Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain
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This chapter presents an interpretation of the historical development of criminology in Britain. Any such history is inevitably a contentious undertaking, entailing theoretical choices and rhetorical purposes as well as the selection and arrangement of historical materials. Whether they acknowledge it or not, histories of the discipline necessarily come up against fundamental issues—What is ‘criminology’? What are its central features? How are its conceptual and historical boundaries identified? In what institutional, political, or cultural contexts should it be situated? It may therefore be useful to begin by outlining some of the theoretical assumptions that underpin the interpretation offered here. I take criminology to be a specific genre of discourse and inquiry about crime—a genre that has developed in the modern period and that can be distinguished from other ways of talking and thinking about criminal conduct. Thus, for example, criminology's claim to be an empirically grounded, scientific undertaking sets it apart from moral and legal discourses, while its focus upon crime differentiates it from other social scientific genres, such as the sociology of deviance and control, whose objects of study are broader and not defined by the criminal law. Since the middle years of the twentieth century, criminology has also been increasingly marked off from other discourses by the trappings of a distinctive disciplinary identity, with its own journals, professional associations, professorships, and institutes. One of the concerns of this essay will be to try to explain how such a discipline came to exist as an accredited specialism, supported by universities and governments alike. My broad historical argument will be that modern criminology grew out of the theoretical debate by other means. The recovery of a lost theoretical tradition, the reinterpretation of the subject's early history, claims and counter-claims about the true ‘founders’ of the discipline, or critical summaries of previous patterns of thought, are all ways in which the subject's history gets drafted into current controversies and made to do duty for one side or the other. The history of the discipline has, on a few occasions, formed the central subject matter for a book or an article. Most of these excursions into historical criminology are minor attempts to attribute importance to a particular author whose influence upon the subject is felt to have been slighted, but some historical writings have more ambitious intentions. Books such as Mannheim's Pioneers in Criminology (1960), or Radzinowicz's Ideology and Crime (1966)—both published by leading figures in the process of discipline-building-played an important role in shaping the contours and self consciousness of the discipline, and sought to enhance its status by invoking a distinguished Enlightenment past and a progressive scientific mission. The collection entitled The History of British Criminology (Rock 1988a)—edited by one of the sociologists who helped remake British criminology in the 1960s and 1970s—professes similar discipline-forming ambitions, aiming to introduce new generations of criminologists to a revised history more in keeping with contemporary interests and understandings. It is not just the textbooks that have to be adjusted when a discipline changes; history must also be rewritten. The received history of the discipline, often simplified into a tale of icons and demons (Beccaria, Lombroso, Burt, Radzinowicz . . . ), a few key distinctions (classicism, positivism, radicalism . . . ), and an overarching narrative in which ideological error is gradually displaced by the findings of science ( e.g., the myth of the born criminal and its subsequent debunking), plays a small but significant role in shaping the horizons and reference points of contemporary criminology. A discipline's practitioners work with a sense of where their subject has come from and where it is going, which issues are settled and which are still live, who are the exemplars to imitate and who are the anathemas to be avoided. Perhaps most importantly, the received history provides practitioners with a standard-issue kit of collective terms and shared values. Thus, for example, anyone who learned about the discipline's history from the textbooks of the 1970s and 1980s would find it hard to identify with the methods and aspirations of ‘positivism’, even though this term was broad enough to include virtually the whole discipline prior to the rise of 'labelling' theories and the associated anti-positivist critiques. The standard textbook account of criminology's history begins with the writings of criminal law reformers in the eighteenth century, particularly Beccaria, Bentham, Romilly, and Howard. These writers are said to have characterized the offender as a rational, free-willed actor who engages in crime in a calculated, utilitarian way and is therefore responsive to deterrent, proportionate penalties of the kind that the reformers preferred. This ‘classical school of criminology’, as it is usually called, was subsequently challenged, in the late nineteenth century, by writers of the ‘positivist school’ (Lombroso, Ferri, and Garofalo are usually cited) who adopted a more empirical, scientific approach to the subject, and investigated ‘the criminal’ using the techniques of psychiatry, physical anthropology, anthropometry, and other new human sciences. The positivist school claimed to have discovered evidence of the existence of ‘criminal types’ whose behaviour was determined rather than chosen and for whom treatment rather than punishment was appropriate. Subsequent research refuted or modified most of the specific claims of Lombroso, and restored the credibility of some of the 'classicist' ideas he opposed, but the project of a scientific criminology had been founded, and this enterprise continues, in a more diverse and sophisticated way, today. This standard textbook history is, of course, broadly accurate-it would be very surprising if it were not. But the broad sweep of its narrative and the resounding simplicity of its generic terms can be profoundly misleading if they are taken as real history, rather than as a kind of foundational myth, developed not for historical purposes but for heuristic ones.
Source Publication
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology
Source Editors/Authors
Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, Robert Reiner
Publication Date
2002
Edition
3
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain" (2002). Faculty Chapters. 684.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/684
