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The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna, and Lesley McAra

Notes on Contributors

AlisonLiebling,ShaddMaruna and Lesley Mcara

Katherine M. Auty is Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Andy Aydın-Aitchison is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Edinburgh School of Law.

Nick Blagden is Professor in Criminological Psychology at the University of Derby, former Head of the Sexual Offences Crime and Misconduct Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, and co-founder and trustee of the Safer Living Foundation.

Mary Bosworth is Professor of Criminology and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford.

Ben Bowling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London.

Ben Bradford is Professor of Global City Policing and Director of the Centre for Global City Policing at the Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London.

Avi Brisman is a Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, an Adjunct Professor in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology (Australia), and an Honorary Professor at Newcastle School of Law and Justice and a University Fellow at the Centre of Law and Social Justice at the University of Newcastle (Australia).

Mirza Buljubašić is Postdoctoral Research Associate at Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and Senior Assistant at the Faculty of Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security Studies, University of Sarajevo.

Michele Burman is Professor of Criminology in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow.

Paolo Campana is Associate Professor in Criminology and Complex Networks at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Victoria Canning is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Bristol.

Ryan Casey is Interdisciplinary Research Fellow in Digital Society & Economy at the University of Glasgow.

Neil Chakraborti is Professor in Criminology and Director of the Centre for Hate Studies at the School of Criminology, University of Leicester. He is also Director of the Institute of Policy at the University of Leicester.

Amy Clarke is a Research Fellow for the Centre for Hate Studies at the School of Criminology, University of Leicester.

Ben Collier is Lecturer in Digital Methods at the University of Edinburgh.

↵ Adam Crawford is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds and Professor of Policing and Social Justice at the University of York. He is also Co-Director of the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre.

Ben Crewe is Deputy Director of the Prisons Research Centre and Professor of Penology & Criminal Justice at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Danica Darley is completing a PhD at the University of Sheffield and conducts research with and about children in care and the youth justice system.

Bill Davies is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University.

Susan Donkin is Research Fellow in European Urban Security at the University of Leeds.

Ron Dudai is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University.

Rod Earle is Senior Lecturer in the School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care at The Open University.

Manuel Eisner is Wolfson Professor of Criminology and Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo.

Alistair Fraser is Professor of Criminology in the Scottish Centre of Crime & Justice Research, University of Glasgow.

Pete Fussey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.

David Gadd is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester.

David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University.

Loraine Gelsthorpe is Professor Emerita of the Institute of Criminology; Deputy Director of the Centre for Community, Gender & Social Justice; and a Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.

Evi Girling is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Keele University.

Hannah Graham is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and an Associate Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Stirling.

Chris Greer is Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.

Adrian Grounds is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Keith Hayward is Professor of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Paddy Hillyard is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University, Belfast.

↵ Dick Hobbs is Emeritus Professor, University of Essex.

Barbora Holá is Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

David Honeywell is Lecturer in Criminology at Arden University.

Mike Hough is Emeritus Professor in the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London.

Alice Hutchings is Professor of Emergent Harms at the Department of Computer Science & Technology, University of Cambridge, Director of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

Martin Innes is lead Co-Director of the Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute <https:// www.cardiff.ac.uk/security-crime-intelligence-innovation-institute> and a Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.

Yvonne Jewkes is Professor of Criminology at the University of Bath.

Darrick Jolliffe is Professor of Criminology at The School of Law and Criminology, University of Greenwich.

Trevor Jones is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.

Nicola Lacey is Professor of Law, Gender, and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Cheryl Lawther is Reader in Law at Queen’s University Belfast.

Michael Levi is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.

Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and Director of the Prisons Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Nicholas Lord is Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester.

Shadd Maruna is Professor of Criminology at Queen’s University Belfast and President of the American Society of Criminology.

Ben Matthews is Lecturer in Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Stirling.

Lesley McAra is Professor of Penology in the Law School at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime.

Kieran McEvoy is Professor of Law and Transitional Justice and Theme Leader (Rights and Justice) at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Justice and Security at Queen’s University Belfast.

Eugene McLaughlin is Professor of Criminology in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City, University of London.

↵ Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology & Social Work at the University of Glasgow where he works in Sociology and in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.

Susan McVie is Professor of Quantitative Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.

Tim Newburn is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Ailbhe O’Loughlin is Senior Lecturer in Law at York Law School, University of York.

Nicola Padfield is Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Penal Justice at the University of Cambridge and a Life and Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

Alpa Parmar is Assistant Professor in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the Faculty of Law, and a Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge.

Jill Peay is Emeritus Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Coretta Phillips is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Jo Phoenix is Professor of Criminology at the University of Reading.

Gosia Polanska was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Keele University.

Lidia Puigvert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona.

Robert Reiner is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Julian V. Roberts is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford, and Executive Director of the Sentencing Academy.

Gwen Robinson is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Sheffield.

Paul Rock is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Meredith Rossner is Professor of Criminology at the Australian National University.

Bethany E. Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Penology at the University of Cambridge.

Ed Schreeche-Powell is a Lecturer in Criminology at The University of Greenwich and Associate Lecturer in Social and Forensic Psychology at The Open University.

Toby Seddon is Professor of Social Science and Head of the UCL Social Research Institute at University College London.

Joe Sim is Emeritus Professor of Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University and a Trustee of the charity INQUEST.

Oliver Smith is Associate Professor (Reader) in Criminology at the University of Plymouth.

Nigel South is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, and Honorary Visiting Professor in the Institute for Social Justice and Crime at the University of Suffolk.

↵ Richard Sparks is Professor of Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.

Alex Stevens is Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Kent.

Cyrus Tata is Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at the Law School, University of Strathclyde, Scotland.

Steve Tombs is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at The Open University.

Maria Ttofi is Associate Professor in Psychological Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Beth Weaver is Professor of Criminal and Social Justice and an Associate Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Strathclyde.

Christine A. Weirich is Research Fellow with the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre and is based at the University of Leeds.

Belinda Winder is Professor of Forensic Psychology and Research Director of the Centre of Crime, Offending, Prevention and Engagement (COPE) at Nottingham Trent University. She is a co-founder of the Safer Living Foundation charity.

Lucia Zedner is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College and Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Oxford, as well as Conjoint Professor at the University of New South Wales Sydney.

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

Guide to the Online Resources

The online resources that accompany this book provide students and lecturers with ready-to-use teaching and learning materials. These resources are free of charge and are designed to enhance the learning experience.

www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e <http://www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e>

Student

Resources

Selected Chapters from Previous Editions <http:// www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e/prevedchapters>

In-depth material on topics from previous editions of the text, including the development of criminology as a discipline, and key issues, such as punishment and control, and crime reduction, are provided in electronic format for additional reading.

Please note that these chapters are only available directly through the hyperlink above.

Useful Websites <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/ liebling-maruna7e-student-resources#tag_useful-websites>

Links to useful websites for each chapter point you in the direction of important research, statistical data, and classic texts, keeping you informed of the developments in criminology both past and present as well as providing a starting point for additional research and reading.

Essay Questions <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/ liebling-maruna7e-student-resources#tag_essay-questions>

Written by the contributors, the essay questions that accompany each chapter encourage you to fully consider the key criminological issues. These essay questions help you to reflect on your reading and provide an opportunity to assess your understanding of each topic.

Guidance on Answering Essay Questions <https:// iws.oupsupport.com/ebook/access/content/liebling-maruna7estudent-resources/liebling-maruna7e-guidance-on-answeringessay-questions?options=showName>

Guidance on approaching essay questions and structuring your answers is available from the Handbook editors, to help you demonstrate your knowledge and critical understanding of criminology.

LecturerResources

Figures

fromtheText

Figures from the text are available to download in high resolution format, for use in teaching material, or assignments and exams. ↵

Introduction:Therenewedvision

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

Introduction: The renewed vision

AlisonLiebling,ShaddMaruna and Lesley Mcara

https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0044

Publishedinprint:21September2023

Publishedonline:August2023

Abstract

Thischapterreviewsdevelopmentsinthefieldofcriminologyinthecontextofthefundamentalshiftsthathaveoccurredover thepastsevenyearsinalmosteveryaspectofsociety,causedbytheCovid-19pandemic,theglobaleconomicdown-turn, risinggeo-politicaltensions,andtheimpactofactivistmovementssuchas#MeTooandBlackLivesMatter.Itarguesthatthese shiftshighlightthecontinuedrelevanceofBritishcriminologyascurrentlypractised,withitsexpandingknowledge-base, inter-disciplinaryinsight,anddiversearrayofmethodologicaltools,allcontributingtoabetterunderstandingofthe conditionsnecessarytosupportjustsocialorders.Thechapterpaystributetothepreviouseditorialteamandtothosethat criminologyhaslostsincethelastedition.Thechangingofthegenerationsisreflectedinthisvolume:itconstitutesaliving archive—a marked step in the life narrative of the field and a celebration of its growing strengths and popularity as a subject.

