Weather and Crime

Newburn’s Criminology is a massive and comprehensive introduction to criminology widely used by and for undergraduates.  It’s over 1,000 pages long, of which the index is nearly 20, and appears to contain no mention of weather.  I know from my wider reading of the history of criminology and of contemporary common-sense criminology that weather has been associated with crime in the past and still.

The Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology is equally silent on weather but has much to say about climate.  Specifically these two books (Climate Change from a Criminological Perspective Edited by Rob White and Criminological and Legal Consequences of Climate Change Edited by Stephen Farrall, Tawhida Ahmed and Duncan French) take the matter further but make little mention of weather other than as evidence of climate change.

Tom Clarke, Science Editor of Channel 4 News, phoned the other day asking if I could talk about weather and crime and off the top of my head I came up with socio-cultural aspects of our adaptation to hot weather that might increase opportunities for some crimes.  And indeed PC Rain, the copper’s friend.  I was interviewed in the blazing sun outside the Cafe next to ITN’s building in Gray’s Inn Rd for about ten minutes.  What survived is in here.

Tom mentions climate change in the package.  Perhaps he means it in the common sense way of getting hotter rather than the increased instability of the weather.  This is what green criminology talks about.  Crimes caused by changing political economy responding to long term climate change not short run weather.

The Howard Journal Virtual Reader Volume 4 Research Methods Selected and introduced by me

Go to the Virtual Issues page of the Howard Journal to see articles

This volume is a selection of 18 articles published in the Journal from 2001-2010 that are interesting and valuable in their own right but illustrate practical and theoretical issues around doing research. It is hoped that researchers, whether students, practitioners or experienced academics will find these useful. Not unsurprisingly many of these articles relate to prisons but other elements of the criminal justice system or aspects of crime are considered too. The contents or findings of the research are touched on but here the main concern is the methods chosen and discussion of them. It is slightly artificial but to assist more quickly finding a relevant article they are grouped below as quantitative and qualitative. Additionally the full, and often, self explanatory titles have been bolded and a keyword highlighted. But first some ethical issues and ‘mixed methods’ by way of introduction. 

Introduction: ethics and mixed methods 

Prison is, in many jurisdictions, the most extreme removal of human rights. In England and Wales one ongoing human rights dispute is the extent to which prisoners should have the right to vote (Hirst v the United Kingdom) but the first article presents a more stark affront to a prisoner’s human rights. 

Geraint Osborne examines ‘Scientific Experimentation on Canadian Inmates, 1955 to 1975’. Once it was established that prisoner’s claims to have been experimented on were true it was the ethical issues that came to the fore. It is this ethical issue that means this article is put first. 

The psychologists and pharmacologists and their backers decided that their research was justified by the context of the time. The research/human-rights-breach/abuse comprised: sensory deprivation, electric shock ‘therapies’, extreme cold, tranquiliser and LSD prescription, toxicity and allergy tests. All with ethical approval at the time and sometimes the ‘consent’ of the prisoner. Results were often mixed and rarely or poorly written up. The article usefully runs us through the history of modern ethical concerns, the Nuremberg Code and Helsinki Declaration - the final draft of which omitted a specific ban on the use of prisoners. 

The methodologies war may have died down but there are still cultural, political and attitudinal disagreements over methods. Some now seek to avoid these issues by opting for ‘mixed-methods’. The majority of these articles use single methods but often refer to others or follow on from other research. However the work of Samantha Banbury is considered next as she uses a variety of methods and also addresses the ethical issues raised by her own research and that of others. 

The Howard League have, at the time of writing, announced their intention to research sex in prison: consensual sex in prisons; coercive sex in prisons and healthy sexual development among young people in prison. Banbury’s article concentrates on, ‘Coercive Sexual Behaviour in British Prisons as Reported by Adult Ex-Prisoners’ but also reports to occurrence of consensual sex. She used both one-to-one interviews (106) and self-completed questionnaires (302) elicited by adverts in the personal columns of mainstream and alternative press. Ethical issues and absence of official assistance lead to the use of ex-offenders. Differences in the actual content of adverts (describing or not describing the purpose of the study) lead to some respondents being tagged as ‘victims’ (200) and the rest as ‘participants’ (208). ‘Victims’ were more likely to report concerns and a history of victimisation but ‘participants’ were far from immune. Some ‘victims’ reported being perpetrators. The self selected nature of the samples and raft of disaggregated data means it is difficult to draw conclusions but the sheer quantity of material and some of the qualitative observations make it a good place to start. 

We turn now to quantitative methods. 

Quantitative 

It might be said that the sine qua non of quantitative methods is the survey. In ‘The Performance of Volunteer Appropriate Adults: A Survey of Call Outs’ Harriet Pierpoint sets out why and how she did her survey in a very clear fashion relating it to the methodological literature and her own critical reflection. In her conclusion she supports the method chosen but examines participant observation and the use of a police interview simulation video. Importantly she recognises that the survey method allowed her to find the proportion of volunteer appropriate adults who contributed or did not contribute during an interview but not how appropriate that was.

Lorraine Sheridan et al in ‘The Course and Nature of Stalking: A Victim Perspective’ also use a survey but not of their own. The sample and 46 item questionnaire was provided by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust of 95 individuals who had approached the Charity about being stalked. Necessarily their methods discussion is much shorter and its limitations noted. As the first survey just after the change in the law in E&W on stalking it has some value but other methods and researcher controlled data would be better. 

If surveys are the typical of the quantitative method then surveys of public opinion are the archetype. They are the method most often used by and in the media to tell ‘us’ about ‘ourselves’ and in ‘Individual Differences in Public Opinion about Youth Crime and Justice in Swansea’ Kevin Haines and Stephen Case found, ‘local public opinion is shaped by national media and political rhetoric, rather than the local realities of youth offending.’ Their survey asked 500 people 18-64, and an impressive (even for an opportunity sample) 496 replied, about youth crime in Swansea. They set out a methodology and justification and even include some of their questions and helpfully review some of the literature on such surveys including the British Crime Survey. 

We now turn to the variety of qualitative work - often forms of interviews but also observation, documents and focus groups. As we shall see ethical issues continue to feature. 

Qualitative 

Whilst it is a qualitative piece of work Cowburn’s ‘Men Researching Men in Prison: The Challenges for Profeminist Research’ raises many theoretical and practical issues that arise in research. Nine men imprisoned for sex offences told him their life histories in semi-structured interviews based around life transitions. They were serving sentences of between four and ten years. Six had offended against children and three against adults. Only one had previous convictions for sexual offences. All of the men were white and aged between 25 and 61. The interviews lasted between four and seven hours in total. Running through epistemology and feminist interventions he interrogates his own position as white male researcher and concludes, perhaps in hope, ‘To listen, to record and, in publication, to critique dominant male practices from a clear and explicit standpoint, may be a positive way forward for further research’ (2007: 287). 

