Showing papers in "Criminology & Criminal Justice in 2010"

Youth crime and justice: Key messages from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime

Abstract: Based on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, this article challenges the evidence-base which policy-makers have drawn on to justify the evolving models of youth justic...

The sleep of (criminological) reason: Knowledge—policy rupture and New Labour’s youth justice legacy:

Abstract: For over a decade, three successive New Labour administrations have subjected the English youth justice system to a seemingly endless sequence of reforms. At the root of such activity lies a core tension between measured reason and punitive emotion; between an expressed commitment to ‘evidence-based policy’ and a populist rhetoric of ‘tough’ correctionalism. By engaging a detailed analytical assessment of New Labour’s youth justice programme, this article advances an argument that the trajectory of policy has ultimately moved in a diametrically opposed direction to the route signalled by research-based knowledge and practice-based evidence. Moreover, such knowledge— policy rupture has produced a youth justice system that ultimately comprises a conduit of social harm. All of this raises serious questions of knowledge/evidence—policy relations and, more fundamentally, of democracy, power and accountability.

Gold standard or fool’s gold? The pursuit of certainty in experimental criminology

Abstract: This article assesses some of the claims made for experimental research in the field of rehabilitation of offenders. It suggests that both policy officials and evaluators have tended to over-invest financially and intellectually in a technocratic model of reducing reoffending that emphasizes programmes for offenders, and to under-invest in models that see the process as a complex ‘people changing’ skill. It argues that the complexity of this process renders it hard to evaluate using experimental methods of evaluation such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs). RCTs provide strong internal validity, but in complex settings offer weak external validity, making it hard to generalize from the experimental setting to other settings. The article suggests that the proper role for evaluative research in this field should be seen as building and testing middle-level theories about how best to change offenders’ behaviour.

Sociological criminology and youth justice: Comparative policy analysis and academic intervention:

Abstract: This article is presented in two interconnected parts. It addresses issues that have arguably received insufficient attention in most sociologically oriented criminological research and commentary on youth justice and related policy and practice developments, both within the UK jurisdictions and in wider international contexts. First, it highlights the need to recognize the complexities of comparative policy analysis at international, national, regional and local levels. Second, in the light of such complexity, the article attempts to explore the challenges confronting social science in general and sociological criminology in particular, in efforts to critically inform policymaking processes. In conclusion, it is suggested that the possibilities for vibrant, critical and publicly engaged academic intervention in the youth justice policy sphere rest upon the mobilization of theoretically and empirically based analyses, together with research-informed proposals for policy formation and practice development.

‘What Works’ and the Correctional Services Accreditation Panel: Taking stock from an inside perspective:

Abstract: This article provides an ‘insider’ perspective on the work of the Correctional Services Accreditation Panel (CSAP) of England and Wales, a key plank of the government’s ‘What Works’ strategy and in...

The rise of biocriminology: Capturing observable bodily economies of ‘criminal man’:

Abstract: Revisiting the contributions of numerous foundational biocriminological works, this article uses the concept ‘bodily economies’ to analyze the emergence and solidification of criminological pathologizations of the bios dependent on the capture and analysis of human corporeal matter. The scholars we discuss (Lombroso, Ellis, Goring, Hooton, and the Gluecks) each causally equate some part of the body with inbuilt criminality. Through an exegesis of their work, we illustrate how the boundaries of the social body are constituted in and through corporeal capturings and classifications of ‘criminal man’. Our analysis investigates the biocriminological method of locating sources of criminality inside the body, which still permeates the new ‘science of criminals’ used as a tool to define and protect the social body. We conclude by discussing the renewed biocriminological interest in preventing criminality through forecasting it in various scientific constructs and visualizations of the inner body.

Devolution and youth justice in Wales

Abstract: This article discusses youth justice services in Wales in the context both of devolution and the wider social policy agenda of successive Welsh Assembly Governments It sets out the operating arrangements and outcomes achieved by Youth Offending Teams in Wales, before arguing that a specific approach has been developed to policy and practice in this field in the post-devolution period The article traces the main features of this approach, locating it in the wider contexts of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the development of broader children’s policy in Wales The discussion ends with an account of the most recent developments in Welsh youth justice, suggesting that it provides ample points of interest for those concerned both with the development of devolution in general, and services for children and young people in trouble with the law, in particular