Keywords: theory,teaching,newgenerations,legacy,crime,socialjustice,universities,criminologicalimagination, intellectualcurrents

The three of us are deeply honoured to open this seventh edition of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, our second volume since taking over the reins from founding editors Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner in 2015. Their path-breaking and dedicated editorship lasted 18 years, with editions appearing in 1994 (the first), 1997 (the second), 2002 (the third), 2007 (the fourth), and 2012 (the fifth). By the time we took up editorship, nervously aware of the responsibilities and privilege of inheriting such a successful franchise, the Handbook was well established as a constitutive and agenda-setting ‘state-of-the art’ collection and an indispensable archive of the evolving state of criminology. Our plan in the last edition was to maintain the standing of the book, whilst widening its scope and diversifying its authorship. We did this by slightly shortening, but increasing the number of, contributions and encouraging co-authorship,

especially with younger scholars. We were delighted with the volume’s reception when it was published in 2017 as the sixth edition and enjoyed thinking together about the state of our field as well as working with a wide range of talented authors doing outstanding work.

For this edition, we continue this trend with further diversification of subject matter and authors. It remains the case that nearly every invitation we made has been accepted, contributions have all been produced to time (almost) despite our new conditions, and our deliberations with authors about content have been productive and professional. Perhaps the hardest aspect of putting together this new edition has been trying to capture the immense changes in the field and in the wider world that have occurred since the last edition went to press. As an antidote to the kind of ‘vertigo’ Jock Young once described, we felt the need to renew and restate our vision of what criminology is and what it could do whilst also trying to come to terms with the new world we are living in.

From its early immigrant origins our field has always blended empirical science with social and legal philosophy in order to explore, interrogate, or refine the concepts of crime and justice. Questions of citizenship, belonging, and borderlands are built into our history. The introduction of criminology in the UK largely resulted from the pioneering efforts of three post-Second World War émigrés—Hermann Mannheim, Max Grunhut, and Leon Radzinowicz—around the middle of the twentieth century (see Garland 2002). It is striking that at times of global upheaval, and movement of people across borders, the intellectual life sometimes breathes with new energy and determination as a result of its relevance (see Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022).

TheNewWorldWeLiveIn

The period since 2015 has felt particularly tumultuous with fundamental shifts across nearly every aspect of social life in the UK and beyond. Most of these changes have had substantial impacts on the core subject matter of criminology. This is, as a result, much more than an updated edition.

Most obviously, a global pandemic beginning in spring 2020 brought public life to a virtual standstill, shutting down criminal justice functions from courts to therapeutic communities, at least temporarily. Universities closed their doors too, although they swiftly adapted to online delivery before most staff were prepared for this. Prisons, remarkably, largely avoided closures despite being known as places of severe contagion risk. Indeed, prisons in England and Wales saw hardly any of the urgent decarceration strategies seen in other parts of the world, although Scotland and Northern Ireland fared somewhat better in that regard (see Maruna, McNaull, & O’Neill 2022). Like National Health Service (NHS) staff, those remaining working in prisons during this fraught time were celebrated as heroes, yet (like in the NHS), their visible working conditions were exposed as utterly unacceptable.

The pandemic gave unprecedented powers to government control in every walk of life including the imposition of full community lockdowns, consisting of previously unthinkable restrictions on movement and contact with families and friends. Questions of compliance, state authority, and the proper limits of the law were played out on motorways, in neighbourhoods, and in homes across the world. The policing of parties and gatherings played a key role in bringing down Boris Johnson’s controversial reign as Prime

Minister. Protracted debates about ‘Partygate’ and the ‘Barnard Castle scandal’ undermined the early spirit of unity brought on by the pandemic and created a sense that there was one set of rules for the general public and very different rules for the people in charge who created those rules.

Socially, the pandemic seemed to strengthen both localism and globalism. Isolating at home, many of us re-discovered the importance of strong communities. Community members would look out for vulnerable or elderly neighbours, offering to do their shopping if needed, and many of us applauded the NHS from safe social distances on our doorsteps. Yet, confined to our living spaces, we also entered a brave, new world of video conferencing where suddenly we found ourselves giving lectures or sitting in meetings in far flung places as if we were in the same room (except when accidentally ‘on mute’). From a criminological perspective, the lockdown led to significant decreases in many forms of crime, like house burglary, but created opportunities for others, like cyber crimes (see Collier and Hutchings, this volume), and recorded incidents of domestic violence visibly increased (see Gadd, this volume, Walklate, Godfrey, & Richardson 2022). The pandemic and the subsequent lockdown also had a measurable impact on mental health, well-being, and child development (e.g., increased rates of self-harm, anxiety, depression, PTSD, especially among young people) in ways that are likely to have longer term criminogenic effects (see McAra, this volume). Politically, Covid-19 further polarized a population, already divided over issues like Brexit, into new camps based on concern for public health and the economy. Covid also fuelled a pandemic of conspiracy theories and anti-science populism, stoking fears of vaccines and undermining medical advice.

The cost-of-living crisis, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, has intensified already existing social inequalities. At the time of writing, the Conservative Government is ↵ proposing substantial tax cuts for the UK’s richest taxpayers, yet households are having to choose between heating and eating in ways that have not been seen in decades. The realities of Brexit have begun to emerge since the publication of the last volume, and many of the grimmer predictions about the impact on the movement of people and goods have materialized, threatening peace and stability in Northern Ireland and further exacerbating the inflation crisis. Continuing austerity measures have devastated the public sector with declining workforces, deteriorating wages, high attrition rates, and widespread dissatisfaction amongst nurses, teachers, dockworkers, train drivers, and other professions deemed ‘essential’ during the pandemic. Prisons, probation, and the police have all faced staggering staff shortages, impacting on the functioning of the justice system. In universities, wages have stagnated and pensions have been cut dramatically, leading to years of industrial actions, burnout, and a decrease in the sort of professional good will necessary to sustain (largely unpaid) systems of peer review and external examination. Almost all of the critical issues facing higher education discussed in our 6th edition introduction have intensified, including the threats faced by those working in the humanities and social sciences.

The last seven years have seen the exponential rise of the international movement, known broadly as Black Lives Matter (BLM), given increased momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police officers in May 2020 in Minneapolis. With slogans such as, ‘abolish the police’, the movement has sparked a conversation about the role and purpose of policing in contemporary societies that has reverberated across the world. In the UK, the Metropolitan Police Service has come under sustained scrutiny since the last edition, most dramatically in the policing of the vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard by the Met

police officer Wayne Couzens. Under the Conservatives, policing has become increasingly politicized with ministerial and media hysteria about police officers ‘taking the knee’ in support of BLM or dancing at gay pride parades as if such gestures undermined crime fighting capacity. In a related development, the #MeToo movement has led to radical changes in gender politics. A pushback inspired by social media, #MeToo has drawn attention to the widespread culture of sexual harassment and sexual violence in workplaces, schools, universities and throughout society and has raised questions about due process for the accused (see Grounds, Ttofi, and Puigvert, this volume). Debates about climate justice have also intensified as scientific predictions of climate catastrophes, ranging from wildfires to flooding, have become daily realities around the globe (see Brisman and South, this volume). Disruptive activism by environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion has increased in an effort to call attention to state crimes linked to environmental devastation such as the burning of the Amazon Rainforest (see Canning, Hilliard, and Tombs, this volume). University campuses have, predictably, become key sites for working through some of these conflicts, occasionally including the forcible removal of statues or changing the names of campus buildings. ‘Decolonizing’ the university has become a rallying cry, including a rapidly growing movement to ‘decolonize criminology’ (Moosavi 2019) and decentre the influence of white, Northern, male authors from the curriculum.

