(Key Ideas in Criminology) David Churchill, Henry Yeomans, Iain Channing - Historical Criminology-Routledge (2022)

HISTORICAL CRIMINOLOGY
This book sets an agenda for the development of historical approaches to

criminology. It defines ‘histor ical criminology’, explores its characteristic
strengths and limitations, and considers its potential to enhance, revise
and fundamentally challenge dominant modes of thinking about crime
and social responses to crime.
It considers the following questions:
• What is historical criminology? What does thinking historically

about crime and justice entail?
• How is historical criminology currently practised? What are the
advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to historical
criminology?
• How can historical criminology reshape understandings of crime
and social responses to crime?
• How does thinking historically bear upon major theoretical, con-
ceptual and methodological questions in criminological research?
• What does thinking historically have to offer criminological schol-
arship more broadly, and the uses of criminology in the public realm?
In this book, Churchill,Yeomans and Channing situate ‘historical think-

ing’ at the heart of historical criminology, reveal the value of historical
research to criminology and argue that criminologists across the field
have much to gain from engaging in historical thinking in a more regular
and sustained way.
This book is essential reading for all criminologists, as well as students
taking courses on theories, concepts and methods in criminology.
David Churchill is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the

University of Leeds, UK.
Henry Yeomans is Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal

Justice at the University of Leeds, UK.
Iain Channing is Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the

University of Plymouth, UK.
KEY IDEAS IN CRIMINOLOGY
Key Ideas in Criminology explores the major concepts, issues, debates and
controversies in criminology. The series aims to provide authoritative es-
says on central topics within the broader area of criminology. Each book
adopts a strong individual ‘line’, constituting original essays rather than
literature surveys, and offers lively and agenda setting treatments of their
subject matter.
These books will appeal to students, teachers and researchers in crimi-

nology, sociology, social policy, cultural studies, law and political science.
Series Editor
Tim Newburn is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, London

School of Economics. He has written and researched widely on issues of
crime and justice.
Other titles in the series:
John Pratt: Penal Populism

Tony Ward & Shadd Maruna: Rehabilitation
Lucia Zedner: Security
Benjamin Goold: Surveillance
Claire Renzetti: Feminist Criminology
Ian Loader and Richard Sparks: Public Criminology?
Michael Kempa and Clifford Shearing: Policing
Alex Alvarez: Genocidal Crimes
Walter S. DeKeseredy: Contemporary Critical Criminology
Katja Franko: The Crimmigrant Other
‘What does it mean to do “historical criminology”? To put time – and
therefore change, events, flows and durations – at the centre of crimi-
nological inquiry? What are the exemplary texts that have pursued that
approach? And how does that enterprise fit into the larger disciplines of
“criminology” and “history”? These questions motivate this lively, en-
gaging, important new book: the first to organize and reflect upon a field
of research that is as diverse as it is interesting’.
—David Garland, New York University
‘The past is a foreign country, and this book is a perfect companion to

navigate its unknown terrain, avoid data minefields and find the trea-
sures awaiting the criminologist. Historical Criminology invites us to cross
borders between the past, present and the future. The authors present a
novel approach to connecting the past and present of crime and justice,
which will have a decisive impact on the field. A book for all criminolo-
gists who know that the past never lasts but the future is forever’.
—Susanne Karstedt, Griffith University
‘Historical Criminology demands criminologists of all persuasions ask

themselves: what do they mean when they talk of the past, present and
future? Its aim is to decentre the presentism that so hampers criminologi-
cal thinking. It does this extremely well.To be clear: Historical Criminology
is not setting out another subfield of criminology.This book asks us all to
reflect upon how we think about the process of time and in so doing will
be essential reading for anyone claiming to be thinking criminologically’.
—Sandra Walklate, University of Liverpool &
Monash University
HISTORICAL
CRIMINOLOGY
David Churchill, Henry Yeomans

and Iain Channing
First published 2022
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© 2022 David Churchill, Henry Yeomans and Iain Channing
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DOI: 10.4324/9780429196911

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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
1 Historical thinking 19
2 Time and method 52
3 Theory and concepts 90
4 Pasts and futures 118
Conclusion: Ten points of historical criminology 148
References 167
Index 199
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We have been working on this book for about four years, during which
time countless people have contributed their thoughts on its themes. We
have presented aspects of this work in various scholarly fora, including
meetings of the British Society of Criminology Historical Criminol-
ogy Network, the Australian and New Zealand Historical Criminology
Network, the European Social Science History Conference and the
‘Violence of the Archive’ conference at Oxford Brookes University in
2019. We are very grateful to the organizers of these various events for
affording us a platform to share our thoughts as they developed and to
the many attendees who offered comments, criticisms or words of en-
couragement. We have been fortunate to write during a generative time
for historical criminology in various parts of the world, and we have
benefitted especially from the wisdom and insight of those connected
with the British Society of Criminology Historical Criminology Net-
work. Thank you all.
A legion of friends and colleagues have discussed aspects of this book
with us or simply kept us going through the tougher spells of its com-
position. Thanks to Alex Tepperman, Tom Guiney, Pieter Leloup, Lizzie
Seal, Paul Lawrence, Chris Williams, Paul Knepper, Louise Jackson, Paul
Rock, Eleanor Bland, Kisby Dickinson, Elliott Keech, Roger Baxter, Dan
Acknowledgements xi
Birks, Kim Stevenson, Oliver Smith, Arta Jalili Idrissi, Corina Medley,
Katy Roscoe, Adam Crawford, Sarah Wilson, Mark Roodhouse, Heather
Ellis, Anja Johansen, Bob Shoemaker, Klaus Weinhauer, Barry Godfrey,
Guus Meershoek, Xavier Rousseaux, Herbert Reinke, Heather Shore,
Dave Cox, Alexa Neale, Helen Johnston, Marc Schuilenburg, Pam Cox,
Don Fyson and Steve Farrall. We have doubtless forgotten many others;
thanks too – and apologies –
to each of them.
A few people deserve particular mention. First, those who very kindly
read and commented on parts of the book in often quite sketchy draft –
your comments were invaluable and we are tremendously grateful.
Thanks, then, to Berber Bevernage, Paul Bleakley, Francis Dodsworth,
Margo de Koster, Travis Linnemann, Jose Pina-Sánchez, Sandra Walk-
late and Kate West. We were deeply gratified by Tim Newburn’s interest
in this book as series editor and Tom Sutton’s as commissioning editor.
Thanks also to all the good people at Routledge for their unfailing dil-
igence and their seemingly eternal patience. Special thanks are due to
David Garland, Susanne Karstedt and Sandra Walklate for very gener-
ously reading the whole thing ahead of publication and for offering such
kind words of endorsement.
Finally, we are enormously grateful to our families for their forbear-
ance during the long and sometimes difficult road to completing this
book. Much of it was written during a pandemic – in furtive spells and
in moments stolen from more important duties – when those around us
needed us more than usual. We pray we didn’t let them down; and we
thank them, again, for everything.
INTRODUCTION
There is a difficulty, an unease, in how criminology relates to ‘the his-

torical’. We do not mean that criminologists are ignorant of history, nor
that criminology abjectly neglects historical research. One can easily reel
off a long list of eminent figures in criminology responsible for out-
standing works of history: Thorsten Sellin, Leon Radzinowicz, Dario
Melossi, Geoffrey Pearson, Paul Rock, Nicole Rafter, David Garland, Pat

O’Malley, Mariana Valverde, Jonathan Simon, Lucia Zedner – could
we
go on. Besides such scholars as these are many more who consciously
adopt historical perspectives and draw liberally upon historical scholar-
ship conducted beyond the porous bounds of criminology. True, the sit-
uation varies considerably across time and place – rather more historical
interest here than there, rather less then than now – but criminology as
such hardly appears an ahistorical enterprise. Indeed, we will suggest that
criminology is, in a sense, rather more historical than is often recognized.
Yet this failure of recognition gets us close to the heart of the problem.
Despite a fair measure of historical research, there remains in criminol-
ogy a nagging unease, an uncertainty, a hesitancy concerning the histori-
cal. Somehow, it seems, there is always a problem with historical research.
Over the years, several articulate voices have expressed a particular need to
DOI: 10.4324/9780429196911-1
2 Introduction
cultivate historical research in criminology (Braithwaite 1993: 394; LaFree

2007: 4–8;
see also Heidensohn 2012: 128, 132; Smith 2014: 15–16).They

suggest that historical perspectives are systemically underdeveloped –
that

there is a somewhat ephemeral quality to historical thinking in our field. A
few more histories every year will not suffice.This suspicion is reinforced by
interventions that indict criminologists for an impoverished sense of their
field’s own history (Laub 2004; Rock 2005; Bursik 2009; Rafter 2010).
Thus, criminology suffers from a ‘newness fetish’ (Bursik 2009: 6) or from
‘collective amnesia’ (Laub 2004: 2). There are, of course, fine histories of
criminological thought – but again that is somehow not enough.We need
a deeper historical consciousness, a more developed collective memory.
And these points connect with a recurrent dilemma concerning relations
between criminology and the discipline of history (see Pratt 1996; King
1999; Godfrey et al. 2008: 5–23; Lawrence 2012;Yeomans et al. 2020). For
decades, criminologists have sensitively and skilfully drawn upon the work
of historians of crime (see, for example, Pearson 1978). Not long ago, some
even hoped for a gradual ‘convergence’ between the two fields (Godfrey
et al. 2008: 19–22).Yet interdisciplinary fusion has not come to pass; in the
main, basic differences in outlook and approach still divide historians from
criminologists (Lawrence 2012; see also Pratt 1996). Furthermore, one can-
not help but think that the vast output of crime and criminal justice his-
torians has made a rather slight and patchy impression upon criminology
(see Yeomans et al. 2020). Again, a little more history seemingly will not do.
Recently, though, we have perhaps felt the first rumblings of a more
sustained and searching reckoning with the historical in criminology.
These movements are partly institutional: increasing numbers of trained
historians are working in criminology departments or research groups,
and new specialist networks dedicated to historical research in criminol-
ogy have sprung up under the auspices of major scholarly associations
(Yeomans et al. 2020: 245). Yet new directions in scholarship are also
opening up. A flurry of theoretical and methodological works in re-
cent years (discussed below) suggests an appetite and impulse to think
afresh about the historical in criminology. Appropriately enough, much
of this work has proceeded under the banner of ‘historical criminology’.
Although such work is not new, the present juncture seems to offer an
opportunity to embed historical perspectives more deeply in criminol-
ogy and to cultivate historical thinking more widely across the field.
Introduction 3
To this collective project, we offer the current book. Building upon

insights arising from recent work, this book presents a unified framework
for historical research in criminology. It mobilizes the rich traditions of
historical research in our field and brings them into dialogue with con-
ceptual, theoretical and methodological reflections drawn from across
disciplines. It aims to imbue criminology with that sense of assurance
with respect to the historical, that historical self-consciousness, that has
for so long proved elusive. In this way, we hope it will help pave the way
towards a more fully historical criminology.
Why ‘historical
criminology’?
However fruitful the present moment may be, it is still with a little trep-
idation that we write so emphatically on ‘historical criminology’. Allow
us to explain why. Some 60 years ago, Leon Radzinowicz bemoaned
that much effort was wasted within criminology in ‘dividing and sub-
dividing its various departments of interest’. He took especial exception
to the profusion of terms delineating various specialist lines of enquiry:
‘It is difficult to justify such a wealth of expressions, and the confusion is
increased by the fact that many of them have different meanings for dif-
ferent authors’ (Radzinowicz 1961: 167). In recent decades, criminology
has grown prodigiously – both
in raw size and in substantive breadth –
and it has acquired many of the trappings of an autonomous discipline
(Garland 2011; Loader and Sparks 2012: 9–11). As it has grown, the proj-
ect of divide and misrule identified by Radzinowicz has been pursued
with ever-greater
vigour. Today’s budding criminologists face a bewil-
dering variety of divisional labels that have emerged to fill this grow-
ing disciplinary space. As Paul Roberts (2017: 19) has noted, the field is
overrun with ‘adjectival criminologies’: ‘critical criminology’, ‘feminist

criminology’, ‘cultural criminology’, ‘public criminology’, ‘green
crimi-
nology’,‘southern
criminology’,‘imaginative criminology’,‘liquid
crim-
inology’, ‘indigenous
criminology’ – and more besides (see
also Carlen
2011; Hannah-Moffat
2011: 441–5).