Women, crime and control

Abstract: On the surface, Punishing the Poor (Wacquant, 2009a) is about prisons in America; however, its real concern is with what Wacquant calls the ‘paradox of neoliberal penality’ – the way in which the power of the state as expressed in increasing rates of incarceration and punishment more generally have grown over the past 30 years. He argues that the penal state has extended to envelop those on the margins of the market economy, and thus that we need but one analytic framework to understand neoliberal penality, a framework which follows both the contours of prisons and state welfare provision. In Prisons of Poverty (2009b), Wacquant traces the emergence and internationalisation of the policies and practices designed to dismantle the welfare state through a ‘network of Reaganera conservative think-tanks’ and through the media and pro-market policy institutes. At a general level, Wacquant argues that the logic of neoliberalism demands new policies to cope with the aftermath of labour market deregulation on the lowest stratum of society. In essence, it is suggested that the boundaries between penal and welfare interventions have become less distinguishable than hitherto. As Wacquant puts it:

Seeing like private security: Evolving mentalities of public space protection in South Africa

Abstract: This article will illustrate, by means of three empirical research examples conducted in South Africa, that private security operating in public spaces simultaneously retains ‘traditional’ private security mentalities of loss prevention as well as ‘traditional’ state policing mentalities of crime control and coercion. This adoption of either state or corporate mentalities and technologies is fluid, interchangeable and by no means mutually exclusive, befitting the nature of daily security activities as well as the expectations generated from policing that space. In this way, private security is evolving in its application of diverse policing mentalities in its management and interpretation of public ‘space’; in its ability to wield power both symbolically and actually and; in its tendency to adopt a variety of crime control and social ordering techniques.

Diffusion, differentiation and resistance in comparative penality:

Abstract: The contributions to this issue respond to various aspects of two of Loïc Wacquant’s recent volumes in his prodigious output. My focus, rather than taking the broad sweep of Wacquant’s work, is concerned with one relatively small sub-theme that appears most clearly in Prisons of Poverty (2009): namely, his analysis of the flow and spread of neoliberal penality through and across the modern advanced economies. The most significant scholarly activity has a number of consequences, perhaps the most important of which is that it provokes new work – either through emulation, replication, and expansion and/or through critique and revision. Thus, within the general field of contemporary criminology, the power and influence of David Garland’s (2001) The Culture of Control can be seen in the strength of its arguments and the subtlety of its analysis, and through its influence over a generation of scholars who have drawn on it as a means of illuminating and framing their own work. Its impact is also illustrated by the fact that it has stimulated a great deal of new criminological activity, primarily by prompting an increasing number of researchers to examine the penal trajectories of their own and other nations, and to engage anew with comparative research (see, for examples, the essays in Tonry, 2008). Few scholars can expect to have such an impact. Though too early to assess its influence, it seems likely that Nicola Lacey’s (2008) The Prisoners’ Dilemma will fall into a similar category, setting out, as it does, a programme of theoretical and empirical inquiry for a new generation of comparative researchers. Loïc Wacquant’s Prisons of Poverty (and his related scholarship) also seems set to have a considerable future influence in a number of areas, not least in exploring the complex interface between systems of welfare and punishment. Indeed, although it has a publication date (in English) of 2009, it can already be said to have had an appreciable impact in the field of study of convergences and divergences in penal practices under advanced liberalism. Wacquant’s observations on this subject were initially set out in reasonably extended form in ‘How penal sense comes to Europeans’, published in the journal European Societies (Wacquant, 1999), and now appearing in revised form as the

What's Neoliberalism Got to Do With It? Towards a Political Economy of Punishment in Greece

Abstract: SAGE copyright policy clearly states that the co-authors 'may not post the final version of the article as published by SAGE or the SAGE–created PDF – ‘version 3’. Thus we cannot achieve the submitted (SAGE.pdf) version.