As such, we are editing this Handbook in a time of profound change and ontological insecurity with the post-war European ‘project’ largely under threat, or losing its claim to legitimacy. British politics have seen a dramatic shift to the political right, but unlike a similar period of conservative leadership in the 1980s, the Government has been anything but stable. Since the last edition, the United Kingdom has had five different prime ministers (all Conservatives), eight different justice secretaries, and ten different prisons ministers. Little wonder this period has been experienced by so many as chaotic and ↵ fraught. A similar sense of political precarity and turmoil can be found across the globe with the rise of openly authoritarian regimes in several of the world’s largest countries. Russia’s protracted war in the Ukraine, and the violent attack on the US Capital on 6 January 2021 all threatened the very foundations of democracy and the rule of law. In short, if criminology’s main focus, or raison d’etre, is understanding the relationship between law-breaking, law-making, social order and justice, then there has never been a greater need of it. Several of the chapters to follow in the Handbook address the scope of criminology. Loader and colleagues (this volume) for instance, argue that ‘shifting lenses from the sometimes limiting purview of the fear of crime towards ideas of harm, safety, and security that are at once broader and less prescriptive, yet more embedded and grounded in the context of everyday experience, is part of what is involved in developing a contemporary, responsive, and relevant criminological field’. These are precisely the words we would use to describe our aspirations as editors of this new edition.

BritishCriminology’sRoleinFraughtTimes

While the social, economic, and political contexts just described have had profound effects on universities as places of education and research, they also demonstrate the increasing relevance of social science research—and especially of criminology. We can see why students continue to be drawn to the field. Criminology’s expanding subject matter includes questions of citizenship and democratic living; the nature and consequences of crime control and penal practice; the genesis and outcomes of poverty, trauma p. 4

and other social and environmental harms; atrocity crimes, migration and transitional justice. Criminology, at its best, pays systematic attention to the nature, causes, and trajectories of crime, fear, and violence. Longitudinal studies, however expensive, remain a state-of-the-art methodology for achieving the kinds of understanding we need. Criminology also addresses changing responses to crime, which so often cause harm in their own right. Our vision of the field holds these topic areas in productive tension, seeking to explain, and where possible, find ways of reducing, new and old forms of harm.

Our discipline’s collective knowledge base, inter-disciplinary insights and our diverse array of methodological tools, seek to contribute to better understanding of the conditions necessary to support more just social orders. Sometimes, criminological research even contributes directly to such related improvements to practice. What other social science could claim the sort of impact evident in Phil Scraton’s (2013) research on the Hillsborough tragedy, for instance? Or trigger a change in the age of criminal responsibility for children in Scotland?1 Or a transformation in the design of a prison for women in Ireland,2 to take some recent examples? This real-world relevance suggests that criminology remains a live, urgent, and engaged field of study, with all the risks and ↵ complexities inherent in doing that sort of applied work (see, e.g., Jewkes’s 2022 use of the term ‘dirty work’ as she questions whether helping to design new prisons with no bars on windows counts as a success or contributes to the legitimation of new prison building). Criminology’s proximity to state power poses both opportunities and risks.

None of this is to assert that criminology is a settled field. The past seven years have seen further diversification and transformation in some of the basic assumptions and ideas at work within the discipline. A key example is the major advances made in green criminology—with its interrogation of the symbiotic harms contributing to the climate crisis and the destruction of planetary health, and explorations of the contexts and action needed to enable human and non-human species to flourish (see Brisman and South, this volume). A further example is in the contribution of zemiology to contemporary knowledge production, including its substantive development of taxonomies of social harms (see Canning et al., this volume).

The past seven years have also seen a re-emergence of some of the longstanding intellectual battlegrounds in our discipline. Is it still meaningful to talk about a ‘British Criminology’ (a question we have grappled with in both the 6th and 7th editions of the handbook), particularly since many of the contemporary developments to which our discipline is responding (both in the UK and beyond), are transnational or global in orientation? There have been legitimate challenges to the hegemony of scholarship from the global north. Criminology has seen impressive growth in southern criminological scholarship, calls to embrace the epistemic disruption of decoloniality (replacing false universalism with what de Sousa Santis (2014) has called ‘border’ or ‘intercultural’ thinking’), and greater critical acknowledgment of the role of empire and coloniality in early and later histories of global north criminology (see also Chakraborti and Clarke, this volume, Brisman and South, this volume). We welcome the publication of the Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South (Carrington et al. 2018) and we look forward to a reshaping of the field of criminology in the light of these and other developments.

There has been an associated rise in activist scholarship, in particular from early career researchers and academics, reflecting some of the deep dissatisfactions with power structures both within the discipline, or academy, and beyond. One key example is the emergence of the Black Criminology Network, founded in

2020 by a doctoral researcher at Birmingham City University and an associate lecturer at the University of Northampton. The network aims to be a global hub for students and academics of Black heritage, providing mentoring and support, as well as running a series of skills workshops and seminars. A reinvigorated activism has also found expression in feminist criminology with the rise of so-called ‘fourth wave feminism’, premised on the sharing of lived experience, intersectionality and the use of internet tools to drive a praxis predicated on empowerment and transformational justice. Here there have been fierce debates around what role (if any) criminal justice and other state sponsored institutions should play in tackling gender-based violence and inequalities, the extent to which trans and gender diverse experiences are respected or have voice, and the emergence of queer criminology as a framework for new forms of knowledge production and action (see Copson and Boukli 2022, Burman and Gelsthorpe, this volume, Phoenix, this volume). This scholarship differs from the critical criminology of the 1960s and 1970s with its focus on state and structural injustices, by paying closer attention to matters of gender, identity and diversity.

It is clear that nurturing the next generation of scholars requires more transparent opportunity structures and more diverse role models within higher education. The ↵ salience of criminolgy as an academic field—its knowledge-base and innovatory practice in terms of theory and method—constitute powerful reasons for investment by universities. There has been continued expansion of criminology as both an undergraduate and taught postgraduate subject, with 814 undergraduate degree programmes on offer across 132 universities, and 239 masters programmes across 89 universities (WhatUni 2022). This has been mirrored in increased sales for the Handbook as a core text, especially for postgraduate education. The demand for professional education is increasing, as seen, for example, in the continuing provision of two Master of Studies Programmes at Cambridge, albeit with a move towards on-line delivery in some cases. Criminological practice and teaching is diversifying, whilst senior leadership in most institutions of higher education remains overwhelmingly white and male.3 The landscape is turbulent, presenting both risks and opportunities for criminologists and our field as a whole.

Doingcriminologyinachangingclimate

The ways in which we do criminology have had to adapt to these new challenges.

The creativity and resilience of researchers were particularly tested by the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, with successive lockdowns necessitating major changes to the conduct of empirical research. Many sites (for example, prisons and other residential settings) could not be visited in-person. Most fieldwork was either suspended or moved on-line; ethical issues became correspondingly more complex. Access to administrative data (for example, on criminal convictions) became more difficult, as staff shortages and redeployment to tackle the impacts of the pandemic, meant that criminal justice agencies had limited capacity to deal with researcher requests. The intensification of inequalities that the pandemic brought and the ways in which it exposed a justice gap (with regard to disproportionate policing, rights violation in prisons, for example), have become a focus of research in their own right (see McVie 2020, Maruna et al. 2022). They also highlight ongoing sensitivities in undertaking research with potentially traumatised populations (both those who come into conflict with the law as well as those within institutions of criminal justice trying to adapt rapidly to a situation of great uncertainty).

On the other hand, we celebrate the rise of mixed methodological approaches, participatory action research, and other more inclusive or democratic approaches to knowledge creation (see Liebling et al., this volume; Loader et al., this volume). Sometimes this encompasses forms of data collection involving the arts, or more deliberative approaches to analysis, such as citizens’ assemblies. In particular, there has been renewed emphasis on ‘lived experience’ not only in terms of those who come into conflict with the law, but also in terms of practitioners and policy makers (see Earle et al., this volume; Weaver et al., this volume). Such research methods require slow forms of scholarship—in particular, time to build relationships and mutual understanding, to gain trust. The curation of the participatory research experience ↵ raises questions for academics around ways of undertaking research which promote ‘generative justice’: a form of praxis aimed at increasing social solidarity in communities with experience of crime or punishment (see Maruna 2016); and about our responsibilities when projects come to an end. It also demands particular qualities of researchers in terms of active listening, and operating with a sense of humility, whilst also striving to build a credible knowledge base. There is a relationship between criminology’s mission and the methodologies employed. Loader and colleagues talk about ‘the intimate relation between enquiries into public safety (however conceptualized) and the quality and future possibilities of a shared democratic life’, arguing that ‘the modes of inquiry that seem most compelling nowadays need to be more oriented towards dialogue, creativity, and co-production than those that were applied (including by us) in the past’ (this volume).

