent appropriateness
of punishing wrongdoing or in the continently ‘corrective’ or rehabilitative powers of
fines or imprisonments on some criminals.
Note Wasserstrom’s argument:
a view such as Hart’s is less a justification for punishment than a justification of the threat
of punishment. For it is clear that if we could somehow convince the rest of society
that we were in fact punishing offenders, we would accomplish all that the deterrent
theory would have us achieve though our somewhat more visible punishments. This is
so because it is the belief that punishment will follow the commission of an offence that
deters potential offenders. The actual punishment of persons is necessary only to keep the
threat of punishment credible. (Wasserstrom, R. in Cedarblom, J.B. and W.L. Blizek, (eds),
Justice and punishment, Ballinger Publishing Company, 1977: p.186.)
Is it the threat of punishment and not the punishment itself that deters? If so, while
deterrence seems to depend on actual punishment, to implement the threat, it really
depends on publication and may be achieved if people believe that punishment has
occurred even if in fact it has not. Bentham apparently said this clearly: ‘for a Utilitarian
apparent justice is everything, real justice is irrelevant’ (Mabbott 1971: p.41).
Punishment is therefore to be conceived of as a necessary evil rather than a positive

good, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It follows that we ought to
minimise if not eradicate punishment. In Justice and punishment, Wasserstrom
concluded that two extreme positions emerge in considering the effects of the threat
of punishment:
u On one side of the spectrum, are those like Jeremy Bentham, who considered man
to be a rational being choosing between two possible modes of action on the
basis of a calculation of risks of pain and pleasure before deciding upon his actions.
Benthamites believe that we always act in accordance with our own enlightened
self-interest. The consequence of this model is stated as follows: if we make the
risk of punishment sufficient to outweigh the prospective gain, the potential law
breaker will, as a rational being, choose to stay within the limits of the law.
u The other side of the spectrum are those who state that this model is unrealistic
and subscribe to the view that ‘When people remain law abiding, it is not because
of fear of the criminal law, but because of moral inhibitions or internalised norms.
If an internal restraint is lacking, the threat of punishment does not make much
difference since criminals do not make rational choices, calculating gain against
the risk of punishment; they act out of emotional instability, lack of self-control, or
because they have acquired the values of a criminal subculture’ (Andenaes 1974,
p.111).
Is it the fear of punishment – a belief in the reality of the threat – rather than beliefs
about its type or amount that deters? If so, the nature of the potential offender’s
beliefs about the likelihood of apprehension will be crucial to the efficiency of the
system (Lacey 1988: p.28). Moreover, the general deterrent value of punishment might
be dependent on the publicity it receives (Golding: p.96). The threat of punishment is
seen to be justified simply by its necessity as a means of making the standards of the
criminal law real: as a way of stating that the meeting of those standards is a matter of
duty or obligation (Lacey: p.182).
Activity 9.2
Can you summarise the utilitarian position?
Answer:
u The only acceptable reason for punishing a person is that punishing him/her will
help prevent or reduce crime, thereby reducing the amount of suffering in the
future.
u The only acceptable reason for punishing a person in a given manner or degree is
that this is the manner or degree most likely to reduce or prevent crime.
u People should be punished only if the act of punishing produces the best
consequences by way of preventing or reducing crime as a consequence
(Morrison 1997: p.147).
9.3.2 What of punishing the innocent? Who may rightly be punished?

The general deterrence argument for punishing the guilty also seems to justify
inflicting unpleasant treatment on those who have not in fact committed offences.
Note how Ten (p.13) states the proposition:
Let us now assume that the beneficial consequences of punishment outweigh the
suffering that it inflicts on offenders. Critics of the utilitarian theory argue that if
punishment is to be justified solely in terms of its good consequences, then punishment
cannot be confined to offenders. There might be situations in which punishing an
innocent person would produce better consequences than alternative courses of action.
The Utilitarian is therefore committed to punishing the innocent person.
How can utilitarians respond?
u Punishing the innocent is a logical contradiction because punishment implies

guilt’. This response which is sometimes proffered replaces argument by a mere
appeal to definition: ‘Punishment, it is said is something we do to an offender for
an offence. Thus, punishment of the innocent is simply a contradiction in terms – it
is not punishment at all. (Lacey: p.38).
u The premises of the objection are challenged by utilitarians. It is suggested that

punishing the innocent man will not in fact produce the best consequences if
we take into account all the consequences of such punishment of the innocent
including the long-term and less obvious consequences. Here then the utilitarian
response to the charge that they are committed to punishing the innocent they
say that on balance, the punishment of the innocent will always produce worse
consequences than otherwise. For example, it is claimed that the fact that an
innocent man has been punished would soon leak out and what would then follow
would be a loss of confidence in the legal system (Ten: p.17). Similar sentiments
have been expressed by Bentham (Bentham 1982: pp.158–164, in Lacey 1988: p.39).
He stated that punishing the innocent would not always maximise utility because
of the extra suffering caused to the victim by reason of his innocence and of the
risk of damage to the general respect for the legal system should the travesty
of justice ever be discovered. Therefore, the utilitarian response to the point
that they allegedly approve of the deliberate punishment of the innocent is to
respond in the negative and assert that such an action would have more harmful
consequences than beneficial results. Duff states that this misses the point – the
crucial charge is not that a consequentialist will in fact punish the innocent, but
that he is ready to contemplate it as an open moral possibility (Duff 1986: p.160).
u It is claimed that the only situations in which punishing the innocent is optimistic
are hypothetical and fantastic situations rather than situations which arise, or are
likely to occur, in the real world (Ten: p.17).
u On another level, one can argue that one cannot object to a consequentialist
account of punishment merely on the grounds that it would sanction the
punishment of the innocent. ‘No practicable system of punishment can hope to
punish only the guilty; in ensuring that we punish a reasonable proportion of the
guilty, we will inevitably punish some who are in fact innocent.’ (Schedler 1980:
pp.158–59).
But for Duff (p.154):
u A system of punishment is most obviously defective if it involves the deliberate

punishment of the innocent.
u Punishment of the innocent is objectionable not merely because it does not

give the victims a fair chance to avoid it, but because it is a perversion of law and
punishment.
u The aim of deterring potential offenders does not by itself require a system that
inflicts suffering only on offenders for their offences: ‘We might deter potential
offenders by punishing an innocent scapegoat under the pretence that he is guilty’.
But if so then:
u ‘Having threatened to impose punishment on offenders, we are then committed

to punishing actual offenders not only by the need to make the threat believable,
but also because we have in effect promised to do so; thus, in stating this, we are
entitled to punish only those who have voluntarily broken the law ... To punish
an innocent is to deny him the respect which is his due, because instead of
responding as we have legitimately threatened to respond to his own voluntary
actions, we simply use him as a means to our further social ends.’(Duff: p.172.)
9.4 Punishing as a means to an end?

Considerations of general deterrence have proved popular rhetoric, but punishment
on this ground has been attacked as unjust. Bittner and Platt (in Andenaes, J.
Punishment and deterrence 1974: p.129), contend that ‘Punishment on the basis of
deterrence is inherently unjust. For if an example is made of a person to induce others
to avoid criminal actions then he suffers not for what he has done but on account of
other people’s tendency to do likewise’. This is a frequently raised criticism for Kant’s
moral principle that man should always be treated as an end in himself, not only as a
means for some other end is often quoted in support (Kant in Andenaes, 1974: p.129).
Bitter and Platt suggest that ‘Punishment is essential to the law’s effectiveness and that
without its application the law would be meaningless. Thus if it is ethically justifiable
to issue penal laws in order to regulate human conduct, it cannot be ethically unjust to
apply the law in the individual case. It cannot be said that the offender ‘suffers not for
what he has done but on account of other people’s tendency to do likewise’. He suffers
for what he has done in the measure prescribed by the legislature.’ (Bittner and Platt,
in Andenaes, J: p.131). As H.L.A. Hart has put it, the primary operation of the criminal
punishment consists of announcing certain standards of behaviour and attaching
penalties for deviation, and then leaving individuals to choose. This, he asserts is the
method of social control which maximises individual freedom within the framework
of the law (Hart 1968: p.23, in Andenaes, J. op cit.).
Thus, the decisive point does not seem to be whether the law is based on
considerations of deterrence, but rather whether it can be accepted as a reasonable
means to a legitimate end.
From the abolitionist point of view, the notion of controlling crime by penal intervention is
ethically problematic as people are used for the purpose of deterrence, by demonstrating
power and domination. Punishment is seen as a self-reproducing form of crime. (De Haan,
W. in Stenson, K. and D. Cowell (eds.), The politics of crime control 1993: p.205).
De Haan states that the penal practice of blaming people for their supposed
intentions:
u is dangerous because the social conditions for recidivism are thus reproduced;
u is irrational in that it assumes that crime is a result of the individual themselves;
u is irrational in making us believe that punishment is the appropriate means of