Nowhere is such a challenge greater than in work with sex offenders and Nicholas Blagden and Sarah Pemberton cite Cowburn in ‘The Challenge in Conducting Qualitative Research With Convicted Sex Offenders’. They examine the recruitment of participants, informed consent, establishing researcher-participant rapport, avoiding collusion and ensuring confidentiality and anonymity and reflect on the social, political and ethical-legal dilemmas, as well as the emotional aspects (both for the researcher and participant) of researching such populations. For instance: in one interview the participant was recalling his account of the offence and he offered the justification that the offence was not rape, but ‘rough sex’. This was followed by the disclaimer: ‘all men like rough sex’ and then the tag question: ‘you can’t tell me you don’t like rough sex? Come on be honest’. This was an uncomfortable moment and one where the male researcher’s values were the object of the interview. (2010: 273) 

Cowburn was considering the issue of gender in a single sex situation. Clare Byrne and Karen Trew’s ‘Pathways Through Crime: 

The Development of Crime and Desistance in the Accounts of Men and Women Offenders’ directly compares nine male and nine female offenders accounts of their lives and offending and specifically addresses gender. Semi-structured interviews were supplemented with access to official records as all were attending offending behaviour programmes run by the Probation Board for Northern Ireland. 

But as with much qualitative work some rigorous and sometimes quantitatively oriented methods may be required. As they say: 

Interview data were analysed in detail through processes of: categorisation (clustering and describing like units of data); conceptual analysis (exploring links between categories to develop abstract concepts); relating emerging concepts to existing theories; and ultimately generating a ‘theory’ of offending grounded in the interview data. In order to explore gender during this process, data from men’s and women’s accounts were analysed independently and then in light of one another, then in light of existing theoretical frameworks. (2008: 241) 

Gwyneth Boswell’s research for ‘Imprisoned Fathers: The Children’s View’ involved interviews with fathers in prison, partners in the community and staff at prisons but crucially with 17 children. The data on the 209 families involved showed 424 children under 18. Through the mother/carer 25 were approached and 17 agreed to be interviewed. A further 8 wee partially interviewed as part of the mother’s interview. No claim is made that this is representative of the sample. It included only one black child and no children on YOI fathers. The intention was to give the children a ‘voice’ within the wider research. On the ethical front; it was already clear to the child that the father was in prison, indeed half of the interviews occurred in prison visit centres and they were accompanied by their mother. The article then provides many quotes from the children on various aspects of their experience of having a father in prison. 

And it is with ‘voice’ we stay This time listening to very persistent young adult offenders. The in-depth interviews in Wing Hong Chui, Bill Tupman and Colin Farlow’s ‘Listening to Young Adult Offenders: Views on the Effect of a Police-Probation Initiative on Reducing Crime’ include offenders’ attitudes to offending, self-explanations for their criminality, views of peer associations and the usefulness of the Project ARC intervention. The eleven offenders’ first hand accounts also offer insight to the police and probation services on how the project can and should be further improved in order to reform their offending behaviours. 

Ros Burnett and Shadd Maruna's ‘So ‘Prison Works’, Does It? The Criminal Careers of 130 Men Released from Prison under Home Secretary, Michael Howard’ is a rich analysis in its own right and reanalysis of Burnett's earlier work , ‘The Dynamics of Recidivism’. It is also a case study in what can happen to your research as it was (mis)used by Michael Howard. They reanalysed her prospective work and then followed up the offenders she had interviewed ten years earlier. They found that offenders often had a good appreciation of the challenges facing them and their chances of ‘going straight’ - or desisting in the terminology. It was ‘hope’ not prison that worked. 

Better known for their ethnographic work, Geoffrey Pearson and Dick Hobbs, offer interviews with ‘middle market’ (the which definition they discuss) illegal drug dealer/distributors and enforcement personnel to provide a case study of one network. In ‘King Pin? A Case Study of a Middle Market Drug Broker’ they also reveal the ‘glocal’ nature of such networks and even cooperative and trust-based actions and not the early resort to violence that might be expected. Pearson and Hobbs note the prevalence of studies of drug consumption and the rarity of those on drug supply. 

Our next article is one of those rare ones and cites Pearson and Hobbs. The work that Ben Crewe did for ‘Prison Drug Dealing and the Ethnographic Lens’ was at a medium-security men’s prison. Prison ethnographies are rare but have, ‘formed the cornerstone of the field’ (2006: 347) and this one examines the part played by heroin in the internal economy. The method of ‘reserved participation’ and long interviews provided a case study of three dealers. In addition to setting out his method and findings Ben discusses the value of ethnography and reasons for its decline in criminology in the face of quantitative penology. He also addresses the difficulties that some researchers face in setting up such research - having a good sponsor helps. 

Far from prison but equally constrained we find South Asian women experiencing domestic violence. Aisha Gill’s ‘Voicing the Silent Fear: South Asian Women’s Experiences of Domestic Violence’ allows 18 women to ‘speak’ through interview about ‘honour’, ‘shame’ and domestic violence at the hands of husbands and mothers-in-law. The women were contacted through refuges and she sets out the methods and efforts to prevent the process becoming one-sided. 

Gill’s women were hidden in many ways but Elaine Crawley and Richard Sparks find a different and unexpected ‘injured’ group, older men convicted of imprisonment which they describe in, ‘Hidden Injuries? Researching the Experiences of Older Men in English Prisons’. In this they consciously follow Sennett and Cobb’s ((1993) [1972] The Hidden Injuries of Class, New York: Norton.) emphasis on a biographical understanding of structural people’s positions. They breezily observe, ‘The simple fieldwork tasks that we dignify with the name of ‘method’ were as follows: 

(i) Observation (...) 

(ii) Prisoner interviews (80 in depth ...) 

(iii) Staff interviews (11 one hour interviews ...) 

A further ethical note is provided in their endnotes when they reveal that one prisoner respondent asked that his tape only be listened to by the team (so not by an outside transcriber) because he had discussed his suicidal thoughts and another feared he might be identified. 

The biographies in Crawley and Sparks were taken in interview but Mike Nellis argues for the use of already existing written ones. In ‘Prose and Cons: Offender Auto/Biographies, Penal Reform and Probation Training’ he argues that the few uses of such materials should be extended to the training probation officers. Whilst this work is now 10 years old it contains good starting points for research into the lives of prisoners through their auto/biographies. And Tracy Irwin adds her own experience of teaching in Maghaberry Prison in ‘The ‘Inside’ Story: Practitioner Perspectives on Teaching in Prison’. 

Many of these qualitative articles have used interviews as part of their research armoury, Sarah Miller, Carly Sees and Jennifer Brown introduce us to focus groups as a method in their ‘Key Aspects of Psychological Change in Residents of a Prison Therapeutic Community: A Focus Group Approach’. As they say in their abstract, ‘In an attempt to gain a person-centred perspective of therapeutic change, exploratory focus groups were conducted with men in Dovegate Prison’s Therapeutic Community (TC)’. They set out: the design (four focus groups with 27 men encouraged to see themselves as co-researchers); sample (resident in the TC between 1 and 18 months an aged 22 to 57); procedure (2 researchers low involvement facilitator and note taker with a wide and deep topic range attending to specific and contextual factors) and analytical (searching for meaningful themes across and not within the group). They report that Dovegate’s resident found the method a good one to discuss their experiences. 