Denouncing the penal state

Abstract: Whilst teaching law in Edinburgh in the late 1970s, I found myself on the outer edge of a group of Labour party academic activists. (This was at a time when Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Robin Cook were all Edinburgh-based.) The problem we were asked to address was how to rethink the welfare state so as to reduce welfare dependency. I was not particularly enthused by this challenge, and so chose instead to make a contribution as a lay panel member in the welfare-oriented Scottish juvenile justice system. It is, therefore, with special interest that I read Wacquant’s brilliant investigations, in his books Prisons of Poverty (2009a) and Punishing the Poor (2009b), into the relationship between welfare and penality, and the role of think-tanks in spreading a new orthodoxy about punishment and the prison in particular. Wacquant shows us beyond doubt that, in the USA, the scaling down of welfare support provided by the state went together with a more severe response to offending and a rapid expansion in the use of the prison. He also demonstrates that there has been a sustained effort to export both ideas elsewhere. Wacquant’s books display considerable theoretical acumen: he stresses the need to draw both on Durkheim and Marx so as to encompass the expressive and instrumental aspects of penality, and, if a little less persuasively, the value of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘bureaucratic field’ as a corrective to the overly mechanical and functionalist approaches to how the restructuring of the neoliberal state led to increasing punishment. But above all, the argument is carried along by massive empirical detail, including illustrations from Wacquant’s own first-hand investigations of prison conditions and his involvement in public debates over punishment. Both books include a variety of striking and original insights, some connected to his contributions to urban and race sociology as with his challenging claims about the functional equivalency of slavery, ‘Jim Crow’ laws, the urban ghetto, and now the prison. Wacquant’s comprehensive analysis proves, once again, not only that punishment is about more than crime, but also that criminology is too important to be left to criminologists. Wacquant’s central argument is that rising punitiveness must be treated as a response to social rather than criminal insecurity. In the USA, this resulted principally from increased global competition and the rise in costs of raw materials, the end of Fordist methods of production, and the reaction against the equal rights revolution. The

Questioning suspected offenders: The investigative interviewing process in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract: Criminal confessions following the questioning of suspects by police and prosecuting investigators is a problem in the PRC in that some of these admissions of guilt result from the application of illegal methods of interviewing. The interview process is regulated by legislation and policy documents that in practice are frequently ignored; illegal pressures generate false confessions which have resulted in high profile cases of injustice. This article describes one such case. The article outlines the laws and regulations covering the interview of criminal suspects; explains why the regulations and law are often flouted; and considers proposals to promote the due process approach that exists primarily in documents at the moment.

‘Impedimenta state’ : Anatomies of neoliberal penality

Abstract: Punishing the Poor avers not only that the United States has shifted from the single (welfare) to the double (social-cum-penal) regulation of the poor, but also that the ‘stunted development of American social policy’ skilfully dissected by Piven and Cloward stands in close causal and functional relation to America’s uniquely overgrown and hyperactive penal policy. The misery of American welfare and the grandeur of American prisonfare at century’s turn are the two sides of the same political coin. The generosity of the latter is in direct proportion to the stinginess of the former, and it expands to the degree that both are driven by moral behaviourism. (Wacquant, 2009a: 292–3, original emphasis)

Global meets local: International participation in prison reform and restructuring in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract: This paper presents a case study of international participation in criminal justice reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), taken as an example of a small, peripheral jurisdiction experiencing a number of important social, political and economic transitions. The local context is introduced and is followed with a brief discussion on broader developments in penal policy beyond BiH. This precedes a case study of the work of the Council of Europe, which focuses on the pursuit of adequate conditions of detention for forensic psychiatric patients as an example of the impact of international human rights discourse and instruments on local penal policy. The obstacles to progress towards improved conditions of detention are located in the context of political fragmentation in BiH, supporting the view that local factors can constrain or mediate the influence of broader trends in penal policy.

Out of Care 30 years on

Abstract: The article recalls the writing of Out of Care, often regarded as a key text for juvenile justice policy and practice in England and Wales in the 1980s. It dispels some misconceptions about the book’s arguments, showing that it argued for a ‘welfare’ rather than a ‘justice’ approach to juvenile offending, and offered a set of prescriptions for face-to-face practice as well as for a critical understanding of the local juvenile justice system. The article acknowledges some contradictions and ambiguities in Out of Care, but shows that it is a mistake to treat it as advocating minimum (as opposed to targeted) intervention, or as arguing that the content of direct work with young people is unimportant. The article traces some of the processes by which the ideas in the book were made available to audiences of practitioners and policy-makers, and how changes in policy in particular local authorities encouraged a wider process of reform.

