Criminology in Europe

It has been traditional for ESC conference chairs to summarize criminology in their country, but given the scale of criminology in the UK, this would be too daunting, even a somewhat bizarre task. Instead, I have made a non-random selection of components of it that I consider to be illuminating. In the light of the identity politics of contemporary Europe (and Brexit), it is useful to remind ourselves of the non-British European origins of the first generation of ’British’ criminologists and sociologists of crime: (alphabetically) Norbert Elias, Max Grünhut, Hermann Mannheim, and Sir Leon Radzinowicz, all of them Jews escaping Nazism, giving the contemporary interest in atrocity crimes and State Crime a rounded historical feel. However as various histories of criminology in Britain emphasise, British criminology has grown up in the shadow of American criminology and sociology.1 It would be a mistake to view US criminology as monotonic, but there is greater concordance in the quantitative focus there than there is in the UK, with a proportionately small US sub-set of qualitative feminist, queer and critical criminology. Work falling into this latter category is published largely in specialist, rather than in elite, criminology journals, which are inhospitable to articles that fall outside their data-rich framework unless these articles/pieces have particularly big theoretical things to say. Some aspects of crime and crime control are more difficult than others to capture within the ‘quant’ or experimental frameworks and one unintended consequence of methodological fiats is the dearth of ‘organised crime’ and ‘white-collar crime’ papers in the top ‘approved’ journals in the US, publication in which determines academic careers in prestigious universities. Top British and European journals are more diverse in their content, in keeping with Edwin Sutherland and Donald Cressey’s original definition of criminology as the study of the processes of making laws, breaking laws and society’s reaction towards the breaking of laws. This breadth is important to remember and sustain in the face of (a) approaches that ignore the politicality of choices about what we do with crime and offenders, and (b) the zemiological and ‘left idealist’ critiques, which often sideline or ignore legal constructions, such as ‘crime’, as inappropriate categories for judging harm or for what the late Richard Sparks (of Cambridge and Rutgers) termed marxisant analysis.

When David Downes discussed criminology as a ‘rendezvous subject’, he may have been thinking about the eclectic mix of backgrounds of many staff and students at graduate level. My colleague Adam Edwards suggested to me that criminology could be viewed as the first post-disciplinary subject, lacking the clear dogma and lineage of both sociology and psychology. Let us take as an example the growing field of ‘environmental crimes’ - the plural here being deliberate to avoid artificial homogenisation and confusion from ambiguity. Clearly this is different from ‘environmental criminology’, a term appropriated by international ‘crime science’ successors to the ecological school of criminology to refer to the confluence of offender, opportunities and physical/social guardianship. The denotation of ‘environmental crimes’ ranges from national and transnational trafficking of exotic wildlife and timber, through allegedly intended (Volkswagen ‘dieselgate’ and others) deception and pollution of public and regulators, to unintended if careless or reckless corporate pollution, to intentional toxic waste dumping in unapproved sites. Brisman and South (2017), Hillyard and Tombs (2017), Walters (2017) and White (2015) provide some radical conceptual discussions of the boundaries of environmental ‘crime’ and ‘harm’, one implication of which is that every act (whether currently illegal or not) that profits from damage to any component of ‘the environment’ – broadly construed – should be included. This sidesteps one significant component of criminology – the politics and consequences of criminalisation – but I suggest that readers contemplate what would not count as environmental harm under the broadest approaches, and consider whether this is a sensible way of applying the epithet ‘crime’, e.g. if ‘ordinary’ meat production is treated in the same scale as food adulteration (such as in the European horsemeat fraud scandal). Essentially, this dissolves criminology as a subject into general social analysis.

