Public Criminology? by Ian Loader Richard Sparks

Author:Ian Loader, Richard Sparks [Ian Loader, Richard Sparks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Criminology
ISBN: 9781136931536
Google: 5ZGEW_C1Ob0C
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-05-13T03:44:09+00:00

INVENTING TECHNIQUE(S)

We turn now to two cooling devices that are of more recent vintage, modes of intervention that are less securely located within criminology's history and constitutive ways of thinking.19 The first seeks to transcend the established limits and institutions of criminology in the name of a new multidisciplinary mode of studying and improving crime prevention and detection – nothing less than a ‘crime science’. The coolant which this new science offers is one that seeks to de-dramatize crime and criminals and to prioritize the search for practical techniques that will reduce crime's impact upon everyday life. The second brings legal and political scholars to criminology's domain concerns in order to warn against the deleterious consequences of the politicization – or, in our terms, heating up – of criminal justice and penal policy. The response of these scholars to the dangerous entangling of democracy and penality is to invest in bureaucratic authority and expertise, and to press the case for re-insulating criminal justice policy and practice from the surrounding heat. Let us consider these two responses in turn.

Crime science, as the name implies, is the ‘application of the methods of science to crime and disorder’ (Laycock 2001: 4). It aims to deploy those methods – the hallmark of which it takes to be the generation, replicable testing and revision of hypotheses – in the service of preventing and reducing crime, thereby ‘improving the scientific basis of crime policy’ (Clarke 2004: 56; see also Pease 2005). This science has been incubated in new institutions, notably the Jill Dando Institute for Crime Science at University College London, and has ambitions to grow internationally from that base.20 It proposes to draw widely from across the social and physical sciences, not only upon criminology, but from psychology, geography and sociology and from chemistry, engineering, genetics and physics. Its stated purpose is to ‘change the way in which we think about crime and its control’ and to confront with good, tested ideas a crime control landscape which ‘remains doggedly based on intuition, anecdote, received wisdom and untutored opinion’ (Laycock 2001: 2, 5).

Crime science has its roots, theoretically, in rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke 1986) and its close cousin routine activities theory (Cohen and Felson 1979), as well as a practical precursor in the situational crime prevention movement that developed in the early 1980s (Clarke 1983). This body of theory and practice took issue with a field of criminology that it saw as committed to ‘ideals of enlightening society about crime, of helping to fashion a humane criminal justice system, and of helping reform criminals’ (Clarke 2004: 61). But it also challenged many settled social assumptions about criminals and crime control. It broke first with what Ron Clarke (1983) called ‘dispositional’ accounts of offenders and offending – the idea that criminals are different from the ‘law-abiding’, predisposed by their psychological traits, or socialization, or material plight to break the law. Crime, the argument runs, is not committed by ‘bad people’ or people from bad backgrounds

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