Conclusion 

These articles offer a wide variety of methods and a wide variety of engagement with methods. Whilst not selected by using quantitative means we might conclude that qualitative methods have been the preferred method in research published by the Howard Journal. This represents no bias at the journal but might in its potential contributors. 

Serial Killers made in the media: My failure to become a media tart

Earlier this month I received an email from a production company making a new series on serial killers for Sky. They had picked up my name as I’ve written with David Wilson about one of his TV shows but did not want him.  Perhaps he’s seen to be over-exposed.  I exchanged emails and a phone call with the associate producer.  I sent them links to my appearance on Sky News and interview with George Galloway to prove my media chops.

I’ve just heard I’ve not got the gig.  Apparently someone else has been chosen.  I know personally of another criminologist who deleted the email without debate seeing it as inherently trashy.  In my phone and email conversations I made no specific claim to knowledge of serial killers as a sociologist but was well aware of the sociology of victim selection and of media fascination and would want to focus on that. 

As an example of the non-Cracker line I proposed to take I pointed out the work of Drew Gray's London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City who looks at the Whitechapel Murders whilst remaining true to the historical data without becoming ripperological. I pointed out Darrell Hamamoto’s ‘Empire of Death: Militarized Society and the Rise of Serial Killing and Mass Murder’ where he argues for a link with the Vietnam war.  Also Allan LeRoy Branson’s The Anonymity of African American Serial Killers: From Slavery to Prisons, A Continuum of Negative Imagery  offers a different take on the usual story.

I agree with  Kevin Haggerty & Ariane Ellerbrok when they say: 

In fact, serial killing is intimately tied to its broader social and historical setting, something that is particularly apparent when such killing is considered in relation to a series of broad historical changes that have occurred over approximately the past 400–500 years, commonly associated with the rise of modernity.

Perhaps it was such theory heavy language that put them off, or, perhaps because I asked for a fee.  But I’d like to think it was because what I proposed to say didn’t fit the usual media narrative.  I await with interest hearing who has taken on the job and what they do.  Expect more posts if I disagree or feel used.  So while we wait, this will have to do.  Is this my pitch for a properly academic series?

In Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI  Robert K. Ressler and Thomas Schachtman set out how they came up with the term ‘serial killer’ seeing that we/they are ‘lured back to see another episode, because at the end of each one there was a cliff-hanger’.  Having come up with the concept the concept the definition has proved more difficult as the FBI make clear:

In the past thirty years, multiple definitions of serial murder have been used by law enforcement, clinicians, academia, and researchers. While these definitions do share several common themes, they differ on specific requirements, such as the number of murders involved, the types of motivation, and the temporal aspects of the murders. To address these discrepancies, attendees at the Serial Murder Symposium examined the variations in order to develop a single definition for serial murder.

Previous definitions of serial murder specified a certain number of murders, varying from two to ten victims. This quantitative requirement distinguished a serial murder from other categories of murder (i.e. single, double, or triple murder).

Most of the definitions also required a period of time between the murders. This break-in-time was necessary to distinguish between a mass murder and a serial murder. Serial murder required a temporal separation between the different murders, which was described as: separate occasions, cooling-off period, and emotional cooling-off period.

[...]

In combining the various ideas put forth at the Symposium, the following definition was crafted:

Serial Murder: The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.

Many people cite a figure of three as a minimum and emphasise a time gap as the template of the Whitechapel Murders demands (note I don’t speak of Jack, a ‘purely’ media construct).

Harold Shipman therefore meets any of the proffered definitions with over 200 victims over more than twenty years but I wish to demur.  It may be that Shipman’s victims were wrong too in terms of media narrative.  That is not young women.  The case of Trevor Joseph Hardy illustrates some of these issues.  Wilson et al (2010) argue serial killing is now a ‘media event’, as Hardy’s case shows even murdering three young women lead to little coverage as his short series largely came to light late in the investigation.  Even so the media can get it wrong.  Thus this website touts Shipman as the ‘world’s most prolific serial killer’.  But this is a retrospective claim.  Media serial killers are prospective, they promise more action.

Because we only discover the extent of Shipman’s activities all in one go there is no cliff-hanger just an ‘info dump’.  For me, he is not a serial killer because we are not waiting for the next killing/episode.  He is not a serial killer because only the media can create a serial killer, by building that expectation, by forging links between random acts and finally by giving him (usually) a nickname.

The Wire understands this when, in series 5, we have McNulty deliberately ‘dressing’ random murder victims and tipping off the media about a serial killer to unlock funds.  The media gleefully run with this.

British Society of Criminology Brian Williams Prize Shortlist 2013

The Brian Williams Prize was established to honour the memory of Dr. Brian Williams, who was Professor of Community Justice and Victimology at De Montfort University, and who died tragically in 2007.  The prize reflects the desire of the British Society of Criminology to encourage and recognise the achievements of new members of the criminology profession, and is awarded to the author of a criminological article, who is a “new” scholar, published in a refereed academic journal.

Here is the short list.

Ana Aliverti ‘Making people criminal: The role of the criminal law in immigration enforcement’ Theoretical Criminology16(4) 417– 434

This article analyses the recent expansion of immigration offences in Britain. Drawing on criminal law scholarship, it considers the reasons for relying on the criminal law in immigration enforcement. On the one hand, criminal law is used symbolically. In this view, the creation of criminal offences may be read as an attempt to appease a sector of the electorate, the media and the Opposition about the ‘immigration problem.’ By introducing these offences, the government sent a message that the situation is under control. On the other hand, the criminal law serves regulatory functions, offering the UK Border Agency a range of options for dealing with unwanted immigrants. In practice, most immigration offences are rarely enforced. Instead, the criminal law often seems to primarily work as a threat, relied on to enforce compliance with immigration rules. A criminal prosecution is reserved for those foreigners for whom the primary sanction

–expulsion- cannot be carried out. In these cases, a criminal prosecution and conviction facilitate administrative proceedings leading to removal. Given that the criminalization of immigration breaches is in stark contrast with a number of criminal law principles, this paper argues that the normative justification of criminal law in immigration matters is

weak and it should have no role to play in the enforcement of immigration rules.

Ron Dudai ‘INFORMERS AND THE TRANSITION IN NORTHERN IRELAND’ BRIT. J. CRIMINOL (2012) 52, 32–54

Though criminological literature has paid attention to the use of informers in ordinary law enforcement, there is a research gap regarding their usage in contexts of conflict and political violence. This article explores the social, political and security functions of IRA informers in the transition from conflict in Northern Ireland. Based on that experience, it develops four heuristic models regarding informers that the paper argues may be of direct relevance to other conflicted and transitional societies. These are the informer as folk devil, the informer as rumour, the informer as political manipulator, and the informer as celebrity. All these themes demonstrate the long-term effects of the use of informers during the Northern Ireland conflict—an important finding given the increasing prevalence of the use of informers in a political context.

