Sport and Crime: Towards a critical criminology of sport - a review (Intro and Chapter 1)

 Sport and Crime: Towards a critical criminology of sport

It might be unusual to start with mentioning the acknowledgements in a book review but here we go.

Laura Kelly and Emma Poulton are mentioned as originators of the idea for this book and I can attest that ten years ago I advised Routledge to publish it. The book in hand is the successor text to that sadly unpublished one.

And to look even earlier in the book we might ask why the book is in sport and leisure series not a criminology one?

But as the Oxford Handbook of Sports History (Edelman and Wilson, 2017) contains only 4 mentions of ‘crime’ and one of the grand texts aimed at criminology students (Newburn, 2013) barely mentions sport we should not be surprised.

I am extremely grateful to Andy Millie for pushing me and Bristol University/Policy Press for bearing with me in getting my book accepted as a criminology one.

And whilst we are still looking at such ephemera I must take issue with the claim ‘that this is the first book to fully explore the connections between sports studies and criminology’ (website and back-of-book blurb!).

Introduction

I am cited on page 1 in the Introduction as noticing the ‘sheer potential for a distinctive criminology of sport’. I am mentioned amongst a number of others who I also acknowledge - such as Meek (2013) and Nichols (2010). I give a chapter to considering whether sport can prevent crime or rehabilitate the convicted as those two argue. I’m more equivocal.  Millward et al engage in this debate in Chapter 4.

They note Avi Brisman’s review of my book in which he suggests my work was an ‘opening bell or starting pistol’ and likening me to a ‘father wanting acknowledgement of paternity without the responsibilities of child-rearing’. They are kinder but I’m going to admit Avi - who I know and respect - has me sussed, nearly. I am staking a claim - hence my eye-brow raising at the claim that this book is the first. But unlike a stern father I don’t seek to lay down the law and terrorise my children but keep a kindly, perhaps avuncular or god-parental, eye on what is going on in the playground. I’ve always had a ludic intent to my work. 

So whether as parent, uncle or god-father I am engaging strongly in this review and have also provided the afterword for Power Played edited by Derek Silva and Liam Kennedy.

Millward et al are hopeful of the future of connections to be made between studies of sport and criminology. They kindly note my emphasis on mundane acts as well as spectacular or scandalous ones involving elites; for instance, they give an example of the banning of skateboards in Norway between 1978 and 1989. I agree their conclusion that ‘the relationship between ‘crime’ and ‘sport’ is so diffuse, contested and broad’ (p5). I would add that our relationship as people and criminologists is similarly diffuse, contested and broad.

My book took a critical criminological stance, even critiquing sports and theories I favoured but also attempted to set out how a variety of criminologies might be applied to sport. Millward et al dive right in so spend some of the introduction setting out some critical points.

Those critical points are:

1) there is a starting point in my work and that of others and

2) citing Francis (2012) they note ‘sport is and always will be harmful’ and

3) those harms include dead workers on Qatar’s World Cup stadia (which they take up in Chapter 7) and increased control and surveillance at sports mega-events (taken up in Chapter 5)

and 4) critical criminology has become diffuse and disputed. Sport makes a ‘novel entry point’ (p6).

Chapter 2 then provides further history of critical criminology and its scant engagement with sport.

Chapter 3 looks at white collar crime and crimes of the powerful in sport. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fédération internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

Using a Foucauldian lens, sports based interventions (SBIs) are examined in Chapter 4. They are found to mask social inequalities and control whilst providing isolated cases of ‘success’ (p9).

Critical Security Studies inform Chapter 5’s examination of sport mega-events but also of athlete’s bodies.

Drawing on ‘edgework’ Chapter 6 looks at mixed martial arts, bare-knuckle boxing and other extreme sports.

Chapter 7 focusses on the upcoming football Word Cup in Qatar and the social harms caused by it.

Chapter 8 sums up and offers a research agenda. I’ll check it against mine in (Hall and Scalia, 2019).

I’ll review a chapter at a time over the next few weeks.

Joyriding N Ireland: dangerously conventional protests

Kilpatrick (1997) carried out her research into joyriding in Belfast in early 1994 and I missed her work in writing up mine. I cited many other’s work in both Northern Ireland and the Republic but mostly on the generics of joyriding. I avoided examining the specifics of the situation there as the Troubles (’68-98 according to Encyclopaedia Brittanica) were ongoing (and still very resonant today). I briefly touched on some of the differences for joyriding in Belfast (all the work seemed to be on this area) in my PhD. Not only might joyriders attract the attention of the police (then the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC) but also the British Army. They risked shooting by either if they crashed through - or came too close to - a checkpoint. In addition the loyalist and republican paramilitary forces actively ‘policed’ anti-social behaviour. The provisional IRA (pIRA) were known to ‘kneecap’ joyriders - that is disable them by shooting them in the knee - or deliver a punishment beating.