For many years, criminology tended to career somewhat erratically
from one orienting creed to the next, reinventing itself in successive new
iterations.1 Nowadays, though, it seems that criminology does not ‘turn’
from one direction to the next – rather,
it fractures, forming ever-further,

4 Introduction
overlapping sub-divisions. The divisional labels listed above serve various

purposes: to denote certain modes of enquiry; to isolate topical fields;
to signal shared political or ethical commitments (Loader and Sparks
2012: 17–18). Yet they also serve other kinds of purposes: to forge alli-
ances; to attract resources; to further careers; to sell books. They betray ‘a
good deal of programmatic disciplining and scholarly entrepreneurship’
(Roberts 2017: 20). Criminology’s eclecticism has long been a strength –
a source of periodic reinvigoration and renewal. It has lent the field an
intellectual flight-of-foot, able to embrace new material and confront
fresh challenges without the agonizing methodological struggle (and
introspection) that periodically afflicts the more established disciplines
(Pavarini 1994: 50–1).Yet it also obstructs meaningful dialogue between
the field’s constituent tribes (Ericson and Carriere 1994; Garland 2011:
312; Hannah-Moffat 2011: 443–5; Rock 2017: 21). Why, then, add yet
another division to the list? Why ‘historical criminology’?
The experience of disciplinary sub-divisions elsewhere suggests that
the very act of naming ‘historical criminology’ carries its own risks.Those
who champion new scholarly movements often come to regret it. Take
‘historical sociology’: the phrase was issued with the ambition of infusing
sociology with an historical sensibility; yet, in time, it was domesticated.
Rather than transforming sociology from within, ‘historical sociology’
became a somewhat marginal subfield, a place where those with his-
torical leanings could be safely exiled from the sociological mainstream
( Calhoun 1996). Participants were left to wonder what might have
been – a rich longitudinal sociology, a thoroughly processual sociology,
a dedicated sociology of the past (Abbott 2001b: 95–6). Yet these were
lost hopes. The doyen of the historical sociologists apparently saw it all
coming, remarking early on that he wished ‘the phrase had never been
invented’ (Tilly 1981: 100, cited in Abbott 2001b: 118).We hear the same
concerns voiced about ‘public sociology’ – that it would enter the schol-
arly lexicon without disrupting disciplinary hierarchies, leading to the
‘compartmentalization’, even the ‘ghettoization’, of public-spirited so-
ciology (see Hays 2007: 80 and Collins 2007: 103–4, respectively). So, the
question asserts itself once again: why ‘historical criminology’?
The phrase itself is not new. ‘Historical criminology’ has rattled around
for some time, largely minding its own business and seemingly attract-
ing little notice (see, for example, Inciardi et al. 1977: 38; Carlen 1980:
Introduction 5
Geis and Goff 1986; Braithwaite 1993: 394).2 Yet this has slowly
1 3–15;
begun to change: over the past two decades, a swelling tide of studies has
embraced the phrase and proclaimed it more boldly (see, among oth-
ers, Bosworth 2001a; Godfrey et al. 2008: 5–23; Knepper and Scicluna
2010; Knepper 2014; Deflem 2015; Churchill 2017; Churchill et al. 2018;
Nagy 2020a; Bleakley and Kehoe 2021). It is now more common to see
reference to ‘a historical criminology’ of such-and-such
(Guiney
2020)
or to an ‘historical criminology method’ or ‘approach’ (Bleakley 2021).
Collections of studies – theoretical
and empirical –
have
also appeared
under this banner (Flaatten and Ystehede 2014; Churchill et al. 2019).
Thus, ‘historical criminology’ has taken its place in the dizzying world of
contemporary criminology.
And yet, to date, there has been almost no sustained exploration of
‘histor ical criminology’. Accordingly, basic questions remain outstanding:
what does it mean to do historical criminology? How (if at all) does it
differ from doing crime or criminal justice history? In what respect (if
any) does today’s ‘historical criminology’ constitute a new endeavour?
What are its pretensions with respect to the wider field of criminology? In
many respects,‘histor ical criminology’ has emerged less as a deliberate, self-
conscious intellectual project than as an exercise in scholarly re-branding;
its increasing prominence partly reflects specific developments in the social
organization of criminology as an academic field, the shifting fortunes of
related disciplines and wider changes in the structure and culture of con-
temporary academic research. Yet, having emerged from this rather mun-
dane institutional context, enquiry is now directed at major conceptual,
theoretical and methodological issues raised at the conjunction of crimi-
nology and the historical. We have seen fresh insights into (among other
things): the value and changing conditions of archival research (Knepper
and Scicluna 2010; Guiney 2020); the power of historic data to explain
contemporary developments, shape our practice and inform policy (Cox
2012; Catello 2019; Lawrence 2019); the emotional and ethical issues raised
by research on crime and punishment in past times (Bosworth 2001a); and
the ways in which historical perspective feeds the ‘criminological imagi-
nation’ (Yeomans 2019a). Hence, much more than scholarly branding and
disciplinary positioning are at stake in the emergence of ‘historical crimi-
nology’: under this banner, scholars have brought to the surface fundamen-
tal issues for the study of crime and justice, past and present.
6 Introduction
In this book, we set out to harness as fully as we can the opportuni-

ties for intellectual rejuvenation and re-creation presented by the arrival
of ‘histor ical criminology’. Building upon recent work, we aim to help
make ‘historical criminology’ as stimulating and fertile a space of crimi-
nological enquiry as possible. As such, we have resolved to forego some
of the more obvious (though, in our view, ultimately uninspiring) routes
for thinking about ‘histor ical criminology’. We do not catalogue what
criminology has to learn from the discipline of history, nor do we make
the case for a thoroughgoing criminology of the past.These paths are not
dead ends – on the contrary, there is much still to learn from ventures
in these directions. Yet, to make the best of ‘histor ical criminology’, we
consider that a more involved, searching assessment of historical enquiry
and the concept of ‘the historical’ is required.
This book grounds historical criminology in a certain conception of
historical time. Historical criminology is best seen, for us, not as a crimi-
nology of the past, nor as an appropriation of historical research methods
to criminological enquiry, but as scholarship on crime, criminal justice
and related matters conducted with respect to historical time. Of course,
a considerable body of scholarship, across disciplines, is premised on the
importance of taking time seriously; moreover, recent years have wit-
nessed increasing interest in time and temporality in criminology and
socio-legal
studies (see,
among others, Farmer 2010; Black 2011; Craw-
ford 2015;Valverde 2015; Crawford 2018; Beynon-Jones and Grabham
2019). What distinguishes historical criminology from such work are the
specific qualities of historical time. For us, five such qualities are of central
importance. First, historical time is a time of change – from subtle shifts
and gradual developments to seismic breaks and radical transformations.
Second, it is an eventful time – a time of happenings, of things taking place.
Third, it is a time of flow – a time of movement, process and becoming.
Fourth, it is a tensed time – it suggests relations to pasts, presents and fu-
tures. Fifth, it is an embodied time – a time embodied in things and a time
to which things belong. The basic tasks of this book are to develop this
thumbnail sketch and to show how a more sustained engagement with
historical time might inform core concerns of criminological research.
All this suggests that historical criminology is not a niche sub-field,
a technical specialism or an insurgent movement; rather, it is one of a
handful of basic approaches to scholarship on crime and related matters.
Introduction 7
One can think of crime as a phenomenon of various kinds – social,

legal, moral, psychological and so on. To practise historical criminology
is to think of it (and related concerns) as an historical phenomenon.
‘Historical criminology’ thus describes a way of orienting oneself in the
study of crime and justice – a basic position that sets the general direc-
tion of (and imposes general limits on) enquir y. This is our justification
for seeking to cement another ‘criminology’ in scholarly discourse. As a
broad approach, historical criminology is not at all sharply distinguished
from other such approaches. There is no neat dividing line separating
historical criminology from sociological or psychological criminology;
on the contrary, historical criminology feeds off the frisson of encounters
with other basic approaches.3
A rich inheritance
The following chapters expand on the above conception of historical
time and develop it with respect to various broad domains of crimino-
logical research. En route, we touch upon major criminological traditions
that incorporate a more or less sustained engagement with historical
time. This section offers a brief survey of six such traditions, each of
which provides an important conduit for historical thinking in crimi-
nology. Some more closely resemble a common-sense
understanding of
‘histor ical research’ than others; yet, as Chapter 1 shows, each channels
particular insights into historical time. Hence, although the sources and
methods of historians figure rather marginally in contemporary crimi-
nology (Lawrence 2012: 314), one finds meaningful engagement with
‘the historical’ in large sections of our field.
Classical sociology
Several of the principal figures of classical sociology, from Karl Marx to
Norbert Elias, have exercised a significant influence over criminological
scholarship.Their example has stimulated interest in how structural trans-
formations and social processes figure in the world of crime and control,
leading to historical analyses covering extended periods of time. Much
formative work in the sociology of crime control and criminal justice
institutions took this basic form. Classic Marxist work in the sociology
8 Introduction
of punishment traced the evolving connection between modes of pro-

duction and penal forms (Rusche and Kirchheimer 2017; Melossi and
Pavarini 1981); more recently, Valeria Vegh Weis has developed a wider
account linking changes in production to patterns of selective crimi-
nalization (Vegh Weis 2018). Similarly, a fusion of Marxist and Webe-
rian themes underpinned long-ter m studies of the alienation of policing
functions from face-to-face
communities and their bureaucratization in
modern police institutions (see, for example, Spitzer 1979; Robinson
and Scaglion 1987). Followers of Elias have also embraced long-term,
diachronic perspectives, focusing on the operation of developmental so-
cial processes –
especially
(de)civilizing
processes – and their impact on
evolving dynamics of violence and punishment (see, for example, Spie-
renburg 1984, 2001; Pratt 2002).
The influence of the classics has perhaps waned somewhat in recent
decades. Work on Eliasian themes excepted,4 scholars have increasingly
taken their cue from newer developments in social theory (see Gar-
land and Sparks 2000; Karstedt 2007). Yet, despite ‘moving on’ from
more familiar themes, criminologists have continued to reproduce the
same basic approach, analysing basic shifts in societal formation in long-
term perspective. This method underpinned a wave of highly influen-
tial studies on ‘late modern’ crime and control, which described new
social structures and cultural formations and contrasted them with the
more familiar landscapes of the past (most famously Garland 2001a; see
also Karstedt 2007: 57–9; Daems 2008: 3–10;
Churchill 2019).Thus, the
historical perspective of classical sociology retains an important place in
contemporary criminology.
History
More conventional works of history – issuing from within criminology
and from adjacent disciplines – have also made an important contri-
bution to understanding crime and justice. These histories take several
forms. There is a long lineage of legal and administrative histories, which
once tended to extol the march of progress towards a more humane
and enlightened mode of criminal justice (Knepper
2016: 5–29).
Such
‘Whiggish’ interpretations have since retreated, yet detailed, empirical
research on criminal justice administration – shorn of such celebratory
Introduction 9

10 Introduction
above (see King 1999; Lawrence 2012; Knepper 2014; also Burke 2005).
Many criminologists find history ‘interesting’, but perhaps little more
than that – something of ‘an
innocuous intellectual luxury’ (Bloch
1953:
38; see also Williams 2015: 70). Equally, many criminal justice historians
remain somewhat reticent about developing the broader implications or
theoretical insights issuing from their research on particular times and
places (see also Sewell 2005: 3–6). That said, shifts in the structure of
history and criminology as academic fields may allow historians to claim
a more prominent role in criminology over the coming years (Yeomans
et al. 2020; cf. Godfrey et al. 2008: 5–23).