D.J. McCarthy ‘Gendering ‘Soft’ policing: multi-agency working, female cops,and the fluidities of police culture/s’ Policing & Society 2012, 1:18

This article examines the role of female police officers within the context of developing ‘soft’ policing initiatives designed to divert young people away from crime. Within the police culture literature, a masculine model of policing associated with coercive crime fighting tasks is often contrasted with a more cooperative, problem-solving and compassionate mode of police work. The latter model is viewed as serving to create a more legitimate structure for female police officers to work within, involving increasing trust and cooperation in communities and engaging with community crime prevention strategies. The aim of this article is to assess the role of female police officers within recent changes under the auspices of community policing reform in England and Wales, highlighting the role of female officers in enacting ‘soft’ policing initiatives in collaboration with social work and other community agencies. This raises some limitations of the conventional police culture literature by illustrating the ways these operations have carved a niche for female officers, in addition to altering the style of policing across certain sections of the organisation more generally.

Alisa Stevens ‘I am the person now I was always meant to be’: Identity reconstruction and narrative reframing in therapeutic community prisons’ Criminology & Criminal Justice 12(5) 527–547

Drawing upon semi-ethnographic research, this article explores desistance in process among serious offenders residing in democratic therapeutic communities. It is argued that offender rehabilitation in therapeutic communities involves a process of purposive and agentic reconstruction of identity and narrative reframing, so that a ‘new’ and ‘better’ person emerges whose attitudes and behaviours cohere with long-term desistance from crime. This is possible because the prison-based therapeutic community, with its commitment to a radically ‘different’ culture and mode of rehabilitation, socially enables, produces and reinforces the emergence of someone ‘different’. The article therefore develops existing understandings of change in forensic therapeutic communities, and reaffirms theories of desistance which emphasize the importance of pro-social changes to the offender’s personal identity and self-narrative.

Contenders for the British Society of Criminology Book Prize 2013

Contenders for the British Society of Criminology Book Prize 2013 (sponsored by Routledge Publishing)

We are near finishing the judging of the BSC Book Prize for 2013.  But all are worthy of consideration so here’s the shortlist:

Deborah Drake Prisons, Punishment and the Pursuit of Security Palgrave

Simon Harding’s Unleashed The phenomena of status dogs and weapon dogs The Policy Press

Arlie Loughnan Manifest Madness Mental Incapacity in the Criminal Law OUP

Demetra M. Pappas The Euthanasia/Assisted Suicide Debate Greenwood Press

Coretta Phillips The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations among Prisoners OUP

Gilly Sharpe Offending Girls: Young Women and Youth Justice Routledge 

Helen Wells The Fast and The Furious: Drivers, Speed Cameras and Control in a Risk Society Ashgate

Daniel Briggs Crack Cocaine Users: High Society and Low Life in South

Routledge

The prize will be awarded at the BSC Conference in Wolverhampton 2-4 July 2013.

As you can see they largely say what they are in the title.

Public criminology, Raoul Moat and ‘the perfect crime story’

There is clearly some argument about what public criminology is and some of this might turn on the precise definition of democratic underlabouring.  Here Elizabeth Turner of Liverpool Univeristiy responds to recent guest post by David Wilson.

Professor David Wilson’s April 18^th guest post on this blog made a number of criticisms of three recent peer-reviewed articles published in the British Journal of Criminology (Turner, 2013) and in Crime, Media and Culture (Ellis, Sloan and Wykes, 2013; Rowe, 2013). Wilson’s frustration with these three articles appears to stem from the fact that they each in their own way criticise, conflict with or neglect his own work as the most frequently quoted ‘public criminologist’ in the UK (Wilson, 2011: xvi). In this post I want to respond to Wilson’s assessment of the contribution made by these three pieces of peer-reviewed academic work, by examining the concerns he expresses against the backdrop of the wider debate about ‘public criminology’.

Wilson defines a ‘public criminologist’ as ‘an academic criminologist who, while teaching, writing and researching at a university, also engages in popular debates in the print and broadcast media about crime and punishment’ (Wilson, 2013a). For me this definition is what I have described elsewhere as theoretically ‘empty’: it provides no normative justification as to why criminologists engaging with the media should necessarily be considered to be a desirable thing. The idea that ‘public criminology’ merely means criminologists gaining media exposure in order to say things about crime rests upon a number of assumptions which I think need to be interrogated. Indeed, examining the assumptions underpinning recent discussions of criminology’s public role is what I set out to do in the journal article which Wilson criticises (see Turner, 2013).     

Wilson’s main criticism of my article seems to be that it merely reinforces what he sees as a dominant tendency amongst academic criminologists to shun the kind of active engagement with the media that he himself has adopted. In Wilson’s view the criminological field is overpopulated with individuals happy to accept a modest role as ‘democratic underlabourers’ (see Loader and Sparks, 2010) rather than engaging in ‘newsmaking’ (see Barak, 1988) or what Wilson (2013b) calls ‘viewsmaking’, criminology.  Wilson suggests that my article is aligned with Loader and Sparks’s (2010) notion of ‘democratic underlabouring’ and that I unfairly dismiss the ‘newsmaking’ perspective without providing adequate evidence or quoting from some key recent texts in this area (including Wilson’s own work).  

The first point I would make in response to this is that I don’t think Wilson accurately represents Loader and Sparks’s (2010) idea of the ‘democratic underlabourer’. The ‘democratic underlabourer’ Loader and Sparks describe is not, as Wilson suggests, simply a criminologist doing what criminologists already do [1]. As such I think for Wilson to say there are too many ‘democratic underlabourers’ is inaccurate. To be fair I think what he meant was that too many criminologists are wholly concerned with producing knowledge which they communicate in ways that are utterly incomprehensible to the proverbial ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ and that they devote too little time to finding ways to make their knowledge accessible such that it can make a constructive contribution to public discourse. This may be an accurate point. However it is not the same as saying there are too many of Loader and Sparks’s ‘democratic underlabourers’ amongst the ranks of academic criminologists.   

As regards Wilson’s suggestion that I myself am ‘aligned’ with the democratic underlabouring perspective there is some truth in this. As I make clear in my article I think that, to date, Loader and Sparks have made the most theoretically sophisticated and democratically committed attempt to grapple with what it means for criminology to go ‘public’. I also concur with their suggestion that if criminology is to have a more prominent public role, that that role must be subordinate to the primacy of democratic values in the political sphere. ‘Expert knowledge’ might help to improve political deliberation but it cannot and should not replace it (a position I imagine Wilson also supports). Furthermore Loader and Sparks rightly identify and attempt to accommodate within their ideas the plural and disputatious nature of criminology, something which I think it is important to acknowledge if a satisfactory account of criminology’s public role is to be provided. So broadly speaking, yes, I am aligned with the notion that criminology’s public role must be democratically defensible [2].

In order to consider whether, as Wilson alleges, I unfairly dismiss the ‘newsmaking’ approach (and thus his work) without acknowledging its achievements, it is important to revisit what my article sought to do. The purpose of the article was to consider the ways in which criminologists have reflected upon the appropriate public role for their field and to interrogate the justifications which they have provided (or failed to provide) for their right to play any public role [3]. The ins and outs of doing ‘public criminology’, and the impact made by those who do it, were never my primary focus. It is clearly a fact that some criminologists have rolled up their sleeves and embraced the difficult task of translating academic research for mass mediated dissemination and I never set out to claim otherwise.

