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. 

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.

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

Theocratic Criminology

If I were a Saudi-based criminologist how would I deal with a request from the authorities to investigate why women wanted to commit the crime of driving or anyone the crime of alcohol production, distribution and sale?  As a UK-based criminologist I can select from, or mix up, the whole smorgasbord of criminological history in attempting to explain crime or, in this Saudi example, criminalisation.  But what of a Saudi criminologist?

Women driving or pretty much anything to do with alcohol are crimes in Saudi Arabia but not in many other places; and I use such facts in my criminology teaching.  That is I attempt to show my students that law and morals have changed over time and between places and therefore that crime and deviance is relative.

I have often tossed such ‘facts’ into lectures without too much thought.  Whilst areligious I teach at a Roman Catholic University College.  I often spend time early in my introductory criminology module on the pre-history of criminology when crime and sin were undivided and indivisible and you only needed religious authority to know what was right and wrong and why.

The theological knowledge of my students (not all of whom may be Catholic) never stretched to answer my question to them about whether religious ideas of the devil and evil were more similar to classicist or positivist approaches to crime.  Did we freely chose evil - calculating in the classicist way that the fun now might be worth any pain later - or were we - in a positivist medical model way - ‘infected’ by the devil.  The punishment/treatment might be the same though.

Changes in the demographics of the college’s entrants and the obviousness of Islamic dress mean that I’m now having pause for thought.  How are my religio-criminological musings and discussions of lap-dancing or rape, let-alone the significance of the Enlightenment project to sociology going down?  My commitment to that and the need for an education that challenges, nay offends, comfortable and comforting complaisance ensures I will continue to teach such material.  However, I also now drop in plenty of examples of the theocratic absurdities derived from Judaism and Christianity too and autocracies that wield similar ‘I-am-the-Law’ powers.

But this has got me thinking about my notional Saudi scholar and his problems (or her worse ones). Critical scholars in the West don’t necessarily get preferment and Government and Commerce insist on practical solutions.  So it is no surprise to see Talal Al-Eidan, described as ‘a criminology and criminal justice expert’ advising, ‘the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency and banks should strengthen precautionary measures when it comes to stocking ATMs’.

Ali Wardak pointed out in 2005 how little research into crime and criminal justice there had been in Saudi Arabia.  But Dr. Robert Winslow’s A Comparative Criminology Tour of the World offers some and notes that:

In November 1990, a group of forty-seven women staged a demonstration to press their claim for the right to drive. The mutawwiin demanded that the women be punished. The government confiscated the women's passports, and those employed as teachers were fired. The previously unofficial ban on women's driving quickly became official.

And Hamid R. Kusha specifically discusses the possibility that Sharia Law deters criminality by comparing that in Iran and Sudan (but in 1998, so the changes in both those countries render comparison difficult).  Others suggest the influence of internalised specifically Islamic self-control.  Crime statistics show low but existent levels of crime.  These figures can, like all Government figures, be criticised and the low levels of crime against women subjected to particular scrutiny.  Women in post-Enlightenment countries find it hard to report partner violence so Saudi women even more so.  And violence at the hand of strangers is reduced by a segregation of the sexes that many women here would not welcome.

So we might conclude that crime is low in Saudi Arabia for a variety of reasons - religious, social, cultural, political and economy.  None of which one would want to replicate nor could we.  They have money and, until recently, isolation (Saudi Arabia builds giant Yemen border fence to keep out illegal immigrants and drug smugglers).

I’d not want to be a criminal in Saudi Arabia, nor a criminologist.  If you are one or the other let me know.  How’s it going?  What does a theocratic criminologist do all day when all the answers are in one book or in the head of one ruler?  And this was the case when Beccaria published his ‘On Crimes and Punishments’ and why initially published anonymously.

Different faces of criminology

On 14 September I enjoyed the highlife discussing efficient and effective policing with the private sponsors circling to offer back and middle office solutions to Chief Constables and the incoming Police and Crime Commissioners courtesy of Reform and then on 19th at the Southbank for the Koestler Exhibition for offender art.

There is much to be found in this Burglar's 'dumb' letter. It is reproduced below from the Daily Mail website.

It appears, on the face of it, to be an anti Restorative or Community Justice - indeed even Criminal Justice - but it seems also to have been a form of Governmental 'criminology of the self' (Garland).

The letter was never sent - though we only discover this part way through - but we, potential victims, are meant to heed the wise words of the 'dumb' burglar to ensure we don't become a vitim of crime.