Yet despite these additional high risk factors for joyriders the descriptions in Kilpatrick are entirely in line with my, and others, findings. Her work with 15 juvenile offenders who had stolen cars or allowed themselves to be carried in such a car. They mostly did it for the thrill, usually in company, didn’t necessarily look for the added excitement of a police chase and might steal from the car and may graduate to fewer but more professional theft. Not only was Belfast the focus Kilpatrick points out some real differences in the narrowness of that focus, more than half the cars thefts in Northern Ireland were in Belfast with South Belfast (near the University) a particular hotspot with 85% being recovered (a high rate) and of those two thirds being found in West Belfast (a largely Catholic, republican area).

Mulcahy (2013) adds some further Northern Ireland specific facts/suggestions. The heavy armour on police and army vehicles made chases less than feasible and considerations of public policy counselled against them. He mentions a suggestion that the youngest member of a joyriding team might act as a ‘sandbag’ (to absorb bullets) by lying on the parcel shelf.

Some of this situation is captured in this account of a joyrider who was kneecapped (O’Docherty, 1993). Johnny McGivern had stolen more than 100 cars and had signed a document presented by the pIRA promising not to steal any more cars. He did and he and his friend received a public beating with a baseball bat and chair leg. He stole another car and was arrested by the legal authorities but the station where he was being held was bombed and he was released for his safety before being formally questioned. He continued to offend and was eventually shot in the leg by the pIRA as were 58 others that year. Such joyriders were seen to be anti-social to their own community through theft of cars and dangerously displaying them but also as potential informers if they came within the orbit of the security services. The young men didn’t see themselves as political or particularly criminal. They were not ‘hoods’ (ie gangsters) (McCullough and Schmidt, 1990).




The Extern organisation tried to work with and for such young men with an Auto Project offering car mechanics and banger racing (set up in 1981!). Their research McCullough et al (1990) sets out how car theft then was less of a problem than in the rest of UK or Ireland (South Wales said to have a particularly bad problem) but joyriding in Belfast was seen to be a particular problem. McCullough and Schmidt (1990) interviewed joyriders and those who work with them. They too focussed on Catholic West Belfast. They note young women did steal cars or more often allowed themselves to be carried in stolen cars ‘but the number is relatively insignificant’ (1990,2).

They establish a timeline in which accounts of joyriding in Belfast the start in the late 60s when paramilitary groups encouraged teenagers to steal cars and antagonise the Security forces by burning cars to use as roadblocks or diversions. As these tactics increasingly annoyed the communities in which they lived the pIRA turned against them and instated informal punitive sanctions. So the joyriders proclivities were enrolled in republican/nationalist protest against British rule. Acting against them formed a part of the pIRA’s localist politics. Thought there is some suggestion that more cars might be stolen after a punishment shooting as a ‘collective act of defiance’ (1990,8). This might be seen as ‘protest’ joyriding.

In an earlier post I talk about Greene’s suggestion that some young black men in New York/New Jersey were engaged in ‘protest joyriding’. One might argue that the specifics of Belfast during the Troubles meant that this too was a protest. That is the joyriders were taking on the authorities or the paramilitary forces. I would argue that both Greene’s and Belfast’s joyriders are still deeply conventional despite doing illegal and potentially dangerous things. Parker argued in his early study of joyriding in Liverpool that (Parker 1974b) "While joyriding is a delinquent action, it is motivated by respectable and conventional desires.” I concluded in my PhD from a green perspective that ‘Car use continues to be respectable and conventional but its taken-for-granted nature is now being contested’. That is the joyrider is presented as very different to the respectable owner driver but given the bad driving and ecological damage of that car use I see that as doing ideological work to bolster the current consumerist car culture.

Pascal Menoret seeks to argue that the joyriding he observed in Riyadh constituted a revolt but that can wait til another blog. Much of his ‘joyriding’ was ‘drifting’ in cars they or friends owned.

References

Kilpatrick, R., 1997. Joy-riding: An addictive behaviour. Hodge, J.E., McMurran, M. and Hollin, C.R (eds) Addicted to crime, pp.165-190.
McCullough D and Schmidt T (1990) 'Joyriding in West Belfast', in Car Theft in Northern Ireland., Recent Studies On a Persistent Problem CI RAC Paper no 2 Dave McCullough, Tanja Schmidt and Bill Lockhart Belfast: The Extern Organisation.
Mulcahy, A., 2013. Policing Northern Ireland. Routledge.
O'Docherty Malachi 4 April 1993 The Independent ‘It was one damn good car: In hospital after a kneecapping, and just before he died, Johnny McGivern wrote about his life, in stories introduced here by Malachi O’Doherty’ available at https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/it-was-one-damn-good-car-in-hospital-after-a-kneecapping-and-just-before-he-died-johnny-mcgivern-1453233.html accessed 16 May 2020.