Genealogy
A further tradition of historiography fits neatly into neither of the previ-
ous two categories. We have in mind those studies that trace the lineages
of particular crime and justice phenomena through time, often all the way
down to the present.This approach foregoes the analytical grandeur of the
classical sociological survey; yet it also exceeds the delimited chronological
parameters of empirical historiography. For want of a better word, we shall
call this approach ‘genealogy’. This instantly connects us to Michel Fou-
cault’s histories of the origin and descent of contemporary techniques of
government (for example, Foucault 1991). According to its programmatic
statements, genealogy is concerned with tracing the twists and turns of
particular phenomena from their origin down to the present. Its pro-
tagonists (as well as its detractors) are fond of dramatizing an opposition
between genealogy and conventional historiography on the ground that
genealogy is a ‘history of the present’: its purpose is not to evoke and
interpret the past but to outline how particular phenomena have issued
into and subtly shaped the present (Foucault 1984: 86–90;
Garland 2014:
367–8;
cf. Braithwaite 2003: 8–9).
Furthermore, it has an avowedly critical
purpose: to uncover the historical preconditions of present practices of
governance and hence to open them up to critique. Its preoccupation
with the present aligns genealogy to the dominant temporal perspective of
criminology (Lawrence 2012); yet it shares with the historians an emphasis
on contingency and the causal significance of specific historical conjunc-
tures. The genealogist typically works from original historical documents,
though more often from published sources than manuscript records.
Introduction 11
Genealogy has made a highly significant

– if somewhat diffuse
–
contribution to criminology. It has illuminated the careers of particular
ways of imagining ‘the criminal’ and related social problems, and how
they connect with changing techniques of governance (see, for example,
Pratt 1997). Through such studies, genealogy has vividly demonstrated
the fertility of combining long-term
perspective with suggestive theoriz-
ing (Lacey 2006: 200–1). How far such work has pushed the boundaries
of historical thinking in criminology, though, is another question. Part of
the issue here is something of a gap between the theory and practice of
genealogy in criminology. Many prominent studies styled as genealogies
in fact remain faithful to the inheritance of classical sociology. Consider
David Garland’s work: Punishment and Welfare emerged from an interest
in the Marxist problematic linking economic conditions, class relations
and modes of punishment (Garland
2019: 270–1;
cf. Daems 2008: 23–4);
equally, The Culture of Control was fundamentally concerned with the
relation between structural change in crime and society and new strat-
egies of control. These studies exemplify how criminologists have often
brought a harder, more structural edge to genealogy, keying into the
classical concern with societal types and transformations (see Stenson
1998; Churchill 2019; also Osborne 2002: 180–2; Daems 2008: 59–60).
Social constructionism
While the above traditions diverge in a number of respects, they at least
share an interest in crime and criminal justice in historic settings. This is
not the case for other traditions of historical research in criminology. One
such tradition is ‘social
constructionism’ – work derived from the various
schools of interpretive social science. Such work focuses on the construc-
tion of meanings of crime and related phenomena, resisting the thought
that such meanings are natural, given or pre-determined. Histories and
genealogies have contributed to understanding the social construction
of crime and control in the past (see Rafter 1990b: 377–81); yet we are
concerned here with interpretive studies centred on the present. Of par-
ticular interest for our purposes are those approaches that trace ‘the pro-
cess by which criminal definitions are formulated and applied’ (Quinney
1970: 24; see also Abbott 2001b: 65–6). Symbolic interactionists, for
example, describe how individuals interpret themselves and their social
12 Introduction
environment, and how those individuals, in turn, are interpreted by

others (Downes
and Rock 2011: 178–9). Such work typically relies on
participant observation, self-observation
or ethnography, though some
scholars work from documentary sources. This kind of processual per-
spective flourished during the heyday of the sociology of deviance in
the 1960s and 1970s. Under the banner of ‘labelling theor y’, scholars
sought to understanding how particular individuals and groups became
‘deviant’
in their own self-perception
and in the eyes of others (see, clas-
sically, Becker 1973). While such perspectives have not since regained
the prominence they once had in criminology, neither have they disap-
peared; subsequent studies of meaning-making have proved influential
in work on crime and deviance (Katz 1988; Collins 2008), as well as a
wider range of topics, from the social organization of policing (Manning
1997) to the formation of criminal justice policy (Rock 1995). There
remains, then, a live tradition of constructionist research in criminology,
which explores the formation of social meanings through time (see also
Ferrell et al. 2015).
Life course research

Similarly, although studies of offenders’ life courses show little direct
interest in the historic past, much work in this area manifests a deep con-
cern with continuity and change at both the individual and the collective
level. ‘Life course research’ is a broad term covering a range of method-
ologies that connect with historical time in distinct ways. Most prom-
inent in contemporary criminology is the longitudinal panel study –
qualitative, too, but especially quantitative –
which
works through suc-
cessive sweeps of data from a given cohort. Pioneered by Eleanor and
Sheldon Glueck in the mid-twentieth
century (for example, Glueck and
Glueck 1950), the approach has since blossomed into a major research
area. Recently, researchers have applied the same basic techniques to ar-
chival data on offenders, taking advantage of newly digitized records
such as census returns (see Godfrey et al. 2007). An alternative approach
to life course studies – less popular today, but with a long tradition in
journalistic and scholarly research on crime – is oral history or biograph-
ical interviewing (Bennett 1981; Goodey 2000). Rather than retriev-
ing data at regular intervals over an extended period, oral histories use
Introduction 13
in-depth
interviews to reconstruct life courses in retrospect. Sociological
work on offender (auto)biography dates back to the days of the Chicago
School (Shaw 1966); again, in more recent times, historians have contrib-
uted similar studies (for example, Samuel 1981). Despite their differences,
each variety of life course research opens up space for enquiry into the
dynamics – the trajectories and transitions – of individuals’ lives through
time (see Sampson and Laub 2005).
Memory and justice

Our last major seam of historical research in criminology centres on
themes of memory and justice. It is perhaps less a coherent research tra-
dition and more the confluence of several streams of work that share an
interest in how we negotiate difficult or problematic pasts in the present.
Prominent here are pasts coloured by war, conflict, mass violence, occu-
pation or colonization. Work in this area derives largely from research
on societal conflict, genocide and mass atrocities; much of it originates
from political science, law and anthropology, though there is a growing
criminological literature too (see, among others, Cohen 2001; Hagan
and Rymond-Richmond
2009; Rafter 2016).This literature is theoret-
ically eclectic, drawing upon notions of collective memory, trauma and
haunting, including perspectives from sociology, cultural studies and psy-
choanalysis. Studies start from the premise that difficult pasts are hard
to process: they bleed into the present, defying effortless closure; hotly
contested and frequently denied, we must come to terms with them
in some special way. A unifying theme is ‘transitional justice’ – a ter m
covering a range of initiatives, driven variously by state and civil society
actors, which aim to aid individuals, communities and nations transition
from a preoccupation with past acts and events towards a new shared
future. Criminologists have subjected transitional justice projects to crit-
ical scrutiny, asking questions familiar to criminal justice studies – in
whose interests transitional justice projects operate, whose truths they
uncover, the quality of justice they enact upon perpetrators and the
measure of reparations they deliver to victims (see McEvoy et al. 2017).
Beyond this, though, are studies concerned with collective memory in
transitional contexts, how it finds cultural expression and how it is con-
trolled (see Karstedt 2009a; Brown and Rafter 2013; Dudai 2018). At
14 Introduction
the furthest reaches of this literature – and of particular importance for

our purposes – are studies of atrocity, memory and justice that ask basic
questions concerning historical time and the place of the past in the life
of the present (see Bevernage 2008; de Haan 2015).
The above tour of historical research traditions is far from complete. A

number of smaller or more embryonic movements – ‘narrative
crim-
inology’, for example, or work on ‘dark tourism’ – vie for attention.
Yet we consider these six traditions the principal conduits for historical
thinking in contemporary criminology. Part of the purpose of this book
is to provide a unifying framework for these rather disparate lines of
work – to show how each, in its own way, evinces a meaningful engage-
ment with historical time. In no sense are we claiming that the scholars
cited above have somehow really been doing ‘histor ical criminology’ all
along and have simply failed to notice. Rather, they have been doing
social history, genealogy, longitudinal research and so on; they have been
working on quite different assumptions, perhaps even ‘inhabiting parallel
universes which need never intersect’ (Downes and Rock 2011: 12).Yet
some parallel universes, presumably, are closer than others – and while
they need never intersect, there is common ground on which they could
learn much from each other. By setting out a broad conception of ‘the
historical’ and historical thinking for criminology, this book charts this
common ground, assesses the lie of the land and surveys plots that still
await cultivation.
Aims and scope

The basic purpose of this book is to outline a broad conception of his-
torical research and to exhibit the fruits of such research for criminology.
We seek to enlarge the creative possibilities of ‘historical criminology’,
to encourage original, stimulating applications and to forge novel and
rewarding connections between existing bodies of historical scholar-
ship. We should be clear, though, about what this book does not aim to
do: it does not provide a general introduction to the history of crime
and criminal justice; it does not itemize points of connection between
history and criminology as disciplines; it does not provide a history of
criminological thought or historical research in criminology. Readers in
Introduction 15
search of guidance on these points should consult those works that deal
with them directly.5 We hope that, in time, such readers will return to
this little book, should their thoughts turn (as ours have) to the scope and
potentialities of historical research in criminology.
We should also make clear some more specific limitations of the pres-
ent work.While it seeks to outline a broad and encompassing conception
of historical criminology, the book issues from three individuals who oc-
cupy a quite specific space in the academic field. By background, we are
(respectively)
a social historian, an historical sociologist and a socio-legal

historian. Collectively, our interests centre on two rather particular top-
ics: on the one hand, policing; on the other hand, alcohol regulation. We
hold positions at universities in the United Kingdom and our research
focuses almost exclusively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Britain.
Finally – and least excusably – we are all effectively monoglot English-
speakers. Hence, this book issues from a particular perspective. In the
pages that follow, we deliberately engage with topics and literatures far
beyond our research fields – from ecocide to desistance, from trauma to
terrorism. Nevertheless, the book doubtless reproduces a certain image
of what ‘cr iminology’ is and what ‘cr iminologists’ do that will align more
closely with the experience and aspirations of some readers than others.
This is perhaps the inevitable consequence of addressing a short book to
a variegated and contested field; we can only hope to persuade others to
develop some of the points we make here, transposing them to issues and
contexts beyond our ken.
So much for its limitations – what is this book good for? What pur-
poses do we hope it might serve? We suggest that the book might use-
fully be read in three ways. First, it extends an invitation – to new scholars
and to those well versed in other approaches to cr iminology – to think
historically about their particular area of concern. The book offers such
readers basic principles to follow and standing questions to reflect upon
in embarking upon historical research. It also highlights points of overlap
and synergies with related research areas, such as comparative criminol-
ogy, which may be more familiar to some readers. Second, for those with
an active interest in historical criminology, the book outlines an evalu-
ative framework for such work. It furnishes a set of criteria for assessing
the contribution of a given piece of historical research in criminology
as a piece of historical research. It suggests that when we ask ourselves, ‘how
16 Introduction
historical is this study?’, we should consider how far and how fruitfully
it engages with the various aspects of historical time. Third, we hope the
book will serve as a provocation, for practised historical researchers, to push
the boundaries of historical thinking in criminology. Inevitably, most
researchers in any field work squarely within the parameters of their par-
ticular scholarly tradition or disciplinary training. Yet, for those wishing
to fortify historical approaches to criminology, we hope this book will
make explicit some of the basic assumptions underpinning such work
and so strengthen their resolve in transcending scholarly convention. In
this respect, we hope it will encourage some readers to pursue new ways
of understanding crime and related issues and so to push the bounds of
criminological knowledge.
What would ‘success’ for the arguments made here look like? What
intervention do we seek to make in the wider field of criminology? First,
we wish to see the richness, variety and value of historical enquiry fully
recognized within criminology. We hope that the book will help diffuse
historical thinking more widely across the field, encouraging those less
familiar with historical approaches to engage seriously with them and to
integrate them as appropriate into their own research. Second, we hope
to sponsor the development of a more fully historical cr iminology – a
scholarly enterprise that treats crime and related concerns more regularly,
rigorously and reflexively as historical phenomena. Third, by providing
a searching re-examination
of basic conceptual, theoretical and method-
ological issues, we hope to go some way towards refreshing, rejuvenating
and reorienting criminological research at large. To be clear, we do not
suggest that historical criminology is somehow the best approach to the
study of crime and justice; the history of criminology is littered with
such self-aggrandizing
partisanship (Carlen 2011; Loader and Sparks
2011: 20–3;
Roberts 2017: 26–7), and we have no wish to augment the
record. Rather, as pluralists, we think that criminology is best served by
nurturing its core approaches; when each is in rude health, we are likely
to find the various possible forms of criminological knowledge more
frequently and more plentifully re-stocked (see
Abbott 2001b: 234–5).

