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Kempa--Lecture2TwinStreamsAutosaved1.pptThe Twin Streams of the Discipline of Criminology
Criminals, Crime // Justice Institutions and Social Systems
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What Is Criminology?
- A rendezvous point for many disciplines, providing unique perspectives (which includes their strengths and liabilities) on issues of crime, criminality, criminal justice, security, and public safety.
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- “The body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes the processes of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting to the breaking of laws. Its objective is the development of a body of general and verified principles and of other types of knowledge regarding this process of law, crime, and treatment.”
- Linden goes on to note “this definition implies that criminologists take a scientific approach to the study of crime”; perhaps not though!!!!
- Science: Deductive – testing predictive theories based on observed data, with the objective of improving theories’ predictive power
- Post-Modern – analytic, more Inductive – looking at the world to explain HOW we have gotten to where we are, not so much WHY
Causes vs. Conditions of Possibility
Explanations vs. problematizations
Prediction vs. description
Testing vs. analysis
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Why are we here?
- Objective One: Conceptualization/Categorization
Individualistic versus macro accounts
Consensual versus conflict perspectives
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Situate what you read and therefore what you think somewhere in this grid – what kind of theory is this? What kind of theorist am I?
Typology of Theories/Approaches to Criminology
macro
Micro/individualistic
consensualist
conflict
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| systems analysis | systems critique |
| why do people offend? | how are individuals harmed by crime and criminal justice processes? |
Stream one: systems analysis and critique
- Cesare Beccaria
On Crimes and Punishments (1764) is one of the most influential texts of this "classic school" of criminology.
Beccaria concerned himself with the question of how the criminal justice system -- of which the law is of course an important component -- ought best to be structured in addressing the issue of crime.
- Science of criminal justice: certain, swift, proportionate – what WORKS to reduce crime and produce collective safety?
Beccaria = the beginnings of a scientific theory of punishment and criminal justice: building theories as to ‘what works’ to control crime
Break down his worldview in terms of our categorisation of theories grid = what does he think about individuals? Why do we behave the way we do? What is society like? Is it perfect, fair but flawed and correctible, or fundamentally unjust?
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Stream two: what makes offenders tick?
- Cesare Lombroso:
The pathology of criminals -- Lombroso's insistence on the accurate and deliberate measurement of the physical abnormalities of known criminals has for many established him as the first fully "scientific" criminologist
While this particular approach to theorizing crime causation was eventually to be discredited through the wake of evidence supporting counterargument, the principles of the Italian school of positivism were gradually to become influential not only in intellectual circles but in the development of less uniform and more individually oriented forms of penal treatment.
Critique Lombroso’s ‘science’: is it good science???
How did he find his ‘sample’ population?
Is his data generalizable to the population at large (are his measures reliable?)? Did he use a control group? Or did he just go and measure people who were already in prison?
Are his measures ‘good’ (valid) indicators of what he thinks he is measuring? If we are looking for an earlier stage of human evolution, is a tattoo a valid measure of your genetics?
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Context of the Rise of Criminology
- The birth of the nation-state
A shifting balance from private power to state power – in reality and in our imaginations (corporate power has never gone away)
- Criminology matured over the course of the heyday of the nation-state: it is a ‘state knowledge’
Macro, structural context that supported the rise of ideas coming from people like Lombroso and Becarria.
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- Competing interpretations of the rise of the nation-state: consensualist versus conflictual approaches
- Social contract theory: Hobbes’ Leviathan
- Karl Marx: the dictates of capital
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See Kueneman in your Linden reader! Esp pgs 44-59
Consensualist Views of Society: Hobbes’ Leviathan and the ‘Social Contract’
According to this worldview, “the Sovereign” derives his power from us: each one of us, assuming we are “rational”, would agree to give up a bit of our freedom in order to be safe. If we did not, we would be killed and harmed by other humans, who are assumed to be nasty, selfish critters. So, in this drawing, you see the body of the sovereign is made up of millions of little citizens…he watches over us, and can smite anyone who misbehaves with the sword…and the scepter means he has to do so fairly (according to rules and codes).
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Conflict Views: Modes of Production as Driving Forces for Change
- Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture
- Industrial – forcing a progression from local (tribalist) to sovereign (mercantilist/feudalism) to elected state (capitalist) authority
- Instrumental vs. Structural vs. Conceptual accounts
- See: Kueneman, Rodney and Evan Bowness. "The social context of dispute settlement and the rise of law", in Linden, Chapter 2.
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Macro context: the Enlightenment
- A macro social belief in the power of the scientific method to illuminate the truth of social life, and thus help us solve our problems.
- 400 years of conflict and continuing problems have made us wary and skeptical of uncritical or unreflexive scientific social intervention (promoting post-modern approaches)
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