Nic Groombridge, ‘Public Criminologist’ and ‘Master of Truth’

Twitter tells me that for the week of 15 November 2014 my tweets received 3,809 views and that I had 55 new followers with 74 visits to links that I had posted. My most popular tweet that week accounted for one third of those link visits; with one in ten of those viewing visiting the link to an article in Radical Criminology.  This is the text of the tweet:

Slagged off by Nicolas Carrier in @critcrimjournal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc/a… with other public criminologists @ProfDavidWilson @martina0074

So Nicolas’s article received 25 more views than it might have.  In addition to my tweet I also emailed Nicolas as follows:

Hi Nicolas
some good points in your sound thrashing of us deluded public criminologists
Not sure Loader and Sparks would see as being on same team as them.
In addition to my academic work you critique I tweet and blog.
Long shot but do you fancy boiling down your argument for the public - 1000 words?- and I'll put it on my blog and tweet the link?
I've already facebooked and tweeted link to your radical crim article
regards

Obviously a bit cheeky of me but this is his reply:

Hello Nic,
Happy to read that this piece of mine gave you some pleasure and, perhaps, food for thought.
Thanks for adding the link to your social media posts – the ‘public’ can access my argument if it so desires, but the audience targeted is composed of social scientists like you.
Cheers

I have alerted some of the other academics quoted about the article so they can make their own responses.  These are mine and will concentrate on how my work is seen by Carrier.  I believe he has misunderstood some things but his email suggests too that however radical his intention he is as elitist as those he criticises.

Carrier’s title is, ‘On Some Limits and Paradoxes of Academic Orations on Public Criminology’. Cultural differences may be at work but I’ve never claimed to be a social scientist and ‘academic oration’ is too hifalutin to describe any of my writing.  And, as I suggest in my email, I’m not sure Loader and Sparks see me as an equal to their theorising as I rate only one mention in their book, Public Criminology?.  

Here’s my review of their book in Punishment and Society in which I concluded:

This is a high-minded book – with the occasional dig (e.g. at Carol Smart for leaving criminology and the harm perspective for disciplinary fuzziness). It is well written and a useful tour de horizon, but the authors’ long labour has not produced an elephant. Their eclectic take on criminology is useful but the narrowness of their concept of ‘public’ is not. Far more attention to both old and new media is needed for a full discussion of ‘public criminology’.

and more critically in mid flow (and channeling Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) I opine:

The book is said to offer ‘an original and provocative account of the condition

of, and prospects for, criminology’. That is, they present ‘the Life and Opinions on

Criminology, an academic discipline’ and spend so long on its conception, gestation,

stormy adolescence and middle-aged spread that whether and how to do ‘public

criminology’ is scarcely addressed.

Carrier is influenced strongly by Vincenzo Ruggiero’s ‘How public is public criminology’ in Crime Media Culture.  For instance:

But how can public criminologists act as citizens in a participatory democracy

and as professional social scientists simultaneously?

I surmise that Carrier sees ‘public criminologists’ as the elitists, following Ruggiero’s contention that:

Something esoteric and elitist still remains in the description of ‘public criminology’ provided above, in that experts working in academia seem to seek the help of experts working in adjacent areas and, while begging for their benevolence, try to improve the lives of others, namely non-expert actors.

Carrier’s judgement of my work stems purely from my published oeuvre 'I'm Making a TV Programme Here!': Reality TV's Banged Up and Public Criminology with David Wilson and Criminologists Say … : An Analysis of UK National Press Coverage of Criminology and Criminologists and a Contribution to the Debate on ‘Public Criminology’ when he, like Loader and Sparks, overlooks social and popular media.

Ruggiero’s position is that criminology isn’t sociological or political enough.  As he was the External Examiner of my political and sociological PhD it is disappointing that I don’t even rate a mention in his article.  It would be nice to think that this was deliberate as I don’t fit his argument so well but guess it just a failure to search beyond the usual suspects.  I am more disappointed by Paul Rock’s survey, ’The public faces of public criminology’ failure to mention me as I’d emailed him the details after hearing the talk upon which the article is based.  So now I’m making my private humiliation public.