This book is issued in pursuit of richer stocks of historical knowledge
about crime and justice and thereby of a somewhat fresher complexion
for criminology as a whole.
Introduction 17
Outline
This book opens by addressing its central question: how might we use-
fully conceive of historical research in criminology? Chapter 1 develops
the claim that it is best understood as an engagement with historical
time. It presents a thorough analysis of historical time, exploring notions
of change, eventfulness, flow, tense and embodiment. It elucidates each
of these points with reference to relevant theoretical work, from across
disciplines, and illustrates them through topics and issues familiar within
our field.This provides the foundation for the chapters that follow.Yet the
framework for historical criminology developed here necessarily exceeds
what we could hope to develop in such a short book. Hence, we hope
that this first chapter in particular will provide a point of reference for
subsequent work in historical criminology and induce others to take up
pathways to historical thinking which we are unable to survey in this text.
Chapters 2–4
build upon this basic framework and explore some of
the issues and opportunities it raises for certain broad areas of crimino-
logical research. Chapter 2 focuses on applications of historical thinking
to substantive, empirical research in criminology. It first reviews major
temporal units of analysis in criminology
– the trend, the life course,
the event, the recurrence and the inheritance – and assesses the pos-
sibilities and pitfalls that each presents for historical research. Thereaf-
ter, the chapter outlines a set of generic methodological techniques that
operationalize historical thinking in the practice of empirical research.
Chapter 3 asks how historical thinking might inform theoretical and
conceptual enquiry in criminology. It argues that criminological theo-
ries and concepts are themselves historical phenomena, although they
are usually approached in ways that limit or obstruct historical thinking.
Taking concepts first, the chapter develops three broad modes of enquiry:
tracing the descent of concepts through time; recovering historic mean-
ings of familiar terms; and conceptualizing criminological phenomena as
processes. Turning next to theory, the chapter discusses the issues raised
in applying contemporary theory to historic materials, before exploring
ways of theorizing that are attuned to historical time. Chapter 4 explores
how historical thinking might illuminate cultural and affective enquiry
in criminology, focusing on how experiences of crime and (in)justice
18 Introduction
mediate our relations to pasts and futures. Concerning pasts, it analy-

ses how history and memory address the past, explores how traumatic
and haunting experiences render the past immediate in the present and
examines attempts to fix particular, authoritative understandings of the
past. Concerning futures, the chapter explores expectations embedded in
projects of reform, imaginaries of risk and uncertainty and how futures
are ‘stolen’ through ecological destruction, genocide and other existential
threats.
The book concludes by outlining ‘ten points of histor ical criminology’,
which reiterate and extend its core arguments. This concluding chapter
aims to provide a succinct statement of what historical thinking has to
offer criminology in terms of research, teaching, policy and practice. It il-
luminates some of the most compelling roles the historical criminologist
has to play – as witness to time’s flow, as custodian of collective memory,
as conduit for alternative ways of thinking, even as futurist. In essence, it
offers the strongest answer we can give to our opening question, ‘why
historical criminology?’, and the most suggestive account we can offer of
what we all have to gain from a more fully historical criminology.
Notes
1 From a British perspective, Paul Rock memorably observed that ‘cr iminology
undergoes a scientific revolution every time Jock Young changes his mind’
(Rock 1992: x, original emphasis).
2 There is, it seems, a longer established tradition of work on ‘histor ical crimi-
nology’ in German-language scholarship (see Radbruch and Gwinner 1951;
Faber 1978).
3 This book illustrates historical criminology in dialogue primarily with socio-
logical perspectives, as we consider that such perspectives constitute the main
currents of thought in Anglophone criminology.
4 Of course, Elias’s work was received into Anglophone scholarship much later
than that of Marx, Weber and others.
5 On the history of crime and criminal justice, see Knepper and Johansen
(2016); on history and criminology, see Lawrence (2012) and Yeomans et al.
(2020); on the history of criminology, see Garland (1997), Becker and Wetzell
(2009), Rafter et al. (2016) and Dooley (2016). On the history of ‘histor ical
criminology’, the reader is currently short of options – but see Catello (2019:
142–208).
1
HISTORICAL THINKING
This chapter’s purpose is rather daunting – at least for us. It aims to outline a
conception of ‘the historical’, or ‘historical thinking’, fit for historical crim-
inology.We are obliged to start at this basic level – what is ‘historical think-
ing’? what is ‘the historical’? – because there are so few satisfactory accounts
to hand. Innumerable works offer suggestive reflections and theorizations
on these themes; we draw on some of them below.Yet most follow a partic-
ular current of historical thinking rather than offering a unified framework.
There is also an ample literature on history as a discipline, its assumptions
and working practices (for example,Tosh 2015). But this tells us more about
history as such than about the historical. Historians have no monopoly of
wisdom over historical thinking; indeed, some of the richest insights are to
be gleaned from others.1 Hence, in what follows, we draw on work from
a range of fields – principally from history, sociology and philosophy – to
assemble a fairly unified framework for historical thinking. We fashion this
framework from a sustained exploration of historical time. This is just one
possible starting point for addressing historical thinking; as such, ours is a
specific conception of the historical. Nevertheless, thinking through histori-
cal time helps to integrate the several traditions of historical thinking within
criminology and offers a springboard for new directions and approaches.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429196911-2
20 Historical thinking
We do not intend here to delineate a neatly bounded mode of enquiry

called ‘historical thinking’. Indeed, we shall say little of its bounds – where
historical thinking crosses into ahistorical thinking. We have no wish jeal-
ously to build fences or ward off incursions.We aim instead to expose what
is at the core of historical thinking – its basic attachments and aversions.
We consider historical thinking a broadly shared disposition, or sensibility,
rather than a checklist of theoretical positions or methodological proce-
dures. One can think historically in a number of different ways, leading in
divergent directions. Our goal, then, is not to divine the ‘One True Path’ for
historical criminology, but to offer a suggestive sketch of where historical
thinking issues from, enabling readers to assess for themselves the some-
times competing claims of different scholarly approaches. Also, what follows
speaks sometimes of ‘the historical’ and sometimes of ‘historical thinking’. It
can be read either as a meditation on the historical reality of crime and justice
or as an account of how to study crime and justice in an historical way. Put
rather grandly, we tack here between discussions of historical ontology and
historical epistemology. Our agnosticism reflects a suspicion that such phil-
osophical niceties matter little for practical enquiry in criminology. Readers
with strong views on such matters are welcome to read this chapter one
way or the other, substituting the terms to suit their preference.
In what follows, we first outline a few alternative answers to the ques-
tion of historical thinking. These answers – that identify historical think-
ing with particular data, specific methods or with study of the past – seem
to us to offer an unduly narrow conception of historical thinking. Second,
in the heart of the chapter, we analyse historical time as a time of change,
an eventful time, a time of flow, a tensed time and an embodied time.
Each of these temporal qualities provides a point of orientation for histor-
ical research in criminology; taken together, they constitute a framework
for evaluating such research. Finally, we briefly outline some implications
(and
non-implications)
of this account for historical criminology.
What counts as historical research?

Let us start by considering four imaginary research projects:2
1. A cross-national,
quantitative study of violent crime and literacy,
c. 1500–1750 –
using manuscript archival records to quantify rates
Historical thinking 21
of each – which aims to uncover how educational attainment af-

fects the incidence of interpersonal violence.
2. A study of local police reform, 2012–13 – drawing on reports of
official inquiries and policy documents – which aims to explain
how a notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional force was overhauled.
3. A study of memories of mass violence and human displacement
in an episode of societal conflict, 1971–75 – based on in-depth

interviews with survivors and their descendants – which aims to
determine the conflict’s long-term
repercussions and effects.
4. A life course study of ‘Douglas’,
formerly a persistent offender –
based
on repeated, in-depth
interviews conducted over the last
25 years – which aims to explain his desistance from crime.
Which of these projects are historical and what makes them so? One
might assume that historical research is simply research about the past.
This seems to align with the division of labour between sociologists
and historians, criminologists and criminal justice historians (Elias 2009:
20–2;
Lawrence 2012: 314–5). It suggests that project 1 is historical –
though its aim ‘to uncover how educational attainment affects the
incidence of interpersonal violence’ might seem to anticipate a general
theory, not about the past as such but about an apparently omnitemporal
relation between education and violence. The historical status of the
remaining projects is still less clear: project 2 seems least historical, as it is
about very recent events; projects 3 and 4 have rather longer timeframes,
but they are still within living memory.This raises the question – looking
back from the present – of when ‘the past’ begins? All four projects are
about things that have happened – does that mean that project 2 is in fact
about the past, albeit the very recent past? And if so, is it perhaps more
historical – more centrally about the past, in and of itself – than project 1?
Now consider project 3: supposing the episode in question is deemed
to be ‘past’, is research on memories of that episode about the past or
the present? Is it about both? Or neither? Last, consider how historians
sometimes decry a study of the past – typically one with strong theo-
retical leanings – as ‘ahistorical’.
Assuming such denunciations are not
purely a defence of disciplinary self-interest, they suggest that a project’s
being ‘about the past’ does not, in itself, qualify it as historical (see also
White 2014: 18–19).
Alternatively, one might suppose that research is ‘histor ical’ by virtue

of using primary historical sources. Again, this seems to distinguish what
most historians apparently do (archival research) from the work of social
scientists (research with living participants); historians work from exist-
ing materials, whereas social scientists generate new data (cf. Tosh 2015:
99–100). It also aligns with the view that archival work distinguishes
‘proper’ historical research from reliance on ‘theory’ to offer schematic
interpretations of history (see Knepper and Scicluna 2010; Knepper
2014; Knepper 2016: 232–3; Guiney 2020: 80–1). All this suggests that
historical research consists in a particular method – or rather family of
methods, since historical ‘sources’ come in many shapes and sizes (wr itten
documents, images, sound recordings, material artefacts and so on). On
this basis, project 1 is historical, as it uses sources (documents) from the
past. The other projects do not work from such mater ials – project 2
uses recent documents, while projects 3 and 4 gather original data from
living participants. Yet where does this leave oral historians who do, in
fact, gather original data from living participants? Perhaps project 3 is a
work of oral history – does that make it ahistorical? If not, then how do
we distinguish oral history from interview-based research more widely,
given that interviewees almost invariably draw upon their memories?
Equally, we criminologists often have cause to look up old documents –
statutes, official reports, policy papers and the like. When we do so, are
we necessarily doing historical research? Surely there must be more to
it than that.
Perhaps the distinction lies not in the materials themselves but in
the way they are analysed – not in method, narrowly, but in method-
ology. There is much in this thought, but it begs the question: what is
historical methodology? As a discipline, history does not discuss meth-
odology in the sustained, rigorous and reflective manner of the social
sciences (Godfrey 2016: 38; Gunn and Faire 2016; Guiney 2020). The
standard primers on historical method emphasize ‘cr itical analysis’ of
primary sources and the need to situate sources ‘in their histor ical con-
text’. The first point does not get us far: all researchers reflect critically
on their data, and there is little to distinguish ‘cr itical source analysis’
from rigorous documentary social research (compare Tosh 2015: 98–
121 with Scott 1990: 19–35). ‘Historical
context’ is a richer, if some-
what beguiling, notion. It directs us to understand research findings
in light of the conditions and circumstances specific to the time from

