Radical, humanist and pessimistic ‘So What’ criminologies.

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

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

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

REALIST CRIMINOLOGY   - PALGRAVE MACMILLAN (July 2014)

Roger Matthews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.rogermatthews.net 

Special Green Edition of Radical Criminology Call for Papers

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

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

·       Environmental harm as crime

·       Environmental regulation and corporate environmental crime

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

·       Animal Protection and Wildlife crime

·       Social and ecological justice

·       The importance and impact of green criminology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many times women assaulted before reporting to police?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Floral chancers’ and ‘tea leaves’: a green criminological speculation

I first heard about the theft of a species of water lily from Kew Gardens through twitter when @JackieLeonard01 posted the item and asked what sort of person would do such a thing.  I jestingly responded a ‘floral chancer’ and later ‘a tea leaf’ before seeing the criminological, indeed the green criminological, potential of such a story.  Hence this brief blog.

This Guardian article sets out the bare facts: that on 9 January 2014 sometime during the day, one of Kew’s 50 samples of Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest water lily in the world, had been stolen.  Some of the coverage - and it received global coverage - might stem from the plant’s cuteness, rarity and therefore value.  Some incredulity might be involved in its newsworthiness.  Who or why would anyone steal such a small, precious thing?  Put like that it starts to become more obvious even to the non-criminologist why.  Small, so easily done.  Precious, nuff said? And where was the ever present (in UK society) CCTV?  Also as a criminologist I’m rarely surprised by any crime.

Also as an occasional gardener and listener to BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time and visitor to stately homes and gardens I was aware of the issue of people acquiring/taking/stealing cuttings from gardens and nurseries.  The Guardian Gardening Blog posed this question in 2010 ‘Green collar crime - do you take plant cuttings without permission?’

The comments on the blog contain many justifications and admissions of crime (including possible border or transnational crime!) and occasional twinges of guilt.  Was the floral chancer just one such person?  Is that water lily now in someone’s green house?  Or the collection of some baddie Greenfinger?  Do they aim to propagate from it?  Possibly even to repopulate the hot spring in Rwanda from where it originates but is now extinct?

Any green crime to be studied by green criminology is not the theft in Kew but the un-explained, unexplored ‘over-exploitation’ that lead to its demise.  Well some green criminologists might think that but for me green criminology is an attitude, a perspective.  The root of the crime and the extent of the victimisation lies in that over-exploitation.  Or, perhaps, they were just a plant rights activist freeing the lily?

Weather and Crime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction: ethics and mixed methods 

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

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

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

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

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

We turn now to quantitative methods. 

Quantitative 

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

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

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

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

Qualitative 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(i) Observation (...) 

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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