Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain
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This essay 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 which underpin the interpretation offered here. I take criminology to be a specific genre of discourse and inquiry about crime—a genre which has developed in the modern period and which can be distinguished from other ways of talking and thinking about criminal conduct. Thus, for example, its 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 this 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 central 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 convergence of two quite separate enterprises—‘the governmental project’ and ‘the Lombrosian project’—which together provided a social and an intellectual rationale for the subject. By talking about a ‘governmental project’ I mean to refer to the long series of empirical inquiries, which, since the eighteenth century, have sought to enhance the efficient and equitable administration of justice by charting the patterns of crime and monitoring the practice of police and prisons. This tradition of inquiry was eventually to become a major part of the criminological enterprise and to provide criminology with its central claim to social utility. The ‘Lombrosian project’, in contrast, refers to a form of inquiry which aims to develop an etiological, explanatory science, based on the premise that criminals can somehow be scientifically differentiated from non-criminals. Although each of these projects has undergone important revisions during the twentieth century, and the situation of criminology has been significantly altered by its entry into the universities, I will suggest that the discipline continues to be structured by the sometimes competing, sometimes converging, claims of these two programmes. One pole of the discipline pulls its members towards an ambitious (and, I have argued elsewhere [ . . . ]deeply flawed) theoretical project seeking to build a science of causes. The other exerts the force of a more pragmatic, policy-orientated, administrative project, seeking to use science in the service of management and control. Criminologists have sometimes sought to overcome this tension by rejecting one project in favour of the other—either giving up the search for causes in favour of a direct policy orientation, or else disengaging from governmental concerns in the name of a pure (or a critical) science. However, the combination of the two seems essential to criminology's claim to be sufficiently useful and sufficiently scientific to merit the status of an accredited, state-sponsored, academic discipline. The coming together of these two projects was by no means inevitable. The historical record suggests that it took several decades for officials to accept that the Lombrosian search for the causes of crime had any relevance to their administrative tasks, and, in fact, Lombroso's criminology had to be extensively modified before it could be of service to policy-makers and state authorities. Beyond that, the very idea of a science devoted to ‘the criminal’ seems in retrospect to have been something of an historical accident, originally prompted by a claim that was quickly discredited: namely, that ‘the criminal type’ was an identifiable anthropological entity. Were it not for the contingency of that intellectual event there might never have been any distinctive criminological science or any independent discipline. As an historical counterfactual, it is perfectly plausible to imagine that crime and criminals could have remained integral concerns of mainstream sociology and psychiatry and that ‘criminological’ research undertaken for government purposes could have developed without the need of a university specialism of that name. If this is so, and criminology has a contingent rather than a necessary place in the halls of science, then its history becomes all the more relevant to an understanding of the discipline. In the light of the assumptions and arguments I have outlined here, history becomes essential to an understanding of the modern criminological enterprise. If we are to understand the central topics which criminology has marked out as its own, if we are to understand the discipline's relation to institutional practices and concerns, if we are to understand some of the key terms and conceptions which structure the discourse, then we will have to ask genealogical questions about the constitution of this science and examine the historical processes which led to the emergence of an accredited disciplinary specialism. Moreover, the kind of historical inquiry required is one which is sensitive to context and contingency, and to the relation between intellectual developments and the social practices out of which they emerge. If my claim is correct, and criminology is a product of the convergence of certain ideas and interests, in a particular institutional context, then its history cannot be treated, as it so often is, as the gradual unfolding of a science which was always destined to appear. Such is the prevalence of this kind of history that it may be worth discussing the shortcomings of received accounts, before going on to sketch an alternative approach.
Source Publication
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology
Source Editors/Authors
Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, Robert Reiner
Publication Date
1997
Edition
2
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain" (1997). Faculty Chapters. 696.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/696