Alongside these creative and person-centred efforts in the field, there has been a simultaneous expansion in big data analytics—both as a mode and a site of criminological enquiry: themes which run through a number of chapters in the Handbook (see especially Bradford and Fussey, Crawford et al., Jones et al., this volume). Whilst technological advances both in terms of data capture, linkage and analysis enable researchers to draw on new forms of data—such as social media scraping—this development raises new ethical challenges for criminology as well. Researchers need to be mindful of issues related to consent, privacy, surveillance and data ownership. Big data analysis requires computing infrastructure—which is both expensive to run and energy intensive. Skills in data handling and coding are a necessary prerequisite, with implications for researcher training. One concern is that many universities and bodies holding data, such as the police, are increasingly relying on business developers and data scientists to address operational questions, or drive research agendas. These researchers have tremendous technical skills, but they may not be familiar with criminological theory, data collection methodologies, or the realities on the ground in these justice contexts. Such a technologically driven development risks a future of theory-free data harvesting and false interpretations based on partial understandings of complex real-world processes like ‘recidivism’.

LossesandAcknowledgments

Since our last edition, British criminology has lost some of its trailblazers and much-loved characters, including Jackie Tombs and Roger Matthews, with the latter dying after contracting Covid-19 in April 2020. In books like Realist Criminology and What Is To Be Done about Crime and Punishment?, Matthews came to represent the hugely influential tradition of ‘left realism’. Through her leadership roles in the Central

Research Unit of the then Scottish Office, and the early days of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, Tombs played a key role in ensuring that research evidence infused policy debates in Scotland (long before ‘evidence-based policy’ became a UK mantra) and in building criminological capacity.

Globally, too, criminology has lost some of the most transformative figures in the history of the field, like David Matza, Nils Christie, Elmar Weitekamp, Joan Petersilia, Nicole Hahn Rafter, Hans Toch, Jim B. Jacobs, M. Kay Harris, Charles Tittle, Ed Latessa, Bob Bursik, Ray Paternoster, Travis Hirschi, and David Bayley. Although associated with universities overseas, several of these scholars made an outsize impact on the development of criminology in the UK. (Indeed, one of our struggles with the concept of ↵ ‘British’ criminology is how to categorize the work of scholars like Christie, Matza, and Rafter with their evident global influence).

However, no one on that list has shaped British criminology like Donald West (9 June 1924–31 January 2020) or Roger Hood (12 June 1936–17 November 2020). Both West and Hood directed major centres of Criminology, in Cambridge and Oxford, respectively, with Hood serving for nearly three decades. Both were highly influential in legal reform, lived to a ripe age (95 and 84 respectively), and were still active in their research areas as long as they could work and travel. Perhaps there is some relationship between these facts. In any case, we wish to celebrate and record their contributions here.

Donald West, a psychiatrist, joined the newly established Institute of Criminology in Cambridge in 1960 as assistant director of research, and spent the rest of his career there, as lecturer, reader, and then professor of clinical criminology. He was director of the Institute from 1981 to his formal retirement in 1984. He became a Fellow of Darwin College and was promoted to a personal professorship in Clinical Criminology, while also providing an outpatient clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital as an (unpaid) honorary consultant psychiatrist. He started the best known of his contributions to criminological research, the Cambridge longitudinal study in delinquent development, in 1961. He was joined in 1969 by David Farrington, and their project became one of the major, continuing, prospective longitudinal studies internationally in the field of developmental criminology (see Chapter 5 in this volume). The study commenced as a prospective survey of 411 London boys, aged 8, who have since been interviewed at intervals throughout their lives (including most recently in their late 60s). Their children, and grandchildren, have also been interviewed in more recent years, enabling a rich range of findings about antecedents and causes of criminality and desistance. Major books arising from the study include Who becomes Delinquent (1973), The Delinquent Way of Life (1977), and Delinquency, Its Roots, Careers and Prospects (1982). West also served as a founding member of the parole board. His work (including his book Homosexuality, published in 1955) contributed to the decriminalization of homosexuality. He was pioneering, courageous, and left behind many close friends.

Roger Hood’s career-length research on the death penalty, likewise, was instrumental in the abolitionist campaign. During his degree in Sociology at LSE, he attended an optional course given by Hermann Mannheim, the ‘grand old man’ of criminology, who asked for help preparing a paper about the Homicide Bill, which eliminated the death penalty for so-called crimes of passion. ‘Mannheim was so pleased with it that he asked me if I would be his research assistant,’ Hood recalled (The Times obituary 2020). In 1967 he joined the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, with a fellowship at Clare Hall. His work on the history of criminal law with Sir Leon Radzinowicz, the ‘old fox’ of British criminology (Zapatero,

Introduction:Therenewedvision

obituary 2020), is masterful (see A History of the English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750). He also published Borstal Reassessed and Key Issues in Criminology (1970, with the ‘older’ Richard Sparks) during this period. In 1973 he became the founding director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford with a fellowship at All Souls College, a position he held until 2003. All who knew him remember with considerable fondness his supportive, exacting, generous, and gentle style. A new Death Penalty Research Centre, established in his honour, and led by his young colleagues, was launched the day before his memorial service in 2021. His book, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (1989), remains one of the best-known on the subject. He will ↵ be remembered as a ‘champion of justice’ (Garrett 2020) and as a wise advisor and friend to younger colleagues.

As third generation criminology scholars, we are aware of the privilege of having studied under the original giants, and of the historically extraordinary nature of a person-and legal-centred discipline. The people who established our field were intellectual and political activists as well as outstanding scholars.

The humanitarian preoccupations of our field remain central.

So where do we go from here? The new edition of the Handbook illustrates a changing of the guard, an opening up of the discipline, and an effort to build a bridge between the old and the new. We retain our commitment to the best scholarship, whilst recognizing that the boundaries of our discipline, and its locations, are becoming harder to maintain.

WhatIsNewintheNewEdition?

The Handbook has a new look, a new structure, and every chapter has been updated and revised for the contemporary context. In addition, we specifically commissioned a series of new chapters to better capture the changing zeitgeist in British criminology, including types of crime or approaches to criminology that have emerged in the past few decades. As part of our refresh, we have invited a number of new authors to cover a range of traditional topics that have appeared in previous editions of the Handbook. These include Nicky Padfield and Cyrus Tata on penal decision-making; Manuel Eisner on comparative criminology; Darrick Jolliffe and Katherine Auty on developmental and life course criminology; and Beth Weaver, Hannah Graham, and Shadd Maruna on desistance from crime.

We have expanded our coverage of types of crime with four newly commissioned chapters. First, a chapter on sex offending (by psychologists Neil Blagden and Belinda Winders), which contains important insights about compassion and trauma-informed therapeutic approaches to dealing with those who come to the attention of the criminal justice system for sexual assault, and offences against children. Secondly, a chapter on hate crime (by Neil Chakraborti and Amy Clarke) which explores the processes (social, political, and economic) which sustain power dynamics between dominant and subordinate groups predicated on prejudice and hostility, the nature of the harms caused and the ways in which hate crime might be best responded to. Thirdly, Ben Collier and Alice Hutchins examine the challenges posed by the rapidly exploding and technically complex field of cybercrime for the first time, describing the ecology and subcultures of online offending, the harms and methods involved, and the labours of increasing types of diverse personnel working in enforcement and control. Cybercrime now justifiably constitutes a sub-field in its own right. Finally we commissioned a new chapter by Andy Aydın-Aitchison, Mirza Buljubašić, and

Barbora Holá on atrocity crimes. This chapter develops and encourages criminology’s engagement with the forms of mass violence associated with war, armed conflict, and political repression as well as with efforts to pursue, or describe and define, justice for victims. Importantly, the themes of trauma and the harms of injustice are also addressed in another newly commissioned chapter on ‘victimology’ in an age of #MeToo by Adrian Grounds, Maria Ttofi, and Lidia Puigvert. Their account of voice and power shows that understanding suffering is a concept that ‘merits more attention in criminology’.

↵ Paolo Campana applies network thinking to criminology, including in the analysis of violence and organized crime. The transmission of risky phenomena across communities with diverse social structures has been vividly illustrated as we witness infections exploiting webs of social relations to increase their spread across individuals and places. He argues that relations matter in explaining phenomena of interest to criminologists and that these can have an effect over and above individual characteristics. Pathogens have well ‘understood’ the power of relations underpinning human networks. Criminology has much to learn from the analysis of social structures and connections in understanding the formation and operation of gangs, patterns of victimization and the broader structure of violence.

The Oxford Handbook has never before had a chapter on penal abolitionism’s role in British criminology, although, as Sim (this issue) points out in this fascinating chapter, abolitionism has a long tradition in Britain. Support for abolitionism and sustained decarceration has grown demonstrably in recent years, spurred on by the parallel push to ‘abolish the police’ inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the extreme threats faced by those in prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time ever, the Handbook also includes a chapter on the concept of ‘convict criminology’ or criminological research that centres lived experience and is produced mainly by those with first-hand experience of the justice system. Convict criminology has been around in US criminology since the late 1990s, but the idea has very much come to the fore in Britain in the past few years. Rod Earle and colleagues provide one of the most sophisticated, up-to-date discussions of the now ubiquitous new concept of ‘lived experience’ and its implications for the study of criminology.