which they arise. As times change, so do these conditions and circum-
stances (Tosh
2015: 10, 108–9).
That is all well – but most contem-
porary social researchers also situate their findings in the context of
their time. Does this make pretty much all social research ‘historical’?
Equally, what about those landmarks of historical sociology that are
more attentive to long-ter m historical processes than to the specific
conditions of particular epochs (see Elias 2009: 10–34) – are such
works somehow ahistorical? Are not long-term processes themselves
important historical contexts for local events (see Yeomans 2019a; also
Elias 2009: 34). ‘Historical context’, then, discloses something of the
nature of historical research, but to appreciate which contexts matter
and why one must search for deeper assumptions underpinning his-
torical thinking.
It is not easy, then, to specify what distinguishes historical research in
criminology. In particular, we doubt the usefulness of conceptualizing
historical research in terms of some distinct method (contextual, docu-
mentary research) or content (‘the past’); such an approach may suit the
claims of history to disciplinary autonomy, but they hardly seem ideal
starting points for a more encompassing conception of historical think-
ing. The next section outlines what we consider more promising starting
points through an analysis of historical time.
Historical time
For us, the most fruitful way of understanding the historical is in connec-
tion with historical time. Historical research plainly has something to do
with time. Consider the following claims: history is the ‘science of men
in time’ (Bloch 1953: 47); ‘the histor ian… is committed to the detection
and description of the shape of time’ (Kubler 1962: 12); the purpose of
history is ‘to provide a specific temporal dimension to man’s awareness
of himself ’ (White 1978: 48). Yet time matters for other researchers too:
witness the experimental scientist’s stop clock, the palaeontologist’s fossil
timelines, the economics of time allocation or the metaphysics of time it-
self.What, then, is historical time? This section – which lays the foundation
for the remainder of the book – explicates five qualities we consider cen-
tral to historical time: change, eventfulness, flow, tense and embodiment.
These are not discrete elements of historical time, but rather intimately
connected aspects; discussion of one necessarily blurs into discussion of
others. Here, though, we develop each aspect in turn, teasing out some
basic theoretical insights, applying them to the imaginary research proj-
ects described above and raising connections with existing scholarship
in criminology.3
First, though, a few words on the literature addressed below. Draw-
ing widely on historical scholarship from across disciplines, we aim to
synthesize an encompassing and inclusive conception of historical time.
We follow no particular theorist or school, though we return frequently
to a few ‘big names’. Some of them are little read in criminology – the
philosophers Henri Bergson and R.G. Collingwood, for example, or the
historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck.While others are more familiar, we
often draw on their lesser-known
works: G.H. Mead’s The Philosophy of
the Present, for instance, or Norbert Elias’s writings on time, history and
figuration.We hope to inaugurate these figures and studies into criminol-
ogy as rewarding sources of inspiration. Clearly, though, we draw upon a
skewed (and emphatically Western) sample of thinkers on the historical.
This might raise concern, especially as Western notions of time have long
been instrumental in contexts of colonial and imperial exploitation (see
Nanni 2012). To repeat, ours is a specific conception of the historical; we
hope that others, in time, will showcase the insights for historical crim-
inology issuing from a more diverse group of thinkers. We would only
underline that the notion of historical time developed here differs sharply
from the absolute, abstract, dimensional time – time as clock time –
that

is often seen as the dominant (and domineer ing) concept of the mod-
ern West. Indeed, we mobilize something of an oppositional tradition in
Western thinking about time – a broadly organismic, experiential and
relativist perspective (see
further Adam 2004: 51–70).
A time of change
Historical time is a time of change. Change vitiates history; it seems
impossible to imagine a history in which nothing changes. And with
change at its core, historical time produces difference between earlier and
later states of affairs. Thinking historically, then, entails thinking through
encounters with difference (Tosh 2015: 8–9;
Bevernage 2016: 353).The
centrality of change exposes a limit of historical thinking: things that

do not change – things that have remained constant heretofore and
(presumably) will do so forever hereafter – are not amenable to histor-
ical enquiry. As the historian Jacques Le Goff put it, ‘there is no immo-
bile history’ (Le Goff 1992: 127; cf. Braudel 1980: 33). To put the point
more positively: everything that changes has a history. This quality of
‘having a history’ is termed ‘historicity’; entities possess historicity insofar
as they are changeable on any historical scale. The objects of histori-
cal enquiry are not eter nal – they are made and unmade in historical
time. Change, then, is omnipresent in historical thinking: however infre-
quently it may occur, the possibility of change – the spectre of mutation
and transformation – hangs
over all historical phenomena.
The raw fact of change unsettles the naïve assumption that this or
that aspect of the historical world is natural or given – that it stands
outside of time. As Thomas Guiney notes: ‘Even the events of a single
lifetime underline the contingency of seemingly stable social structures
and prompt us to re-examine taken for granted ideas and assumptions
about the world we inhabit’ (Guiney 2020: 77; see also Abbott 2016: 5–9).
Even the ‘largest’
social phenomena –
the
economic systems and social
hierarchies that seem so fundamental – are products of historical change,
and they will, in time, surely be laid waste by it. Sensing the possibility of
change makes us aware that we and our social practices exist in time. And
this, in turn, nurtures a critical disposition towards current arrangements;
once exposed as transitory, they often seem ripe for reform. Some spe-
cies of historical investigation obtain their allure from making this criti-
cal purpose explicit. For many, the great attraction of Michel Foucault’s
genealogies was their effect in denaturalizing the present, exposing the
contingency of our practices and thus opening up space for revaluation
and critique (Garland
2014: 372–3).
Foucault’s influence springs in large
part from how vividly he exhibited the historicity of human thought and
practice: genealogy, he wrote, must set forth ‘in the most unpromising
places, in what we tend to feel is without history – in sentiments, love,
conscience, instincts’ (Foucault 1984: 76).
Yet judgements concerning historicity are sometimes contentious or
ambiguous. Despite Foucault’s efforts, not everyone accepts that human
cognition and the self are historical categories. For the historian Barbara
Taylor, historical understanding presupposes an ‘empathetic connection’
between historian and subject made possible by a common human sub-

jectivity across times (Taylor 2012: 195). Some historians argue that
violence is not simply a mutable artefact of culture; rather, they posit
universal cognitive structures or psychological dispositions – themselves
the legacy of adaptive evolutionary development – which shape patterns
of violent behaviour (including changes in such patterns) across human
history (Wood 2007; Roth 2011). Equally, the implications of recogniz-
ing historicity are not always comforting or clear cut. Take humanistic
efforts to evoke the worlds of ordinary people in the past – the kind of
‘history from below’ that drove much formative work on the history of
crime. Affirming though they may be, such accounts perhaps run the
risk of understating the historical distance separating the living from the
dead and thus domesticating the otherness of the past (Bourdieu and
Chartier 2015: 81–2;
cf. Phillips 2013: 189–206).Walter
Johnson, an his-
torian of American slavery, has argued that exhibiting the ‘humanity’ of
enslaved peoples tends to empty enslaved subjects’ experience of their
historical specificity, reifying the slave as a generic historical subject, and
thus alienating ‘enslaved people from the historical circumstances and
ideological idioms of their own resistance’ (Johnson 2003: 118). Invoking
universal categories – ‘agency’,
‘humanity’
– in this way perhaps sub-
stitutes comfort in lasting truths for insight into specific inter-relations
between times.
Returning to our imaginary research projects, it seems that project
2 has the makings of an historical enquiry after all, for it is centrally
concerned how a particular police force changed under reform. The re-
cency of this change should not discourage us, provided that sufficient
time has elapsed to discern a difference between old and new. Were we
to conduct this study a hundred years hence, it would constitute a quite
different project and almost certainly lead to a rather different inter-
pretation. However, with respect to the change at issue, it would be no
more (or less) historical than if conducted in the aftermath of the events
concerned.
Change, then, is central to historical time – but that is not the full
story. Historical thinking is also concerned with continuity – with en-
durance and stability through time. For every dramatist of change, there
is a naysayer who emphasizes continuity. How, then, are continuity and
change related in historical thinking? Crucially, historical continuities
relate to things that could have changed rather than to eternal constants. As
much as change, then, continuity emerges through time. Furthermore,
it too requires explanation: we must explain why something persisted
while all manner of other things were changing (Abbott 2016). Hence,
historical time is a time of potential change; it is as much concerned with
meaningful continuities as with change.
If continuity and change pattern historical time then things must
change at different rates and according to different rhythms. While some
things change, others repeat or endure. Hence, we can speak of a plurality
of historical times with respect to various objects of enquiry. The histo-
rian Fernand Braudel (1980) famously argued that beneath surface events
lie deep structures – geographical, biological, economic, psychological –
that condition human action and exper ience over ‘the longue durée’. Elab-
orating this insight, fellow historian Penelope Corfield (2007) argued
that the ‘shape of history’ is composed of three forms of temporal passage:
the rapid macro-change
of transformative events; the deep continuity
of enduring structures; and the incremental micro-change of develop-
mental trajectories. Koselleck too discerned three dynamics: singular
events, recursive structures, and trans-historical, ‘anthropological’
struc-
tures (Koselleck
2002: 50–5, 144–5).Thus,
any given ‘now’ is composed
of multiple ‘layers’
of historical time – from surface occurrences to deep
structures, from linear trajectories to recursive dynamics (see also Zam-
mito 2004; Jordheim 2012). The historian William Sewell provides an
excellent worked example of historical plurality in his analysis of the
‘temporalities of capitalism’ (Sewell 2008). Beneath the surface appear-
ance of unremitting change under capitalism, Sewell points to regular,
repetitive patterns (such as the business cycle), a long-run, incremental
progression (towards ever greater accumulation) and an essential, un-
changing logic (of abstraction).
The confluence of continuity and change implies that historical
change does not mark thresholds of absolute difference. There is no fi-
nality in history, no perfect rupture; all efforts to overcome the past, to
liberate ourselves from the dead hand of history, are met by the return of
the repressed (de Certeau 1988: 36–8). Here, then, we have a second limit
to historical thinking: just as no passage of historical time is invariant, so
none is wholly transformational (see also King 2000: 1–24; Spurk 2004;
Corfield 2007). A world completely transformed would have no past – it
would be an instantaneous new beginning. Let us return to our project

on police reform. It might (just) be conceivable that reform changed
virtually everything about that police force: personnel, uniforms, equip-
ment, mission, strategy, systems and so on. We would have, so to speak,
a new police. But it is inconceivable that the wider context in which
they operate would change to anywhere near this extent; hence, points
of connection between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ would present themselves.
Local citizens would bring to the new police memories and experiences
of the old; their first encounters with the new force, however cordial,
would not be innocent. More likely, of course, reform would not propel
the force from darkness into light: there would have been causes for
hope under the old regime – those
officers who exemplified the longed-
for change and thus made it imaginable – and
all-to-familiar
characters
under the new regime – those who reproduced past practices or resisted
assimilation into the new culture. Historical change, then, necessarily has
its limits.
As this example suggests, we can discern different orders of historical
change. One kind of change – ‘quantitative’
change
– refers to some
continuous thing undergoing change in some particular respect(s). This
reflects our common-sense view that things – individuals, institutions,
nations – persist through time, despite changing in innumerable ways.
They endure by virtue of an unchanging bundle of intrinsic properties –
those that make them the very same things across time.What changes are
merely their contingent properties (Hawley 2001: 9–36). One encounters
this view in the so-called ‘variables
paradigm’ that underpins much quan-
titative social science, which assumes that the social world consists of en-
during entities with contingent attributes (Abbott 2001a). Contrast this
with a more radical variety of historical change – change not in things
but of things. Such change –
‘qualitative’
change –
denotes
transformation
in the very constituents of the world. It reveals that history is no respecter
of essences (Ankersmit
1995: 146–8, 152–4;
Bevir 2015: 229–31). Fou-
cault revelled in this radical order of change: the genealogist, he wrote,
does not search for ‘the exact essence of things’, but instead exposes
‘the secret that they have no essence’ (Foucault 1984: 78; cf. Nietzsche
1994: 54–6;
Elias 2012: 109–10). On this view, all we can say about the
‘nature’ of something is how it has changed over time, how it came to
be (Collingwood
1999: 140–1, 178; see also Croce 1941: 151). Differing
assessments of the order of change in particular contexts may stimulate

debate. Can one speak of ‘juvenile delinquency’ before its apparent ‘r ise’
early in the nineteenth century (King 1998; cf. Griffiths 2002)? Can
one juxtapose studies of delinquency across the twentieth century, as if
each addressed the same, enduring problem (Laub 2004: 9; cf. Downes
and Rock 2011: 19)? Historical thinking demands that we take seriously
distinct orders of change: behind the usual flux of enduring things, there
lurks the potential for change in the very nature of those things them-
selves (Collingwood
1961: 210–2).