crime control, rather
u we should not seek to isolate the criminal act, but view it in its overall
environmental context.
Abolitionists deny the utility of punishment and claim that there is no valid
justification for it.
They criticise deterrence theory for its sloppy definitions of concepts, its immunity
to challenge, and for the fact that it gives the routine process of punishment a false
legitimacy in an epoch where the infliction of pain might otherwise have appeared
problematic. (Christie 1982, in de Haan, W. op cit: p.209)
9.4.1 Retributive theories: the complete opposite of consequentialist

views?
In the late 19th century Judge Stephen offered a view characteristic of the Victorian
ethos:
I think it is highly desirable that criminals should be hated, that the punishment inflicted
on them should be so contrived as to give expression to that hatred, and to justify it so far
as the public provision of means for expressing and gratifying a healthy natural sentiment
can justify and encourage it. (Stephen 1883, in Rubin, S. op cit: p.654).
Retributive theories require the features of punishment to be shaped by reference to

the features of the offence for which it is meted.
Thus, a retributive theory is necessarily backward looking in its orientation to punishment.

Its focus is on the offence and nothing else, especially not any social cost/benefit or
individual eugenics that can be calculated to result from punishments. The typical
concerns of forward looking, consequentialist theories of punishment, have no place in a
retributive theory. Hence, retribution in punishment ignores all features of the offender’s
character, the victim’s situation, all the effects of the threat or infliction of punishment
insofar as these are distinct from the nature and gravity of the offence and whatever else is
central to characterizing the offence itself (Bedau in Cedarblom, J.B., and W.L. Blizek (eds),
Justice and punishment 1877: p.51).
For retributivists:
u the offender’s wrongdoing is deserving of punishment;
u the amount of punishment should be as proportionate as possible to the extent of

the wrongdoing;
u it is the offender’s desert, and not the beneficial consequences of punishment, that
justifies punishment.
Retributivists differ in their details of their explanation of how punishment is supposed

to give the moral wrongdoer what s/he deserves. Some regard the punishment of
wrongdoers as derivative from a fundamental axiom of justice that ‘wrongdoers
deserve to suffer’. Braithwaite and Pettit state:
Retributivism, as part of a deontological theory will give an axiomatic, underived status to

some constraint or set of constraints (the relevant constraints being in relation to giving
offenders deserved punishments). It will assess systems of criminal justice by reference to
whether or not they satisfy those ultimate demands. Since the constraints are axiomatic
the requirement to satisfy them is prime. It does not turn on the assumption that
satisfaction promotes some independent target (Braithwaite and Pettit 1992: p.33).
Some retributivists try to connect punishment with broader issues of distributive

justice, or justice in the distribution of the benefits and burdens of social life. The
offender is viewed as someone who taken an unfair advantage of others in society, and
thus the meting out of punishment is then needed to restore fairness and equality
among its citizens (Ten: p.5).
9.4.2 Punishment and ‘desert’

Immanuel Kant appears to be the definitive retributionist: the criminal must be paid
back in mind because he must not be allowed to profit from his wrongdoing. To profit
would be unjust to his victim, to civil society and indeed to the criminal himself. Kant
is clear:
But what kind and what amount of punishment is it that public justice makes its principle
and measure? None other than the principle of equality (in the position of the needle on
the scale of justice), to incline no more to one side than the other. Accordingly, whatever
undeserved evil you inflict on another within the people, that you inflict on yourself. If you
insult him, you insult yourself; if you steal from him, you steal from yourself; if you strike
him, you strike yourself; if you kill him, you kill yourself. But only the law of retribution
(ius talionis) – it being understood, of course, that this is applied by a court (not by your
private judgment) – can specify definitely the quality and quantity of punishment; all
other principles are fluctuating and unsuited for a sentence of pure and strict justice
because extraneous considerations are mixed into them (Kant, I Metaphysics of morals
6:332).
If the offender commits an offence then he should suffer the penalty, and that penalty
should be proportionate to the amount of his wrongdoing. Garland summarises:
‘Utilitarian argument and reformative purposes have given way to an emphasis upon
desert, denunciation and punishment ... what was originally intended as a liberal
critique of modernist reasoning in favour of classic Enlightenment restraints has been
taken up by a more punitive anti-modernism, which emphasizes the importance of
punishment as a symbol of sovereign power and social authority.’ (Gardland in
Blomberg, T.G., and S. Cohen (eds.), Punishment and social control 1995: p.192).
The retributivist appears to defend the desirability of a punitive response to the

offender: ‘the punitive reaction is the pain the criminal deserves, and that it is highly
desirable to provide for an orderly, collective expression of society’s natural feeling
of revulsion toward and disapproval of criminal acts. It is argued that this expression
vindicates the criminal law and in so doing help to unify society against crime and
criminals.’ (Grupp p.7).
Hart (1968: p.231) put forward a model of the retributive theory of punishment:
u a person may be punished if, and only if, he has voluntarily done something morally
wrong (i.e. committed a crime);
u the punishment must in some way match, or be the equivalent of, the wickedness
of his offence; and
u the justification for punishing men under such conditions is that the return of
suffering for moral evil voluntarily done, is itself just or morally good.
If punishment is the deliberate infliction of pain and legal punishment the infliction of
pain on a duly convicted criminal, the right to punish can rest only on the retributive
principle so understood (Berns in Baumann, F. and K.M. Jensen Crime and punishment:
issues in criminal justice 1989: p.1). Under retributionism:
u the punishment should be made as analogous as possible to the nature of the

crime or to create a proportionate relationship between the offence and the
punishment (Middendorff 1968: p.51).
This implies that:
u the punishment must not be excessive. It must not exceed what is appropriate
to the crime. We must always be able to say of the person punished that he
deserved to be punished as he was punished: this is the reason why one views
the punishment of the innocent as unjust punishment, as is punishment that is
disproportionate with the crime. Furthermore:
u the person punished must deserve the pain inflicted on him.
u To be deserved, punishment must be of an offender who is guilty of an offence

in the morally relevant sense of ‘offence’ (McCloskey in Ezorsky, G. (ed.),
Philosophical perspectives on punishment 1972: p.121). To assert that someone
deserves to be punished is to look to his past wrongdoing as reason for having
him penalised.
u This orientation to the past distinguishes desert from deterrence theory,

which seeks to justify the criminal sanction by its prospective usefulness in
preventing crime (Von Hirsch 1976: p.46).
In brief, for punishment to be just it must be merited by the committing of an offence.