There is also extended coverage of security and place as a thematic. Ian Loader and colleagues, revisit their work on crime and social change in middle England (Girling et al. 2000), in the context of a more recent project in the same locale, with a meditation on the relationship between democratic politics and security. The chapter highlights the importance of co-production in researcher-participant relationships, and the need for deliberative methods to capture in more granular ways the lived experience of (in)security, and the conditions necessary for social change. By contrast Ben Bradford and Pete Fussey explore the dynamics of ‘informational capitalism’ and the digital society and the ways in which they have transformed crime, security, surveillance and policing, within the context of ‘smart cities’. Here there is emphasis on the ways in which new technologies can increase vulnerability to crime at the same time as enhancing social control, with some efforts aimed at enhancing security, paradoxically increasing feelings of insecurity.

The Handbook is a living research project and its various editions function as an archive of some of the best and most influential scholarship within British Criminology, however loosely defined and problematic that term now feels. As ‘guardians’ of the Handbook, we are aware that our protégé is now a fully-fledged and independent adult making its way in a treacherous—contested, uncertain, economically precarious—

world. The unique strengths of criminology as a discipline give us a strong belief in the opportunity for renewal. We hope this new edition provides some of the energy for a dialogue about what social order and justice might look like by the time the eighth edition of the Handbook is in preparation.

References

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Carrington,K.,Hogg,R.,andSozzo,M. (2018), ‘Southern Criminology’, TheBritishJournalofCriminology, 56(5): 1–20.

Copson,L.andBoukli,A. (2022), ‘Queer Utopias and Queer Criminology’, CriminologyandCriminalJustice,20:5. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895820932210 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895820932210>

Cumhaill,C.M.andWiseman,R.(2022),MetaphysicalAnimals:HowFourWomenBroughtPhilosophyBacktoLife, London:ChattoandWindus.

deSousaSantis,B.(2014),EpistemologiesoftheSouth:JusticeagainstEpistemicide,NY:Routledge.

Garland,D.(2002),TheCultureofControl:CrimeandSocialOrderinContemporarySociety,Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress.

Garrett,B.(2020).https://wcsj.law.duke.edu/2020/11/remembering-roger-hood-a-champion-of-justice-andinternational-leader-in-criminology/ <https://wcsj.law.duke.edu/2020/11/remembering-roger-hood-a-champion-ofjustice-and-international-leader-in-criminology/>

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Maruna,S.,McNaull,G.,andO’Neill, N. (2022). ‘The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Future of the Prison’, Crime&Justice, 51–103.

Matthews,R.(2014),RealistCriminology,London:PalgraveMacmillan.

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Moosavi,L. (2019), ‘Decolonising Criminology: Syed Hussein Alatas on Crimes of the Powerful’, CriticalCriminology, 27(2): 229–242.

Radzinowicz,L.andHood,R.(1991),AHistoryoftheEnglishCriminalLawanditsAdministrationfrom1750.,Oxford: ClarendonPress.

Scraton,P. (2013), ‘The Legacy of Hillsborough: Liberating Truth, Challenging Power’,Race&Class’, 55(2): 1–27.

Universities UK and the National Union of Students (2019), ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Attainment at UK  Universities’ #closingthegap, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bamestudent-attainment.pdf <https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-studentattainment.pdf>.

Walklate,S.,Godfrey,B.,andRichardson,J. (2022), ‘Changes and Continuities in Police Responses to Domestic Abuse  in England and Wales During the Covid-19 ‘Lockdown’, PolicingandSociety, 32(2): 221–233.

West,D.(1955),Homosexuality,London:Penguin.

West,D.(1982),Delinquency,ItsRoots,CareersandProspects,London:Heinemann.

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West,D.andFarrington,D.(1977),TheDelinquentWayofLife,London:Heinemann.

WhatUni(2022),https://www.whatuni.com/ <https://www.whatuni.com/>

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Notes

1ProfessorsLesleyMcAraandSusanMcViewontheESRCCelebratingImpactPrizein2019fortheirworkonthe EdinburghStudyofYouthTransitionsandCrime(ESYTC)(https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news/professorsmcara-and-mcvie-win-esrc-celebrating-impact-prize <https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news/professors-mcaraand-mcvie-win-esrc-celebrating-impact-prize>).

2ProfessorYvonneJewkeswontheESRCCelebratingImpactPrizein2020forherinnovativeresearchonprison architectureanddesign(https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/professor-yvonne-jewkes-wins-esrc-celebratingimpact-prize-2020-for-societal-impact <https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/professor-yvonne-jewkes-wins-esrccelebrating-impact-prize-2020-for-societal-impact>).

3ArecentreportauthoredbyUniversitiesUKandtheNationalUnionofStudents(2019),foundthatonly1percentof universityprofessorswereblack,with11percentoverallfromglobalmajoritygroups.Womencurrentlymakeuponly 28percentoftheprofessoriate,despiteforming46percentoffacultystaff.Effortstobuildmoreinclusive

Introduction:Therenewedvision environmentshavebenefitedfromstaffandstudentactivism(seeforexampleRace-EDandGender-EDatthe UniversityofEdinburgh),butstaffsurveysacrosstheUKcontinuetoreportculturesofbullying,racialstereotyping, experiencesofmicro-aggressions,inadditiontoinequalitiesofpayandpromotionprospects.

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The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

1. Sociological theories of crime

https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0001

Publishedinprint:21September2023

Publishedonline:August2023

Abstract

Thischapterdescribeshowthesociologyofcrimeoriginallystemmedfromprofessionalandpoliticalpreoccupationswiththe problemspresentedbythepracticalmanagementofcrimeandpunishmentintheemergingBritishstateoftheearly nineteenthcenturybutthenevolvedandexpandedinaratherunsystematicfashionoversometwocenturiesintoasemidetachedacademicdisciplinethataddressesthevariouswaysinwhichsocialorder,socialcontrol,andsocialrepresentations ofrule-breakingaresaidtoaffecttheaetiologyofcrime.Ithasneverstoppedswelling,fragmenting,andproliferating,partly becauseofatendencyfornewgenerationsofscholarstoforgetthepast(seePlummer2011),andpartlyinresponsetothe emergenceofnewdata,newmethodologies(suchasrandomizedcontroltrials),newempiricalareas(suchastheglobal South),andnewtheoreticalpossibilitiesandpoliticalpreoccupations(suchasviolenceagainstwomenandgirls)andsocial andecologicalproblems(suchasclimatechange).

Keywords: historyofcriminology,socialorder,socialcontrol,socialrepresentations,theemergenceofthestate,new bodiesofknowledge,newinstitutions,universities,professionalization

Introduction:TheDevelopmentofCriminologyinBritain

Criminology emerged so fitfully, discontinuously, and indecisively in Britain that its history does not lend itself easily to a coherent narrative (Rock 2011). Although it is now more than 50 years old, Hermann Mannheim’s account of its loosely connected early stages remains as serviceable as any (1965: Vol. 1, 79). First, he said, there were private individuals working alone, and he cited as examples John Howard and Jeremy Bentham. One might also add that Howard, Bentham, and others were men working in a newly established tradition of social, juridical, and political improvement, often lawyers by training and Nonconformists or utilitarians by inclination, who believed in the possibility of reform through the

application of reason to a welter of confusing and apparently illogical laws, institutions, and practices that composed an English and Welsh ancien régime. Jeremy Bentham, said John Stuart Mill, ‘found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science …’ (1838, republished 1950, 75).

It was a group that was tenuously united at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries by a copious correspondence; an independence of thought; an independence of wealth; the holding of pivotal positions as magistrates, sheriffs, and Members of Parliament; and a common membership of philanthropic societies and religious organizations (see Whitten 2002). They learned at first or second hand about conditions in Britain and elsewhere, and they cultivated in their turn the beginnings of a systematic, comparative, and investigative stance towards problems of crime, policing, and punishment. John Howard’s The State of the Prisons of 1784, Colquhoun’s A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis of 1797, and Samuel Romilly’s Observations on the Criminal Law of England of 1811 are prime examples of their method. But, being independent individuals, lying outside the universities, they did not lay much of a foundation for an enduring tradition of research and teaching.