Wacquant and Civic Sociology: 'Formative Intentions' and Formative Experiences

Abstract: Our contribution to the now rather expansive activity of welcoming, critiquing, and otherwise discussing Loïc Wacquant’s new books is devoted to exploring the conception of sociology’s ‘civic’ roles that he says animates and underpins them. For this reason, we will focus here in particular on the afterword to Prisons of Poverty (which itself is called ‘A civic sociology of neo-liberal penality’) (Wacquant, 2009b). Given that this is the argument with which we primarily wish to engage, we will shortly devote a moment or two to summarising the position. Like many people, we think there is reason to be grateful that a sociologist of Wacquant’s stature has chosen to devote a substantial portion of his career to analysing the new penal politics. We believe that this has contributed significantly to our understanding of the issues and to the seriousness with which wider social scientific and public discourse now have to treat ‘criminological’ questions. As far as space permits here, we will go on to say a few words about what this means for sociological and criminological work as agents of democratic deliberation and reflection. This happens to be the very problem that has occupied our attention recently (Loader and Sparks, 2010), just as it does, in one way or another, most people who think seriously about these issues at all. We will then go on to argue in favour of a certain conception of the civic roles of social science. This emphasises the connections between what we call an ‘academic formative intention’, on the one hand, and a commitment to the enhancement of democratic deliberation on matters of common concern, on the other. Our argument, in brief, is that the public value of sociology or criminology, in this case as applied to questions of punishment and social control, is most coherently and convincingly described as that of contributing to a better politics of crime and its regulation – or what we call ‘democratic under-labouring’ (we say a little more about this curious term below; for a fuller exposition, see Loader and Sparks, 2010: Ch. 5). We think this is in many respects very

The governance of crime and the negotiation of justice

Abstract: With increasing frequency, criminologists have documented the growth of a culture of control that has ushered in repressive penal policies and diminished people’s freedoms. Contra the portrayal offered by these ‘criminologies of catastrophe’, this article argues that there are several factors within contemporary European societies that militate against authoritarian rule and impel justice towards a negotiated model. European political integration is responsible for advancing a more complex form of justice as powerful supra-national actors are able to articulate their own understanding of the harms that national criminal laws should repel in countries such as Ireland. Societies are also becoming more internally complex as victims are increasingly critical of their exclusion from the criminal justice system and have demanded greater inclusiveness. Penal changes do not necessarily arise from crime being the last common social denominator by which politics can appeal to the people. They may reflect a more com...

The problem with experimental criminology: A response to Sherman’s ‘Evidence and Liberty’

Abstract: This article is a response to Sherman (2009) and argues that experimental criminology ought to clearly acknowledge the political aspect of much crime research, and expand the timeframe of research involvement in policy making if it is to bring the liberty promised. Failure to do so can lead to a fundamental misconception that experimental criminology is somehow divorced from the political realities that inscribe it, and to possible unintended consequences in the deployment of policy. The example of use of the so-called ‘stop and frisk’ crime policy in Philadelphia is used to examine Sherman’s claims.

Stop the clock? Predictors of detention without charge in police custody areas

Abstract: The recent consultation exercise, used to review the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, highlighted that that the detention clock (used to detain suspects without charge) does not allow the police sufficient time to conduct their investigation, especially in complex cases. In this review it was suggested that the detention clock — which normally allows detention without charge for 24, 36 or in exceptional circumstances 72 hours — should be stopped if suspects are unfit due to intoxication or they require a period of rest or to allow legal advisers, health professionals, interpreters and others time to arrive at the police station. Drawing on data collected from two sites — one public, one private — this article quantitatively and qualitatively explores the factors affecting the length of detention in police custody. I argue that there is insufficient evidence to introduce a stop-clock system and that the increase in the length of detention to pre-PACE levels suggests that it may not have struck the in...

Preface to the special issue: Neoliberalism and penality: Reflections on the work of Loïc Wacquant:

Abstract: For nearly two decades now, through an extensive and ever-growing series of interventions in academia and beyond, Loïc Wacquant has been scrutinising and criticising what he views as the inextricable link between the ascendancy of neoliberalism and the rise of the penal state. As Loader and Sparks indicate in their contribution to this special issue, many feel that criminology has refined and expanded its intellectual resources thanks to inputs by a sociologist of Wacquant’s stature. And with good reason, for he simultaneously breaches a host of boundaries which have long impaired scholarly engagement with crime and punishment. These are the boundaries between theoretical analysis and empirical research, between disparate empirical strands, between diverse disciplinary realms, and between science and politics. Wacquant’s work combines sophisticated theoretical construction with an intrepid search for empirical evidence in both qualitative and quantitative sources, from urban and prison ethnographies to official crime and criminal justice statistics. Due not least to the multifariousness of his subject matter, Wacquant also brings together concepts, insights, and data from a variety of academic disciplines and sub-fields: from criminology and sociology to geography and anthropology, and from youth deviance, policing, and imprisonment to ethnoracial relations, the welfare system, and the economy. All this, finally, he does with a passionate and unrelenting commitment to the practice of democratic politics; that he strives to debunk social, scientific, and official myths such as those of the ‘new law-and-order reason’ (Wacquant, 2009a: 243–69) is because he wishes to alter the parameters of public discussion and thereby help redress poverty and inequality. And indeed, Wacquant’s arguments appear to have percolated amongst journalists, policy-makers, practitioners, activists, unionists, interested citizens, and university students (see Wacquant, 2009b: 161–76). Interest in the work of Wacquant has intensified in recent months on the occasion of the publication of his two latest books, Punishing the Poor and Prisons of Poverty. In