Don’t pick on people pick up litter.

The blog entry below appeared 5 years ago on the now defunct but much missed Works for Freedom site associated with the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. I’m republishing it now because of fresh proposals to tackle litter.

As the Daily Mail says:

Litter fines set to DOUBLE: Rubbish louts now face £150 on-the-spot penalty while late payers will be forced to stump up £300

• Theresa May's election manifesto promised to 'do more to reduce litter' 

• The current maximum fine stands at £80 but town halls have demanded a rise

• A large majority of councils now want the power to levy fines of £150 for littering

I stand by my conclusions but should make it clear:

I don’t believe this will deter ‘litterers’;

I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘litterer’, let alone ‘litterbug’ or ‘litter lout’;

I believe this will be used to raise much needed cash for local councils whilst decreasing respect for them and the law and

will involve privatised criminalisation of the poor and easily targeted.

Don’t pick on people; pick up litter.

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’Hard’ to be green?  ‘Zero-tolerance’ and litter

My chapter ‘Matter All Over the Place: Litter, Criminology and Criminal Justice’ in the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology explores a ‘green perspective’ on litter.  It runs through criminological theory, anthropology, art and poetry to sort of conclude, untidily, that litter is difficult to define but should be important to green criminology.

That is, for very good reason, green criminology has looked at the larger misdeeds of polluters.  In this they might be seen to be following in the muck-raking traditions of investigative journalism and radical criminology.  Green activists too, often focus on these global issues ignoring the more local, indeed the hyper-local.  Litter is globally a very local issue.

The only criminology that seems to have engaged with litter was of the ‘Broken Windows’ variety.  Indeed, I found a large packaging firm in America directly quoting Wilson and Kelling on their website and claiming, ‘that litter is a "people issue" not a product issue.’  This may remind us of the NRA mantra that guns don’t kill people, people do.  Their website has since changed but they continue to be ‘concerned’ about litter.

As a teaching point I sometimes try to provoke students by pointing out the persistence of the average litterer against that of ‘your average murderer’ and suggest highly punitive prospective incapacitation punishment of litterers.  I’m as opposed (who claims to be for it?) to litter as most and occasionally ‘return’ it to its owner or clear up litter that is not mine yet I’ don’t advocate a punitive approach.  I think that this comes more from my criminological beliefs than my green ones.  Here I can only assert that the green take on punishment should be to reduce, reuse and recycle not throw away lives, even of ‘green’ offenders.

But as we shall see, others not necessarily ‘green’ but in the interests of ‘the Environment’, are keen to police, prosecute and punish and often through the private sector.  For instance,  Blaenau Gwent Council is now employing security guards from Xfor who make much of media coverage of their activities.  For instance, this advertorial from Environmental Health News in which they boast of their single and joint operations under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.  Apparently Maidstone, Enfield, Broxbourne borough, Birmingham City and Peterborough City Councils have all used their services.  Some of such usages have been sharply criticised by Big Brother Watch and by Ministers and the Daily Mail.

There is a disputed line between anti-social behaviour and the criminalisation of the disapproved.  There is also the temptation to pick low hanging fruit in any policing situation.  That is to pick on the discarded fag end not the factory that produces them.  The malleability of definitions in this field also mean that a reasonable desire to see the end of litter means some Councils are now using the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 to restrict public leafleting.

So don’t litter or else local or national authorities will use it as an excuse to criminalise you or remove your political rights.  Snappy slogan eh?

Too many moral panics not enough folk devils. Was Stan Cohen wrong about his own work?

This was posted on the Works for Freedom website in May 2013 which is sadly no more. I’ve just updated the links etc.

This is a short blog post, not a doctoral thesis.  I cannot come close to doing justice to the extensive primary and secondary literature on moral panics.  So apologies if I missed the very article or paragraph that says exactly what I say here.  But no apologies for running the argument as I feel it is under represented.  That argument is that the term ‘moral panic’ is overused.  That may be contested by few.  More contentious is my argument that even the late Stan Cohen misused it.

Rather than engage textually with many examples I offer, unusually for me, a bone-headed, positivistic, empirical account which updates my ‘Criminologists Say ….’.  A search of Lexis Library of UK newspapers shows 107 mentions of moral panics for the year 2012 (choosing the last twelve months throws up Stan’s obituaries) but only 22 of folk devils.  This is even replicated in the book with 83 mentions of moral panics against 44 of folk devils.  So to some theory.