It follows from this that punishment, to be justly administered, must involve:
u care in determining whether the offending person is really a responsible agent i.e.
‘autonomous individuals who are assumed to have the capacity to determine their
own ends as free and rational creatures.’ (Morrison: p.148.)
Thus:
u if he has done nothing wrong for which he deserves to suffer, he ought not be
made to suffer; e.g. he ought not be punished solely to deter others from doing
something. Kant espoused the following view: ‘Judicial punishment can never be
used merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or
for civil society, but instead it must, in all cases be imposed on him only on the
ground that he has committed a crime’ (Kant in Morrison op cit: p.148). Further:
Even if a civil society were to dissolve itself by common agreement of all its members (for
example, if the people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse themselves
around the world), the last murderer remaining in prison must first be executed, so
that everyone will duly receive what his actions are worth and so that the blood-guilt
thereof will not be fixed on the people because they failed to insist on carrying out the
punishment; for if they fail to do so, they may be regarded as accomplices in this public
violation of legal justice. (Kant in Morrison op cit: p.148).
Honderich (pp.12–13) suggests two propositions arising from these passages of Kant:
u Kant’s words, that we punish a man only because he ‘has committed a crime’
require another interpretation if it is to be meaningful. ‘In part, we do support the
man’s punishment because it is his desert for his deeds. [And] in part, the point
is that he acted wrongly or immorally, as distinct from only illegally. He has done
something of a sufficient wrongfulness to be prohibited by the law’ (Honderich:
pp.12–13).
u In the second passage, Kant states that we have an absolute and categorical
obligation to impose a certain penalty. A person must be punished if he has
performed an act for which he deserves a penalty. Since the individual was seen
as a rational, responsible and autonomous agent; retributivists make strong
assumptions of voluntariness and responsibility. The agent’s free and informed
choice to commit an offence means that they deserve to be punished, the deepest
rationality of the offender as agent would allow him to see that he should be
punished in the given circumstances. As commentators such as Lacy recognise,
punishment under these circumstances does thus not violate the autonomy of the
offender as a person, it rather respects him as such’ (Lacey: p.154). As Duff states
‘we accord him the respect which is his due as a responsible moral agent ... He may
therefore claim a right to be ... punished, for his wrong-doing; a right to be treated,
respected and cared for as a moral agent.’ (Duff: p.70).
The notion of desert is central and punishment is justified in terms of the desert of the
offender. Retributivists base their assessments of desert both on the harm done by the
act, and on the mental state of the offender as a further element which determines
his culpability. To be deserving of punishment, the offender must be morally culpable
in that his act was done in the absence of one of the accepted excuses. One can then
formulate retributive theories of punishment as those theories that maintain that
punishment is justified because the offender has voluntarily committed a morally
wrong act (Ten: p.46).
Bedau (in Cedarblom, J.B. and W.L. Blizek (eds.), Justice and punishment 1977: p.51–73),
in his critique of retributionism examines certain features of an ideally just society to
ascertain what would be the rationale for punishment in such a society namely, who
would be punished and for what conduct; and what their punishment ought to be.
He argues that the rationale for imposing a system of punishment in a just society
would be to secure compliance with rules that are just and this he states is not a
retributivist rationale for imposing a system of punishment in a just society would be
to secure compliance, its reasons for punishing a violator is not that he ‘deserves’ it
because of his guilt, but rather that society meant what it said when it threatened the
punishment in the first place and that, he claims, is why this view is not reconcilable
with the retributivist viewpoint.
Honderich (p.23) puts forth an explanation of the assertion that a man ‘deserves a
particular penalty’, when we say this we imply:
u that he behaved culpably and ought therefore to be punished;
u that the penalty imposed will give satisfactions equivalent to the grievance that
was caused by his actions;
u that similar penalties have been and will be, imposed for similar offences;
u that he was responsible for his action and performed it with a knowledge of the
possible consequences that would arise in the penalty system;
u that, unlike non-offenders, he gained satisfactions attendant on the commission of

the offence.
The fifth point concerns the idea of unfair advantage.
The idea of unfair advantage
One particular version of the retributive theory justifies punishment in terms of the
claim that the offender has taken an unfair advantage over law-abiding citizens.
Finnis’ modified natural law theory (Braithwaite and Pettit: p.158) stated that we
currently have a distribution of certain freedoms, a freedom to do certain things under
the law and that these have been distributed in accordance with the rule of law. He
then poses the question: What happens when someone breaks the law by committing
a murder or robbery? He states that what this person has done is to gain for himself a
greater quantity of social goods than what he would ordinarily be entitled to, that he
has assumed certain freedoms that the rest of us simply do not have. In this case, we
need to punish the offender in order to restore the balance.
Herbert Morris displayed similar sentiments. In ‘Persons and punishment’ (Ten: p.52).
Morris envisaged a general justifying aim of punishment, he saw this as being to
restore the balance which the offence disturbed. He declared that there were benefits
and burdens in society: where the benefits consisted of the non-interference by
others, but he stated that this benefit was only possible if there was a burden of self-
restraint. When the criminal violated the rules of the criminal law, they were seen to
have renounced the burden that other law-abiding citizens had accepted. The criminal
was then seen as assuming an unfair advantage over the law-abiding citizens who had
accepted this restraint on them. Punishment was therefore justified as it prevented
the weakening of the disposition to obey the law among the law-abiding citizens.
Retributive punishment is thus perceived as ‘restoring the balance’ by cancelling out

this advantage with a commensurate disadvantage. It thus ensures that lawbreakers
do not gain from their wrong-doing and punishment is justified because, if we failed
to punish lawbreakers, it would lead to an unfairness for the law-abiding citizen
(Cavadino (second edition)).
Retributionism appears to rationally reconstruct something close to our normal sense

of the concept of the punishment fitting the crime. The amount that the offender
is punished in order to bring about the just distribution of freedoms within society
would be proportional to the amount of freedom that he had taken for himself
unjustly.
However, there are theoretical difficulties inherent in such a theory.
First, Ten states that ‘the scope of Morris’s theory should only extend to the punishment
of those who violate the rules which are necessary for the survival of society, for it is only
those rules which can confer equal benefits on all. The scope of this theory does not
therefore cover all cases in which punishment is thought to be justified.’
Similarly, in his text he states that it is dubious to imagine that this theory can justify
our present practices of punishment or anything of the sort. He suggests that this
theory only applies if our society is a just one in which all citizens are genuinely equal,
otherwise there is no equilibrium of equality for punishment to restore. For example,
most detected offenders begin from a point of disadvantage socially, and thus
punishment would only serve to increase that inequality.
Secondly, there is no practical guidance about the fair measure of punishment in

any particular case. Lacey asks what actual punishment would forfeit a set of rights
equivalent to those violated by, say a rapist or murderer. It would be difficult to
quantify the level of punishment in order to ensure that it reflected the amount of
freedom that the offender had assumed for himself.
Thirdly, the view presupposes that there is an independent account of what counts as
an unfair advantage and a just equilibrium (Cavadino (second edition)).
Finally, Braithwaite (Cavadino (second edition)) states that the theory which holds
up the achievement of an equilibrium between benefits and burdens as the point
of the system, by imposing a counterbalancing disadvantage over his non-violated
fellows. Braithwaite suggests that for all this characterisation tells us, the theory fits a
consequentialist mould just as comfortably as deontological one.
9.5 Are compromise theories possible?

The strength of both utilitarian and retributivist rationales of punishment leaves many
people uneasy as to what really justifies punishment.
9.5.1 Hart: valid justification of punishment

Hart (op cit: pp.1–27) offers the reader another way of considering the problem. He
argues that the justification of punishment raises a number of different issues, and
that any account which seeks to provide a single answer – whether it be the pursuit
of a single value or a plurality of values – to a single question is inadequate. We
have instead to look for different answers to different questions. Hart distinguishes
between three such questions that must be answered in order to produce a valid
justification of punishment (see also p.5):
u what justifies the general practice of punishment? I.e. what is it that makes it
necessary and right to have institutions of punishment in the first place? (Hart,
H.L.A., ‘Prolegomenon to the principles of punishment’, in Hart, H.L.A., Punishment
and responsibility, pp.1–27);
u who may be punished? That is, concerning the liability to punishment; and
u how severely may we punish? That is, of the amount of punishment which may be
justifiably imposed in the particular case.
Hart maintains that the general justifying aim of punishment (Braithwaite, J. and
Pettit, P. op cit., p.48) is the utilitarian one of deterrence, protecting society from the
harm caused by the crime, and which therefore leads to beneficial consequences and
not the retributive aim of inflicting pain on offenders who are morally guilty. But the
pursuit of the general justifying aim has to be qualified by principles of ‘distribution’
which restrict the application of punishment to only those who have voluntarily
broken the law (Hart op cit: pp.1–27).
As to the question: who may rightly be punished? Here, a principle of ‘retribution in

distribution’ is espoused, and thus only offenders may be punished for their offences
(Lacey op cit: pp.1–27).
9.5.2 Punishment as a socio-cultural paradigm