Anyone who knows me or who follows me on Twitter or even Facebook will find my inclusion in this list of ‘cookbook’ writers risible:

Similarly, Fichtelberg and Kupchik (2011:61) see criminologists as “experts with a unique contribution to make to debates on criminal justice policy”, and believe that public criminology shall “enhance the credibility” of the ‘discipline’. It is from this general perspective of criminology as the master of truth on crime and punishment that public criminology cookbooks are usually published (e.g. Rowe, 2012; Wilson and Groombridge, 2010; Feilzer, 2009; Groombridge, 2007).

Having worked for the Home Office nearly 18 years before becoming a criminologist means that I know (standpoint epistemology) how little attention is paid to criminologists  or other experts - so praise to the undercover ‘public’ criminology of David Faulkner.

I’ve written no cookbook, claim no mastery.  Indeed in my work point out that everyone has a democratic right to talk about crime.  I’ll use humour, vitriol, irony (see title of this blog) even peer-reviewed work but increasingly tweets and blogs to start a debate.

And here I have to liken myself to Foucault (who Carrier consigns at the concluding moment to a footnote) in stating clearly that I have no, ‘desire to lay down the law for others and to try “to mold the political will of others”.

Not proof I know but hope that Carrier and Ruggiero might consider this tweet from today. as evidence of my masterly radicalism.

But whilst I see my ‘public criminology’ as an extension of my teaching, and here I offer Carrier a better stick with which to beat me, recognise that actually I practice ‘publicity criminology’.

Cereal Killers: The need for an agri-cultural criminology

I've asked Chris Sambrook of Harper Adams to talk a bit about Rural Criminology.  I know as a green criminologist that there is an uncomfortable overlap; crimes by and against farmers don't sit neatly in a nice pristine offender/victim matrix.  It's more than the theft of machinery, animal cruelty or 'get of my land'. Cue the Archers theme tune.

Rural crime has found a new voice, or rather it has found a voice that previously saw it as little more than a convenient column filler. Rural journalism has long treated machinery theft, hare coursing, poaching and the other crimes spread across their rural crime palette as a reportable irritant rather than a core issue. But not anymore. Rural crime is now making the front pages, both of the specialist press dealing in agricultural and countryside matters and of local newspapers with a rural leaning. In fact we might be tempted to say that it has found two new voices, for this reporting often carries a police quote and details of the latest constabulary initiative to tackle the problem. It seems then that the police have also discovered rural crime. 

Of course as a rural criminologist I am scarcely going to complain about my subject being thrust into public consciousness. Indeed this coverage is most welcome, for at a time when overall crime incident is falling rural crime has seen a considerable upsurge. But it makes me wonder, why the sudden interest?

The truth is it is not sudden for to misquote Eddie Cantor it has taken rural crime many years to become an overnight success. There are probably many factors at play here, but might I suggest that greater public access to the setting of police priorities and the need to placate the demands of an influential rural electorate, both consequential to the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners, has been highly influential.

That said this new found interest causes me some concern, not least because it presents an extraordinarily narrow view of crime in the rural setting. Whilst the media coverage may have grown exponentially in volume we do not see any corresponding growth in breadth. Moreover, and perhaps of greater concern, this constrained view bears a remarkable similarity to the widely held police notion of what constitutes ‘rural crime’. 

This shared discourse is potentially misleading for it takes no account of emerging rural crime or the uniqueness of widely occurring crimes when they happen in the rural setting. It is these issues that are at the core of much of the research being carried out by criminologists within the Centre for Rural Security at Harper Adams University. Take, for example, my own research into the emergence of counterfeit pesticides within the UK agricultural market. It is a crime with known links to transnational organised crime groups and with the potential to cause serious environmental and human health problems as well as its economic impact. And yet this, and similar non-traditional rural crimes, rarely make the local policing agenda.