Second and third in Mannheim’s chronology was what he described as the work of public officials acting first in a private and then in a public capacity, and he cited as examples A.M. Guerry and Cesare Lombroso (1985). One might add that that second era was marked by the activity of embryonic criminologists who made use of the copious data and institutions that the newly reformed, expanding, interventionist, and increasingly ↵ wealthy state of the nineteenth century—the state that the Enlightenment reformers had built—furnished in the service of public administration. The very word ‘statistic’ refers to a fact bearing on the condition of the state, and it first came into use in the late 1780s, to be joined by the word ‘statistician’ in 1825, and they heralded the arrival of a new kind of blue book knowledge. The first population census in Britain was conducted in 1801; the new police, judicial, and penal authorities began to produce their own statistical returns after the 1830s; and a great mass of numerical data began to flood into the public realm. Chevalier remarked of that period in France that there was ‘a determination to obtain figures for everything, to measure everything, to know everything, but to know it by numbers, [it was an] encyclopedic hunger’ (1973: 43). The new statistics were eagerly explored by those who sought to discover patterns, commonalities, and trends in the social world: Fletcher (1850), Guerry (1864), and Quetelet (1848), above all, sought to devise a new social physics that could reveal law-like regularities of behaviour in space and time. One of the three, the Belgian, Quetelet, boldly claimed in 1846, for instance, that ‘we can count in advance how many individuals will soil their hands with the blood of their fellows, how many will be swindlers, how many poisoners, almost as we can number in advance the births and deaths that will take place’ (in Radzinowicz and Hood 1990: 51; and see Merry 2016).

A second concomitant of the emergence of the new penitentiaries, police forces, and asylums (see Scull 1979) was the creation of a new stratum of penal administrators who managed, diagnosed, and ministered to their inmates, and claimed new mandates and fostered new intellectual disciplines to shore up their infant and somewhat fragile professional authority. There was W. D. Morrison, a prison chaplain and pioneering criminologist, the author of Crime and its Causes, published in 1891, and Juvenile Offenders, published in 1896, and the editor of the criminology series in which Lombroso’s The Criminal Woman first appeared in English translation in 1895. There was S. A. Strahan, a doctor and lawyer, a physician at the Northampton County Asylum, and author of writings on ‘instinctive criminality’, criminal insanity, p. 16

suicide, and morphine habituation. There was Henry Maudsley, the co-founder of the eponymous hospital, who wrote about homicidal insanity, insanity, and criminal responsibility, and other matters in the first stirrings of the new science (1888). These men established new professional associations to promote and defend their expertise—for instance, the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane that was founded in 1841; and the Medico-Legal Association that was founded in 1901. And the new associations founded new journals and new stocks of knowledge (the first issue of The Asylum Journal of Mental Science appeared in 1853 and the first issue of the Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society appeared a year after the Medico-Legal Association itself in 1902).

The very word ‘professional’ appeared for the first time in 1848, to be followed by ‘professionalism’ eight years later, and these words signify the emergence of a new kind of expert. The new disciplines of criminal anthropology, criminal psychiatry, criminology, and medico-legal science gave them a capacity to control and speak about new problems, and it conferred a tenuous legitimacy, but they had few precedents to follow, and it was to be medicine, the established science of bodily pathology, that became the principal template for their fledgling science of social pathology. British criminology took much of its form at that time, remaining for a long while a statistically driven, administratively bent form of knowledge copying the precedent of applied medicine, practised in the service of the state (see Sim 1990: 9) and adopting the language of diagnosis, prognosis, epidemiology, treatment, and rehabilitation. And, Garland would argue, it was a project that came to embody ensuing contradictions which have yet fully to be ↵ resolved: the quest, on the one hand, for a criminology as the science of the causes of crime and, on the other, for a discipline serving the practical administrative demands of the state (2002).

The penultimate phase was identified by Mannheim as work undertaken by university departments or individual teachers. By the end of the nineteenth century, enough had been accomplished by the pioneers to invite people to view a newly born criminology as a discrete discipline that could be detached from its anchorage in the applied, working practices of state institutions to be pursued as an intellectual object in its own right. The word ‘criminology’ was devised first in the 1850s and came into more general currency in the 1890s when it began to be taught in universities in Italy, Austria, Germany, and France. It was to be associated with a cluster of European thinkers, and particularly, and not always usefully, with Lombroso and his followers (Lombroso tended to be too fanciful, too extravagant in his mannerisms, to warrant serious consideration by the largely pragmatic and empirical scholars of the United Kingdom (see Kenny 1910: 220)). British criminology is not and never has been significantly Lombrosian in its affections, and when criminology did come eventually and tentatively to establish itself in Britain in the early 1920s, it was not as an offshoot of the new criminal anthropology (see Rock 2007). A university post in the discipline was created first at Birmingham University in 1921 for Maurice Hamblin Smith, and he was a Freudianleaning psychologist (see Garland 1988: 8; Valiér 1995).

What came in time decisively to spur British criminology’s growth was the flight of intellectuals from Nazi Europe in the 1930s (see Morris 1988: 24–6). Three legally trained emigré criminologists implanted the discipline in three universities: Leon Radzinowicz at the University of Cambrige in 1941; Max Grünhut, first at the London School of Economics in 1934, and thence in the University of Oxford in 1940, where he was appointed to the university’s first lectureship in the field in 1947; and Hermann Mannheim at the London School of Economics in 1935—and it was in that year of 1935, said Garland, that criminology was instituted

as a professional academic discipline in Britain (1988: 1). So it was that virtually at a stroke, that the criminology which had been maturing apart in western Europe, was imported into English universities, but it did not receive a ready acceptance (see Hood 2004) nor was it inserted into an intellectual framework that yielded easily.

Mannheim’s course on the Principles of Criminology at the LSE in the 1930s is indicative of what then passed for criminology. It was eclectic, comprehensive and multi-disciplinary, embracing the study of criminal statistics; criminal typologies; the physical anthropology of crime; biological theories, including physical defects; psychological, psychoanalytic and psychiatric theories; social and economic factors; and much else.

What followed was marked by the same stamp. Thus the editorial of the first issue of the new British Journal of Delinquency, published in July 1950 with an editorial board consisting of Hermann Mannheim, Emanuel Miller (a psychiatrist) and Edward Glover (a psychoanalyst), about to become the chief vehicle of the newly institutionalized discipline, and later to be re-baptized the British Journal of Criminology, proclaimed:

it is perhaps unnecessary to add that the British Journal of Delinquency is not in the customary sense a clinical journal. Clinical contributions will of course receive special consideration, but it is hoped to publish articles, both theoretical and practical, from trained workers in the various departments of criminology; namely, medical psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, organic medicine, educational psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, psycho-biology and statistics; also from social workers, probation officers, prison and other institutional personnel, and from forensic specialists whose work brings them into intimate contact with problems of delinquency.

↵ That was the vein in which British criminology long remained: catholic, multi-causal, averse to a reliance on single theories and disciplines; grounded in medicine and medical metaphor; reformist, applied, and tied to the penal politics of the day. But its very eclecticism brought it about that successive generations of students were able routinely to receive instruction and conduct research across a very broad terrain. Sociologists like Terence Morris and Roger Hood could study under Hermann Mannheim or Leon Radzinowicz, and their students, like Bridget Hutter, David Downes, Stan Cohen, Paul Wiles, and Jock Young, and their students’ students, like Dick Hobbs, Nigel Fielding, Ken Plummer, and Ian Taylor, could advance, refine, extend, widen, and revise criminology along a great chain of begats—and there were other centres and other lineages besides. When the great wave of university expansion was launched in England and Wales in the 1960s, when the number of universities grew from 30 to 52 in twenty years, the number of students from 130,000 to 600,000, and the number of academic staff from 19,000 to 46,000, criminology could come freely into its own, blossoming with the rest of the academy, and colonizing departments of psychology, law, social policy, and, above all, sociology. The 1970s were especially propitious: a survey conducted in 1986 revealed that nearly 60 per cent of the criminologists teaching in British universities had been appointed in that decade, and 30 per cent in the years between 1973 and 1976 alone (Rock 1988). In that take-off phase, urged on by publishers, made discontinuous with the past by a thrusting generation of newly appointed young Turks, criminology became striving, expansive, quarrelsome, factious, and open, its practitioners jostling with one another for a place in the sun (see Taylor, Walton, and Young

1973). Some established the National Deviancy Symposium in 1968 in open confrontation with what was conceived to be the old orthodoxies represented by the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and the Home Office Research Unit (S. Cohen 1971; Downes 1988). They splintered along the theoretical and political faultlines of sociology proper, refracting the larger arguments of Marxist and post-Marxist theory then in vogue through the new phenomenologies of social life, and feminism. And then, after a while and inevitably—in the 1980s and beyond—most, but not all (see Hillyard et al. 2004; Sumner 1994, 2004) were to become progressively reconciled to one another as new facts became available through instruments such as crime surveys, battle fatigue set in, scholars mellowed with age, and the pragmatics of having to work together continually in departments, committees, and journals began to supersede the earlier, heady pleasures of intellectual struggle. Yet what the young Turks had succeeded in constructing was an inchoate, exciting, and ambitious discipline that bore all the marks of its diverse origins, earlier quarrels, and competing aspirations, a discipline that was never regulated or subject to the imposition of professional entry requirements, one that could be memorably described by David Downes as a ‘rendezvous’ subject that was shaped by the confluence of many ideas and schools around an empirical area rather than a single orthodoxy.