Despite his many reservations about criminology as a discipline, the late Stan Cohen was critical of concepts, like social control, which become so indiscriminate as to be of little practical utility. Arguably, concepts such as harm sometimes fail to engage in the politics of criminalisation and, therefore, with the normative limitations placed on state interference in private lives that accompany debates about the proper scope of criminal law, which are eroded by growing trends in preventative ‘justice’. One of the virtues of treating criminology as a ‘rendezvous subject’ and field of study is that it can and should stimulate dialogue and enable people to talk with, rather than at or past, one another, and to cultivate constructive argument. As the late Roy Bhaskar noted, if there are no clear common referents, there is no argument: people are just talking about different things. British criminology embodies this diversity, but there are – and always have been since the National Deviancy Conference of 1968 broke the then rather narrowly framed governmentality of the Cambridge monopoly of crime and crime control studies – factions that choose not to engage with each other and that make intellectually monopolistic claims.

Criminology as a subject of study in the UK

When I was a student and a young lecturer, to the extent that criminology was available at all as an undergraduate subject in the UK, it was usually as one optional course in a law or sometimes social science degree. For law students, it was a ‘soft’ change from the intensively insular ‘black letter’ subjects and usually analysed the Anglo-American criminal justice process, the evidence on capital punishment and principles of sentencing, plus a section on why people committed crimes. For social scientists, it was an outgrowth of anomie and new deviancy theories, and/or with the Marxist models of economic and social organisation in which crime was a merely symptomatic tributary. The only criminology postgraduate course in 1971 was at Cambridge, where we were awarded a Diploma, the subject not being deemed yet worthy of the masters’ title it was granted shortly after Larry Sherman’s year (though I don’t think there is any causal connection). When I was appointed to Cardiff in 1975, that was one of two new lectureships in criminology in the UK that year, and that was more new posts than there were in the next few years. Gradually the subject took off during the 1980s as crime and crime control became defined as a more central socio-political problem in the UK and police procedurals became a central part of television (now media streaming) culture. Now criminology has largely eclipsed sociology in student popularity, and competes with sociology in attendance at conferences, et cetera.

Particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, the European Police College (CEPOL) facilitates criminology and CJ studies (especially policing) in police academies, some of which turned into universities – e.g. Germany, Norway. Alphabetically, in former communist countries, at least Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, ‘Macedonia’, Poland, Serbia, and Slovenia offer undergraduate programmes in criminology, but what that constitutes varies greatly, ranging from ‘criminalistics’ and ‘crime science’ to sociological criminology. But despite notable growth in the Netherlands, still, the majority of European criminology and criminal justice Masters and PhD programmes are offered in the UK. Cardiff was the first of the UK research-intensive Russell Group universities to offer a single honours undergraduate criminology degree, but several others have now followed, reflecting student demand and the supply of staff. There are interpretative difficulties with the codes used, but some 106 UK universities offer 804 undergraduate degree courses that involve criminology (https://unistats.direct.gov.uk keyword= ’criminology’).  Using the keyword ‘policing’ yields a further 94 courses offered at 30 UK universities. Using the keyword ‘justice’ yields 103 courses at 50 UK universities: this includes Youth Justice, Social Justice, and Criminal Justice courses.

Criminological research funding and influences

Partly because of the formal commitment of successive British governments to evidence-based policy, and partly because of the role of the ‘old’ Home Office Research Unit(s) in researching some areas of crime control and of NGOs, such as the Howard League in critiquing penal policies, the UK has always been a market leader within Europe in expenditure on criminological research and in debates about crime and criminal policy, which is not to assert that the UK has the most sensible policies on crime control.