Angela McRobbie and Sarah L. Thornton (1995: 559) argue that:

'folk devils' are less marginalized than they once were; they not only find themselves vociferously and articulately supported in the same mass media that castigates them, but their interests are also defended by their own niche and micro-media. 

And even more importantly for my argument:

this approach challenged moral guardians by suggesting that their overreaction was counterproductive. The media coverage of deviance acted as a kind of handbook of possibilities to be picked over by new recruits (McRobbie and Thornton 1995: 561).

I initially read the first edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers (the link here is to the third which can be recommended for Stan’s own thoughts on the development of the term).  My reading was after the first ‘moment’ of mod: indeed after I gave up riding a stripped down Lambretta TV175.  I also sported, at that time, what purported to be a Korean War surplus parka and a ‘suedehead’ haircut.  I further mangled sub-cultures by wearing the same gear on the Matchless 250 (a motorbike, the staple of ‘Rocker’ style) I rode after the scooter packed up.  So I was old enough to remember the events described by Stan as described by the media.  And I had personal access to the ‘handbook’ to which McRobbie and Thornton refer.

I may have come too late to mod but claim to have become sociologically aware early  (through my reading of the alternative press, mostly Oz, see this post) that as a young person who dressed in certain ways I was in danger of being stereotyped (see also this on beards and tattoos).

My argument is that the first part of the couplet ‘Folk Devil/Moral Panic’ has been paid insufficient attention.  In particular, their articulation in the subtitle ‘the creation of the Mods and Rockers’ (emphasis added).  I know from the standpoint of a young person at the time that Mods and Rockers and other youth tribes in many respects created themselves but in an asymmetric relation to the media and authority.  They may have come up from the streets but they entered most young people’s consciousness through their parent’s condemnatory media.  Their parent’s Durkheimian moral boundaries may have been reinforced but their’s were expanded.

With his emphasis on deviancy amplification I believe that Cohen is arguing that the moral panic is counterproductive because it creates folk devils who attract adherents.  So joining a youth tribe, taking ecstasy or legal highs might meet such a definition of a moral panic featuring a handsome devil but becoming a sex offender does not.  So it is disappointing to find Stan discussing the Cleveland sex abuse scandal thus, ‘the resulting moral panic became a pitched battle of claims and counter claims’ and goes on to talk of ‘satanic abuse’ cases as ‘more fictitious and one of the purest cases of moral panic’ (2002: xvii).

For me those events were media frenzies involving moral entrepreneurs and media in an amplification spiral that did not generate deviance but more victims.  The paedophile is not a ‘folk devil’ but a bogeyman or ‘boo’ figure.  Being so reviled attracts no adherents.  In the case of media drugs frenzies the ‘boo’ figure is the ‘evil dealer’ but the ‘folk devil’ is more often the booze, the weed, the Es or the legal highs rather than the wasted junkie (though fashion is sometimes accused of pushing this line).

So I believe that to follow Stan requires a parsimonious definition of a ‘moral panic’ and that one handy rule might be that if the media use the term it isn’t one.

Criminology: Now and then

Your ordinary burglar and forger must pale his ineffectual fires before the brilliant scoundrelism of the man who accepts the fortune of his friend in trust and either spends it in such a way that he is fairly safe in the Bankruptcy Court, or absconds with what is left of it to sunnier climes.

The lengthy quote above appears in an article on the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette on 8 May 1900 which is headlined, simply, ‘Criminology’. It contains many observations of a criminological nature without specifically mentioning any criminologist. We should not be surprised by this (Groombridge, 2007) but it is heartening to note the presumption that readers will know the term. The politics of the paper varied over time - and at this time passed the prime of its radical investigations under W.T Stead - but its compassion and, even, admiration for the ordinary criminal is interesting in th elight of much modern media treatment of crime and criminals.

The opening sentence clearly sees criminology - it is not mentioned specifically again the body of the text - in positivistic but patronisingly compassionate light.

The criminal is an interesting creature considered in the scientific perspective and when in custody. Sometimes he is not all unpleasant; circumstances and a weak will being unable to balance each other, he has fallen into the mire, and lies there with an expression of futile innocence almost ludicrous.

The mention of ‘will’ draws on classicist notions but much of the explanation is a combination of biological, psychological and sociological positivism combined with a desire to be relevant to criminal justice. I intensify this as ‘neo-classical’ in the traction of Tarde. I see this puts me in dispute with the author of the wikipedia page on Neo-classical school (criminology) which aligns it with right realism and name checks social control, drift and rational choice.