In order to appreciate the impact of punishment in society, one needs to consider the
sociological account of punishment. From this perspective, it is argued that methods,
justifications and ramifications of punishment are neither obvious nor rationally
self-evident. To fully understand the various dimensions of punishment, it is therefore
necessary to acknowledge its social foundations and purposes; that is to accept that
punishment is a microcosm of wider social processes (White and Perrone op cit: p.148).
As Garland states: punishment is ‘a social artefact serving a variety of purposes and
premised upon an ensemble of social forces’ (Garland 1990: p.20). Drawing on Marcel
Mausee, Garland described punishment as a ‘total social fact’ (Garland 1990: p.274).
It is an area of social life which spills over into other areas and which takes its social
meaning as much from these associations as from itself, thus accumulating a symbolic
depth of meaning which go beyond its immediate functioning. Therefore, according
to Garland, ‘punishment does not just restrain or discipline society, punishment helps
create it’ (1990: p.276 (original quote from Michel Foucault)).
9.5.3 Is punishment a necessary condition for social order?
Activity 9.3
Read Eamonn Carrabine et al. Criminology: a sociological introduction, Chapter 15
‘Thinking about punishment’.
Emile Durkheim looked to the non-instrumental aspects of punishment – its emotional
aspect, its social origins, its expression of values and cultures (Howe 1994: p.116) and its
effect beyond the relationship of controlled and controlling. Punishment was not for
Durkheim mere vindictiveness. Durkheim saw punishment playing an important role in
the creation and maintenance of the solidarity that was a necessary condition for social
order and the continued existence of society (Cavadino and Dignan op cit: p.68).
Garland states that for Durkheim
the rituals of criminal justice – the courtroom trial, the passing of sentence, the execution
of punishment – are, in effect, the formalised embodiment of the conscience collective.
In doing justice, and in prosecuting criminals, these procedures are also giving formal
expression to the feelings of the community – and by being expressed in this way those
feelings of both strengthened and gratified. (Garland, 1990: 67)
Punishment ‘is a social occasion which simultaneously structures individual sentiment

and gives it cathartic release’ (ibid.: 68).
Without punishment, Durkheim anticipated the demoralisation of the upright people
in the face of defiance of the collective conscience: ‘Criminal acts call forth a collective
hostile response in the shape of punishment, and the punishment serves to restore
and reinforce the outrage of the conscience collective’.
Durkheim saw punishment as not primarily deterrent or reformative, rather it was

produced by collective retributive emotions that then had a useful denunciatory
effect. Its true function was to maintain social cohesion. He felt that if an emotional
response did not come to compensate the loss that this would result in the
breakdown of social solidarity.
For Durkheim, social solidarity was a necessary precondition for collective social
existence, punishment being regarded as important because it was functionally linked
to the maintenance and preservation of social solidarity (White and Perrone op cit:
p.149).
Braithwaite calls this rationale for punishment one of ‘moral education’. He quotes
Durkheim (Braithwaite and Pettit op cit: p.126.
Since punishment is reproaching, the best punishment is that which puts the blame –
which is the essence of punishment – in the most expressive ... way possible ... It is not
a matter of making him suffer ... rather it is a matter of reaffirming the obligation at the
moment when it is violated, in order to strengthen the sense of duty, both for the guilty
party and for those witnessing the offence – those whom the offence tends to demoralize.
(Durkheim, Emile, Moral education: a study in theory and application of the sociology of
education, (trans. E. Wilson and H. Schnurer) 1961, pp.181–2.)
Durkheim thus saw the role of punishment as re-affirming and perpetuating society’s
core values and in this sense punishment had an educative effect. Punishment was
depicted as a group phenomenon of great intensity. It was supposedly propelled by
irrational, emotive forces, which swept society’s members into a passion or moral
outrage (Garland 1990: p.26.). Punishment would then have the function of limiting
the ‘demoralizing effects’ of deviance and disobedience. Punishment did not give
moral discipline its authority; rather it prevented discipline from losing its authority.
Punishment, here, had the role of preventing the collapse of moral authority. It
ensured that, once established, the moral order would not be destroyed by individual
violations that robbed others of their confidence in authority (Garland 1990: p.43).
In this view, punishment is a straightforward embodiment of society’s moral order and

provides an instance of how that order represents and sustains itself (Garland 1990:
p.26.). For Durkheim, crime is in one sense a creation of punishment rather than an
instigator of punishment. Punishment has a broader role than simply responding to
specific types of crime. Punishment is not just a negative response to crime, rather,
punishment actually constituted crime in the sense that it defined what was criminal
and had positive social effects such as reinforcing social solidarity (Howe op cit: p.8).
9.5.4 Punishment as an element of culture

Punishment has deep cultural significance. In Punishment and modern society (Garland
1990: p.3), Garland sets out a sociological account of punishment and its role in
modern society. He emphasises the significance of punishment as an element of
cultural history: and he claimed that one cannot understand punishment and its
evolution without understanding changing sensibilities. Further, that one cannot
understand a culture without taking account of the role of punishment in its social
order and formation (Finnance, M. Punishment in Australian society, Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1997, p.5.). Garland advocates a move beyond the social control
framework. He felt that what was required was ‘a wider, more flexible and more
multi-dimensional framework’ which allowed for the impact of cultural sensibilities
on the punishment processes (Howe, A. op cit., p.116). Punishment is viewed not simply
as an exercise of power, it expressed social sentiments, notably passion. Indeed, the
‘essence of punishment’ was for Garland, ‘an irrational, unthinking emotion’. Thus
punishment needed to be conceptualised not only in terms of the power to punish,
but also as an ‘urge to punish’ – as an emotional reaction which flared up at the
violation of cherished social sentiments (Howe, A. op cit., p.116).
Garland attempted to describe punishment as a cultural artefact, which embodied and

expressed society’s cultural forms (Garland 1990: p.193). A sociology of punishment
requires an analytical account of the cultural forces and values which shaped and
influenced the idea and the organisation of punishment. In particular, an account
of the patterns that were imposed upon punishment, which involved complex,
moral, religious and emotional forces which historians had identified as part of the
motivational dynamic of penal reform. At the same time, these cultural forces must
be considered against the background of social relations and historical change which
had made it possible for people to reason in terms of this sociological setting; and
in methodologies that would enable them to promote policies in accordance with
their own sensitivities. Morals and sensibilities needed to be located within the grid of
social interests and positions in a way that reflected the complex realities of cultural
life. Thus Garland considered punishment as a complex cultural artefact, encoding the
signs and symbols of the wider culture in its own practices (Garland 1990: p.198).
In this sense, Garland sought to demonstrate how society’s cultural patterns had come
to be imprinted upon its penal institutions in a way that made punishment a practical
embodiment of some of the symbolic themes. He stated that any phenomenological
account of punishment:
Should never lose sight of the fact that punishment is also, and simultaneously, a network
of material social practices in which symbolic forms are sanctioned by brute force as well
as by chains of reference and cultural agreement. Penal institutions form a functioning
part of a structure of social action and a system of power, as well as being a signifying
element within a symbolic realm, and in reality, neither aspect ever exists without the
other. Penal practices are shaped by the symbolic grammar of cultural forms as well as
by the more instrumental dynamics of social action, so that in analysing punishment, we
should look for patterns of cultural expression as well as for logics of material interest or
social control. (Garland 1990: p.199)
Penal culture, which Garland meant as being ‘the loose amalgam of penological
theory, experience, institutional and professional wisdom,’ (Garland 1990: p.198)
was an evolving concept – ‘that cultural patterns changed over time and that these
cultural developments tended to exert a direct influence over patterns of punishment’
(Garland 1990: p.201). Penal agents (the professionals involved in the penal process)
and penal ideology were seen to work with broader cultural context, reflecting the
climate of public opinion and the mores of governmental direction. As a consequence,
Garland suggested that the specific culture of punishment in any society would have
its roots in the broader context of prevailing social attitudes and traditions (Garland
1990: p.210).
Culture is a determinant of punishment. The converse of this statement is also true:

that punishment and penal institutions help shape the overarching culture and
contribute to the generation and regeneration of its terms. It is a two way process – an
interactive relationship (Garland 1990: p.249).
In this sense, punishment, like any social institution is modelled by broad cultural
patterns that have their origins elsewhere. However, it also generates its own local
meanings, values and sensibilities, which then contribute to the bricolage of the
dominant culture (Garland 1990: p.193) As Garland states:
Instead of thinking of punishment as a passive ‘expression’ or ‘reflection’ of cultural

patterns established elsewhere, we must strive to think of it as an active generator
of cultural relations and sensibilities. The idea is to indicate just how penal practices
contribute to the making of the larger culture, and to suggest the nature and significance
of that contribution. (Garland 1990: p.250).
Punishment is therefore one of the many institutions that help support the social
world by producing shared categories and authoritative classifications through which
individuals understand each other and themselves. For Garland, this is achieved by
way of an understanding of penal culture. In turn, contemporary society and culture
have a resounding influence on penal culture.
Contemporary penality (what Garland referred to as ‘penal modernism’) (Garland