The importance of co-convictions in the prediction of dangerous recidivism: Blackmail and kidnapping as a demonstration study

Abstract: Co-convictions are court convictions made at the same time as a more serious conviction. Their importance has been little recognized. We investigate their value using data on two separate serious crimes. Taking official conviction careers in England and Wales (1979-2001) for blackmail (n = 5774) and kidnapping offenders (n = 7291), we considered how much information on co-convictions is normally overlooked, and how knowledge of co-convictions contributes to predicting serious recidivism. We identified that co-convictions were pervasive, with 54 per cent of convictions for blackmail and 77 per cent for kidnapping having co-convictions. Co-convictions provided extra explanatory power in predicting the risk of a subsequent sexual or violent offence for both blackmail and kidnapping. For blackmail, most types of co-conviction were associated with a significantly raised relative risk, whereas for kidnapping, only co-convictions which were not acquisitive, sexual or violent had a significantly raised relative risk. We concluded that co-convictions are a useful measure of short-term specialization and are important when predicting serious recidivism.

Ideology? What ideology?:

Abstract: In reading Wacquant’s latest work, I was reminded of the famous cartoon where one academic says to another: ‘Well yes, he discovered fire, but what’s he done since then?’ Wacquant has produced highly creative research. (This creativity was already apparent a few years ago in the field of social control, and it is odd that he does not refer to that as his field.) I intend here to discuss some points that ‘need further development’, if I may use a cliché. I will focus more specifically on the role Wacquant attributes in his narrative to knowledge, ideas, academic theories and organisations such as think-tanks. I do not have many problems with the content of Wacquant’s thesis: the massive surge in the use of imprisonment; the penalisation of poverty to curb urban disorders resulting from economic deregulation and the erosion of social care; and the perception of the prison not merely as a technical instrument for implementing criminal justice policy, but as a core political institution for the Leviathan to reveal itself. We are all Foucauldian enough to grasp the inextricable and inevitable link between power and knowledge, but I believe we can still look at the operation of knowledge – and academic and intellectual knowledge in particular – in a separate sphere. I can see three stages in which ideas appear to matter, explicitly or implicitly, in Wacquant’s current books. First, in the original construction of institutional changes; that is to say, the ideas that inform (or ‘lie behind’) the change of the policy. Second, in their continuing role in legitimating power. Here knowledge functions as an alibi for the continued implementation of policy changes (leaving behind ‘deposits of power’). And third – a rather special and specific context –, in the export or transfer of policies, especially from the United States to continental Europe. Wacquant explicitly takes the role of warning the gullible natives, particularly the French. The latter come out rather badly in his caricature; a savage portrait of these stupid and pompous institutions in France’s pretentious and utterly bogus public face, with titles like ‘Institute for Higher Studies and Domestic Security’, which obviously sound even grander in French. Wacquant notes that these institutions neither hide nor even try to hide their fascination for the supposedly novel and amazingly effective methods of community policing and other such American policies, which they just buy into without any question. Such Mickey Mouse ideas as ‘broken windows’, ‘zero tolerance’, ‘community policing’,

Book Review: C. Piper Investing in Children: Policy, Law and Practice in Context, Willan Publishing: Uffculme, 2008; 240 pp.: 13:9781843923244, £22.50

Abstract: It is significant that Investing in Children: Policy, Law and Practice in Context is split into two distinct halves: while the latter half is, as the title makes explicit, concerned with the notion of ‘investment policies’ and children, the first half is preoccupied with children living in a ‘risk’ society. That is not to say that Piper’s book does not have a cohesive thread running through it—on the contrary, as Piper makes explicit in the Preface,