However, what I do say in the article is that as some criminologists (Wilson included) are frequently and publicly enthusing about the advantages of ‘public criminology’ (confusingly sometimes also referred to as ‘newsmaking criminology’ and ‘viewsmaking criminology’) it is worth taking some time to think about why and how academic criminologists should contribute to public life and under what conditions. So, reflecting on that particular issue, rather than providing an inventory of public criminology’s achievements, was always the focus for the article. As such, when I describe ‘newsmaking criminology’ as ‘appear[ing] to empty criminology of any meaningful content so that all that matters is getting one’s own favoured discourse heard’ (Turner, 2013) I do not mean that self-identified ‘newsmaking’ criminologists have not contributed to public debates in influential, perhaps even desirable, ways. What I mean is merely that they have done so in the absence of a satisfactory normative account of why their particular ‘criminological’ discourses should receive media exposure in preference to any other ‘criminological’, or indeed non-‘criminological’, discourses on crime. As such, I would dispute Wilson’s claim that I ‘airily dismiss’ the ‘newsmaking’ criminologists and suggest that, rather, what I do is to suggest that we might put their achievements on a firmer footing within the academy by providing a robust, democratically-defensible and theoretically-engaged account of their public value. 

Still, in the absence of any explicit exposition on the value of criminologists’s contributions in the mass media, it is possible to consider what some recent examples of ‘public criminology’ in action might tell us about the potential that such activity has to enhance public life. Wilson himself has suggested that some key benefits which might be achieved through ‘public criminology’ are: (1) public education; (2) putting crime issues into a ‘broader context’, recognising complexity and grey areas; and (3) exerting a ‘cooling’ influence on what is often a heated topic of public debate. But, as Wilson and Groombridge (2010) and Rowe (2013) point out, public criminologists oriented to these objectives will inevitably experience significant ‘tension’ when attempting to pursue them through the media as core media agendas and priorities will often clash with those of the public academic. Indeed, Rowe suggests that whilst the possibilities for criminologists to contribute to media coverage are expanding so too are the risks of ‘misrepresentation, simplification or marginalization of perspectives that seek to challenge dominant narratives of crime and responses to it’. These risks create the danger that criminologists will retreat from engagement with the media, leaving a void which less-informed others will be only too happy to fill (Rowe, 2013: 13). 

In his blog post Wilson (2013b) objects to this aspect of Rowe’s analysis, asserting that Rowe ‘lags behind’ the small number of criminologists ‘who are already aware of that framing, written about it and are trying to use that awareness to promote a better public understanding of crimes and punishments’.  Wilson goes on to state that his own awareness of how media framing works, and of the need to reach out to wider, and potentially more challenging, audiences is behind his success as a contributor to the Daily Mail writing, amongst other things, about the Raoul Moat case. Wilson describes this case as providing a ‘perfect example of the various, tensions, opportunities and dangers that exist for the public, newsmaking Criminologist’. In contrast with Rowe (who suggests that the kind of ‘rolling-news’ coverage which is provided in relation to extreme events such as the Raoul Moat manhunt, provides limited opportunities for meaningful criminological contributions) Wilson looks back on his involvement in the media coverage of the Moat case as a positive example of what public criminologists can achieve. In his own assessment of his work Wilson claims that his contributions to the Daily Mail were ‘perfectly framed’ for the paper and yet also offered an argument to which Mail readers would not usually be exposed. 

However, and as Wilson notes, other writers have offered rather less flattering assessments of his Daily Mail contributions. Well-known blogger, author and columnist Owen Jones accuses him of ‘class hatred’, and of reducing the white working class to the status of ‘knuckle-dragging thugs lacking legitimate aspirations’ (Jones, 2011: 6 cited by Wilson, 2013b). Ellis et al (2013) suggest that he draws on ‘established discourses of individual psychopathology’ and fails to consider the powerful impact of media and other public discourses in constituting, making available and reinforcing a hegemonic version of masculine identity which is heavily invested in violence. Wilson’s response is to argue that neither Jones, nor Ellis et al, properly acknowledge his article’s foregrounding of a range of issues including domestic abuse, misogyny and the impact of deindustrialization on men in Northern England. He also suggests that the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is unlikely ever to appear in the Daily Mail. He is probably right on the latter point, but does that mean that the concerns expressed by Jones (2011) and Ellis et al (2013) and the cautionary notes sounded by Rowe (2013) can be so easily discounted?    

Well, if we examine the content of Wilson’s articles then I think there is reason to suggest that Wilson has somewhat blithely dismissed the concerns of his critics, rather than engaging with them in a constructive fashion. Jones (2011) seems to have a point in his suggestion that Wilson invokes the image of the white, working class as relatively unevolved (‘knuckle-dragging’). Writing in the Daily Mail in July 2010 Wilson explicitly likened the women posting pro-Moat messages on Facebook as reflective of the historical tendency for women to be attracted to ‘large, tough, violent’ men, and suggested that they were displaying values compatible with an earlier stage in the ‘evolutionary development of mankind’. 

Furthermore, whilst Wilson did indeed draw his readers’ attention to Moat’s misogynistic attitudes and history of domestic abuse, as well as to the wider issues associated with deindustrialization in the North of England, it is important to consider how he ‘framed’ these issues. For example, in referring to the expressions of support for Moat as ‘a howl of rage from some of the Northern, dispossessed, white working-class who feel, however unjustifiably, they have been neglected by the sweeping social forces changing modern Britain’, in my view, Wilson gave with one hand and stabbed in the back with the other. Moat’s supporters were made out to be emblematic of the whole white Northern working-class; the working-class were portrayed as ‘howling’ like toddlers, or animals; they were said to ‘dispossessed’ but their perception of neglect was ‘unjustifiable’; they were negatively affected by change, but that change was a ‘sweeping force’ seemingly disconnected from human agency. 

Throughout the two articles on Moat which Wilson wrote for the paper (Wilson 2010a; 2010b) familiar, and sociologically unenlightening, Daily Mail staples like ‘welfare dependency’ and ‘underclass’ were rolled out, alongside emotive phrases like ‘dark forces’, ‘twisted mindset’ and ‘grotesque narrative’ which are difficult to read out loud without one’s face being forced into a kind of sneer. At one point Wilson seemed to imply that only it was unemployed people whose lives lack ‘work or stimulus’who were sucked into watching the real-life soap opera of the Moat manhunt unfold, as if the eyes of a nation weren’t glued to the saga at the time. And always in the background of these articles there lurks a low but constant note of othering, occasionally made explicit (such as when he refers to ‘an amorality that exists in our midst’). The plain implication appears to be that misogyny, domestic abuse, violence and deindustrialization are their problems, not ours. One might ask, then, whether there is any point in Wilson drawing attention to these factors, if it is only to locate them squarely in the lives of the allegedly morally degenerate ‘others’ whose lives he purports to describe [4]? 

As Ellis et al (2013) observe the Raoul Moat drama may have been ‘the perfect crime story’. Wilson’s framing makes it just so, if one happens to subscribe to the worldview of the Daily Mail that is. And here lies the problem for Wilson’s self-proclaimed mastery of ‘perfect’ framing: so adept has he proven at adapting to the Daily Mail’s ‘house style’ that he appears to have forgotten that often it is not just what you say but the way that you say it that leaves an imprint on people’s minds. 