An eventful time
We have noted that change opens up thresholds of difference between
earlier and later. Yet historical thinking entails more than comparing
successive states of affairs; it demands attention to how change comes
about, to the punctuation of continuity and change in time. We must
ask, then, how similarity and difference happen. As Sewell put it, histor-
ical time is an ‘eventful’ time – a time of change taking place. For some
contemporary philosophers, ‘the event’ is an almost heroic stand against
the ordinary, the status quo (see Totschnig 2017). For historians and his-
torical sociologists too, the event rises above everyday routine: it is ‘the
juncture between two situations’ (Pachter 1974: 443, original emphasis) or
‘a transformation device between past and future’ (Abrams 1982: 191).
Most famously, Sewell defined the event as ‘that relatively rare subclass
of happenings that significantly transforms structures’ (Sewell 2005: 100).
We have here a dichotomy between spaces of normality (social struc-
tures) and times of exception (events). As such, events occupy a crucial
place in the social world; they underpin a vision of social life marked by
contingency and shot through with asymmetries of ‘before’ and ‘after’.
The world of crime and justice is awash with events – cr iminal offences,
police stops, trials, penal interventions, wars, atrocities and so forth. Gen-
erally, though, we criminologists are interested in events not as ‘junctures
between two situations’ – or as junctures of any sort –
but
as data (of
completed acts) that may disclose apparently more basic factors under-
pinning social action.4 Even faced with such momentous happenings
as homicides, we tend to gather them up, abstract them from temporal
context and analyse them collectively (see, for example, Wolfgang 1958).
Influential traditions of longitudinal research in criminology treat life

events as manifestations of individual pathology rather than as poten-
tial turning points (Sampson
1993: 429–32).
Studies of events as ‘natural

experiments’ concern themselves with exceptional happenings (such as
police strikes – see Pfuhl 1983) only insofar as they illuminate usually
unseen structures or forces of social life. Each of these approaches values
the event not in itself, but for what it tells us about some apparently more
fundamental concern. Perhaps less obviously, the same criticism applies
to many qualitative, narrative studies of events. Take, for example, a fine
recent study by Cecilia Hansen Löfstrand and colleagues of two private
security scandals in Sweden and Britain. The authors provide a close
description of how each event originated and unfolded; yet they use this
material to illuminate pre-existing
‘values,
norms and moral codes’ con-
cerning private security. Hence, the events are of interest insofar as they
‘dramatize’
collective norms (Hansen Löfstrand et al. 2018: 968) – not
insofar as they recode moral sensibilities or create new value positions.
Contrast this with Aogán Mulcahy’s study of two policing scandals in
Ireland, which explores how seemingly banal instances of police miscon-
duct led to the resignation of senior figures in the police, civil service
and government and to structural reforms to police oversight (Mulcahy
2021). This study deals with the force of events to reshape political sit-
uations and institutional structures in policing – how ‘apparently small
things can have big consequences’ (Mulcahy 2021: 174).
Events are unique, unrepeatable particulars – no two historical events
are ever quite the same.Take Mulcahy’s study again: other police scandals
have led to major reforms, but no others led to the creation of the Irish
Policing Authority in 2016. Any talk of an event ‘repeating itself ’ must
in fact signify something else – perhaps the extension of a continuous
process, or an apparently similar but distinct happening (Davidson 1996;
see also Lawrence 2019: 506–7). Hence, to its core, historical thinking is
concerned with the individuality of time and place; its objects are ‘not
indifferent to space and time but [have] a where and a when of their
own’ (Collingwood 1961: 234; see also Abrams 1982: 212; Sampson 1993;
Abbott 2001b: 119–20). And yet, the historical researcher can hardly
avoid identifying commonalities between unique events – by
thinking
of them through broad categories (‘scandal’, ‘r iot’) or in terms of some
larger whole that, together with other events, they constitute (‘moral
panic’,‘genocide’ –
see
McCullagh 1978: 269–70).
As Kubler suggested,
‘we understand events only by the identities we imagine among them’
(Kubler
1962: 67; see also Wagner-Pacifici
2017: 7–8). Like other modes
of enquiry, then, historical research mediates between the general and
the particular; in doing so, though, it institutes an especial regard for the
things in themselves, for the specificities of time and place, even if such
singularities can be comprehended only in a broader perspective.
We have noted that historical time encompasses not just change but
also meaningful continuity. But if one identifies the ‘event’ with structural
change, how can research on continuities be made ‘eventful’? How does
continuity take place? Responses to this question start from a common
intuition: persistence results not from an absence of happenings but from
a continuous series of happenings; structures are not naturally at rest,
but continually reproduced and reinstituted in time. On one view, times
of continuity are constituted not by ‘events’ but by ‘occurrences’ – by
a
routine, everyday kind of happening, which reproduces existing struc-
tures while at the same time making space for disruptive events. For the
anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, there is an inevitable slippage between
the structure of cultural categories and the dynamic context of cultural
practice: hence, every act of cultural ‘reproduction’ in fact effects a subtle
change (Sahlins 1985: 144; see also de Certeau 1984; Ferrell et al. 2015:
6–7). Sewell applies this thought to social structures, suggesting that inter-
action between diverse cultural schemas and material resources – which
are, for Sewell, the constituents of social structure – produces endoge-
nous change, beneath the surface of structural order, quietly preparing
the ground for eruptive events (Sewell 2005: 124–51).This reinforces the
point that, in historical time, there is no such thing as pure repetition;
within every occurrence, there emerges a subtle novelty or new interpre-
tive possibility (see also Bergson 1999: 26; Schutz 1971: 20–1).
A rather different view of continuity issues from traditions of proces-
sual social thought – from those like Mead for whom the social world is
‘a world of events’ (Mead 2002: 35). On this view, events are not devices
of structural change but the very matter of the social – not a rare sub-
class of happenings but simply all there is to speak of. Hence, all apparent
social entities – individuals,
institutions, cities, nations –
are reifications;
the social world consists simply of lineages of events (Abbott 2001a: 209–
39; Abbott 2016: ix–x; see also Rescher 1996: 53; Spencer 2011: 43).
Thus, the sociologist Andrew Abbott argues that continuity results from
events that successively ‘encode’ the past into the unfolding present – in

our bodies, in memory, in documents, in the built environment – thereby
sustaining inherently precarious social formations (Abbott 2016: 3–15).

Whereas Sewell and others posit events to account for transformations
in social structure, processual thinkers use ‘structure’ to describe the pat-
terned legacies of events.
This processual account of continuity reorders the conventional re-
lation between social structure and social change. If the social world is
composed not of elemental structures but of happenings, then the central
explanatory problem for social enquiry is not social change but social sta-
bility (Elias
2012: 142–3;Abbott
2016: 2, 23–4).The
seemingly uneventful
reproduction of social order cannot be assumed; instead, it must be inves-
tigated (for
example, through quotidian policing practices – see Ericson
1982). This raises basic questions concerning social institutions. Crimi-
nologists have recently devoted much attention to institutional structures
as determinants of crime and punishment (see Karstedt 2010b) – yet the
above discussion might prompt us to ask instead how such institutions
persist. Let us take police institutions as an example. One might examine
how officers deploy institutional myths to reinforce ‘cultural inertia’ (see
Campeau 2019). One might investigate how recording practices repro-
duce the institution on paper and on screen, fixing volatile people and
things in textual representations (see Williams 2014: 85–117). One might
investigate how training and induction cultivate distinctive manners and
bodily comportment, differentiating police personnel from members of
the public (see Williams 2014: 62–84).
One might explore how ‘boundary
objects’ – uniforms, vehicles, radios or firearms –
reproduce
the institu-
tion in everyday encounters between police personnel and other security
actors (see Diphoorn 2020). Sustained enquiry along such lines promises
a more dynamic conception of persistence in criminal justice institutions,
disabusing us of any residual sense that such institutions are somehow
given, standing features of the social world.
Consideration of continuity leads us from events as such to an eventful
analytic – from the biography of events to analysing things in terms of
events. Such an eventful analytic, we suggest, orients us to the conditions
and consequences of happenings – to the ground from which they spring
and to their legacies and effects. Take research project 4 on ‘Douglas’ and
his desistance from crime: how do we make sense of this as an eventful

episode? We might start by thinking of it as a sequence of happenings
which produces a certain result. Suppose these events include a pivotal
meeting with his probation worker, his marriage to ‘Paul’, and his vol-
unteering with a local youth charity. We might then locate these events
within more durable social structures – say, chronic underinvestment and
neglect in ‘Brickton’, the neighbourhood where Douglas lives. This lo-
cates his desistance in the articulation of events with structures – in a set
of happenings (events), springing from given (structural) conditions, that
transform his situation. Now suppose, instead, that we are interested in
just one of these events – say in his marriage. We would no longer ap-
proach this as an ‘event’, but as a sequence in itself, with its own constit-
uent events and structural conditions, extended over a shorter timeframe.
Or suppose that we scale up our initial enquiry, focusing on aggregate
offending patterns in Brickton over three generations. In this case, what
was previously a complex episode to be explained (Douglas’s journey to
desistance) is likely now a mere occurrence – something that happens
without any notable effect on the overall pattern of crime. We would
have to search for a new set of events – within and beyond the time-
frame of Douglas’s career – to account for this wider transfor mation in
offending. And these ‘events’ might include changes in what, within the
timeframe of Douglas’s desistance, we took to be ‘structural’ conditions
(for example, the pattern of underinvestment in Brickton).
Thinking in terms of events foregrounds issues of timing and sequence
in social analysis. ‘If there is any one idea central to historical ways of
thinking, it is that the order of things makes a difference’ (Abbott 2001b:
117; see also Abrams 1982: 191–2;
Pierson 2004; Carr 2014: 108–9).
How,
then, are earlier and later events in a given sequence connected? Most
straightforwardly, later happenings are causally dependent upon earlier
events; we explain things that occur with reference to their antecedents.
Historical explanations typically ‘single out’ specific actions (or omis-
sions) and their bearing on an event (Dray 1964: 48; Pachter 1974: 440–
3), rather than resorting to causal laws that apply irrespective of time and
place (see also Calhoun 1998). Hence, one must know when something
happened (at what point in the relevant sequence it occurred) to explain
why it happened. We can only explain why Douglas cut ties with his
criminal associates when we appreciate that it comes after certain key
events of his desistance narrative. Less obviously, perhaps, earlier events

are interpretively dependent on later events. The meaning of an event is
not settled at the point it occurs; it remains a work-in-progress – it must
become ‘what it was’. Thus, the political sociologist Robin Wagner-
Pacifici speaks of the ‘restlessness
of events’ – the ‘ongoing interpretive
and interactional competitions and contestations’ that do not recollect
the event but sustain it as a dynamic, unfolding entity (Wagner-Pacifici
2010: 1374; see also Kubler 1962: 20; Ferrell et al. 2015: 10–11;Wagner-
Pacifici 2017: 25–6).This
interpretive process is inflected by subsequent
happenings as they somehow manifest the consequences of the original
event (Abbott
2001a: 226; Sewell 2005: 100–1). Hence, one must know
when something happened to understand what it was that happened.
Douglas’s first conviction for ‘joy riding’ was presumably a meaningful
occasion when it occurred; yet it only becomes the ‘debut crime’ of an
extended criminal career in retrospect, once seen in light of a string of
subsequent offences (Farrell et al. 2015).5
The various analytical scales of the Douglas/Brickton study outlined
above indicate the relativity of ‘event’ and ‘occurrence’,
‘structure’
and
‘event’, within an eventful analytic. As Koselleck noted, a legal trial can
be both an event and an occurrence – ‘a dramatic history’ in its own right
while ‘simultaneously
an index of long-term social, economic, and legal
elements’ (Koselleck 2004: 109). This suggests that to speak of ‘events’ is
less to describe happenings of a given nature than to mark out specific
happenings as especially significant or worthy of investigation. Even the
choice between analysing structures or events, regularity or change, is
ultimately something of a false choice. Adapting the philosopher Arthur
Murphy’s thought on events and objects, the event-structure distinction
discriminates ‘not between two kinds of being but between two contexts
and sets of meanings’ (Murphy 1928: 574; see also Quinton 1979: 206–7;
Sahlins 1985: 136–56). Regularity and change, then, are but two faces of
the social process. For example, ‘mass incarceration’ is a condition of so-
cial life in early twenty-first-century
America –
a regularity in the social
process that constrains action; yet it is an event in the history of American
penality – something that happened under certain conditions and with
certain consequences.Thus, analysis switches between mass incarceration
as contingent happening and as ‘iron cage’ (Garland 2001b) at different
temporal scales – that is, with respect to different orders of regularity in
social dynamics. An eventful analytic, then, is committed to ‘reciprocal

explanation of events through structures, and vice versa’ (Koselleck 2004:
110; see also Abrams 1982: 192–3).

This discussion highlights the nested durations characteristic of histor-
ical thinking. Processes of change are situated within larger patterns of
regularity, which themselves form processes of change within still larger
regularities (Abbott 2001a: 220). This suggests the limitations of focusing
narrowly on a single sequence (such as an individual career) or a certain
temporal scale. Historical time, as plural, cannot be reduced to the level
of individual experience, whether of a human being, an event or a se-
quence of happenings. Put another way, historical time is inherently so-
cial; it arises from relations, interactions and feedback between sequences
of happenings and between orders of experience (Koselleck 2018: 44–5;

see also Abbott 2001a: 217–22; Harootunian 2007: 479–80).