1990: p.250) claims to be based upon rationalised practices, and upon a utilitarian and
rationalist orientation (Garland in Blomberg and Cohen (Eds.), op cit: p.188). Further,
utilitarians may argue thus that retributive principles are to be considered as an
irrational disutility – a pre-modern tradition based upon emotion and instinct (ibid.:
p.187) and thus should be afforded no place in considerations of punishment.
In a sociological account of punishment, we may observe that the justifications

and consequences of punishment are not self-evident. Therefore, it is necessary to
acknowledge its social foundations and purposes. It is through a study of punishment
and penal culture that one may gain an understanding of the intrinsic nature
of the concept. It has been observed that the concept of punishment does not
exist in philosophical isolation, rather it is reflective of the dominant culture and
contemporary sensibilities. The idea of punishment is thus to be considered as a
microcosm of wider social processes.
9.6 Do we live in a penal society?
9.6.1 The strengthening of the politics of formal social control and the
analysis of David Garland
Since the late 1970s there has been a dramatic increase in the use of imprisonment in
both the UK and the USA.
In the face of the decline of informal social control, reinforcement of formal social
control – through the police and punishment – becomes more important and
politically defensible.
One favourite examination question has been whether prison works and how to
explain the recourse to imprisonment in the face of questions as to its legitimacy of its
effectiveness.
Two key texts of the early 1990’s highlighting this trend were Nils Christie’s Crime
control as industry: towards gulags western style (Sage, second edition, 1994) which
was a devastating analysis of the growth of a crime control industry, and Thomas
Mathiesen’s Prison on trial (Sage, 1990). Mathiesen took the accepted justifications
of punishment and applied them to the operation of the prison. He argued that
the prison was unable to operate in a way the proved itself legitimate by all of the
supposed rationalisations.
What of contemporary conditions? Prisons, policing and crime control are daily news
items. In January 2016 the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, who stepped
down in April 2016, said the former justice secretary, Chris Grayling, ‘disagreed
strongly’ with independent report findings and tried to have them changed. Nick
Hardwick said that Grayling did not want him to publish documents suggesting
changes introduced by his department had contributed to poor outcomes in prisons.
His general concern was that I had said the lack of staff, overcrowding and some of the
policy changes that he had introduced had contributed to poor outcomes in prisons. I
was very clear about that, and he disagreed very strongly with that conclusion.
Hardwick said that prisons were getting worse and that he could not stay in post
as it meant getting used to the unacceptable. (The Guardian, Chris Grayling tried to
interfere with prison report, says Chief Inspector, Friday 29 January 2016.)
In the 1990s (under the last Labour government), for mainstream criminologists – such
as David Faulkner (who was also for some time chair of the Howard League for Penal
Reform) – it became obvious that a ‘political revival of imprisonment’ was taking place
in the USA and the UK. In the UK, instead of considering imprisonment a measure of
last resort, both Labour and the Conservatives presented prison as an instrument of
individual reform and public protection, with an enthusiasm not seen since the middle
of the 19th century.
In Faulkner’s opinion, the movement appeared to come from diverse directions.

One was the development of training and rehabilitative courses within prisons – for
offending behaviour, drug abuse, for sex offenders – which made ambitious claims for
their success in terms of the prisoner’s return to ‘normal life’ and the prevention of re-
offending. But proposals quickly changed: the Labour government announced another
2,660 prison places while also supporting a ‘custody to work’ programme, aiming to
double the proportion of prisoners going directly into jobs on release.
Under this approach, the aim was to increase by 50 per cent the number of national
qualifications which prisoners achieve in prison. They had been rising and the
government’s strategy for women offenders was also full of similarly good intentions,
while the Conservatives (before being in power) went further, proposing financially
self-supporting industrial prisons, where prisoners earn wages from which they will
pay for their keep and support their families. The thesis here is that prisons ‘work’ not
only in preventing offenders from committing further offences against the public, but
also in reforming their characters.
The other direction that deliberately increased the use of imprisonment – not only
for dangerous or persistent offenders – was for failure to comply with orders or
conditions.
It becomes more acceptable to send more people to prison if it is thought they will
benefit from their experience. This also applies upward pressure on the length of
sentences: there is no point in sending people to prison unless they stay long enough
to get that benefit.
It is difficult to achieve anything lasting, certainly anything positive, in prison.

Whatever the programme, nothing is done to change the offender’s family and
social environment, over which the prison has no control. The continually increasing
prison population means that any training and rehabilitation programmes cannot be
sustained.
In the 1990s Faulkner suggested three conditions for legitimacy of prison programmes:
u Programmes must be monitored and evaluated. Programmes should be subject

to checking and part of a wider assessment of the prison experience and its social
effects.
u The prison population must be stabilised at a level that matches the capacity of
the system to fulfil the promises being made. There should be no new laws on
sentencing until the government and judiciary come to an understanding on
its purpose and principles; on the intended size, composition and geographical
distribution of the prison population; and on the sentencing practices and
procedures for release by which that optimum size of the prison population
is to be achieved. That is to say, assumptions about sentencing and the prison
population must be turned into policies. By contrast, there is no longer any other
area of the public sector where it is acceptable just to ‘predict and provide’.
u There must be reform of the prison service itself – of its relationship with other
services and with the communities which it serves and from which it will need
commitment and support; of the composition and skills of its staff; and of its values
and culture.
Faulkner proposed then that there was need for human rights standards to be
established and maintained in prison. This would be of benefit both to the inmates
and aid the professional integrity of the process. Racism, for example, where it
exists, shows a more general lack of professional integrity. The various reviews and
reorganisations that the prison institution had experienced over the past 40 years had
been in response to an immediate political demand or operational crisis; none have
delivered a lasting solution, and none have examined the system from first principles,
although Lord Woolf’s report in 1991 came closest to doing so.
So Faulkner, and he certainly was not a lone voice, stated that the time had come
to re- examine the foundations of the prison system’s authority and legitimacy and
proposed that the Human Rights Act provided a special opportunity and a point of
reference: it may in time provide an imperative.
For Faulkner and others, the UK needed a public debate in which everyone can
take part – through articles in journals, attending conferences and seminars,
by contributions to official rethinking. The state of policing and recourse to
imprisonment poses a challenge to NGOs – for example, the Howard League, the Prison
Reform Trust, the crime reduction charity NACRO, Justice and the International Centre
for Prison Studies – and the media, to help shape the process of penal reform.
9.6.2 Garland and the analysis of the culture of control

David Garland, has produced a masterful overview of criminology and crime control
in The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary society (OUP, 2001) [ISBN
0-19-829937-0].
Garland’s book was premised on a supposition of surprise. Specifically, that a