The Mail's final par encapsulates the disgust but also the fascination we all have for crime news:

A spokesman for the UK Neighbourhood Watch Trust said the letter was ‘appalling’, but added: ‘Christmas is coming and people like to leave their curtains open so people can see their lights and their tree, but they need to realise the criminal is looking at their TV, radio, computer and the presents under the tree.’

Obviously in addition to the 'criminology of the self' the Mail adds the 'criminology of the other', the ill-bred and ill-educated burglar. Win win.

Fascinating Post on Crime and Criminal Justice by right-wing commentator Peter Hitchens - brother of the more famous Christopher. The full text is below. He makes an interesting point about the force used by police against Mark Saunders (but might have mentioned others, like Jean Charles de Menezes) and points out that hanging - of which he is an ardent supporter - followed trial and appeal etc. I think he is right on the judge dredd/robocop developments (though he's not used nor would understand such popular cultural references) but wrong to think the corollary of his argument would be bring back hanging end police 'executions'. It seems as likely now that we'd end up with judicial and extra-judicial deaths.

A good example of nostalgic conservative 'criminology'.

So this is Liberal Britain: execution by masked gunmen

The masked avengers of the Metropolitan Police’s firearms squads scare the pants off me. It’s not just the street-fighting gear they sport, clothes designed to give the wearer a feeling of irresponsibility.

It’s not just the IRA-style facewear. It’s not just the huge numbers of them – enough to invade Sierra Leone once the Army’s been disbanded by George Osborne. It’s not even the anonymity most of them are granted, like something out of the Middle Ages.

It’s the fact that nobody notices. Liberal fanatics abolished hanging in this country nearly 50 years ago. Yet when we had the gallows, our police were unarmed. And if the state wanted to kill someone, it could only do so after a jury trial, an appeal and
the chance of clemency. This was called ‘obscene’ and ‘barbaric’.

Now we have a heavily-armed police force whose members, masked like Henry VIII’s headsmen, deal out death as helicopters thunder overhead – no jury, no judge, no appeal. And those who said capital punishment was wicked refuse to see the connection.

Oh, and please note the crazed, shotgun-wielding barrister Mark Saunders was taking ‘anti-depressants’ – another connection everyone refuses to see.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1317162/Why-bleating-sheep-decide-runs-Labour-Party.html#ixzz11Q10kw2C

Story of a story

I am the very junior co-author of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies report `Criminal justice resources staffing and workload'. The full press release reads:

Embargo: 00.01 Hours, Monday, 8 December 2008

Government approach to criminal justice ‘contradictory’, new report from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies suggests

The criminal justice system faces major pressures in the coming years, with contradictory government policy placing staff under enormous strain, suggests a new report from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London. The report, Criminal justice resources staffing and workloads, argues that workload and staffing pressures have grown alongside the increases in criminal justice budgets (1). As the government seeks to cut costs in the coming years, the report suggests, the key criminal justice agencies face a grim future of staffing cuts, wage freezes and increased work for those that remain. The report will be formally launched at the Palace of Westminster on Monday, 8 December 2008 (2).

Since 2001 the police, courts and Probation Service have benefited from above inflation budget growth. The Courts Service budget has grown by six per cent in real terms. The police budget has grown by 18 per cent and the Probation Service budget by 21 per cent. However, the report argues that once increases in staff levels and workloads are taken into account, as well as structural upheaval, these real terms budget increases are far less generous than they appear. In some cases the costs of structural change and increased workloads have outstripped budget growth.

The Prison Service has experienced a real terms fall of seven per cent in its budgets since 2001. This has placed the Service under huge strain, the report argues, given the rapidly rising prison population and the additional demands that have been placed on prison officers. As a result, government policy on prison is ‘mired in contradiction’, the report argues. It is difficult to see how such an approach can be sustained in the long term, it suggests.

The report concludes that the pressure on criminal justice budgets in the coming years offers the government an opportunity to take stock and reflect on what the criminal justice agencies can realistically achieve, and what their size and reach should be, given the likely resources that will be available.

Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London and co-author of the report said:

'The government looks set to pursue the contradictory policy objective of placing ever greater demands on the criminal justice system while cutting budgets and shedding experienced staff. It is difficult to see how this amounts to a coherent policy framework. The opportunity now exists for the government to rethink the demands it is placing on the criminal justice system and the staff working in it, bringing this more into line with the likely resources that will be available in the coming years.'

Dr Nic Groombridge, a criminologist, former Home Office civil servant and co-author of the report said:

'Neither as a criminologist nor as a former civil servant would I recommend simply increasing expenditure. However, the strains placed upon society by the current economic events and the stress placed upon criminal justice workers mean that the criminal justice system should not be overloaded and must receive adequate resources. Nothing to date or in the current plans gives me confidence that this will be the case.'
The Press Association picked it up and said:

'Fewer frontline police officers'

The number of frontline police officers is falling, according to new research.