Juanjo Medina (2011) observes that nothing elsewhere compares to the funds in the Home Office Research and Statistics Directorate (RSD) or its US federal counterpart, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), though Cindy Smith (2011) notes that expenditure does not translate directly into better policy. The high-water mark of sponsorship of criminological research in the UK was the 10 percent of the £250 million of Crime Reduction Programme funds allocated to research (but not all spent) from 1999. As Mike Maguire (2004) noted in his critical assessment of the programme (p. 231): “the main research lessons have been about weaknesses in project planning (and in some cases project management) and the frustrations of attempting to get projects ‘up and running’ to tight time scales in the face of difficulties in recruitment, bureaucratic delay and negotiations with partner organizations.” To some extent, Smith, Medina and the wider European research community may be the slaves of historic criminological memories. True, there were at one time over 100 directly employed researchers in the Home Office RSD: but these are largely long since gone, some dispersed to the policy areas (such as serious and organised crime, including cybercrime) by Paul Wiles’ reforms when Chief Scientific Officer at the Home Office (and equivalents in the UK regions) to ‘mainstream’ research to the service of policy, and mainly distributed to the growing criminology posts in UK universities. This is also true of research commissioned by the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish Office, and the Welsh government. (Wales does not yet have a separate police or justice system, but is getting there – and health policies including alcohol, drugs and tobacco are devolved to its government.). The irony is that as a result of these modernising government reforms commenced in the Thatcher era, spending on crime and justice research has become both less and less transparent collectively than it used to be.

The critiques of Home Office dominance of the criminological agenda by Rod Morgan (2000) and Rod Morgan and Mike Hough (2007) (and others) were well reasoned, but they have been overtaken somewhat by events, especially by austerity. In 2005-6, the RSD research budget was £24.4 million, of which two-thirds was contracted out to universities and consulting firms. Now the sums spent on research by the Home Office and Ministry of Justice (and its equivalents in the constituent nations) are not disclosed but are significantly smaller than they used to be, and commissioned funds are spent on consultancies as well as universities. ‘Gold standard’ randomised control trials (RCT) research tends to be very expensive, and therefore eats into austerity-limited funds: but if research is small scale, it may have insufficient impact on policy. Police and Crime Commissioners fund some research but in relatively small and seldom coordinated ways. Think Tank-type reports use research, but seldom do large-scale projects. There are also a few independent bodies, such as the Dawes Trust, who have funded innovative research. Research Council expenditure on criminological research is not aggregated, but the budget of the research funding agency of the UK government for social sciences, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), is modest compared with Councils responsible for other disciplines: at £618 million, it is 5.75% of the total Research Council spending 2016-2021. And the ESRC does not specify any particular areas as priorities to which criminology is relevant, outside the Partnership Against Conflict, Crime and Security, which, in 2017, spent some £1 million on eleven interdisciplinary projects on transnational organised crime, in an attempt to remedy the neglect of that area. (I am the sole criminologist member of the PaCCS strategic advisory group.) Its budget for global conflict and cybersecurity research is much larger. (Part of the ‘Peace Dividend’ in Northern Ireland has been the development of expertise in transitional justice, from which other conflicted parts of the world – mainly but not only in the Global South – can learn.) Finally, there is the European Commission (and to a much lesser extent the European Parliament), which has funded a range of mainly Europe-wide projects related to its core mandates, almost all aimed at informing policy, as well as some more fundamental projects: one concern of UK criminologists (and UK University heads) is the financial and cultural loss of European connectivity in what have become increasingly international collaborative projects.

In short, it would be wrong to argue that despite the significant fall in government department funding compared with the 1980s and early 1990s, ‘government’ (broadly construed) has little influence on research in the UK. The government and formal institutions such as the police and the HM Prison and Probation Service (formerly, National Offender Management Service, NOMS) are gatekeepers of access to criminal justice institutions on which much criminological work depends, and the complex web of interlocking relationships retains official influence, though in a less centralised way than previously existed. The privatisation of research and the growth of university criminology departments and units means that officials can choose researchers upon whom they can rely, and the policing of quality and what research methods are necessary to demonstrate it becomes a critical concern. Finally, the growth of the ‘social impact’ component of the Research Excellence Framework gives British academics a further rationale for focusing on areas of crime and justice on which they can plausibly claim research impact, and the implications of this for research independence have yet to mature or be fully understood. There is some irony that as criminology has become ever more studied, research expenditure has declined. In addition to the need for independence of analysis, one of the major challenges for criminology in Britain is to sustain and develop its research base as crimes and methods of regulating crimes evolve. This has happened to some extent with cyber-related crimes, but elsewhere, there has been less advance.