Rural crime is growing, and as importantly it is changing. However, it seems that the way it is perceived and communicated is not. Perhaps then the time is right for an agri-cultural criminology, time for us to consider what has shaped this mediated notion of crime in the rural setting.

Radical, humanist and pessimistic ‘So What’ criminologies.

I plead guilty to most of these charges and more.  Worse still I’m not even that radical, just grumpy.  As an ex Home Office civil servant I’m extremely aware of how difficult it is to influence policy (are you listening REF assessors?); and with my radical hat on generally not sought to - other than wishing some notice had been taken of my early assessment of CCTV.  

I got started in criminology after reading  Jock Young’s ‘Working Class Criminology’ when on an Open University course.  I subsequently took my MA in Criminology at Middlesex where I was taught by Jock, John Lea and Roger Matthews.  Whilst my own output since has been esoteric (so what?) I see it as underpinned by some realism even whilst entertaining ontological doubts.

A rather more echt realism can be found in Roger Matthews latest book.  I asked him to write a few words about it.

REALIST CRIMINOLOGY   - PALGRAVE MACMILLAN (July 2014)

Roger Matthews

The purpose of this book is to provide a response to the paradox that as the criminological enterprise has expanded exponentially in recent years its policy relevance has decreased. In fact, some commentators have argued that a great deal of criminology is in policy terms irrelevant and have called for a more ‘public criminology’. The explanation for the decreasing policy relevance presented in the book is that an increasing body of criminological endeavour is centred around two camps. On one side there has been a growth of administrative criminology funded by governmental bodies. This type of criminology characteristically involves a low level of theory, is essentially managerialist responding to pressing issues, favours highly quantitative methods and tends to produce equivocal conclusions. It also does little to generate a cumulative body of knowledge. On the other hand, academic criminology has become dominated by varieties of liberal criminology – radical, humanist and pessimist. Liberal criminology tends to be minimal or anti-statist, and often anti-punishment. Even in its more radical forms it tends not to talk about social structures, political economy or social class and makes sweeping generalisations about the nature and direction of social control. For example, some leading liberals have reduced the complexity of the changing forms of crime control to a surge of punitiveness, although it is not clear why such punitiveness should arise or how exactly it is to be identified or overcome. In its more pessimistic forms it claims that nothing works, or that interventions only make things worse. Alternatively they fail to present viable alternatives and instead advocate ‘the unfinished’. 

The combination of administrative criminology, on one side, and liberal academic criminology on the other, is to produce a criminological enterprise that is either short sighted and pragmatic, or alternatively largely disengaged from the major issues of crime control.  Academic criminologists increasingly engage in particular topics which are studied in isolation from the major social, economic and economic changes that are taking place in our increasingly globalised world.  As a substitute for examining their topics within these wider contexts they all too often draw on accounts produced by those radical liberals who make some attempt to capture the wider picture. However, as in the case of punitiveness these accounts are predictably inadequate.

Let us take the two main components of the criminological enterprise – crime and punishment. Undoubtedly the most significant development in living memory is the crime drop. The decrease in nearly all forms of crime internationally over the last two decades is unprecedented and was not predicted. An undergraduate student writing an essay in the 1980s predicting a substantial and sustained drop in crime would have either been failed or referred for counselling. Although crime began to fall in both the USA and the UK from the early 1990s it was not until 2000 that the first book on the crime drop appeared in America. Academic criminologists, it would seem like the media (who they are very quick to criticise) were either not interested in this development or did not know how to respond to this good news. Since 2000 there has been a slow trickle of commentaries on this major development but much of it is inconclusive and equivocal. 