Some snippets must suffice:

Crafty criminals […] are few and far between 

the criminal has a brain of inferior quality

the bloodthirsty kind […] general die mad if they be not hanged
the ordinary criminal who suffers imprisonment for petty larceny is quite uninteresting.

In the unlikely event our larcenist becomes expert the Gazette then admits he has: 

many notable characteristics […] persistence of purpose […] may yet sometimes be regarded as evidence of uncommon strength of mind.

It rather relativistically and callously suggests that the burglar:

breaks into the house and carries off the spoons and the tea basket of some respectable mediocrity, who is generally insured against loss of the kind.

They mention the work of Sir Edward Troup at the Home Office to suggest there have been reductions in crime but greater activities by criminals and police.  Two matters are highlighted 1) crimes in seaports by seamen and those who ‘prey on them’ (‘moral scum of the earth’) and 2) the new offences created by the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Interestingly Troup is said to have had severe doubts about the value of police statistics (Sir Leon Radzinowicz).

The CLAA 1885 will be known to some for its section 11 further criminalising sex between men. We are celebrating its repeal 50 years ago in England and Wales. Most of it was about ‘rescuing’ women - fears of white slavery and dangers to heiresses - but did raise the age of consent to 16 from 12 in 1861 and 13 in 1875. The work of the journalist Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette (The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon) on this might be contrasted with MP/editor Labouchere who introduced the section which caught Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing. Stead received a 3 month sentence for his unethical methods, that is purchasing a girl. It is not clear if Labouchere intended his clause to succeed (see his entry in Who's who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II).

But all of this is throat-clearing on the way to its fulminations against bent solicitors and the inadequacies of the Law Society (and need for greater regulation) which take up the second half. After listing various scandals they turn to victimology, or victim-blaming; opining:

clients ought to take the most elementary precautions against being swindled

if such ordinary precautions were taken, half of the scandals, which are, indeed, much to numerous to be creditable to a great profession, would not happen.

I don’t know what caused these thoughts on criminology, penology and victimology so must turn to historians. Any thoughts? What was going on then?

My Crime and Media book reviews: the highlights

I’ve reviewed a number of books on crime and media over the past decade or so.  Most recently Policing and Media: Public Relations, Simulations and Communications, Murray Lee and Alyce McGovern, Routledge, 2014 on this blog.

Many more are published in journals so here are some highlights.

In Crime, Media, Culture I review Anita Lam’s ‘Making Crime Television: Producing entertaining representations of crime for television broadcast’.  Here’s an extract:

Lam’s ethnography takes us through the thinking, writing, rewriting and re-rewriting involved in getting a crime show idea to script, then filmed for TV in North America. She rightly points out crucial legal, political and cultural differences between Canada and the USA and alludes to some in UK/Europe. That ranges from different regulatory regimes to different numbers and length, or even existence, of advertising breaks. The setting for, and partial funder, of the various series she examines is Canada; but for sound commercial reasons, including the Writers Guild of America strike 2007/8, Toronto often stands in for Anywhere/Anytime. One of the series briefly gets a showing on a US network.

Brooding over all this is the hydra-headed CSI franchise and skulking in the corner is The Wire. The latter is lauded by the critics and studied or referenced by academics (guilty) but is not a ratings success. CSI may be studied by academics for its effects but more still by networks seeking to replicate its success.

Lam makes something of the five (usually)-act structure of such shows and once even metaphorically presents her material as if she were a detective assembling the suspects in the drawing room but her book has an introduction, five chapters and conclusion. The introduction is materially substantial enough to warrant an act/chapter of its own, as is the conclusion, which she does not explicitly foreshadow in the introduction.

The following all appeared in The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice:

Law and Order (BFI TV Classics). By C. Brundson Volume 50, Issue 4, pages 441–442, September 2011

Here’s an extract:

Though a short book, it is a model: in examining the text, the means of its production and critical reception.  Crime and criminal justice are at the heart of the text and criminal justice politics at the heart of the reception.  The Police Federation, the Prison Officers Association and assorted MPs objected strongly.  BBC minutes reveal that some of the difficulties of production turned on the delicate relationship between Government and broadcaster.  Perhaps too much is made of the, then, shared ministerial responsibility for broadcasting and criminal justice but the Home Office did refuse assistance during production, and access for news and current affairs after broadcast.  Such was the fuss that a repeat was delayed until 1980. Until the DVD release in 2008 it remained an ‘absent classic’.

Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image by K.J. Hayward and M. Presdee (Eds.) Volume 49, Issue 4, pages 421–422, September 2010

Here’s the extract:

Hindley appears again in Jones and Wardle’s discussion of the image of Maxine Carr.  They carry out a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the images of Carr and Huntley.  They find a concentration on Carr which could be taken to indicate an equality of responsibility (or ‘evil’ in tabloidese) which were it set out in cold print might have constituted contempt of court.  A damning irony is that the images analysed were alleged by newspapers to fall under the subsequent ‘Mary Bell’ order granting Carr lifelong anonymity, so could not be used here.  Gender is an issue but they find a case from the late 1960s where a woman initially covered for her murderous husband yet faced no prosecution and little press censure.

Yar runs through the reasons for criminology to engage with film (valid, but missing the extent to which legal studies already has - see Greenfield et al, 2001) and gives and discusses others analyses of, mostly US, films.  Perhaps under Hayward’s strictures about what the book is not about it sticks to marxist/modernist and postmodern readings of film ignoring the vast feminist and psycho-analytical tradition, mentioning Mike Nellis’s 1988 article on British prison movies in this journal (27: 1) only in passing.

Criminal Visions: Media Representations of Crime and Justice P. Mason (Ed.) Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 341-355, July 2004

Here’s the extract:

Mason admits the reason for the book is his own search for a book to teach media and crime courses and his desire to cover the visual – so I cannot complain about the lack of a radio chapter.  He also sets out the logic behind the division of the book into three parts: part 1 concentrates on the concerns of the media; part 2 on the construction of offences and offenders and part 3 on representations on of criminal justice.

So part 1 quite appropriately starts with Reiner et al setting out their work on press coverage of crime.  They affirm the relevance of Surette’s ‘law of opposites’ – that media representations of crime are largely the opposite of ‘reality’.  Two interesting points are: the finding of the under-representation of black people as criminals (p21), which goes unexplored, and their conclusion that there is an increased tendency to see crime as hurting individual victims rather than morality, the law or society.  Julian Petley has written elsewhere about the ‘media effects’ debate, here he is concerned with an analysis of the treatment by the British Board for Film Classification and the Video Appeals Committee of a video release of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left.  They ignored his advice.  Innes concludes the part by examining ‘signal crimes’ such as the murders of James Bulger and Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.  Such crimes ‘function as mnemonics, subsequently framing the production of new signal crimes, which in turn reverberate with meaning for their audiences.’ (p66)

Crime and Law in Media Culture S. Brown Vol. 43, pp. 99-111, February 2004

Here’s the extract:

In late August 2003 the Chief Constable of Manchester, Michael Todd, was reported, by many papers, as saying: ‘Some of them would have been better off being interviewed by someone who has watched The Bill or Inspector Morse’.  He was describing his observations of his own officers interviewing burglary suspects.  Several days earlier his force had arrested a BBC undercover reporter who had undergone full training and was now on probation.  The journalist had infiltrated to investigate allegations of racism.  In the same month Jake Arnott published truecrime: the third volume of his gangster trilogy, which contains as much criminology as it does literary allusion and action.  All of these, and more, examples come too late for inclusion in Brown’s book but I think they illustrate her contention that ‘empirical’ or ‘administrative’ criminologies, render crime no more comprehensible and law no more legitimate than do the supposedly ‘fictive’ cultural maps of detective novels, or the imagined justice of the courtroom drama, or the hybrid genres of news docudrama and reality TV. (p182)

Policing and the Media: Facts, fictions and factions Frank Leishman and Paul Mason. Cullompton:Willan (2003) Volume 42, Issue 4, pages 397–407, September 2003

Here’s the extract:

On 26 February 2003 Detective Superintendent Craig Denholm of Surrey police wrote to the Guardian to complain of the hypocrisy of that paper’s leader the previous day, which had attacked police handling of the arrest of TV presenter Matthew Kelly.  Just as in previous years the tabloids had raised the stakes over paedophilia, so the broadsheets and mid-market tabloids now weighed in on behalf of the wrongly accused.  The same day the Daily Express spent 1,766 words on this and a number of other cases ranging from the arrest of Neil and Christine Hamilton to football manager David Jones and other less well-known names.  Det. Supt. Denham made the point that the Police had never named Kelly and had only acted so quickly – arresting him at the theatre – after the media had named Kelly.  So the police blame the media and some parts of the media blame other parts.  Then, to put it as this book does, others take those facts and create fiction and ‘faction’. By faction they mean the, “uneasy amalgam of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ that often goes under the name ‘infotainment’.” (p4)  However, as the Superintendent’s bitterness indicates, faction suggests antagonistic groups and the division is not just between police and media.  The Daily Star’s leader of 25 February is a masterpiece of insinuation, opening with these words: “Matthew Kelly is innocent. Everyone says so.  Dave Lynn, the drag queen he used to live with.  All the luvvies who've worked with him.  Even Jonathan King. And now, Surrey police agree too.”