A time of flow
An eventful temporality moves us beyond a simple succession of states of
affairs. But still, historical thinking demands something more. Not con-
tent with the event as marker between past and future, we must enquire
into the emergence and unfolding of the event itself; not satisfied with
the transition from one situation to the next, we must search after the
impetus and trajectory of any given situation. Historical enquiry, then,
concerns itself with immanent change – change in the process of social
life (Elias
2009: 27; Adam 2004: 27–8). And this suggests that historical
time is a time of passage or flow.
Temporal flow is an evocative yet elusive notion. We can get at what
it signifies by comparing two pre-Socratic
philosophers: Heraclitus, who
insisted that all reality is flux and change, denying the existence of endur-
ing essences; and Parmenides, who intoned that existence is unchanging,
forming a complete, eternal block of reality (see Hoy 2013). The former
evokes a living time of the here-and-now,
of emergent becoming – a
pulsing, durational world of creation; the latter suggests a dimensional
time of fixed positions – a stiff, sterile world of order.6 Both allow us
to speak of change and events, but not in the same way. The Parmeni-
dean approach deals in facts concerning change and events. It tends to-
wards the view expressed by the physicist Arthur Eddington: ‘Events do
not happen; they are just there and we come across them’ (Eddington
1920: 51, cited in Murphy 1928: 578). Historical thinking cannot abide
this thought; events do not simply exist, they take place. As Murphy re-
plied, Eddington’s ‘“geometry of events” is all geometry and no events’
(Murphy 1928: 577; see also Mead 2002: 70). Historical research deals
in facts, of course, yet it reaches beyond them to a conception of time
more like that of Heraclitus. Bergson expressed this as ‘duration’ – a
time of pure succession, without distinction, in which each temporal
moment interpenetrates its predecessor and its successor (Bergson 2001:
100–1). Similarly, Mead wrote of ‘emergence’ –
an
original past-present

linkage, issuing from the happening of events, that sustains the passage of
time: ‘that which marks a present is its becoming and its disappearing’.
Mead’s view in particular suggests that time’s flow is not a natural, cos-
mic process, but a corollary of human action as expressed in events (cf.
Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 138; Abbott 2001a: 226–8). In a time of
flow, ‘contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity’ are as fundamental
to social reality as stability and persistence (Rescher 2000: 6).
One can express this regard for temporal flow by attending to process
in social life. ‘Process’ evokes the internal order and immanent dynamic
of temporal passage. For Collingwood, process is ‘the life of histor y’
(Collingwood 1961: 163). We can understand process as a logical con-
nection between events – the identity of interaction that they manifest
from moment to successive moment (Rescher 1996: 40). Hence, in sev-
eral respects, process contrasts with the event. While we narrate events
from beginning to middle to end, a process is a continuous operation,
an ongoing movement articulating moment to moment without appar-
ent end (Stout 1997: 24–6;
Rescher 2000: 23;Wagner-Pacifici
2017: 41).
Whereas events are unique, unrepeatable particulars, processes are in-
delibly marked by type: while a given process may yield different out-
comes and take on different meanings in different historical settings, the
core identity of interaction is the same in each case (Rescher 1996: 40;
Rescher 2000: 24–6). While the event is often associated with structural,
transformative change, process links more closely to the incremental
micro-change of development, evolution or atrophy (see Corfield 2007:
57–79). If events point to a juncture between past and future, processes
direct us to the ‘inner life’ of events – to life as lived rather than life as
represented (Bergson 1999: 27) or to representations in production rather
than representations as finished products (Ferrell et al. 2015: 153–4).
Thus, process calls for us to survey life in motion and to attend to the
experience of continuity and change (Wagner-Pacifici 2017).
Let us return to our imagined study of police reform. Suppose the
reform emerged out of a corruption scandal that shook the force. Atten-
tion to flow might lead us to chart the unfolding of that scandal: the
sense of institutional ground moving beneath the feet of urban gover-
nors, police leaders, officers and citizens (cf.Wagner-Pacifici 2017: 48–9).
One might investigate the dynamics of de-legitimization, charting the
wave of disrepute cascading across the institution, each day’s revelations
feeding into the next’s. Or one might try to capture the process of re-
form and rebuilding – the embedding of new values, the formation of
new practices and procedures, and the emergence of new communities
either embracing or resisting reform. In each respect, one would focus
less on what happened, but on the tendency within those events; one
would strive less for an itinerary of changes in the weather and more for
an evocative sketch of which way the wind was blowing.
Processual social thought exercised considerable influence on crimi-
nology through the ‘constructionist’ traditions of symbolic interactionism,
labelling theory and phenomenology. As Paul Rock said of interactionists
specifically, such scholars ‘are the heirs of Heraclitus’ (Rock 1979: 72).Yet
capturing temporal flow is a delicate art and process an elusive quarry.
Much work on ‘the construction of crime’ in fact attends to crime-as-
construct rather than crime-in-construction – on construction as fact or
outcome to be deconstructed, rather than as process to be reconstructed
(see, for example, Muncie 2001). Our practices of enquiry tend to freeze
fluid processes in fixed representations, to portray dynamic processes as
formulaic procedures (see also Elias 2012: 106–8). Regina Lawrence
(2000) nicely illustrates this distinction between procedure and process
in her comparison of institution-driven and event-driven constructions
of social problems. Police institutions, she argues, typically domesticate
use-of-force
events through formulaic, procedural explanations. Yet,
occasionally – as with the Rodney King beating in 1992 – an
event es-
capes institutional control, taking on a self-creating, signifying force that
results in novel, unforeseen interpretations of the wider social problem it
signifies (in this case, police brutality –
see
also Ferrell et al. 2015: 154–64;
Wagner-Pacifici 2017: 60–9).

One can trace process at various temporal scales, starting from crim-
inal action. Rather than taking crime as completed act, attention turns
to the process of action and its experiential dynamics (cf . Schutz 1971:
19–20).
At this micro-scale,
phenomenological perspectives can capture
something, at least, of the pleasure and excitement of deviant action: the
seductive allure of the intended act; the ‘precipice moment’ (Wagner-

Pacifici 2017: 58–9) of approaching transgression; the more-or-less
protracted ‘letting go’, or surrendering to temptation; the rush of the
action and the euphoria of its consummation (Katz 1988; Ferrell 1997).
Each of these constitutes but one perceptual moment interpenetrating
its antecedents and descendants. The present moment is experienced in
connection with a just-past, a previous, from which it issues, and a near-
future, a subsequent, into which it projects (see Osborne 1995: 48–50;
Carr 2014: 34–6). As such, the processual dynamic of criminal action
is best captured not by narrative, but through richly detailed, evocative
descriptions of particular moments or situations, suffused with a sense of
where they came from and where they were going. Capturing process
depends on getting close to the action – to Bergson’s ‘inner life’ of the
event. Ideally, the researcher is present at the scene of the action, as an
ethnographer (Ferrell 1997; Ferrell et al. 2015: 210–25).Yet this does not
exclude the possibility of capturing the feel of the action much later – of
compressing historical distance through empathetic, reconstructive en-
quiry (Phillips 2013: 189–206). Consider, for example,Vic Gatrell’s study
of public hangings in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
England, an
account uniquely determined to confront the act of hanging itself – to
‘move closer to the choking, pissing, and screaming than taboo, custom,
or comfort usually allow’ (Gatrell 1994: 30).
Enlarging the temporal scale, we enter the interactional dynamics of
the event and the passage of continuity and change. Celebrated work on
the process of becoming ‘deviant’ takes this basic form (Becker 1973), but
so too do some studies of victimization. As Rock remarked, ‘Becoming
a “victim”…is an emergent process of signification…punctuated by
benchmarks and transitions, and lacking any fixed end state’ (Rock
2002: 17).This assessment is substantiated, for example, by work on wom-
en’s efforts, socially and psychologically, to process experiences of men’s
violence (Stanko 1985), or on the interactional descent of households
from spaces of safety into spaces of violence (Denzin 1984). Similarly,
sociologists of punishment have explored the often protracted process

of adaptation to imprisonment, from early studies of ‘prisonization’ to
more recent work on ‘coming to ter ms’ with life inside (Matthews 2009:
49–75; Crewe et al. 2017). And one can extend this kind of processual
perspective to larger patterns of social interaction and longer temporal
durations, from the dynamics of urban-ecological change and their im-
plications for delinquency (Bursik 1986) to centuries-long processes of
civilization in human sociability and their effects on interpersonal vio-
lence (Elias
2000).
This discussion highlights that some historical processes flow quicker
than others. Our experience of historical time, then, is marked by the
patterning of distinct dynamics: the more regular, repetitive aspects of
experience – though themselves not unchanging –
form an experiential
backdrop onto which the more vivid lights of social life are cast (Car r
2014: 34–6, 45–6; Wagner-Pacifici
2017: 42–3, 50–2).
The flames of vi-
olent protest rise before a familiar urban landscape; the spontaneous act
of transgression erupts from the predictable routine of the everyday (see
Ferrell 2004); the lifer’s repetitive day-to-day experience is brought into
relief by photographs of fast-g rowing children. And just as times pass
at different rates, the rate of their passing may increase or decrease. The
unsettling experience of acceleration in social, technological and cul-
tural change – and its implications for feelings of insecurity, unease and
resentment – is a familiar theme in the criminological literature (Young
2007). Such acceleration in temporal experience may clash with the ab-
stract, quantified time of the criminal justice system; it may, for example,
make prison sentences of the same objective length feel ever longer, with
important consequences for psychological distress and coping strategies
among inmates (Matthews 2009: 39). To repeat, the passage of historical
time is not a natural, metronomic regularity; as a product of action and
interaction, it is fitful, irregular, unpredictable.
A tensed time
We have drawn upon the vocabulary of tense – ‘past’,‘present’,‘future’ –

at several points already. It probably seems unremarkable that we should
do so. But is historical time an irreducibly tensed time – can we grasp
it properly only in such terms? In a classic article, the philosopher John
McTaggart (1908) contrasted two conceptions of time. The first is a

tensed view of time, according to which events belong to the past, pres-
ent or future; as time passes, events draw nearer from the future, momen-
tarily become present, and then recede further into the past. By contrast,
the second view shuns any reference to tense, making do instead with
such terms as ‘earlier’ and ‘later’. We can express much about events in
just this way: their temporal location, their position in a sequence and
their mutual determinations with other events. What, then, is gained by
speaking in terms of tense?
Crucially, tense terms help to capture our relations to other times and
the distinctive meanings they evoke. As Elias noted, tense terms relate
a sequence of changes to the experience of agents situated in that se-
quence; by contrast, ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ denote eternal relations between
points in time that are true for all possible reference groups (Elias 1992:
75–81). The term ‘past’,
for instance, speaks to a connection between
some person or group and an earlier time, not simply to everything that
happened before some given moment. The issue of tensed and untensed
time returns us to Heraclitus and Parmenides – to a vision of becoming
in a transient now versus a view of the universe from the standpoint of
eternity. Remaining faithful to Heraclitus, historical thinking embraces
the vocabulary of tense. It pushes us to think about the distinctive qual-
ities of our relations to different times – the particular character of each
temporal domain as it manifests itself in the collective imagination. This
comes out more clearly once we reach for compound tense ter ms – ‘past
present’, ‘present future’, ‘future past’ and so on (Luhmann 1976: 140;
Koselleck 2018: 102–3). Such terms invite us to consider not simply ‘past’
as akin to ‘earlier’, but pastness – together with presence and futurity –
leading assuredly from questions of chronological location to forms of
temporal relation.
What, then, does pastness tend to evoke? Something past is something
gone, left behind, ‘ir revocable’ (Mead 2002: 36; Steedman 2001: 81). Past-
ness connotes fixity and closure – the world we have lost, yet also the
world of facts. It might imply a difference with the present – something we
are no longer – and so a sense of otherness (de Certeau 1988: 3–5,
45–6,