It would seem, then, that Rowe (2013) was quite right to emphasise that there are very real ‘risks’ when criminologists seek to engage with the media. However, Rowe does not mention what may be the greatest risk of all: not that the media will misrepresent what criminologists say, but that criminologists themselves will misrepresent what criminology is. The lure of media relevance and interest may lead us towards certain topics, as well as certain ways of ‘framing’ them. But a line needs to be drawn between making knowledge widely accessible and making it easily acceptable (if all sociological knowledge were readily acceptable into common-sense then there would be little point in us doing research). 

I certainly applaud Professor Wilson, and indeed other criminologists, who seek to find novel and effective ways to enlighten the British public about issues of crime and justice falling within their own areas of expertise and interest. However, I am concerned that in his blog post Wilson (2013b) has been a little too quick to dismiss those who sound more cautionary notes, who seek to explore the theoretical underpinnings of the practical enterprise he is engaged in, or who point out the potential unintended consequences of his media engagements. One such unintended consequence may be that most of the criminology which goes ‘public’ is representative of only a narrow segment of criminological work: that which feeds into and reinforces common-sense understandings of crime and how we should approach the matter of its control, whilst neglecting more critical perspectives which seek to situate ‘crime’ in relation to a much wider range of social harms [5]. For me, it seems likely that such a development will be to the detriment of high quality democratic dialogue. In the end, then, unless self-proclaimed ‘public criminologists’ can give a coherent account of how their approach to media engagement enhances the health of our democracy, then, for me at least, one question looms large: precisely which ‘public’ is ‘public criminology’ for?   

References

Barak, G (1988) 'Newsmaking Criminology: Reflections on the Media, Intellectuals and Crime' in Justice Quarterly 5 (4) pp. 565-585

Ellis, A; Sloan, J and Wykes, M (2013) ‘ “Moatifs” of masculinity: The stories told about “men” in British newspaper coverage of the Raoul Moat case’ in Crime, Media, Culture 9(1): 3-21

Jones, O (2011) Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, (London: Verso Books)

Loader, I and Sparks, R (2010) Public Criminology? (London: Routledge)

Rowe, M (2013) ‘Just like a TV show: Public criminology and the media coverage of “hunt for Britain’s most wanted man”’ Crime, Media, Culture 9(1): 23-38

Turner, E (2013) ‘Beyond “facts” and “values”: Rethinking some recent debates about the public role of criminology’ in British Journal of Criminology 53 (1): 149-166

Wilson, D (2010a) ‘A howl of rage from a bitter and deluded underclass’ in Daily Mail 16 July 2010 View at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1295161/Raoul-Moat-Facebook-tributes-A-howl-rage-bitter-deluded-underclass.html (Last accessed: 27/04/13) 

Wilson, D (2010b) ‘Violent narcissist who thought he was Rambo’ in Daily Mail 12 July 2010 View at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1293954/Raoul-Moat-Violent-narcissist-thought-Rambo.html (Last accessed 27/04/13)

Wilson, D (2011) Looking for Laura: Public Criminology and Hot News (Hook: Waterside Press)

Wilson, D (2013a) ‘The TV academic: balancing the demands of a double career’ Guardian Professional. View at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2013/mar/28/tv-academic-celebrity-media-career (Last accessed 27/04/13)

Wilson, D (2013b) ‘Raoul Moat and Public Criminology’ Blog post. View at: http://criminologyinpublic.blogspot.co.uk/ (Last accessed 27/04/13)

Wilson, D and Groombridge, N (2010), “’I’m Making a TV Programme Here!: Reality TV’s Banged Up and Public Criminology,” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 49 (1): 1-17

Notes

[1] Perhaps, Loader and Sparks have not helped matters here because they somewhat confusingly refer to both a broad sensibility of ‘democratic underlabouring’ and the specific figure of the ‘democratic underlabourer’. However, a careful reading of their text reveals that the ‘democratic underlabourer’ is a criminologist with a particular orientation towards what we might think of as intellectual diplomacy. She attempts to support the productive coexistence of different modes of criminological knowledge production and their collective interaction with the wider public sphere in such a way as to support a ‘better politics’ of crime, crime control and criminal justice. This is not the daily bread and butter work of most criminologists who are, I think it is fair to say, primarily concerned with producing knowledge, rather than with undertaking intellectual diplomacy

[2] Where I part company with Loader and Sparks is over their rather optimistic assessment of the prospects for their conception of democratic underlabouring to facilitate (i) peaceful coexistence between starkly different approaches to thinking about and researching crime and (ii) a ‘better politics’ of crime, crime control and criminal justice. I suggest that democratic values occupy a precarious position in the contemporary public sphere, and that our politics are all too vulnerable to domination by particular interest groups and certain narrow ways of knowing about the world. In this public sphere inconvenient conclusions can be buried, alternative perspectives crowded out and research agendas skewed.  Under these conditions, my article asks, what hope is there for the ‘better politics’ which Loader and Sparks rightly desire?  

[3] The article approaches this task by describing and examining three perspectives on criminology’s public role which I believe can be discerned in the existing literature: (1)  ‘Fighting for truth’ – (see Currie, 2007) criminologists should use impartial scientific methods to identify objective, value-free ‘truths’ about crime and then disseminate these perspectives widely and assertively; (2) ‘Newsmaking criminology’ (see Barak, 1988)  – criminologists should develop a strategic approach to working with the media in order to ensure alternative ‘discourses’ on crime and justice are heard (3) ‘Democratic underlabouring’ (see Loader and Sparks, 2010) – criminologists produce knowledge in three modes – Primary, Institutional-Critical and Normative – some criminologists should work as ‘democratic underlabourers’ or ‘diplomats’ helping to interpret and negotiate between different modes of criminological knowledge and the wider public sphere in order to bring knowledge to bear on ‘matters of public concern and dispute’ and thus help to bring about a ‘better politics’ of crime and justice. Ultimately I argue that none of these perspectives is entirely satisfactory, because none of them offers a plausible and democratically-defensible response to either the manifest pluralism of the criminological field, or the wider political context within which a variety of ‘facts’ about crime jostle for position in a public sphere prone to dominating influences.

[4] It is worth adding here that I think it is fair to suggest that Wilson’s implication that the by-lines assigned to both of his Moat articles in the Mail were misleading is somewhat disingenuous. Both by-lines use phrases which are completely reflective of the language used in Wilson’s articles. No ‘sub-editor’ can be blamed for this; the by-lines are not false advertising for the content which follows.

[5] Take Wilson’s most recent foray into TV documentary: ‘Killers Behind Bars’. From the title, to the description of the academic front man as a ‘real life “Cracker”’ to the bizarre CSI-style trailer which sees Professor Wilson walk through a mock-up murder scene and spray an unidentified substance onto a brick wall, this programme has clearly been designed to, as Wilson himself says, harness ‘the public’s fascination with murder’. But, apart from the fact that the presenter is a criminologist, what has this kind of CSI-framed, cold-case research got to do with what most criminologists do? The answer, as I am sure Wilson is well-aware, is very little.