Academics found there were nearly 1,500 fewer police constables in England and Wales last year compared with 2006 - a fall of more than 1%.

In the same year, the number of Police and Community Support Officers (PCSOs) doubled.

Researchers at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College, London, said cheaper staff were being recruited to give the impression there were more police.

They said the figures showed "the way in which the Home Office has relied on the recruitment of less qualified and lower paid auxiliary staff to boost the visible policing presence".

Until last year, Pc numbers grew every year from 2002. But the growth in beat officers was far outstripped by the number of higher-ranking officers. In the last five years the number of superintendents grew by 16% and chief inspectors by nearly 20%.

The report's authors examined funding and workload in the police, prisons, probation and courts systems. They found total spending on the criminal justice system was one third higher last year than in 1997. Police funding was up nearly 20% in real terms in the last five years, they said. But tighter budgets in the future were likely to mean future staff cuts, they warned.

The report found the number of administrative staff in the prison service had risen 20% in five years, despite budget cuts.

Co-author Richard Garside said Government policy was "mired in contradiction" with cuts coming despite an increase in the prison population. "The Prison Service is probably facing the greatest pressures of the criminal justice agencies examined in this report," he wrote.

"If the Government continues to increase the demands it places on the criminal justice system, and the staff working in it, the coming period of budget cuts will be an exceedingly challenging one. It is difficult to see how service quality will not decline in such circumstances. In particular, reductions in staffing seem almost inevitable if budgets are to be balanced."

This lead to a variety of stories, few of which do justice to the many facts and opinions in the report. The DailyExpress page7 takes the PA line. The Sun page 7 says `Blue line is thinner’ giving an even shorter précis. Readers of Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News won’t be surprised at such ‘churnalism’. However, nothing in these reports is false just does scant justice to our work. It is clearly the ‘police’ issue that has legs.

The Daily Mail page 30 goes with `More police funding but fewer frontline officers' and appears to write own article backed up with quotes from all political sides as follows:

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said: 'This undermines all Labour's rhetoric about record police numbers.
The fact is that because of Labour's target culture our police spend just 14 per cent of their time where the public want them, which is on the streets.'
Liberal Democrat justice spokesman David Howarth said: 'The report rightly points out how incoherent policy from a Government obsessed with looking tough has left staff at the sharp end of the criminal justice system confused and overworked.'
But the Home Office insisted that spending on additional staff has meant fully-qualified officers can spend more time combating crime.
A spokesman said: 'Time spent by officers on frontline duties has increased each year since 2003 - equivalent to 5,340 more police officers. ‘
The Daily Telegraph page 2 `Police shortfall "hidden" by use of support officers' gives a similar story to the Mail. The use though of “hidden”, even with the quotes is clever since we don’t say this, indeed all the figures we use come from official sources and would be available to an assiduous journalist. Ironically the picture editor has chosen a picture of many officers to talk about the growth of PCSOs.

Only two online sources were truer to the report’s intentions. Thus Public Servant Online headlined a short piece highlighting the issues for the Prison Service “Criminal justice system 'under strain'”. InTheNews website called the, ‘Govt's approach to criminal justice 'contradictory'. They were the only one to run the quote I had provided for the press release.

However, I did have a number of press contacts in the days before and on the day of launch. On the Friday Sky News contacted me and set up a pre-record for the Sunday at there studios. BBC Wales also said they wanted a live interview from Millbank Studios for the Monday morning but, like the BBC’s Breakfast show, who’d phoned on Saturday night, they never came back to me. Later Sky Radio – they have no station but provide news for local commercial stations – also contacted me so visited them after doing Sky News.

I have had limited media contact but teach Crime and Media and have an MA in Journalism Studies. Richard and I had not thought our ‘findings’ that interesting and wondered if the fact that I had worked for the Home Office had piqued some interest so were surprised when all the questioning centred on the police numbers question. I don’t think I did that well and have not seen or heard the output. Indeed I don’t currently know if any of it was used.

However, after the launch – and before I got home – BBC Radio Five Live asked for a live interview at 4:20 on the Drive Time programme. I declined the offer to go into the studios at Millbank but elected to go home where I readied myself at my computer with a sort of script to move on from police figures – the researcher had mentioned them – to get back to the report and the problems faced by all the criminal justice workers even where they appeared to have done well and speculated a little on the future in the light of the credit crunch.