Politics and Policy in Criminological Discourse: A Study of Tendentious Reasoning and Rhetoric
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Throughout the history of their discipline, criminologists have endeavoured to maintain a distinction between what they say as scientists and what they do as political citizens. Indeed this distinction has been so important that a revision of its terms has been seen to lead to a major revision of the discipline itself, as the case of ‘radical criminology’ makes clear. The conventional position is that while individual criminologists may well be politically committed—usually to particular penal policies and legal reforms—these concerns and values should be kept quite separate from the “purely logical or purely scientific appreciation of facts” which their science demands. In other words, a firm distinction is maintained between criminology as a scientific discourse and criminology as a programme of penal reform. Of course no one has ever denied that these two projects have accompanied and complemented one another. Indeed this pairing of ‘science’ and ‘policy-relevance’ has been criminology’s major asset in the struggle for research funding and institutional recognition. But nonetheless the convention continues that an interest in matters of policy should not impair one's integrity in matters of science. That this imperative has been more of an ideal than an actuality docs not detract from the point at issue. In fact, those instances where writers have recognisably failed to maintain the separation (and one might include here the case of Cyril Burt) have served only to re-affirm the distinction's importance. On the other hand, this ideal has not been without its detractors. Indeed on occasion the very possibility of distinguishing ‘politics’ from ‘science’ has been denied, leaving us with an epistemological nihilism which has no means of knowing the world, only a policy for judging it. The argument which will be presented here differs from both of these positions. It will proceed not by denying the possibility of such a distinction, nor by chastising individual failures to observe it, but by arguing that the concepts and discourse of criminology have been developed in a manner which has silently but steadfastly refused any such distinction, i.e. that criminological discourse has always been ‘political’. Perhaps I can clarify this argument by approaching the issue from a slightly different angle. A related problem is registered in the philosophy of science by the distinction between the ‘external’ and the ‘internal’ history of a theory. It is argued by lmre Lakotos (1981), that in order to explain the foundation of a science, its initial orientation and the energy behind its formation, one must make reference lo external social, political and cultural conditions. However, once a scientific project is reasonably well-established, these external factors will tend to become marginalised as the internal logics and methods of reasoning of the science itself take over. If this internal scientific take-off occurs, then concepts will be developed, investigation or experiments undertaken, data will be accumulated and analyses refined, in accordance with the increasingly autonomous logic of the discipline. In other words, to the extent that this internal logic asserts itself, the social origins of the science will tend to fade into its pre-history. This pattern of development has been charted for a number of disciplines, and most notably in regard to the history of statistics in Britain—which in some ways overlaps with the history of criminology. However, if the discipline of statistics has partially succeeded in shrugging off its political parentage, my argument will be that criminology shows no signs of following a similar path of maturation. Indeed it will be argued that this lack of autonomy from politics and ‘external’ ideologies is an inescapable feature of the discipline of criminology as it has developed in this country over the last 100 years. The aim of this paper will be to move from this initial criticism to a demonstration of precisely how such political and ideological elements entered into a discourse which prides itself on its scientificity and value-freedom. There is no doubt that criminology’s initial formation, in the 1870s and 1880s, owes a great deal to external events. I have tried to trace the complex history of these events elsewhere, so perhaps I may be forgiven for simply asserting here that criminology is not a product of scientific reasoning and discovery. It is rather a product of the prison, of the institutions and ideologies which individualised and differentiated the criminal, and of the social desire to do so in a thorough and rigorous manner. Criminology, as others have pointed out, is not a science, nor even a knowledge which aspires to scientificity. It is a social-problem-solution which utilises some of the methods and much of the prestige of other scientific disciplines. Its objects of study—and this applies as much to present day criminology as to that of a century ago—are the ‘criminal’ and the forms of ‘criminality’. These objects are neither real entities nor theoretical products but are instead socially-defined problems in need of a scientific solution. The ‘criminal’ or his ‘criminality’ become objects of study precisely because they are chosen targets of particular social policies. Theoretically, the criminal has no more right to a science of his own than do the law-abiding or the ‘honest poor’—who in some ways pose more difficult questions. The argument of this essay will be that this ideological foundation—this social problem raison d'être—taken together with the reforming concerns of criminologists, crucially affects the subsequent development of the discipline. Instead of settling down to a development which is internally directed in accordance with the patterns of theoretical logic, criminology is continually transformed and directed by external factors—by the demands of penal policy, political viability and ideological conformity. In other words, criminology's policy programme—its external relations and its external history—continues to assert its ideological effect upon the ‘science’ of criminology. The two cannot be separated because they are interdependent—the science is the programme and the programme is the science. Precisely because criminology's object is a social problem—defined by policies, ideologies and state practices—its ‘external’ origins will always be internal to it.
Source Publication
Criminal Policy Making
Source Editors/Authors
Andrew Rutherford
Publication Date
1997
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Politics and Policy in Criminological Discourse: A Study of Tendentious Reasoning and Rhetoric" (1997). Faculty Chapters. 695.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/695