criminological commentator writing in the 1960s and 1970s could never have
predicted the rise of what he calls ‘the culture of control’:
…recent developments in crime control and criminal justice are puzzling because they
appear to involve a sudden and startling reversal of the settled historical pattern. They
display a sharp discontinuity that demands to be explained. The modernising processes
that, until recently, seemed so well established in this realm – above all the long term
tendencies towards ‘rationalisation’ and ‘civilisation’ – now look as if they have been
thrown into reverse. The re-appearance in official policy of punitive sentiments and
expressive gestures that appear oddly archaic and downright anti-modern tend to
confound the standard social theories of punishment and its historical development. Not
even the most inventive reading of Foucault, Marx, Durkheim, and Elias on punishment
could have predicted these recent developments – and certainly no such predictions ever
appeared. (p.3)
One may find Garland’s supposition of a complete reversal overstated but there is no
denying the development of a new complex of fashionable theories depicting the self
as a rational calculator and control practices that maximise surveillance and depict the
offender as someone other. Garland’s narrative was sophisticated and wide-ranging.
He asserted that up until the late 1970s, crime control had an established institutional
structure and established intellectual framework. Its characteristic practices, and
the organisations and assumptions that supported them had emerged from a long
process of development. First the modern structures of criminal justice had been
assembled in their classic liberal form and then increasingly orientated towards a
more correctional programme of action. All this changed dramatically in the 1980s and
1990s. Now Garland asked, why is it that for both the UK and the USA, countries that
view themselves as liberal, non-oppressive states committed to individual liberty and
market freedom, finding new and effective ways of controlling their citizens become
such a high priority for their governments?
Garland focused on the UK and the USA to point out what he took to be important
similarities in the recent experience of these two countries. He suggested that these
similarities stem not merely from political imitation and policy transfer but from a
process of social and cultural change that has altered social relations in both societies.
He called these developments ‘late modernity’, which has transformed the experience
of crime, insecurity, and social order by bringing in a new and powerful cluster of
risks, insecurities, and control problems. Similar processes have been filtered through
the different social, institutional, and cultural characteristics of the two nations. The
particular combination of racial division, economic inequality and lethal violence
which marks the contemporary USA has given it a penal response a scale and intensity
that often seems wholly exceptional. The USA is a western, liberal democracy that
routinely executes offenders and incarcerates its citizens at a rate that is 6 to 10 times
higher than comparable nations. Garland argued that while the scale is different in
the UK, there are strong similarities with the USA in the patterns of penal responses
and in the focal points of public concerns, political debates and policy developments.
Moreover, that there are important similarities in the problems to which actors in both
nations appear to be responding. Specifically, the same kinds of risks and insecurities,
the same perceived problems of effective social control, the same critiques of
traditional criminal justice, and the same recurring anxieties about social change and
social order.
In this climate, the most important currents of change are:
u the decline of the rehabilitative ideal;
u the re-emergence of punitive sanctions and expressive justice;
u changes in the emotional tone of crime policy;
u the return of the victim;
u above all, the public must be protected;
u politicisation of crime control and a new populism;
u the reinvention of the prison;
u the transformation of criminological thought;
u the expanding infrastructure of crime prevention and community safety;
u civil society and the commercialisation of crime control;
u new management styles and working practices;
u a perpetual sense of crisis.
In short the orthodoxies that prevailed for most of the last century (the 20th), what he
called ‘penal welfarism’; have been replaced by a new field. For many practitioners and
theorists, there has been an ‘alarming sense of the unravelling of a conceptual fabric
that, for most of the best part of a century, had bound together the institutions of
criminal justice and given them meaning’. By contrast, ‘today, for better or for worse,
we lack any such agreement, any settled culture, or any clear sense of the big picture…
ideological lines are far from clear and … the old assumptions are an unreliable guide’.
(p.4)
For most of the 20th century, the UK and US governments (largely, albeit with
opposing elements) viewed the direction in which social change was going as an
achievement rather than as a problem. Continuing prosperity and full employment
were to be delivered through a regulated economy while at the same time a social
agenda extended welfare and civil rights and enhanced personal freedoms. But
this dichotomy of economic control and social liberation was transformed as a
new consumer capitalism revolutionised individual tastes and fitted with a new
commercial service culture that made welfare agencies appear rigidly bureaucratic
and unresponsive to client needs and preferences. A new complex of theories, a
criminology of everyday life and contradictory theories of the criminology of the self
(which depict offenders as normal, rational consumers, just like us) and criminology
of the other (which offers images of a threatening outcast, the fearsome stranger, the
excluded and the bitter).
The first type of criminology routinises crime, allays disproportionate fears and
promotes preventative action. The second demonises the criminal, acts out popular
fears and resentments and provides support for massive state punishment. They
exclude a middle ground that was previously the terrain of welfarist criminology (that
depicted the offender as disadvantaged or poorly socialised and made it the state’s
responsibility, in social and penal policy, to take positive steps of a remedial kind). A
new complex is accompanied by process of adaptation, denial and acting out.
What are the costs of the new complex? Garland lists the following: a hardening of
social and racial divisions; the reinforcement of criminogenic processes; the alienation
of large social groups; the discrediting of legal authority; a reduction of civic tolerance;
a tendency towards authoritarianism. Garland suggests that mass imprisonment and
private fortification may be feasible solutions to the problem of social order but they
are deeply unattractive – at odds with the ideals of liberal democracy.
Ultimately Garland’s text is a criticism of the governing assumptions deeply built into
modernity that the sovereign state can successfully ‘govern by means of sovereign
commands issued to obedient subjects’. Yet the state continually tries to convince us
that it can. The result is a culture of crime control that intensifies as it fails. What else
could it do? Garland suggests: ‘In the complex, differentiated world of late modernity,
effective legitimate government must devolve power and share the work of social
control with local organisations and communities. It can no longer rely upon “state
knowledge”, on unresponsive bureaucratic agencies, and upon universal solutions,
imposed from above’ (p.205).
Activity 9.4
Read Burke, Chapter 23 ‘Living in penal society’.
Burke starts from the same premise as this chapter, namely that the social progress
model was assumed and then undercut. In what ways does he say it was criticised?
u Outline what he means by the carceral surveillance model.
u What is his favoured left realist hybrid model?
u What are his policy implications?
u You may live in the UK, Europe or the USA, if so do you recognise this as the
society you live in? If not, why?
u If you live elsewhere, to what extent, if any, does this description fit your society?
Activity 9.5
Read Eamonn Carrabine et al. Criminology: a sociological introduction, Chapter 18
‘Prison and imprisonment’.
u What were the origins of imprisonment and how does today’s use differ?
u Why does prison have such a major symbolic role?
u Does prison work? What does it mean to ask that question?

1. Why punish?
‘We do not have a settled philosophy of punishment: instead we have

inconsistent and contradictory accounts.’
Discuss.
2. ‘While the philosophy of punishment may appear rational when compared to

what is done in its name, the result is irrational.’
Discuss.
References
¢ Andenaes, J. Punishment and deterrence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1974).
¢ Baumann, Fred E. and Kenneth M. Jensen, (eds) Crime and punishment: issues in
criminal justice (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989).
¢ Bauman, Z. The individualised society (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
¢ Beccaria, C. [1764] On crimes and punishments, Henry Paolucci, (trans.),

(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963).
¢ Blomberg, Thomas G. and Stanley Cohen (eds) Punishment and social control
(New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1971).
¢ Braithwaite, J. and P. Pettit Not just deserts: a republican theory of criminal justice
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
¢ Cavadino, Michael and James Dignan The penal system: an introduction (London:
Sage Publications, 1997) second edition.
¢ Cedarblom, J.B. and William L. Blizek (eds), Justice and punishment,

(Massachusetts: Bellinger Publishing Company, 1977).
¢ Duff, R.A. Trials and punishments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
¢ Exorsky, Gertrude (ed.) Philosophical perspectives on punishment (New York: State

University of New York Press, 1972).
¢ Farrer, James. A. (ed.) Crime and punishments (London: Chatto & Windus
Publishers).
¢ Findlay, Mark and R. Hogg Understanding crime and criminal justice (Sydney: Law
Book Company, 1988).
¢ Finnane, Mark Punishment in Australian society (Melbourne: Oxford University

Press, 1997).
¢ Garland, David Punishment and welfare: a history of penal strategies (Aldershot:

Gower Publishing Company, 1985).
¢ Garland, David Punishment and modern society: a study theory (New York: Oxford
¢ Grupp Stanley E. Theories of punishment (London: Indiana University Press, 1971).
¢ Hart, H.L.A. Punishment and responsibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
¢ Honderich, Ted Punishment: the supposed justifications (London: Hutchinson &

Company Limited, 1969).
¢ Howe, Adrian Punishment and critique: towards a feminist analysis of penality

¢ Lacey, Nicola State punishment: political principles and community values (London:
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¢ McMahon, M. The persistent prison? Rethinking decarceration and penal reform

(University of Toronto Press, 1992).
¢ Michael, Jerome and Mortimer J. Adler Crime, law and social science (New Jersey:
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¢ Middendorf, Wolf The effectiveness of punishment (New Jersey: Fred. B. Rothman