Y. Jewkes, Captive Audience: Media, Masculinity and Power in Prisons and R.C. Mawby, Policing Images: Policing, Communication and Legitimacy, Vol. 42, pp. 93-104, 2003

Here’s the extract:

Whilst both deal with the media it is Jewkes book that specifically addresses theories of media. in Chapter 1 in parallel with her review of the prison literature - specifically the importance of 'doing', 'killing' and 'marking' time.  Particularly important - given her emphasis on masculinities (derived from Connell and Messerschmidt) - is the tendency in some media theory of seeing TV viewing and radio listening as 'passive'.  Within media theory both right and left have their versions of this.  Thus for the right the media subverts all that is good - respect for motherhood and homemade apple pie - and replaces it with promiscuity and ersatz 'pop tarts'.  Equally for the left the media is a 'narcotic' (anyone remember the Yippies?) or a tool of capital (for instance, noting Silvio Berlusconi's control of the Italian State and commercial media respectively as prime minister and owner).  To overcome the deficiencies of these 'hypodermic' or 'cultural dope' models media theorists have developed the 'uses and gratifications' model. This recognises that audiences can be active in 'reading across the grain' of media texts.  Jewkes uses Bourdieu and Giddens (discussed in Chapter 2) to emphasise the interplay of structure and agency in the uses made and the gratifications available to prisoners through various media. Thus the deprivations of imprisonment can be seen to structurally emasculate far more effectively that the castration visited on the couch potato.  She notes, 'like the unemployed, prison inmates are likely to have a far greater degree of attachment to and appreciation of media as a source of entertainment, escapism, identity and opinion reinforcement, social interaction, or simply a means of enduring painfully slow-moving periods of time' (p63).  As we can see watching television or listening to radio has never been so active.

Where Jewkes is largely looking at the reception of media by audiences, Mawby examines the extent to which the media is shaped by the police or, indeed the extent to which the image created of the police is the police. Clearly an ideological reading of the police as reflection or refraction of class, race or gender power has always hinted at this. In using the term image work he recognises that some effort is expended even if he doesn't quite see it in terms of a or 'the' struggle (no Gramsci or Althusser). Mawby tackles some of the theory (Habermas) but mostly offers a history of police image work and a closely observed case study of South Yorkshire Police.  Thus the first two chapters are given over to setting out the four phases he identifies in the history of police image work: 1829-1919 (informal but evident in the choice of uniform and force orders); 1919-1972 (starting from the formation of the Met's Press Bureau and including the 'golden age' of PC Dixon); 1972-1987 (the appointment of Robert Mark and the art of 'winning by appearing to lose') and finally from 1987 (increased professionalism and Imbert's change of force to service and the appointment of Wolff Olins as corporate identity consultants.

News, Crime and Culture M. Wykes Pluto (2001) Vol. 41, pp. 209-217, 2002

Here’s the extract:

Early on Maggie Wykes sets out the premise of this book, which is:

that the media actively, routinely but not exclusively constructed discourses of legitimacy empathic with the interests of conservatism during the period of the Tory Governments of Margaret Thatcher (1979-92) and John Major (1992-97) (p25)

Thus readers will not be surprised to find that the crimes covered are: the criminalisation of black communities; the working class; youth; the homeless; violence between men and women and sex and sexuality.

A context for all this is given in the first chapter which charts the course of a number of ‘criminological crises’.  In short this sets out the marxist and feminist challenges to conventional mainstream criminology.  She argues that it has systematically failed to understand let alone reduce crime moreover that, ‘for most people the major source of information about crime is mass media news.’ (p8) . It is a commonplace to show the news media routinely over report some crimes and under report others.  Thus our understanding of murder (and, as I write, of terrorism) is clearly mediated by press and broadcasting. Yet if we draw the definition of media as broadly as the third term of the book’s title - culture - then there can scarcely be a time when this was not the case.  Those who crowded to the theatre of Shakespeare to see Corialanus or Greek Tragedy should have been as frightened as the inhabitants of Morse’s corpse-strewn Oxford.  However, direct and local experience of everyday mundane crimes such as vandalism, harassment and discrimination is not mediated in quite the same fashion.  Tudor patrons of the theatre would experience the cutpurse much as the modern city dweller experiences ‘mugging’ today – directly.  Wykes is right that there is clearly a punitive discourse in much current media.  However, it is less clear that this can easily be traced back unequivocally to the demands of capitalism or its political puppets.

I also reviewed Crime and Culture: an Historical Perspective Amy Gilman Srebnick and René Lévy Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing (2005) for HoJo but can’t find it was ever used.  So here full text.