Public Criminology and Raoul Moat a guest post by David Wilson

Public Criminology and Raoul Moat

Professor David Wilson

Centre for Applied Criminology, Birmingham City University

In his best-selling book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, Owen Jones quotes a criminologist called “Professor David Wilkinson” arguing that Raoul Moat had:

tap[ped] into that dispossessed, white-working-class, masculine identity, whereby they can’t make their way in the world legitimately so behaving the way that Moat has behaved, as this kind of anti-hero, has, I think, touched a nerve, (Jones, 2011: 6).

Jones was unimpressed by such analyses, suggesting that it revealed “class hatred” and argued that, the “white working-class had, at a stroke, been reduced to knuckle-dragging thugs lacking legitimate aspirations,” (Jones, 2011: 6).  Jones went on to illustrate his point by quoting readers’ comments that had been posted on the Daily Mail’s website. You might gain the impression that Wilkinson – in reality me - had been writing about Moat in the Daily Mail.  That quote was thereafter directly and correctly linked by Mike Wayne (2012)

 to an article which I had actually written in the Daily Mail.  That article was headlined “A Howl of Rage from a Bitter and Deluded Underclass” (Daily Mail, 16 July 2010).   It is not one I would have chosen but even high profile columnists find their work given ‘unexpected’ headlines or pull quotes.  I am sure Jones must have his own experience of this and I’m sure his editor is to blame for confusing my name with Richard Wilkinson

 who he later quotes approvingly.

Wayne is more forgiving than Jones and noted that I had, at the very least, correctly identified that mass de-industrialisation in the northeast of England had created a “crisis in masculine identity,” (Wayne, 2012: 128).  On the other hand, Aida Edemariam, writing in the Guardian, wanted it both ways, and therefore suggested that my analysis was both “glib and patronising” but that it had, nonetheless, “a kernel of truth in it,” (Guardian, 12 July 2010).

Thankfully Edemariam had correctly identified that the quote, used in different ways by Jones and Wayne, did not in fact come from the Daily Mail

  but instead had been used by me in a live, studio interview on Sky News on 11^th July 2010.  Selected extracts from that interview thereafter appeared in print on the Sky News website and, as a consequence, some of the context for the quote got lost unless the reader clicked onto the actual footage.  Indeed, the immediate context for the comment, and now a quote in several books, was an attempt to explain why 3,000 people had wanted to sign up to a Facebook page in Moat’s memory on which he was described as “a legend”.  So, comments made by me live on air about people – especially working-class men - in communities which had been de-industrialised, feeling harassed unfairly by the police, and essentially powerless and trapped, with few legitimate outlets for their talents, were  lost.  

The point here is not so much to dwell on how fair, or otherwise, these various uses of a quote made by me on live TV might have been, or to chart that quote’s subsequent misidentification with a newspaper article where it never appeared, and attributed to a non-existent criminologist.  Some might see an irony in a media savvy criminologist so hoist by such petards.  But despite such reverses my aim is to  consider whether or not public Criminology in the print or broadcast media did help to explain the actions of someone like Moat, by placing his behaviour in a broader context which recognised both his personal responsibility for his actions, and how that responsibility might also be shaped and determined by broader, social, cultural and economic forces.  

This seems like a timely moment to consider all of this with the publication of Anthony Ellis, Jennifer Sloan and Maggie Wykes’s (2013) “’Moatifs’ of Masculinity: The Stories Told about ‘Men’ in British Newspaper Coverage of the Raoul Moat Case,” and Michael Rowe’s (2013) “Just Like a TV Show: Public Criminology and the Media Coverage of the ‘Hunt for Britain’s Most Wanted Man”, both published in the current edition of Crime, Media, Culture.  I feel in a particularly good position to comment, not only because I did indeed write several articles and make various comments in the print media about Moat,(see, for example, BBC online 10 July 2010 and Guardian 7 July 2010) , but also because – like Rowe – I was used by Sky News, as a “presenter’s friend” in Rothbury on 7^th and 8^th July 2010, and also made other comments on such outlets as BBC Radio 4’s The World and One and PM.   I subsequently described these experiences in Looking for Laura: Public Criminology and Hot News (2011: 136-148).

Rowe does not reference this work in his article, nor a previous co-written article about the competing demands and tensions placed on public criminologists whilst working with the broadcast media (Wilson and Groombridge, 2009).  However, Ellis et al do quote from one article that I wrote for the Daily Mail – again by-lined by a sub-editor “Violent Narcissist Who Thought he was Rambo” (Daily Mail 12 July 2010) - noting that there was a “façade of novelty” in my explanations but, echoing the Guardian’s Edemariam, that these explanations still drew on “established discourses of individual psychopathology,” (Ellis, et al 2013: 4).  They do not therefore acknowledge that I also claim in this same article that Moat’s actions were those of a “domestic violence abuser”, which in turn were underpinned by “misogyny” and that, more generally, some “working-class males no longer have a role in our society”.  These are neither, I would suggest, tropes from “individual psychopathology”, nor the usual suspects and demons favoured by the Daily Mail – an issue I discuss below.  However, at least they didn’t accuse me of class hatred.

Clearly there is an inevitable desire to expand, modify, disagree and praise what Rowe, Ellis, Sloan and Wykes have written but rather, I want to use these two articles, and another by Elizabeth Turner, as a lens through which to discuss not just Raoul Moat specifically, but public Criminology more generally in relation to “news-making Criminology”.

The Current State of Public Criminology

Elizabeth Turner’s (2013) article in The British Journal of Criminology – “Beyond Facts and Values: Rethinking Some Recent Debates about the Public Role of Criminology” – neatly summarises the three, and often competing perspectives, on Criminology’s public role.  Turner identifies these three perspectives as: “fighting for truth”; “news-making criminology”; and “democratic under labouring”.  The second perspective can be readily associated with Barak (1988; 2007) and Groombridge (2007), and the third with Loader and Sparks (2010).  

Turner – while offering a new take on the idea of ‘democratic under labouring’ – is clearly aligned with the third perspective.

  However, she rather airily dismisses “news-making criminology” as “appearing[ing] to empty criminology of any meaningful content so that all that matters is getting one’s favoured discourse heard”, (page 157).  No evidence is presented to support this and, crucially, Turner fails to cite Rowe’s work, that of Jon Silverman, the former BBC Home Affairs correspondent, or my own, all of which predate her article.  And, lest we forget, the biggest news story of last year, about the paedophile Jimmy Savile, and which is continuing to make headlines this year, was exposed by Mark Williams-Thomas, who  publicly identifies himself as a Criminologist and is currently studying for his PhD .  Had Turner been able to take this growing corpus of work into consideration she might have been able to modify her conclusion or, at the very least, acknowledge that good “news-making criminology” is indeed filled with Criminological insight and can even, REF-like, have “impact”.  