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Cavendish Publishing Limited, 1997).
¢ Newburn, Tim Crime and criminal justice policy (London: Longman, 1995).
¢ Pakenham, Frank The idea of punishment (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1961).
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(trans.) (Pattersin Smith Publishing Corporation, 1968).
¢ Stenson, Kevin and David Cowell (eds) The politics of crime control, (London: Sage
Publications, 1993).
¢ Sykes, Gresham M. Crime and society (New York: Random House).
¢ Ten, C.L. Crime, guilt, and punishment: a philosophical introduction (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1987).
¢ Vold, George B. and Thomas. J. Bernard Theoretical criminology (New York: Oxford
¢ Walker, Nigel (1969) Sentencing in a rational society, London: The Penguin Press.
¢ White, Rob and S. Perrone Crime and social control: an introduction (Melbourne:
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¢ Zimring, Franklin E. and Gordon Hawkins The scale of imprisonment, (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Notes
10 Conclusion: criminology under globalisation
Contents
10.1 In place of a conclusion: facing globalism and post-modernism . . . . . 161
10.2 The challenges of globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Learning outcomes
By the end of this introduction you should be able to:
u Reflect back on the course;
u Reflect on the ambiguities of contemporary existence (including having an
opinion on the profundity or otherwise of this question); and
u Have a basic understanding of how globalism and post-modernism impact on
criminology.
Essential reading
¢ Burke, Chapter 19 ‘Crime and the postmodern condition’; Chapter 21 ‘Crime,
globalisation and the risk society’ and Chapter 22 ‘Radical moral communitarian
criminology’.
¢ Extracted and put on the VLE.
¢ Aas, Katja Franko Globalization and crime (Sage: London, 2007) Chapter 2 ‘Global
mobility and human traffic’.
¢ Morrison, Wayne Criminology, civilisation and the new world order (Routledge,
2006) Chapter 3 ‘Criminal statistics, sovereignty and the control of death:
representations from Quetelet to Auschwitz’.
10.1 In place of a conclusion: facing globalism and post-

modernism
‘The Aleph?’ I repeated.
Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing
clear, without any confusion or blending….
… Then I saw the Aleph. … And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of
symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate
into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?
Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be
infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful;
not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency.
What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be
successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I’ll try to recollect what I can.
… I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was
revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world
it bounded. (The Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges, 10–13)
The Aleph, the possible/impossibility of seeing all. This guide began with a quote from
the Holocaust. It made an appeal to transcend mundane concerns. Over different
chapters, it asked what is crime? And what is the discipline of criminology? In
Chapter 2 we encountered a short story by the South American writer Julio Cortazar.
Cortazar reflects the differing political and economic experiences of Argentina and
demonstrates the strangeness of ‘reality’. Often termed a magical realist, like Jorge Luis
Borges, Cortazar confronts our accepted view of the normal by imposing the fantastic
within it but this not to escape ‘reality’: ‘When we write about the fantastic we are
trying to get away from time to write about everlasting things’ (Borges).
What is the fantastic and what is the normal?
Criminology once assumed that the normal was good and the deviant was bad but any
hope that it could uncover a secure, civilised world where good people did the normal
things and bad people did the deviant things has been lost.
This guide has tried to show both the limitations and the necessity for criminology
but not criminology as a narrow discipline rather as an imagination: a criminological
imagination.
As such any conclusion is only a temporary pause in thinking.
The three Burke chapters in the Essential reading they pull in different directions,
point to different difficulties.
If criminology were meant to be a science that gave clear answers then it has become
deconstructed and scattered. The boundaries, not to mention the foundational
certainties, of the discipline are being undercut (new books appear with new topics,
such as Criminology and war: transgressing the borders (Walklate and McGary, 2015);
Invisible crimes and social harms (Davies, Francis and Wyatt (eds) 2014), nothing, it
seems, is now beyond the gaze of a new criminological gaze.
It is common to describe the problems and challenges of this as a mixture of post-

modernism and globalism.
Until recently, criminological texts were developed with local concerns: even the
attempt by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) to develop A general theory of crime
described crimes as mundane acts committed by people with low rates of self-control.
But if we consider genocide – and the many millions of people killed by the state either
directly or by deliberate neglect (as in Mao’s Great Leap Forward) we face people like
Eichmann who has great personal drive and self-control.
Post-modernism is defined by people such as Leytord as the collapse of belief in the

great meta-narratives of social progress, a post-Auschwitz coming to grip with history.
Globalisation in one sense refers to our confronting the world with knowledge
of history – the history of colonialism, imperialism and the Holocaust. If we think
of Nazism as an expression of bureaucratic objectivity, we see it as part of the
secularisation of the rational universe. If we understand the Holocaust within
the normal categories of social scientific explanation, we also understand it as an
expression of legality and the ethos of criminology. It is not beyond time and place,
it is not a place outside of law, it is not a place undetermined, but over determined
by law (see David Fraser, Law after Auschwitz, 2005) and the problem-solving ethos
of the administrative criminological imagination of the time. For Rubinstein (After
Auschwitz, 1966), the Holocaust shows us that we live in a cold, unfeeling cosmos.
What modern science has shown us is that nature functioned without any sensitivity
to human concerns, but that realisation (which of course Hobbes had) was now linked
to the understanding that history revealed distinctly anti-human capacities in which
extermination was a very real strategy for human waste disposal. The Nazis destroyed
the rubric: they showed that there was no limit to the governmental use of violence
and organisation being employed in a way to tackle any political, social, or economic
problem. They should, in that criminology was predicated on the idea of solving the
problem of crime, have destroyed traditional criminology. Perhaps it is the dialectical
realisation of that which ensured the Holocaust did not appear within mainstream
criminological texts.
Another theme of globalisation is an expanding economic process in which the free

market plays an important role, either seen as a perverse fiscal discipline or as a
developing liberating power. The difference between the former and the latter is not
simply reducible to a specific political stance but reflects views on the consequences
and gauges winners and losers (on this see Stiglitz, J.E., 2002). Certainly capitalist
expansion has enveloped every country (even those who are supposedly communist).
In this sense, globalisation is mostly described by means of the three major official
advocates of liberal democracy: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and is usually described as a neo-liberal
world order.
Post-modernism refers to the consequences of the modernist (Enlightenment)

drive to uncover the world and subject it to objective reason: modern transport and
communication technologies, new forms of data gathering and expansion of historical
archives simply makes the world visible and knowable yet contradictory and diverse.
The contemporary world, the globalised world, is a combination of the discovering
of the world, together with the expansion of a neoliberal ideology. What matters, is
the deep interwovenness of the expansion of the neoliberal economic world with the
encompassing of the world. In this sense the world becomes known but through a
particular set of ideologies (Western) and for some it is a new imperialism (e.g. Harvey,
2005). In other words, the globe is undeniable neoliberal, modernist, and suffused
with Western notions of self-worth and consumerism. At the same time, new risks
arise (Beck, 2000) along with violent struggles with reactionary forces (anti-secular
and totalitarian Islamic extremism being one) and the costs of its economic model
become more apparent (climate change being one) so that globalism has severe
human consequences (Baumann, 1998).
Globalisation – and indeed post-modernism – are complex concepts/phenomena that

operate both as:
1. an empirical description, and
2. a normative principle for living in the world.
Regarding (1): among the empirical referents we are told that state sovereignty,
the legitimate definer of crime in a territory, is being undercut. At its strongest, the
argument is that the state can no longer produce sovereignty – if so, this impacts
on all aspects of the state’s performance. In the field of crime control, this results in
ambivalent tactics. State sovereignty asserts itself even when it lacks control over the
economy by a wave of popularism in the arena of security-seeking public support of
its power displays in war or crime sometimes by declaring ‘war on drugs’ or ‘war on
terror’. Different states play the sovereignty games differently and what is crime in one
area may not be crime in another, additionally the efforts of one state to fight crime
or drugs may actively cause crime in another. In this negative argument, the decline of
the state as the body that laid out the conditions of territorial security means that the
state is increasingly part of the ‘crime problem’ and not the solution; the need then is
to go beyond the state in the process of locating the foundations for defining what is
crime and what are proper and legitimate responses to it.
Regarding (2): globalisation as a normative principle, this implies that we need to view
humanity and our common environment as a form of praxis, as a life, as our global
living together. As such, globalisation demands we reconceive the contours and the
limits of the way in which we think, understand, act upon and relate to the world. It
is not just an account of reality but a demand that this reality requires a new – more
globally just – mode of existence.
There are a range of dualities or counter-positions: there is a globalisation of hope

(displayed, for example in Arvanitakis, J., 2007) and there is a globalisation of crisis;
what is common to both is that we live in a time where the normative structures of
the ‘nation state’ and ‘international society’ are being refashioned, will normative
structures of the global be the result? Some hold out the promise (or dream) of a
peaceful and just global order… talk of an emerging global code of legality focused
around human rights and their defence (and institutions such as the International
Criminal Court) and some are sceptical of the results, such as Douzinas, C. (2007); others
see the destruction of the nation state, failed states, increasing chaos and increasing
difficulties in grasping reality (and so the US Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s
comment that ‘until our authorities can tell us what the hell is going on, we should ban
Muslims from entering the US’ is a response and feature of the current situation).
10.2 The challenges of globalisation

