The Place of History in British Criminology: 20th-Century Developments (original) (raw)

Who gave historical criminology a name? A history of 20th-century historical criminology

Journal of Criminal Justice, 2022

While popular interest in notorious criminals and their deeds can be said to be perennial, 'crime history' and 'criminal justice history' were scarcely explored subjects in the 1970s. Over the past 50 years or so, however, the history of crime and criminal justice has matured into an internationally recognized field of research, and the British Crime Historians have been meeting regularly since 2008. The contribution of criminologists to the development of a historiography of crime and criminal justice remains a relatively under-explored topic in this burgeoning academic field. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of the place of historical criminology within the historical study of crime. The paper traces the usage of the term 'historical criminology'-mostly in the English languagethroughout the 20th century with the aim of developing a preliminary history of historical criminology.

Historical criminology and the explanatory power of the past

Criminology & Criminal Justice

To what extent can the past ‘explain’ the present? This deceptively simple question lies at the heart of historical criminology (research which incorporates historical primary sources while addressing present-day debates and practices in the criminal justice field). This article seeks first to categorize the ways in which criminologists have used historical data thus far, arguing that they are most commonly deployed to ‘problematize’ the contemporary rather than to ‘explain’ it. The article then interrogates the reticence of criminologists to attribute explicative power in relation to the present to historical data. Finally, it proposes the adoption of long time-frame historical research methods, outlining three advantages which would accrue from this: the identification and analysis of historical continuities; a more nuanced, shared understanding of micro/macro change over time in relation to criminal justice; and a method for identifying and analysing instances of historical recur...

THE HISTORICIST OBJECTION TO HISTORICAL CRIMINOLOGY

Law, Crime and History, 2022

A central question surrounding the historical study of crime today concerns whether studying crime historically has a valuable contribution to make to the reform of criminal justice in the present or whether its scope should remain limited to providing a more satisfactory understanding of past crime-related phenomena. This paper problematises such a question by critically discussing the relationship between the history of crime and criminal justice policy. While it seems intuitive to suggest that historical works in criminology can positively effect change in the field of criminal justice, the historical study of crime, punishment and criminal justice presents historical criminologists with a key methodological challenge that has not yet received sufficient scrutiny by historical criminologists; that of overcoming historicism. The paper starts by showing that the dominant influence of historicism on Western historiography up until the middle of the twentieth century prevented the flourishing of historical works in criminology. It then suggests that, in the second half of the twentieth century, a number of historical works on crime started to move away from the historicist conception of history as spectator theory of the past thanks to the popularisation of present-centred historiographies such as Foucault's history of the present. Lastly, the paper reviews some recent writings at the intersection of history and criminology to show that overcoming historicism in the historical study of crime is possible but also that there are limits to history's capacity to contribute to present-day debates about topics of criminological relevance.

From Deviance to Censure: A ‘New’ Criminology for the Nineties

The Modern Law Review, 1996

Most disciplines tend to hive off the task of interrogating their foundational assumptions and preconceptions to sub-specialisms such as jurisprudence or the philosophy of science, if such awkward questions get asked at all. By comparison, self-inspection and reappraisal seem to be at the heart of the criminologist's enterprise and to occupy a good portion of his or her time. Is criminology, then, the paranoid science? Since self-awareness can easily become self-obsession the possibility of neurosis cannot be dismissed out of hand. Yet, it seems reasonable to suggest that criminology's reflexivity is by and large a healthy sign of maturity.' At its best, criminology exhibits a willingness to interrogate its own structuring assumptions and categories, and is explicit about its value-commitments and the consequences of espousing them. Other disciplines would, I think, be improved by cultivating similar character traits. Self-examination is often a painful process, however, and when criminology looks at itself today it does not like what it sees. The mantra that work of real theoretical significance has dried up in recent years has been recited with sufficient frequency to achieve a kind of orthodoxy.2 Some of the writers who were in the vanguard of an exciting and relevant criminology in the 1970s have since distanced themselves from the di~cipline.~ And if criminology thought that it could dine out on the feminist revolution in the social sciences, it could think again: free lunches,

The 'Death of Deviance' and the Stagnation of Twentieth Century Criminology

The publication of Colin Sumner's (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary marked a critical transformation in the theorisation of crime and criminality. In a work that offered a narrative history of criminological theory from Durkheim's ( [1895) Sociological Method to ) The New Criminology, Sumner explored the rise and fall of early sociological explanations for criminality, the emergence of a new perspective and a radical transformation of the discipline during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The original 'sociology of deviance' -the book's initial object of study -emerged during the 1920s as an early attempt to offer a sociological theory of criminal causation. Its reliance on a normative perspective, however, left little room for the putative plurality of social norms in light of the counter-cultural ideals of the nineteensixties. In these circumstances Sumner goes on to identify an increasingly forceful pluralist critique that placed greater emphasis on the potential illegitimacy of normative prohibitions, the censorious nature of centralised power and hysterical social reactions to the perceived deviance of subordinate groups.

Deconstructing Criminology's Origin Stories

The global production of knowledge is grossly skewed to the northern Anglophone world (Hogg et al. in International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 6(1), 1– 7, 2017; Connell 2007). It should be no surprise therefore that criminology's origin stories are derivative of northern experiences, yet generalised as universal theories of crime causation. In this article, we argue that the origin stories of criminological theory translated the 'darker', 'hairier' and 'muscular' masculinities of the global south into prototypes of dangerousness. These prototypes were first articulated as scientific claims in the nineteenth century works of Lombroso, but have been refined and embedded in mainstream criminological discourses well into the present, mainly through the quantitative study of social disorganisation, 'race' and racialised masculinities as variables in crime causation. The paper concedes that while deeply troubling expressions of violent masculinity exist now and in the past in the global south, it is mistaken to conceive this violence simply as expressions of atavism or social disorganisation associated with a less civilised world. On the contrary, this paper argues that the violence of colonality itself has had, and continues to have, a criminogenic impact on the present.