I asked to review this book because I am trying to write something on 'cultural criminology' however this is not a work of cultural criminology but of history. It is a history of criminology, of criminal justice and of representations of crime; with three or four articles on each.  This review necessarily concentrates on the criminological and the cultural not the history but there are arguments around historical method, Foucault and narrative to detain those with appropriate knowledge.

Not only are all but two of the thirteen contributors historians – only Clive Emsley will be known to most UK criminologists – but many are European and their work is presented in translated American English.  Moreover, much of the work has its genesis in conferences of the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice.  So this book suffers from some of the usual problems of such a collection.

The editors’ short introduction sees the history of crime providing ‘a way to study time, place, and culture’ (xiii) and claims ‘there are important continuities in the history of crime and its representations in modern culture, despite particularities of time and place’ (ibid).  A major source of continuity are media texts; broadly drawn to include news media, dime novels and Arrêts Criminels.   Other texts analysed include published criminological texts and unpublished police records.  Less interesting to HJCJ readers will be those like Rousseaux on a Belgian Department under French Rule in 1789 which is only tangentially about crime – the violence of a revolt and its suppression – and culture – French and Flemish perspectives.  Mátay and Csepeli introduce us to a legendary Hungarian Highwayman and the brief media flowering in the late 1990s of a bank robber likened to him. Miller’s account of dime novels doesn’t go much beyond noting a number of themes that will be recognizable to most readers – incompetent police, maverick private eye, innocence wronged etc. Lévy unpicks the legal fall out from a police drugs sting that went wrong – officers sent to prison - but doesn’t specifically tie it to an understanding of the culture of Police, Customs or civil servants involved.

Leaving aside these and the historical, indeed historiographical, first chapter we have six interesting chapters with three on criminology and three on police. Turning first to the criminology: Peter Becker deploys a Foucauldian method on the discourse of German criminology texts from the late 18th to the early 20th Century; Mary Gibson examines the ‘scientific’ narratives of Italian Criminology from 1880-1920 and Herbert Reinke discusses the influence of the criminologist Robert Heindl on policing before, during and after the Nazi period.

More central to criminological concerns is Gibson’s work as it relates to Lombroso and his acolytes, moreover she has recently translated – with Nicole Hahn Rafter – his work, with Ferrerro, on women and crime.  She notes his use of quantitative and qualitative narratives to show a particular sort of wrinkling on the skin of women criminals is evidenced by ‘the old woman of vinegar’ - said to have assisted women kill their husbands and memorialised in the museum of Palermo and granted a photo in Criminal Women.  Gibson asks is this bad science or a means – at the time – of strengthening his arguments by deploying both scientific and popular discourses to forge his new, and powerful, knowledge?  She notes, ‘criminal anthropologists were indefatigable in giving lectures and writing articles for popular audiences’ (40).

She analyses an article Lombroso wrote about the capture of a celebrated brigand which moves from derision at the forces of law, to the claim for the superiority of his methods - based solely on a picture of the man - before returning to admiration for his intelligence.  As this is later in his career, and consonant with his socialism, he mentions the poverty and illiteracy of the man’s background before slipping into casual ethnic stereotyping.  Rather than wondering why he wrote so badly or the editor did not rein him in she feels Lombroso is appealing to various audiences in the one text.  She gives a similar reading of Ferrero’s account of a murder by a casual prostitute but notes too the sexism and the anxieties that women’s crime raised.  Finally she analyses an article in a police and prison staff journal.  It is the notes of a lecture given by a disciple of Lombroso’s, Salvatore Ottolenghi, where a thief was physically and psychologically examined before a class.  Again it is a diverse text as the lecturer, the note taker and the thief all have a voice.  That is positivism took off because it told good stories.

Allen Steinberg examines a case of police corruption and murder in New York that lead to an officer, Charles Becker, going to the electric chair in 1915.  Politicians were involved in the case and often, through the media, in using it to pursue their own ends.  Jean-Marc Berlière shows how the narratives deployed by police during the Nazi occupation to gain promotion or bonuses could redound on them as collaborators.  Clive Emsley’s examines the case of Sergeant Goddard, sentenced to 18 months hard labour with a ￡2,000 fine in 1929.

Police and official historians note with satisfaction that he was bought to book by the police themselves – the rotten apple – but Emsley wonders if a diseased orchard was to blame.  He gives tables for those dismissed or transferred from the same Division.  Some were old hands others new recruits but the vice beat proved as problematic then as in later scandals of the 60s and 70s.  Clearly the media had a field day but he uses the historical records to flesh out the culture of the police then.  He comes nearest to cultural criminology when footnoting the fact that Spike Milligan may have met one of the criminals involved.

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  

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