The breadth of Criminology in the UK

An indicator of the breadth of UK criminology is the subject matter of prizes awarded. In 2017, the book prize was awarded to Philippa Tomczak (2017) for ‘The Penal Voluntary Sector’; Anastasia Chamberlen (2016) won the Women, Crime and Criminal Justice paper prize, in Theoretical Criminology. The policing paper prizes went to Dominic Wood (2016), Policing and Society; and to Kath Murray and Diarmaid Harkin (2017), British Journal of Criminology. This represents a broad range of topics, journals and approaches (though they contain no experimental or high quant methods). This has been the pattern of previous years. Moreover, the winners (and runners up) came from a broad range of universities, though Oxford, Cambridge, London (and – it has to be admitted – Cardiff) were not represented in the 2017 prize list. This institutional and gender (if not ethnic) diversity is an important feature of British criminology, as it was also among criminology finalists at the Economic and Social Research Council Impact prizes.

The implication is that whatever may be the broader cultural international hegemony of the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, good quality research as judged by the British Society of Criminology is much more distributed. Criminology does not yet have a separate identity in the Research Excellence Framework for publications, research environment and social impact, but its contribution helped Cardiff become the top ranked UK sociology department that included criminology in 2014. In many other universities, criminology played a prominent role in enhancing their social policy and law results in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the periodic scholarship and impact assessment of UK universities: currently, each institution has a choice about what subject area it puts criminology into, and this makes it difficult to compare ‘performance’ overall.

There have been and continue to be many schisms within criminology. Experimental criminology, ‘Crime Science’ and the use of RCT still evoke controversy over their cost, their limited application to newer and transnational harms (e.g. online and offline organised and white-collar crimes), and their relative neglect of the personal, political and institutional dimensions of implementation and of social control generally. Conversely, some criminologists also are simply not particularly interested in ‘what works’, whether done experimentally or via other forms of systematic review: this is connected to wider (dis)respect for falsifiability and statistical methods. As Susanne Karstedt observed in response to one of the late Jock Young’s excoriations of statistical criminology in favour of qualitative analysis, ‘you are the only people who cannot be proven wrong’. David Wall memorably referred to cybercrime as primarily ‘new wine in old bottles’, but there is little doubt that the Internet and social media have generated immense scale on harms of various kinds, including hate crime as well as economic crimes: this is a challenge for the validity of crime and victimisation statistics and for ‘hot spot’ analysis based only on offline crimes. But despite our obsession with all things digital, we should remember that the offline hate crimes that accounted for most of my family being killed (in various pogroms and the Shoah) and led to my being British have hurt and killed vastly more people of diverse ethnicities, gender identities, nationalities and religions, than has anything online to date.

There has been a recent surge of interest in transnational crimes, from ‘crimmigration’ to grand corruption, assisted by WikiLeaks, the Panama Papers, and suchlike revelations. And there has been a melding together of some components of ‘organised crime’ and ‘white-collar crime’, as elite scandals make many wonder whether motor manufacturers that seriously misrepresent their vehicles’ toxicity or international banks/law firms that persistently fail to notice large flows from corrupt dictators and drugs syndicates may not be properly labelled as ‘organised criminals’, even though they are only part-time (alleged) criminals. However, these crimes and mechanisms of crime delivery still attract the interest of only a small minority of British (or American) criminologists. Likewise, the shift to the ‘how’ of crime that emanated from routine activities/situational crime prevention and is also manifested in ‘script’ analysis should be a component of more explanatory models than it is. Mostly, people do whatever interests them, what they can get published, and what they can get access to and money to research (if they need money): intellectual debate and conference programming needs to take account of these myriad interests and foci. We should celebrate this diversity of perspective rather than, like investment bankers, seek to monopolise the market for our own intellectual and methodological products.