What are some of the current criminological features?
Activity 10.1
Read: Katja Franko Aas Globalization and crime (Sage: London, 2007) Chapter 2
‘Global mobility and human traffic’.
Make you own notes on the features she identifies as criminogenic in the greater
global mobility that globalism brings/denotes.
Her chapter relates among other things to:
1. Border crossing: here we see issues of transnational crime and the rise of issues of
crime control and criminal justice responses that go beyond the nation state. The
types of crimes involve:
u ‘trafficking’ and illegal migration: the focus is on drugs, human trafficking (sex
workers, illegal immigrants);
u ‘new forms of organised crime’ – pretty well the same types of crime as
trafficking but focused more on the organisations and what is ‘new’ about
them;
u international fraud, money laundering (overlap with organised crime) and

failures of regulatory systems in dealing with these;
u terrorism – to what extent is this a criminological issue? Has the rhetoric of the
war on terror been a huge mistake? The war on terror and global terrorism has
become a kind of catch-all which takes in attacks from ISIS to issues of money
laundering;
u security and risk – includes terrorism, migration – re-theorisation security

sometimes posed as a correlate of mobility;
u the rise of internet – allows for new forms of communication which impacts on
all of the above, but the internet furthers a privileged set of crimes (trafficking,
etc.) – as used by organisations and/or as way of luring victims.
This bundle has seemingly emerged in an ad hoc fashion – existing crimes

deemed to have taken on a new cross-border dimension with globalisation – or
even been ‘revived’ (compare the rhetoric of ‘trafficking’ with slavery). This also
links into the study of criminal organisations. Our concern in the syllabus has not
been institutional – we do not focus on trans-border/international/transnational
policing/INTERPOL, etc. But gender oriented work has also focused on this territory,
especially re sex ‘slavery’ but also re drug mules, i.e. here the emphasis is more
victim oriented (yes, they are illegal immigrants often but also victims).
Although these new cross-border developments are often just presented as

empirically given effects of globalisation, there is some commentary/theorisation:
u Decline of the nation state – national state boundaries as increasingly

irrelevant and/or porous – weakness of the state as incapable of controlling
cross-boundary phenomena – all sometimes posed in grander terms as the
‘end of Westphalia era’, i.e. international law as inter-state agreements, etc. In
this mode, mention is also made of the new importance of sub-state levels, e.g.
regions, see what Burke calls radical moral communitarian criminology.
u Globalisation identified with transnational flows of people, things and ideas.

A criminological imagination confronting globalisation must necessarily be
post-colonial.
2. Harms that are ‘global by definition’ or transnational harms:
u Environmental – toxic waste, pollution and so forth. These are linked to

corporate crime and state collusion (see crimes of the state). Why exactly is
this global in nature? For the first time, we see that harm against the earth may
render human life impossible. Remedies have to be undertaken globally.
u Also transnational environmental activism (which leads on to eco- and

animal rights-terrorism as well as new forms of criminology)
u Crime and the internet: because the internet knows no jurisdictional

boundaries – is everywhere – key examples in this mode are identity theft,
computer hacking and ‘modern day pirates’.
u War crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity– crime that is internationally

recognised.
Activity 10.2
Read: Morrison, Wayne, Criminology, civilisation and the new world order (Routledge,
2006) Chapter 3 ‘Criminal statistics, sovereignty and the control of death:
representations from Quetelet to Auschwitz’.
Questions:
1. Why does Morrison relate the measuring of crime to ‘the power of the nation
state?
2. In what ways did the Nazis misuse statistics?
3. If we are concerned to raise the level of the ‘average individual’ does this mean
we should eliminate the inferior?
4. Did criminology contribute to the Holocaust?
5. What is ‘genocide’? Why was it necessary to come up with this definition for a
‘crime’?
6. Why is there little agreement on actual events in the world as to whether they
are ‘genocides’ or not?
7. If the statistics mentioned by scholars looking at genocide in the 20th century

are correct, does that mean that the state was the biggest killer of humans, if so,
why has criminology traditionally not studied this?
Criminology has been very weak on theorising this – rather there has been a call for
expansionist understandings of harm not limited to classic legal definitions of crime or
indeed crime at all.
10.2.1 Crimes of the state and state agents

These include:
u state collusion with corporate crime and environmental crime;
u state power and corruption by state elites;
u crimes of international peacekeepers/higher power holders – e.g. torture at Abu

Ghraib
u domestic police: e.g. Tahrir Square as protest re Egyptian police.
All of this fits with the theme of the breakdown of the nation state and Westphalian
order – we face a loss of faith in those officers and people who previously were
assumed to be responsible. And, of course, a loss of faith in traditional criminology.
Was traditional criminology just an agent of the state? Perhaps you can go back to an
earlier question, who are you and why are you doing this subject? Think about this
amidst the appeal of the spread of the market with associated liberal cosmopolitanism
and mass consumerism, in the face of prospects of a world (dis) order, institutional
instability, and political violence… the future is, as always, what we individually and
collectively make it.
References
¢ Arvanitakis, J. The cultural commons of hope. The attempt to commodify the final
frontier of the human experience (Saarbruücken: VDM Verlag, 2007).
¢ Bauman, Z., Globalization. The human consequences (New York: Columbia

¢ Beck, U. What is globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
¢ Douzinas, C. Human rights and empire. The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism

(Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007).
¢ Harvey, D. The new imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
¢ Held, D. and A. McGrew Globalization/anti-globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press,

2007).
¢ Hertz, N. The silent takeover. Global capitalism and the death of democracy
(London: Arrow Books, 2002).
¢ Mertes, T. (ed.) A movement of movements. Is another world really possible?

(London: Verso, 2004).
¢ Pleyers, G. Alter-globalization. Becoming actors in the global age (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2010).
¢ Rosenberg, J. (2005) ‘Globalization theory: a post mortem’ in International

Politics, 42, 2–74.
¢ Stiglitz, J.E. Globalization and its discontents (London: Penguin Books, 2002).
Notes
Criminology page 167
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Criminology

© University of London 2016

Published by: University of London

2 Crime, globalisation and the/your criminological imagination . . . . . 11

3 Competing traditions? Legacies of classical and positive criminology or the

4 Sources of criminological data: official criminal statistics and their

5 Psychology and crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

6 Sociological perspectives – structural and cultural foundations . . . . . 77

7 Contemporary cultural criminology and existentialism . . . . . . . . . 97

8 Feminist criminology: the challenge of gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

9 Punishment and its institutional framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

10 Conclusion: criminology under globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a subject?

1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

1.3 The syllabus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

1.4 Core materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment . . . . . . . . . . 9

Murdered on September 15, 1942.

Criminology – what is it?

Criminology is increasingly offered as a whole degree, in which case criminology

Contrasts in outlooks and mood: ‘Whose side are you on?’

Throughout this guide, a three-fold distinction will be made between:

1. Criminology, as ‘logos’, in other words, as the ‘scientific’ discipline aiming for

As said above, criminology involves humans commenting on other humans; unlike

Consider the historical position:

We now live with many of the advances of post-Enlightenment projects – fantastic

Yet it is surely an advance to know of these things. In 2016, we live in a globalised

Consider who speaks:

As an academic discipline, criminology has been dominated by the writings of

The specific orientation of this module:

While it will be of benefit to you to have outline knowledge of elements of criminal

1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a

1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it?

The existence of so much crime in western societies shows the underside of

1.3 The syllabus

1.4 Core materials

1.4.1 Core texts

¢ Morrison, Wayne Theoretical criminology: from modernity to post-modernism.

1.4.2 Study pack

1.4.3 VLE and web

1.4.4 Journals, government and NGO material

u Anti-Slavery International, found at www.antislavery.org.uk

u Amnesty International, found at www.amnesty.org.uk

u Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, found at www.crimeandjustice.org.uk

1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment

Formal assessment is by a three-hour unseen examination. You are expected to do four

1.5.1 The examination

To quote from the Introduction to the 2011 reports:

Candidates are not expected to have achieved an in-depth immersion in particular

To succeed in the examinations the candidates should:

• Focus their answers on the actual words of the questions asked;

2.2 Placing criminology in context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

2.3 Criminology and the advent of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.4 Other relevant characteristics of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

2.5 The dilemma of criminological knowledge and personal opinion . . . . 17

2.6 Some fundamental concepts in criminology: crime and criminality . . . 20

¢ Morrison, Wayne ‘What is crime? Contrasting definitions and perspectives’

2.1 Developing a criminological imagination

Many practitioners of what we might call ‘traditional or mainstream’ criminology