Initially, a number of factors were suggested to account for the crime drop – policing policies, mass incarceration and changing patterns of drug use. These were discounted fairly quickly since they did not account very well for international decreases in crime or the continuous decrease in crime across the board over time. Subsequently, a variety of factors were suggested including the introduction of legal abortions, increased security, changing drinking habits and the decrease of lead in the atmosphere. Needless to say all of these explanations suffer the same limitations as the earlier explanations to varying degrees. Characteristically Andrew Karmen in is book New York Murder Mystery (2000) argues that the decline in homicide has been a ‘fortuitous confluence’ of factors, while Franklin Zimring (2007) suggests that there was no single cause - or even an evident cause - but claims that the decline is an example of multiple causation with none of the many contributing factors playing a dominant role.

Moving beyond these liberal and generally inconclusive accounts, it would seem that we need to examine the role of wider structural and social processes such as the shift to PostFordism, the growth of a service economy and accompanying changes in the nature of masculinity and social relations. In addition, as the leading conservative criminologist James Q. Wilson has suggested there are important cultural changes that also underpin this development.

In relation to punishment what we might call the ‘liberal turn’ in academia has faired no better. If we take imprisonment as an example we have seen hundreds of books and articles over the last two or three decades telling us that prisons do not work. The various deficiencies are repeatedly identified and in this way the liberals aim to claim the moral high ground. However, it is difficult if not impossible to find anyone these days that claim that prisons do work and even governmental authorities admit that ‘prisons can be an expensive way of making bad people worse’. The liberal solution takes one of two forms – reductionism or abolitionism. That is, first to reduce the number of people in prison. However, as there is no agreement about what is the correct number of people in prison, the reductionists inevitably claim that there are always too many. This reduces the issue of prisons and punishment to a ’numbers game’ and notions of social justice are sidelined. The other option is abolitionism in which advocates want to see mass decarceration and in some cases the greater use of community based sentences. However, abolitionists often claim that engaging in prison reform and improving prison conditions only serves to re-legitimise prisons, while more pessimistic liberals argue that developing community based ‘alternatives’ only reinforces the centrality of imprisonment while encouraging net widening. Rarely, do these liberals address the realist question of who should go to prison, for what purpose and for how long.

The failure of criminology as Jock Young pointed out some time ago lies in its inability to develop an approach that coherent, sophisticated and useful. The failure to produce ‘joined up’ criminology tends to result in what Elliott Currie refers to as “So What?’’ criminology. That is, a criminology which is theoretically thin, methodologically weak and has little or no policy relevance. The ultimate aim of this book is to address these deficiencies and to re-establish realist criminology, while contributing to the development of a more critical and progressive approach to crime and punishment - an approach aimed at reducing suffering, abuse, exploitation and victimisation, while improving the operation of the criminal justice system and thereby contributing to the goal of achieving greater social justice. 

Note: Palgrave Macmillan are offering a 20% discount on this book when ordered directly from them.  Just quote PM14TWENTY  

Go to: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=770617

www.rogermatthews.net 

Special Green Edition of Radical Criminology Call for Papers

Articles are invited for a special ‘Green’ edition of the journal Radical Criminology. The overarching theme of the edition will be arguing for a green criminology as a means of addressing environmental harms (including animal abuse and wildlife crime) which are often ignored by mainstream criminology.

The editors are interested in papers that discuss how a green criminological perspective can inform criminal justice and social policy perspectives and wider social harms that extend beyond narrow definitions of crime and criminal behaviour.  The special edition follows the journal’s ‘deep green’ perspective which draws attention to and opposes the integral relationships between capitalist exploitation, business practices, and the destruction of local and global ecosystems.  We are particularly interested in papers on the following themes:

·       Environmental harm as crime

·       Environmental regulation and corporate environmental crime

·       The complicity of states, their institutions and capitalist society  in the destruction of ecosystems

·       Animal Protection and Wildlife crime

·       Social and ecological justice

·       The importance and impact of green criminology

Other topics fitting within the scope of the journal’s radical manifesto (available online) and the specific ‘green’ perspectives of the special edition are also encouraged.