It is here that I want to use Rowe’s work to argue that “news-making” Criminology has now actually moved beyond these essentially preliminary theoretical positions that Turner employs, and which Rowe implicitly endorses, and has reached a very different stage of development.  Far from the latter’s fear that criminologists might “retreat from engagement” with the media (Rowe, 2013: 35), a small number of us have increasingly welcomed that engagement – albeit this in itself has now created different tensions (see Wilson, 2013) - and, in doing so, have, I would argue, developed the “robust public criminology” that Rowe is advocating for in his article.  However, sadly, his downplaying of such engagement that has already taken place means that his desire for the academy to better understand how the media frames crime events, lags behind those of us who are already aware of that framing, written about it and are trying to use that awareness to promote a better public understanding of crimes and punishments.  Indeed, that awareness is the primary reason why much of my public writing now appears in the Daily Mail.  

Hated by the Daily Mail

I have previously written about how I have made a conscious decision to stop writing so often for the Guardian and to start writing for the Daily Mail and Tribune.  As I pointed out at the time:

The two papers are not natural bed-fellows, but the move to the Daily Mail was made because I felt that my views and opinions were naturally accepted by most readers of the Guardian and if I wanted to see real change then getting the readers of the Daily Mail onside seemed to me to be more important.  I’m still debating with myself if that part of the strategy has worked, although I have thoroughly enjoyed learning to write about issues that are important to me in a different style and aimed at a different audience.  The move to Tribune was meant to reinforce the fact that in deciding to write for the Daily Mail I hadn’t lost my left-leaning principles, (Wilson, 2011: xvii).

I am still debating as to whether this move has been successful.  However, I did see it as part of a broader strategy to use Criminology to cool the ‘red hot debate’ about crime and punishment and, in doing so, reposition some tabloid staples into a broader context that recognises the complexity of issues related to serial killers, sex offenders, naming and shaming, child killers, “holiday camp prisons”, ASBOs, yobs and slobs and the underclass.  Has that move been successful?  How would I measure success? 

Perhaps we could use the Moat case which, as both these articles seem to reveal to me, provides a perfect example of the various tensions, opportunities and dangers that exist for the public, news-making Criminologist who is in danger of being damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.  After all, does the Daily Mail taking an article by me about Moat – albeit framed within language that suits the readers of that paper – describing the dispossession of white, working-class men not at least encourage a broader acceptance of the negative consequences of global, neo-liberal economics?  I’m uncertain, but I did describe how these men have been “neglected by social forces sweeping modern Britain [and] the manual occupations that gave their forefathers pride, like shipbuilding and coalmining, have gone”.  In their wake, welfare dependency had merely rendered these men – like Moat - “useless”.  This conclusion seems to me to be perfectly framed for the Daily Mail, while at the same time making an argument which would not normally be heard in that paper.

This importance of this issue of framing that Rowe is keen to describe, is not something that would seem to have even been acknowledged by Ellis et al.  Indeed, I did sometimes get the impression that within their general review of the papers that they analyse I was being criticised for my “façade of novelty” for not overtly acknowledging hegemonic masculinity.  Frankly, I can’t imagine any article using this term ever appearing in the Daily Mail.  In other words, the “retreat” from engagement with the media that Rowe fears, or at least, in the examples provided by Ellis et al from this particular outlet – is predicated on an inability, or an unwillingness, to re-frame an academic argument into one which can be accommodated by the audience which would consume that argument, and also in terms that they would understand.  

This would seem to fit into a broader pattern of how British academics deal with the media more generally.  For some, although I am not suggesting that this is necessarily the position of Ellis et al, the media is a scary monster to be avoided at all costs, or a machine that will simply grind their beautiful and complex arguments into simplistic sound-bites and, in doing so, render them meaningless.  And, as my opening paragraphs show, academics and more serious commentators are quite capable of some grinding and sound-biting.  In other words, as far as public Criminology is concerned, some of the tension that Turner well describes between her three perspectives is not simply about the plural, contested nature of Criminology  but also about a clear preference for most criminologists to remain rooted in the academy.  Tucked away behind the university’s walls, I continue to sense a reluctance, never mind a retreat, on the part of many criminologists, for different reasons, to engage with any public, let alone a “news-making” debate.  

But let’s leave all of this to one side, for my greatest concern about what Turner presents is that she sees her three perspectives as if they each have equal weight and support.  Nothing can be further from the truth.  Sadly, democratic under labourers and diplomats proliferate in academic Criminology, either because of temperament, inclination or downright academic snobbery.  The tragedy for me is that either through omission, in the case of Rowe, or commission with Ellis et al, they fail to acknowledge that engaging with the media, and framing a reasoned argument that will be heard in outlets outside of the academy, is not easy to do, has to be tailored to the relevant audience and therefore also needs to be done with care.  I appreciate that I am probably fighting a losing battle on this, and I should also acknowledge that I have had perhaps had unfair advantages over my peers in that I was trained to present TV programmes by the BBC.  I now have considerable experience of doing so, and many will perhaps simply see me as a “media tart” and this short article as special pleading.  However, it nonetheless still seems short-sighted to me that so few of my academic peers want to engage with the print and broadcast media.  Rather, they are far more comfortable – dare I say “proud” – of being democratic under labourers or diplomats, than public criminologists – or, if I may – “public intellectuals”.  What’s more, the small number of us who do engage with the media will gradually become even smaller, if their work continues to be ignored, taken out of context, or simply misrepresented.  In so doing they may cede the field to the rag-tag of police, politicians and moral entrepreneurs that Groombridge (2007) found sheltering under the rubric, ‘Criminologists Say’.

References

Barak, G (1988), “Newsmaking Criminology: Reflections on the Media, Intellectuals and Crime,” Justice Quarterly 5: 565-587

Barak, G (2007), “Doing Newsmaking Criminology from within the Academy,” Theoretical Criminology 11: 191-207

Ellis, A, Sloan, J and Wykes, M (2012) “’Moatifs’ of Masculinity: The Stories Told about ‘Men’ in British Newspaper Coverage of the Raoul Moat Case,” Crime, Media, Culture, 9 (1): 3-21

Groombridge, Nic (2007) ‘Criminologists Say … : An Analysis of UK National Press Coverage of Criminology and Criminologists and a Contribution to the Debate on ‘Public Criminology’ The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 46, Issue 5, pages 459–475, December 2007

Jones, O (2011), Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, (London: Verso Books)

Loader, I and Sparks, R (2010), Public Criminology? Criminological Politics in the Twenty-First Century, (London: Routledge)

Rowe, M (2012), “Just Like a TV Show: Public Criminology and the Media Coverage of the ‘Hunt for Britain’s Most Wanted Man”, Crime, Media, Culture, 9 (1): 23-38

Elizabeth Turner (2013), “Beyond Facts and Values: Rethinking Some Recent Debates about the Public Role of Criminology”, The British Journal of Criminology

Wayne, M (2012), “Hans Magnus Enzenberger and the Politics of the New Media Technology,” in D Berry (ed) Revisiting the Frankfurt School: Essays on Culture, Media and Theory, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing).

Wilkinson Richard G. and Pickett Kate (2009) The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better Allen Lane

Wilson, D (2011), Looking for Laura: Public Criminology and Hot News, (Winchester: Waterside Press).

Wilson, D (2013), “The TV Academic: Balancing the Demands of a Double Career,” Guardian, 29 March 2013

Wilson, D and Groombridge, N (2009), “’I’m Making a TV Programme Here!: Reality TV’s Banged Up and Public Criminology,” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 49 (1): 1-17