CRIMINOLOGY

Criminology

Criminology

Currently the role of criminology in understanding crime and influencing policy is on high mark. Criminology has many meanings but at its widest and most commonly accepted it is taken to be the scientific understanding of crime and criminals. But such a definition will really not get us very far. For hidden within the term there come many different topics, different approaches to 'science' and different disciplines.

Travis Hirschi (1993) noted that a portion of Criminology lacked a sense of rational history and showed a resultant movement toward shopworn and outmoded biological explanations of criminal behavior. This was often joined with a hypothetical vacuum and augmented federal funding. This kind of research is called by Hirschi as “Administrative Criminology” consistent as it is with the requirements of government bureaucrats.

Much criminology stays firmly within the existing confines of the criminal law. Criminology explores the bases and implications of criminal laws - how they emerge, how they work, how they get violated and what happens to violators. (Bobbitt 2003, 17-29) But we know that laws vary from time to time and from place to place. Laws are relative, and always historically shaped. Even something as seemingly universally condemned as killing others has its moments when it is acceptable (e.g. in war). Many criminologists believe therefore that they should not be confined by the bounds of law - this would make criminology a very traditional, orthodox and even conservative discipline. Rather, criminologists should also be able and willing to take on wider matters. (Matthews 2005, 175-201)

Criminologists have mostly followed the criminal law in adopting an apolitical concept of crime. They paid limited attention to both political crime and the political power to criminalise. The article traces efforts to redress this since the 1960s. It nevertheless remained a minority concern, mostly of critical criminology. Yet crime has been politicised in various ways by other developments, also examined in the article. The events of 9/11 have crowned the emergence of crime as a strategic security issue posing a challenge to criminology to engage with politically inspired crime and its control.

The phenomenon of political crime has been neglected in western criminology, attracting the attention of only a relative handful of scholars. From the 1960s a small number of critical researchers sought to broaden the horizons of criminology, exploring the manner in which much deviant behaviour embodied, however inchoately, elements of protest against the prevailing social, moral and political order. Yet other critical scholars switched the focus altogether by concentrating on state crime. The impact of this work on mainstream criminology, however, remained limited and probably diminished as the optimistic climate of radical protest in the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the neo-conservative chill of the Thatcher/Reagan years, the implosion of Soviet communism and the apparent global triumph of western capitalism. Many pioneers of critical criminology came in from the cold, renounced any lingering romanticism concerning the protopolitical character of crime and embraced a new realism. Other scholars in this period worked away in areas like terrorism ...