SociologicalCriminology

Sociological theories of crime are wide-reaching, extending, for example, from an examination of the smallest detail of street encounters between adolescents and the police to comparative analyses of large differences in rates of recorded crime between nations (see Lacey 2008) and over long swathes of time (see Eisner 2003 and Spierenburg 2008), and it is sometimes difficult to determine where their boundaries should be drawn. Two of the sociological criminologists most influential in the development of the discipline ↵ once defined it in very broad terms as ‘the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the processes of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting towards the breaking of laws’ (Sutherland and Cressey 1955: 3). There is as a result no one, royal way to lay it out. In an empirically driven subdiscipline where formally different theories often contend with the same problems in very much the same way, as useful a procedure as any is to identify and describe a number of families of theories that share some big idea or ideas in common.

I shall, in particular, attend to the key themes of control, signification, and order. Crime is, after all, centrally bound up with the state’s attempts to impose its will through law; with the meanings of those attempts to lawbreaker, law-enforcer, observer, and victim (Condry 2010); and with concomitant patterns of order and disorder. Criminologists differ about the weights and meanings that should be attached to those attributes: some, and control theorists in particular, would wish to be what David Matza once called ‘correctionalist’, that is, to use knowledge about crime to suppress or change it. Others would look upon the exercise of control even more critically. Some are more hostile to interpretive sociology than others (see Clarke 1980). But they all feed off one another’s ideas even if their practices and politics diverge. The ideas addressed here map the discipline’s more visible features, and I shall employ them to steer a more or less straight route through Durkheimian and Mertonian theories of anomie; control theories; rational choice theory; routine activities theory; the work of the ‘Chicago School’; studies of the relations between control and space, including Newman’s ‘defensible space’, and more recent ideas of risk and the

marshalling of dangerous populations; experimental criminology; radical criminology and Left Realism; functionalist criminology; and ‘labelling theory’ and cultural and subcultural analyses of crime. I shall take it that such a grand tour should encompass most of the major landmarks which criminologists would now consider central to the foundations of their field.

What this chapter cannot do, of course, is provide substantial context, history, criticism, and detail. That would be impossible in a relatively short piece, although the rest of this Handbook may be read as its frame. Neither is this chapter concerned with theories of penology or governance. Like any scheme of classification, it is further inevitable that it will face some problems of anomaly and overlap, not only internally but also with other chapters. If the study of crime cannot be severed from the analysis of control, the state, or gender, there will always be such problems at the margins. But the chapter should both furnish the larger contours of an introductory map of contemporary sociological theories of crime and serve as a complement to those other chapters.

CrimeandControl

Anomieandthecontradictionsofsocialorder

I shall begin by describing anomie theory, one of the earliest, most enduring and, for a while, hardresearched of all the ideas of criminological theory, and one that still persists, albeit occasionally in disguised form.

At heart, many theories, lay and scholarly, take it that crime is a consequence of defective social regulation. People are said to deviate because the controls and authority of society are so weakened that they offer few restraints or moral direction. The idea is a very old one, antedating the emergence of sociology itself, but its formal birth into theory is linked indissolubly with anomie and the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim.

↵ Durkheim awarded two rather different meanings to anomie, or normlessness. In The Division of Labour in Society, published in 1893, and in Suicide, published in 1897, he asserted that a French society undergoing industrialization was in uneasy transition from one state of solidarity or social integration to another. A society without an elaborate division of labour rested on what he called (perhaps misleadingly) the mechanical solidarity of people who not only reacted much alike to problems, but also saw that everyone about them reacted alike to those problems, thereby lending objectivity, scale, unanimity, authority and solidity to moral response, and bringing a potential for massive disapproval and repression to bear down on the deviant. Such a social order was conceived to lie in the simpler past of a less differentiated pre-industrial society. The future of industrial society would be distinguished by a state of organic solidarity, the solidarity appropriate to a complex division of labour. People would then be allocated by merit and effort to very diverse positions, and they would not only recognize the legitimacy of the manner in which rewards were distributed, but also acknowledge the indispensability of what each did in his or her work for the other and for the common good. Organic solidarity would thus have co controls peculiar to itself: ‘Sheerly economic regulation is not enough … there should be moral regulation, moral rules which specify the rights and obligations of individuals in a given occupation in relation to those in

other occupations’ (Giddens 1972: 11). People might no longer think wholly in unison, their moral response might not be substantial and undivided, but they should be able to compose their differences peaceably by means of a system of restitutive justice that made amends for losses suffered.

Durkheim’s distinction between the two forms of solidarity and their accompanying modes of control was anthropologically suspect (see Llewellyn and Hoebel 1941), but it was in his analysis of the liminal state between them that criminologists were most interested. In that transition, where capitalism was thought to impose a ‘forced division of labour’, people acquiesced neither in the apportionment of rewards nor in the moral authority of the economy or state. They were obliged to work and act in a society that not only enjoyed a precarious legitimacy but also exercised an incomplete control over their desires. In such a setting, it was held, ‘man’s nature [was to be] eternally dissatisfied, constantly to advance, without relief or rest, towards an indefinite goal’ (Durkheim 1952: 256). Moral regulation was relatively deficient and people were correspondingly free to deviate, perhaps in a manner defiant towards the existing political and social order (Sherman 2010). That is the first meaning Durkheim gave to anomie. His second will be visited below.

Given another, distinctively American, complexion by Robert Merton, anomie became a socially fostered state of discontent and deregulation that generated crime and deviance as part of the routine functioning of a society which promised much to everyone but actually denied them equal access to its attainment (Merton 1938). People might have been motivated to achieve success in the United States, the society on which Merton focused, but they confronted class, race, and other social barriers that manifestly contradicted the myth of openness. It was not easy for a poor, inner-city adolescent to receive sponsorship for jobs, achieve academic awards, or acquire capital. In a society where failure was interpreted as a sign of personal rather than structural weakness, where failure tended to lead to individual guilt rather than to political or collective anger (Newman 2006), the pressure to succeed could be so powerful that it impelled people thus disadvantaged to bypass legitimate careers and take to illegitimate careers instead: ‘the culture makes incompatible demands … In this setting, a cardinal American virtue—“ambition”— promotes a cardinal American vice—“deviant behavior”’ (Merton 1957: 145).

↵ Merton’s anomie theory was to be modified progressively for some thirty years. In the work of Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960), for example, it was elaborated to include illegitimate routes to success. Their Delinquency and Opportunity (1960) described the consequences of young American men (in the 1950s and 1960s the criminological gaze was almost wholly on the doings of young American men) not only being pushed into crime by the difficulties of acquiring money and position in conventional ways, but also being pulled by the lure of lucrative and unconventional criminal careers. There would be those who were offered an unorthodox path in professional or organized crime, and they could become thieves, robbers, or racketeers. There would be those for whom no path was available, and they could become members of conflict gangs. And there were those who failed to attain admission to either a law-abiding or a law-violating group, the ‘double failures’, who would, it was conjectured, give up, retreat and become drug-users and hustlers. Each of those modes of adaptation was, in effect, a way of life, supported by a system of meanings or a subculture, and Cloward and Ohlin provided one of the bridges between the structural and the interpretive models of crime which will be discussed towards the end of this chapter.

And then Irving Spergel went even further to add patterns of community organization to the model, describing Racketville, Slumtown and Haulburg as the environments in which organized crime, conflict gangs, and professional crime could flourish (1973).