Full length/feature articles to a maximum of 9,000 words in length and shorter pieces up to 4,000 words are both welcomed.  The deadline for abstracts is 31 March 2014 and a decision on acceptance will be communicated to authors by 30 April 2014.  Full versions of accepted papers will be required by 30 July 2014 with authors expected to respond to peer-reviewers’ comments with final papers no later than 20 October 2014.

Proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words, as well as the author’s name, address, telephone number, email address, and institutional affiliation and should be sent to one of the editors below:

Dr Angus Nurse, Middlesex University – email a.nurse@mdx.ac.uk

Dr Gary Potter, London South Bank University – Email potterg@lsbu.ac.uk

Dr Nic Groombridge, St Mary’s University – email nicholas.groombridge@smuc.ac.uk

Journal Website: http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc

How many times women assaulted before reporting to police?

A quick search of newspapers on Lexis Library shows that the claim that a woman suffers 35 instances of domestic violence before she reports to the police is still going strong.  This should not be a surprise as both Women’s Aid and Refuge repeat the statistic. See The Independent  (9 September 2013) or Sarah Wollaston MP writing in the Daily Telegraph (19 June 2013) in the wake of the accusations against Charles Saatchi in respect of his very public assault on Nigella Lawson.  Wollaston says, ‘On average a woman is assaulted 35 times before first contacting the police’ without giving a source and links it to other specific English and Welsh stats.  Further examples are  the Daily Post (North Wales) on December 24, 2009 or Grimsby Evening Telegraph, January 12, 2004 or even The Guardian, October 15, 1993.

Many of the receptions of this stat give no source but Refuge do, as the work of Peter Jaffe (1982) but with no further details of publication or journal title.  Whilst much of his work is featured on his institute’s associated website to end abuse no title as early as this is featured.

I have no doubt about the seriousness of domestic violence or that delays, sometimes fatal, occur in victims reporting.  Any criminologist can take you through the problems of crime stats but this article from Full Fact examines whether the figures were 400,000 or more than double that.  There is also a wealth of research pointing at the delays and poor decision making of the police and other authorities - some of it by Jaffe and various colleagues.  However, I’ve always worried about the prevalence of the statistic and its failure, seemingly, to be updated.

I’ve several times tried to persuade undergrad students doing dissertations to track it down or to update it but without success.  So given the coverage of Clare's’ Law and International Women’s Day I decided to look into it myself.

It did not prove easy.  A search on Google Scholar didn’t seem to throw up a single authored work by him published in 1982 but intimations from references in other work suggested a joint article by Jaffe, P., and Burris, C. A. (1982).  Their  An integrated response to wife battering: A community model. Ottawa: Research Report of the Solicitor General of Canada contains the ’35 times’ figure but is not the main focus.

Some of the confusion might come from Jaffe himself as in  ‘The Impact of Police Charges in Incidents of Wife Abuse’ (with Wolfe, Telford and Austin Journal of Family Violence Vo1 No 1 1986) he incorrectly cites Burris, C. A., and Jaffe, P. (1984). ‘Wife battering: A well-kept secret’ as the source for the ’35 times’ figure!

Jaffe and Burris examined the processing of ‘wife assault’ cases (the terminology of the day) through the criminal justice system in London, Ontario, Canada and found that between January and June of 1979, 222 females reported assaults or threatened assaults by their partners or ex-partners. These women had been assaulted an average of 35 times before 1979.

So an old, small, non-UK study still ‘rules’.  I am sure domestic violence researchers in the UK and elsewhere struggle to get their voices heard in policy and media but guess they must have newer and more relevant figures than Jaffe and Burris.  My hunch is that the continued popularity of the figure is, in part, due to its narrative impact for campaigners and lazy or hard-pressed journalists.

So my challenge to DV researchers is to get your figures into the media.