Criminological Conferences

Despite the reduction in crime since the 1980s, criminology remains very popular in all the constituent parts of the devolved UK. In 2017, the number attending the British Sociological Association conference in Manchester was 832, the second best ever, compared with 350 for the British Society of Criminology conference at Sheffield Hallam (a number also attained by Cardiff in 1993, the first time we hosted it). The number attending the ESC in the glorious city of Porto was 1,400, which we may compare with the largest ever total of 6,000 (boosted by 986 Japanese scholars) attending the last (now 4-yearly) International Sociological Association World Congress in Yokohama in 2014. Like the ESC, the ISA has also been on an upward trajectory, though only a small number attend its crime and deviance and sociology of law sessions. Attendance at the biennial European Sociological Association conferences has doubled since 2007, and was 3,459 in Prague. Considering the range of areas within sociology and the fact that unlike sociology, the ESC is annual, this is an impressive ratio of criminology to sociology.

It is easy to mistake the homogeneity of different institutional groupings of criminologists in the UK. However, even in institutions which trumpet their distinctive experimental, qualitative or crime science focus, there are normally significant variations, and there is no inherent conflict between qualitative and quantitative work provided that we recognise their limitations and strengths of scope and insight. There are many smaller and more specialist colloquia which cater for like-minded people, but the opportunity for this more generous spirit of deliberation is a reason for the expansion of the ESC into one of the largest annual meetings of professional social scientists in Europe. Rather than attempt a systematic review of criminology in Britain, I chose to highlight some features that will be both implicit and explicit in the European Society of Criminology 2017 conference in Cardiff, that will be held in Wales for the first time and in the (dis)United Kingdom for only the second and hopefully not the last time. We look forward to criminologically rendezvous-ing with you in Cardiff in September. Let us hope that the weather is not as variegated as the criminology: but the welcome will be warm, whatever.

Mike Levi is Professor of Criminology at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, and heads the Programme Committee of the 2017 ESC Annual Conference.

References

Brizman, A. and South, N. (2017) Green criminology. In Liebling, A., McAra, L. and Maruna, S. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 6th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chamberlen, A. (2016). Embodying prison pain: Women’s experiences of self-injury in prison and the emotions of punishment. Theoretical Criminology, 20(2), 205-219.
Hillyard, P and Tombs, S. (2017). Social Harm and Zemiology. In Liebling, A., McAra, L. and Maruna, S. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 6th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maguire, M. (2004). The Crime Reduction Programme in England and Wales: Reflections on the vision and the reality. Criminal Justice, 4(3), 213-237.
Medina, J. (2011). Doing criminology in the ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’: In search of a post-colonial criminology, in Smith, C., Zhang, S. and Barbaret, R. (eds.) Routledge Handbook of International Criminology
Morgan, R. (2000). The politics of criminological research. In King, R. and Wincup, E. (eds.), Doing Research on Crime and Justice, 1st ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, R. and Hough, M. (2007). The politics of criminological research. In King, R. and Wincup, E. (eds.), Doing Research on Crime and Justice, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murray, K. and Harkin, D. (2017). Policing in Cool and Hot Climates: Legitimacy, Power and the Rise and Fall of Mass Stop and Search in Scotland, British Journal of Criminology, 57 (4), 885-905.
Smith, C. (2011). Introduction to international research challenges, in Smith, C., Zhang, S. and Barbaret, R. (eds.) Routledge Handbook of International Criminology.
Tomczak, P. (2017). The Penal Voluntary Sector. London: Routledge.
Walters, R. (2017, forthcoming). Social Harm and the Political Economy of Food, Bristol: Policy.
White, R. (2014). Environmental Harm: An Eco-Justice Perspective, Bristol: Policy.
Wood, D. (2016) The importance of liberal values within policing: police and crime commissioners, police independence and the spectre of illiberal democracy, Policing and Society, 26(2), 148-164.

¹ The extent to which continental European criminology – or rather parts of it –- has grown up in the shadow of US and/or British criminology is too large a topic for this essay. In case readers are puzzled by the use of the UK here, Great Britain includes England, Wales, Scotland (and, for some, Cornwall!). So to include Northern Ireland, we need to use the United Kingdom. For euphony, I will occasionally use British to include Northern Irish.