In the work of Albert Cohen (1957), anomie was in effect to be synthesized with the Freudian idea of ‘reaction formation’ in an attempt to explain the manifestly expressive and ‘non-rational’ nature of much delinquency. The prospect of failure was depicted as bringing about a major psychological rejection of what had formerly been sought, so that the once-aspiring working-class adolescent emphatically and expressively turned his back on the middle-class world that spurned him and adopted a style of behaviour that was its systematic inversion. The practical and utilitarian in middle-class life was transformed into non-utilitarian delinquency; respectability became malicious negativism; and the deferment of gratification became short-run hedonism. Again, in the work of David Downes, conducted in London in the early 1960s to explore how far beyond America anomie theory might be generalized, the ambitions of English adolescents were found to be so modulated by the presence of relatively abundant, albeit low-paid, jobs and what was then a stable and legitimated system of social stratification that working-class youth did not seem to undergo a taxing guilt, shame, or frustration in their failure to accomplish middle-class goals. They neither hankered after the middle-class world nor repudiated it. Rather, their response was ‘dissociation’. Where they did experience a strong dissatisfaction, however, was in their thwarted attempts to enjoy leisure, and their delinquencies were principally hedonistic, focused on drinking, fighting, and malicious damage to property, rather than instrumentally turned towards the accumulation of wealth. And that theme—of the part played by the adolescent ‘manufacture of excitement’ and the courting of risk— was to be echoed repeatedly in the empirical and theoretical work of criminologists thereafter. Making ‘something happen’ in a world without significant cultural or material resources could easily bring about a drift into delinquency (see Matza 1964; Corrigan 1979; Cusson 1983; Katz 1988; Presdee 2000). Indeed, it was to be distinctive of much delinquency. Ferrell, Hayward and Young, for example, talked about how many young people ‘push themselves to ‘the edge’, and engage there in ‘edgework’, in search of an ‘adrenalin rush’, authentic identity, and existential certainty; they lose control to take control’ (2008, p. 72).

An incarnation of anomie theory is thus to be found in muted form in ‘Left Realism’ and its successor, ‘cultural criminology’, where the idea of structural tension is integrated ↵ with that of the social meanings of the act to produce a conception of delinquency as a motivated, often hedonistic response to the inequalities of capitalism. ‘The Mertonian notion of contradiction between culture and structure’, wrote Jock Young, himself the father of ‘left realism’ turned father of ‘cultural criminology’, ‘has run throughout all my work, from The Drugtakers onwards’ (2004: 553). I shall return to Left Realism below. It is also found implicitly in an interesting book, written by epidemiologists and only sporadically related to crime, which suggests that rates of mental illness and violence, including homicide, are tied to levels of income inequality within societies (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). The more unequal a society, they argue, the greater is its abundance of social problems, and the tempting conclusion is that the illegitimacy and blockages inhering in social arrangements conduce to strain (which they call stress) and criminal violence. Rosenfeld and Messner would add that societies whose key sectors were out of joint with one another can be distinguished by what they call ‘institutional anomie’, a state of malintegration particularly acute when the economy ‘dominates the institutional balance of power’ (2013: 61) and ‘non-economic functions and

roles’ are comparatively eroded and devalued. Market achievements will trump other forms of success; work can trump the demands of community, family, church and school; and structural restraints and informal controls will be corroded.

Anomieandsocialdisorganization

The second reading of anomie stemming from Durkheim touched on moral regulation that was not so much flawed as in a critical or chronic state of near collapse. People, he argued, are not endowed at birth with fixed appetites and ambitions. On the contrary, their purposes and aspirations are shaped in part by the generalized opinions and reactions of others, by a collective conscience, that can appear through social ritual and routine to be externally derived, solid, and objective. When society is disturbed by rapid change or major disorder, however, that semblance of solidity, authority, and objectivity can itself founder, and people may no longer find their ambitions subject to effective social discipline. It is hard to live outside the reassuring structures of social life, and the condition of anomie was experienced as a ‘malady of infinite aspiration’ that was accompanied by ‘weariness’, ‘disillusionment’, ‘disturbance, agitation and discontent’. In extreme cases, Lukes observed, ‘this condition would lead a man to commit suicide and homicide’ (1967: 139).

Durkheim conceived such anomic deregulation to be a matter of crisis, innately unstable and short-lived. Disorganization could not be tolerated for very long before a society collapsed or order of a sort was restored. Indeed, sociologists are generally ill-disposed towards the term, believing that it connotes a lack of understanding and perception on the part of the observer (see Anderson 1976; Katz 1997; and Whyte 1942). It is indeed evident that informal control can survive even in the most adverse circumstances (see Walklate and Evans 1999) and, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Congo, Sierra Leone, or Uganda at their most devastated, people seem able to sustain a measure of organization within disorganization. Yet, on both the small and the large scale, there are also clear examples of people living in conditions where informal control and cooperation are only vestigial; where formal control is either absent or erratic; where others are, or are seen to be, predatory and dangerous; where life is unpredictable; and where, as cause and consequence, there is little personal safety, much anxiety, and abundant crime. Take William Julius Wilson’s description of life in the poorest areas of the American city: ‘broken families, antisocial behaviour, social networks that do not extend beyond the ghetto ↵ environment, and a lack of informal social control over the behaviour and activities of children and adults in the neighbourhood’ (1996: xvi). On some housing estates in Paris (Wacquant 2008), London (Genn 1988), Nottingham (Davies 1998), and St Louis (Rainwater 1970), social groupings have been portrayed as so lacking in cohesion that they enjoyed no shared trust, neighbour preyed on neighbour, and joint defensive action was virtually impossible.

Rampant anomie has been well documented, especially by Erikson who described in a succession of studies the radical disorganization and collapse of social order flowing from natural and not so natural disasters (such as the breaking of a dam and the destruction of a community) (1979, 1991,1994). Consider Davis’s half-prophetic description of MacArthur Park, one of the poorest areas of Los Angeles, as ‘feral’ and dangerous, ‘a free-fire zone where crack dealers and street gangs settle their scores with shotguns and Uzis’ (1992a: 6). Consider, too, Turnbull’s (1973) description of the condition of the Ik of northern Uganda,

a tribe that had been moved to a mountainous area after their traditional hunting grounds had been designated a national park. They could no longer live, collaborate, and work as they had done before; familiar patterns of social organization had become obsolete; and they were portrayed as having become beset by ‘acrimony, envy and suspicion’ (1973: 239), ‘excessive individualism, coupled with solitude and boredom’ (ibid.: 238), and the victimization of the weak (ibid.: 252).

A number of criminologists and others have pointed to parts of the world, commonly called ‘failed states’, whose political structures have been so radically weakened and disordered that it becomes difficult to talk about legitimate governments operating effectively within secure national boundaries at all (see Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999). So it was that Kaplan wrote graphically about the road-warrior culture of Somalia, the anarchic implosion of criminal violence in the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone, which he depicted at the time as a lawless state that had lost control over its cities at night, whose national army was a ‘rabble’, and which was reverting to tribalism. The future for many, he melodramatically predicted, would be a ‘rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerilla conflicts’ (1994: 62–3). So, too, Martin van Creveld analysed what he called the ubiquitous growth of ‘lowintensity conflict’ waged by guerrillas and terrorists who threatened the state’s conventional monopoly of violence: ‘Should present trends continue, then the kind of war that is based on the division between government, army, and people, seems to be on its way out … A degree of violent activity that even as late as the 1960s would have been considered outrageous is now accepted as an inevitable hazard of modern life’ (1991: 192, 194). If Kaplan and van Creveld are even partially gifted with foresight (and much of their argument is quite stark), the trends they foretell will be of major consequence to criminology. Without a viable state legislature, laws, and law enforcement, without adequate state control over the exercise of violence, how can one manage to write intelligently about a discrete realm of crime at all? Crime, after all, is contingent on a state’s ability clearly to define, ratify, and execute the law. When the police of a state are massively and routinely corrupt (as they appear to be in Mexico); when, for example, the Colombian president’s aeroplane was found to be carrying large quantities of cocaine (see the New York Times, 22 September 1996); when ISIS vied with a weak state and weak occupiers to impose control over large reaches of Syria and Iraq; and when a President of Liberia was accused of cannibalism (The Times, 2 November 1999); it is not difficult to ask with Stan Cohen whether it is possible any longer to distinguish firmly between crime and politics. There has been, he asserted, ↵ a widespread decline of the myth that the sovereign state can provide security, law, and order; a decline in the legitimacy of the state through corruption scandals; a growth of international crime and a rise of criminal states such as Chechnya; and, in Africa particularly, the emergence of barbarism, horror, and atrocity. In some settings, he remarked, ‘lawlessness and crime have so destroyed the social fabric that the state itself has withdrawn’ (1996: 9).

Controltheory

A second, large, and linked cluster of theories centres loosely around the contention that almost all people seek to commit crime because it is possible, profitable, useful, or enjoyable for them to do so, and that they will almost certainly break the law if they can. Even if that contention, with its covert imagery of feral man (and woman), is not strictly convincing, control theorists would argue that it directs enquiry in a helpful

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