Coming out as a Proud Parent of Queer Criminology and Shameless Trumpet blowing

Back in 1999 my ‘Perverse criminologies: The closet of Doctor Lombroso’ was published in Social Legal Studies, 8(4), 531–548. It stemmed from the work I was doing on masculinities in criminology. I was reading much feminism and a lot of gay and queer theory. It seemed obvious to me:

a) that just as there were arguments about types of feminist engagement with crime and criminology there should be gay or queer ones
b) that much of the ‘masculinist turn’ in criminology was heteronormative
c) there was mileage in the criminal and sexual connotations of ‘bent’ and
d) that given much of the common-sensical stereotyping of gay men their involvement in crime should be lower even whilst gay criminalisation/victimisation was high.

I published and moved onto other things - having already covered CCTV (1994) green issues (1991)! - and noticed little citation until a couple of years ago a number of out gay men and women Post Grads started to contact me. And now I see that Critical Criminology Volume 22, Issue 1, March 2014 is a Special Issue on Queer/ing Criminology: New Directions and Frameworks and some extensive mention of my work occurs. Not always in the direction I thought - but not for me to be legislative about this.  Here are some excerpts.

Woods merely notes in ‘Queer Contestations and the Future of a Critical “Queer” Criminology’, ‘LGBTQ populations have been stigmatized and ignored in several ways since the inception of the field of criminology (Groombridge, 1999)’

Buist and Stone in their article ‘Transgender Victims and Offenders: Failures of the United States Criminal Justice System and the Necessity of Queer Criminology’ say:

We also believe that the foundation of queer criminology, the inception of which is often attributed to Nic Groombridge’s (1999) article, Perverse Criminologies: The Closet of Doctor Lombroso, is rooted in both critical and radical criminology… 

Particularly grateful for Vanessa Panfil’s engagement in ‘Better Left Unsaid? The Role of Agency in Queer Criminological Research’ with my work, thus:

Despite gaps in the literature, contemporary empirical research at least provides more of a nuanced portrait of gay men’s involvement in crime than prior literature; historically, criminologists’ attention to gay men has focused on offenses that are (or were) sexual in nature, ranging from sodomy, to sexual “perversions,” to pedophilia (Groombridge, 1999)

the omission of gay offenders from modern criminology and other justice studies is especially interesting considering a historical pattern in the Western world of linking homosexuality with sexual deviance and criminality, both in court proceedings and scholarly research (Groombridge 1999)

I interrogate the assumption of heterosexuality inherent in much of the existing criminological research (Collier 1998); aid in Groombridge’s (1999: 545) encouragement for criminology to consider queer sexualities, as they may introduce additional “subversive knowledges” into the discipline; and answer Messerschmidt’s (1997: 119) call for criminology to be brought “out of the closet.”

Related to these concerns, a critique of approaches that seek to investigate the criminal involvement of queer populations such as those advocated by Woods (2014a) and Groombridge (1999) is their unintended consequences.

And again Gledhill ‘Queering State Crime Theory: The State, Civil Society and Marginalization’ says:

As Groombridge (1999) outlines, there is a desperate need for criminological engagement with diverse sexualities and gender identities. Historically, understandings of “homosexuality” in criminology, and most other disciplines, were centered on notions of difference and otherness

And Frederick, one of those post grads, has this to say in ‘“Delinquent Boys”: Toward a New Understanding of “Deviant” and Transgressive Behavior in Gay Men’

Public health and behavioral health researchers examine the reasons why gay men and men who have sex with men (MSM) engage in “high risk” drug and sex activities (see Groombridge, 1999) (Not sure I see myself in this role

Unfortunately, criminology, when it turns its focus towards the LGBTQ community specifically, tends to focus on crimes committed against LGBTQs, such as hate crimes (Groombridge, 1999)

Groombridge notes that criminology has a “long record of selectively ignoring deviance associated with new social movements” (1999: 532). Also, criminologists, in general, tend to view sexuality as “normatively heterosexual” (Groombridge, 1999)

I have long struggled with my identity in all this. Whilst a long term supporter of gay and other rainbow rights my work was not a ‘standpoint’ one but purely theoretical and speculative. I have suffered as much homophobia as any straight man who tends to the flamboyant but I have had no gay experiences. So I’ve been ‘passing’ as gay. Or, at least some people may think I am from my writing or dress. I’ve been reluctant to 'come out' as 'straight for fear of suggesting that I am defensive about it. Indeed if I think it will unnerve people - short of attracting violence, I am a coward - I allow people to think I am gay.

I am, as you can see, an enormously proud and boastful parent (a 'breeder', no less).

Gothic Criminology: a rambling intro (as befits the subject) and some thoughts on the dark side of the dark side

This picture is of an interior at Strawberry Hill House.  Here is some introductory material from their website.

Created by Horace Walpole in the 18th century, Strawberry Hill is internationally famous as Britain’s finest example of Georgian Gothic revival architecture. It also inspired the first gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.

The Castle of Otranto suggests a gloomier place than the current exterior of the House shows.  The picture below left taken was during the restoration and that on the right more recently.  The House is in the grounds of my University and we used to use the rooms for meetings and events. Its shabbiness adding to the effect.  Our remaining access is to the Senior Common Room and Waldegrave Drawing Room.

I may work at St Mary’s University College but have yet to read the Castle of Otranto.  Most of my knowledge of the gothic comes from Jane Austen’s parody Northanger Abbey, popular culture and Goth sub-culture.

Strawberry Hill House can be seen in the bottom left hand corner of this picture from the college website.

I identify as criminologist (with all the baggage that brings) but teach squarely within a sociology programme.  In my teaching I point out that criminology may have a history but not a neat and tidy time line or chronology.  In popular, if not academic, criminology its not so much the ‘return of the repressed’ but a general failure to kill off any theory, to repress or suppress it.  No sooner than you think you’ve screwed down the coffin lid it rises zombie/vampire like (forgive me if I’m mixing my genres - must talk to my Screen Media and English colleagues).

Within criminology there is a difficulty of where to start on ‘our’ history.  With the pre-modern, theocratic, demonological, ‘common-sensical’ criminology (all refusing to be killed off) of ‘evil’ or ‘possession’ and extremes of violence by offenders and the Authorities (local, religious, monarchical or State)?  Or the Enlightenment, the Classical, the rationality of which informs the Law (it and neo-classical versions too have their ongoing life)? Or yet with the ‘father’ of criminology Cesare Lombroso (whose gruesome collection of criminal skins - for their tattoos has been called gothic)?

I know that there are a number of books and articles about Gothic Criminology and these are listed below.  But the main focus of those items is that the subject matter of criminology is Gothic.  Gonzalez even speaks of crypto-criminology (Crypto-criminology refers to the dark, devious and dangerous side of human nature.)

My contention is that the subject itself is Gothic.  Some of its practitioners might see themselves as Classicists.  It is this commonly used reference to Classicism architectural metaphor for crime control - or a criminology that supports/houses it - and the surroundings of Strawberry Hill that lead me in lectures to call most criminology Gothic.  Not only the early, ‘medieval’ or barbaric but the very convoluted structure of the discipline with its left and right Wings and very ‘sub’ basement.

This blog signals my intention to engage more fully with this for presentation as a paper at a Conference this year.

Blackwell’s Online Reference on ‘Crime and the Gothic’

Picart Caroline Joan and Greek Cecil THE COMPULSION OF REAL/REEL SERIAL KILLERS AND VAMPIRES: TOWARD A GOTHIC CRIMINOLOGY 2003 School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 10 (1): 39-68

Picart Caroline Joan (Kay) and Greek Cecil (eds) (2004) Monsters In and Among Us: towards a Gothic Criminology Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Rafter Nicole, Ystehede Per (2010), Here be dragons: Lombroso, the gothic, and social control, in Mathieu Deflem (ed.) Popular Culture, Crime and Social Control (Sociology of Crime Law and Deviance, Volume 14), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.263-284