83–5).Yet
it also contains the conditions that gave rise to the present –

the ground from which we sprang.We are what we are (and not what we
were) for our having come out of the past. This communicates a sense
of the weight of the past – of the dead upon the living. Thus, pastness
conveys both loss and legacy, departure and continuity, disconnect and
accumulation (cf. Rock 1976: 354, 362–3; King 2000: 1–24). Past time
is divisible into phases or periods – it can be broken up and analysed in
a way that the live flow of the present cannot. As Bergson observed, we
can ‘solidify duration once it has elapsed, divide it into juxtaposed por-
tions…yet this operation is accomplished on the frozen memory of the
duration…not on the duration itself ’ (Bergson 1999: 30; cf. Collingwood
1961: 226).
Compare these qualities with the characteristics of futurity. Like ‘past’,
‘future’ connotes a difference with the present, an otherness, though this
time as a world we have yet to win. Futurity links to potentiality –
the ‘open future’ – in contrast to the fixity of the past (Luhmann 1976;
Koselleck 2004: 9–25).This foregrounds our capacity for agency: we tend
to think that we can act in the present to shape the future in a way that
we cannot to shape the past (Torre 2011: 361–2). Indeed, we often feel
compelled to adjust present action to suit future goals (Elias 1992: 144–5).
Where pastness promises matters of fact, futurity seems to speak to pos-
sibilities, probabilities and preferences (Adam and Groves 2007: 31–2;
Urry 2016: 13).Yet ‘future’ also conjures impending death – in individual
consciousness (Heidegger 2010) but also in the collective psyche, at least
in times of war, genocide, nuclear weapons and ecological destruction. As
such, besides potentiality, ‘future’ signals a desert –
a canvass of catastro-
phe, extinction or annihilation (Urry 2016: 33–53).
Presence is perhaps the most beguiling of temporal relations. First,
it connotes action – it speaks to both agency and the stakes of action.
The now is the time of decision; it suggests a certain ‘free play’, a time
of ‘tactics’ –
of
adaptation, appropriation or resistance (de Certeau 1984:
35–9). Furthermore, as Pierre Bourdieu noted, ‘the present…is some-
thing still sufficiently alive to be the object of struggles’ (Bourdieu and
Chartier 2015: 16).This brings home that the present is our time, whereas
past and future are theirs. Second, presence evokes the time of the event,
of passage from past to future (Mead 2002: 49–51; cf. Wagner-Pacifici
2017: 45). To say that something is happening is to declare it ‘present’
(Prior 1968: 15–25). Hence, there is no standard measure of the present;
rather, there are longer and shorter presents depending on the duration
of the event (Abbott 2001a: 227–8).Third,
presence suggests co-location,

These qualities of tensed time may seem familiar, yet they are neither
natural nor universal categories. Different societies have conceived of
temporal relations and the shape of history quite differently (see Sahlins
1985: 32–72; Hartog 2015). Moreover, the qualities of pastness, presence
and futurity outlined above sometimes combine or blur together in the
context of complex events; as such, tensed temporal relations are the
product of specific patterns of social action and social relations (see also
Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 138; Elias 1992; Spurk 2004). Consider,
for example, our imaginary research project on memories of mass vi-
olence and displacement. While these memories are clearly present –
indeed, they are made present to the researcher –
they
may evoke pasts,
presents and futures: survivors may recollect not just what happened but
also their memories and expectations at the time the events were un-
folding. What, though, about the episode of violence itself? Is it straight-
forwardly ‘past’? Clearly it has already taken place. Perhaps it is also a
formative experience for our interviewees – a standing condition of their
existence. Yet it might also be ‘present’. The events themselves may re-
main deeply contested – they
may yet be ‘the
object of struggles’.They
may also be ongoing, still playing out, for those suffering from recurrent
effects of violence, or for those otherwise unable to ‘move on’ from that
time. The episode might even, conceivably, signify a future possibility –
perhaps through fear of a resumption of (still unresolved) conflict or in
the prospect of a ‘repeat’ in another part of the world (as we sometimes

speak, for example, of ‘another Rwanda’, ‘another Iraq’ or ‘another Syria’,
in various contexts of international conflict and humanitarian assistance).
Thus, thinking through tense exposes how the chronological placement
of events may bely our temporal connections with them.
Particular forms of temporal relation are also instituted in our social
practices and institutions. For example, the compound term ‘present-
past’ – denoting that of the past which is present to us – directs us to how
pasts are recollected, reproduced and reinterpreted, and what stocks of
knowledge and experience we mobilize in making sense of new events.
Take the example of criminal records: they preserve traces of irrevocable
events, fix mutable and mobile bodies in authoritative representations and
inform judgements concerning character and suspicion in the context of
fresh occurrences (see Cole 2001). Or consider imitative or ‘copycat’
crime (see Surette 2016; Miller and Hayward 2019). The expressive
quality of many such acts relies upon observers grasping the allusion to
past example (whether fictional or real). Furthermore, such crimes are
underpinned by particular mnemonic practices among perpetrators –
including repetitive, immersive consumption of media representations
of the original act (Surette
2016: 44–5) –
which sear past act onto pres-
ent consciousness of action. Or, finally, notice how historical analogies
mediate responses to crime and disorder. In 2011, many politicians and
commentators responded to unrest in English cities through reference to
the ‘r iots’ of 1981, whether to legitimize the unfolding disturbances (by
placing them in a tradition of popular resistance to neoliberal political
economy and institutional racism) or to denigrate them (by contrasting
the apparent ‘criminality’ of the present with the justifiable grievances of
the past – Smith 2013).
An embodied time
We turn finally to the point that historical time is an embodied time. It is
not an abstract, dimensional time, apart from things, but a time embodied
in the elements of the historical world (cf. Hölscher 2014: 584–5).
The
movement of historical time is thus inseparable from the dynamics of
those things – individuals,
groups, institutions, social forces, and so on –
that embody it.7 Historical time, then, is a time of things (cf.
Adam 2004:
36). Equally, these things are historically specific – things of their time –
and they cannot, so to speak, stand apart from time. This enriches our
earlier discussion of historicity: to think historically is not just to think of
things in and through time but also to think of the times of things. This
opens up a relation of belonging between things and their times.
Let us turn to our imaginary cross-national study of violence and edu-
cation, 1500–1750. The idea of temporal embodiment makes us ask how
both violent acts and practices of literacy are specific to their time – to
the era conventionally (in European historiography) described as ‘early
modern’. We would start from the assumption that violence is not im-
mutable, but coloured in meaningful ways by the context of its time.
This would lead to tough choices in gathering the data: for example,
do we count assaults by means of casting spells as ‘violent’ incidents?
Perhaps they were understood as such at the time, but this is probably
not commensurate with our understanding.We would also have to think
carefully about the timeframe of the investigation. Do the years 1500–
1750 constitute a single ‘time-of-literacy-and-violence’,
with a constant
relationship between the two variables? Or is there a threshold within
this timeframe across which this relationship changes significantly, such
that we cannot compare material from either side as like with like? Per-
haps the years around 1500 mark a fairly clear shift in the violence-
literacy relation in some nations under study, while a similar shift came
later, say around 1600, in other countries. This would suggest that for
around a century we have ‘old’ and ‘new’ violence-literacy
relations co-
existing side-by-side.

This discussion indicates that periodization is indispensable to histor-
ical thinking. Historical research entails discerning periods in the life of
things – phases of linear development, for example, or successive points
in a cycle. Whatever their form, periods are constructs of the researcher;
they do not arise spontaneously from the data (de Certeau 1988: 27–9).
Conventionally, ‘per iodization’ means demarcating relatively coherent
intervals of time (or rather times-of-things
– ‘modern
policing’, ‘late-

modern penality’) and specifying their character. For example, we tend to
divide the history of crime control into fairly unitary stages: pre-modern,
communal dispute resolution; modern, bureaucratic state control; late-
modern, pluralized governance (Churchill 2019; see also Stenson 1998).
This kind of procedure springs from the idea that each age manifests
a fairly coherent spirit, a zeitgeist (Koselleck 2002: 154–69;
Koselleck
2004: 222–54; Hölscher 2014: 586–7), and from a sense of distance sep-
arating past from present, ‘the antique’ from ‘the moder n’ (Le Goff 1992;
Fritzsche 2004; Phillips 2013). Once formulated, such periodizing con-
structs all too easily slip loose of the context of temporal succession and
are reified as discrete social formations.Thus, the interpretation of histor-
ical phenomena and their times degenerates into a static analysis of social
forms, which are juxtaposed and compared as if they were not mutually
constitutive (Osborne 1995: 1–2;
Churchill 2019: 481).
There are, though, other ways to approach periodization. If we as-
sume that historical time is plural, we might shift the locus of periodiza-
tion from a single channel to multiple streams of time. A unified thread
of successive epochs thus gives way to a fabric of multiple, overlapping
times-of-things.
This returns us to Koselleck’s ‘layers’ of historical time
and directs us to ask how penal technologies, police strategies, modes
of criminal organization and so forth are ‘layered’ with multiple levels
of historical development (see Rubin 2016). This move highlights what
Koselleck called ‘the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous’ –
the co-existence (in the same time) of historically distinct phenomena
of the same time –
(not Koselleck
2002: 154, 159–60; cf. Jordheim 2012).
It subverts the assumption that co-existing things are coeval – that the
chronologically simultaneous are historically unified. This assumption is
sometimes elevated to a point of principle, especially to refute the sug-
gestion that certain peoples are ‘backward’,‘retrograde’ or ‘savage’ –
that

‘the other’ is our predecessor in a common process of development (see
Fabian 2014; Hindess 2007). Yet, as the historical theorist Berber Bev-
ernage (2016) has argued, the presumption of coevality tends to reduce
historical time to chronology, draping the heterogeneity of events in a
fictive veil of contemporaneity (see also Chakrabarty 2011). Bevernage
suggests that we think of contemporaneity not as co-belonging but as
the presence of plural historical times – as an encounter with difference
(Bevernage 2016: 367). Similarly, the historian Harry Harootunian (2007)
argues that we inhabit a ‘thick’ present, incorporating multiple ‘temporal
regimes’, each embodied in particular political and economic formations.
In particular, Harootunian highlights the power, amid historical diversity,
to designate a singular present. ‘The present’, he explains, is distinguished

not just from times past, ‘but also from those different temporalities that
exist immanently in the modern present but are hidden from it, as in
the there and then, since it is our time that provides both perspective
and tribunal. The here-and-now of actual experience, our modernity,
is our history, our time, and never theirs’ (Harootunian 2007: 483). This
suggests a social relations of (non-)contemporaneity,
in which the dom-
inant assert their privilege to speak from ‘the present’ (see also Le Goff
Spurk 2004).8 It reminds us too that think-
1992: 1; Osborne 1995: 24–7;
ing historically entails making judgements about difference and incom-
mensurability, which perhaps unavoidably carry normative undertones
(Chakrabarty
2011: 672–5).

Such ideas find expression in research on the timeliness (or otherwise)
of criminal law. For example, it is often said that the law fails to ‘keep up’
with technology – that there is an asynchronicity between technological
change and legal or regulatory change. This may result in proposals for
new law and questions concerning the application of existing legal rules
to new socio-technical
contexts (Bennett Moses 2007). According to
Koselleck, the history of law has a specific ‘temporal structure’ (Koselleck
2018: 130), founded upon repeated application, which tends to institute
persistence. As such, law relies heavily on a panoply of institutions –
official commissions, legislative committees and the like – to
identify
historical dissonance with social practice and to formulate means of re-
storing contemporaneity (Bennett Moses 2011). The same point extends
to law and social change more widely. As Sally Sheldon (2016) has shown,
the provisions of the UK Abortion Act 1967 have, since its enactment, di-
verged from understandings of good medical practice. The decline of the
paternalistic medical ideal centred on the doctor, changing institutional
contexts and new medical means of abortion have thrust medical prac-
tice into tension with even a broad interpretation of the law, restricting
access to services in the shadow of criminal sanction. Sometimes, though,
seemingly archaic laws are rejuvenated by social change, as they provide a
means of mediating new social tensions or moral dilemmas. The English
law of blasphemy, recommended for abolition in the late-1960s, was
revivified in the following decades – not to defend sovereign religious
authority from the pressure of dissent, but to address tensions between
liberalism and moral order amid cultural diversification (Unsworth 1995).
It is not just the objects of research that embody historical time but re-
searchers themselves. Historical research is a product of its time – the time
of enquiry. As Collingwood noted, ‘the historian…is a part of the process
he is studying, has his own place in that process, and can see it only from
the point of view which at this present moment he occupies within it’
(Collingwood 1961: 248). Historical enquiry, then, is never a detached
reconstruction of a given historical phenomenon and its time. Rather, it
is an essentially comparative endeavour –
a ‘mediatory
practice’ that en-
ables a kind of exchange between the times of researcher and researched,
with potential to illuminate each (Phillips 2013: 5; see also Bloch 1953:
64–5; cf. Nelken 2010).9 The work of ‘making-up’ the past is done in
the present, from traces which, persisting after their time, encounter the
different times embodied by historical researchers (see Mead 2002: 57–8;
King 2000: 3–4; also Knepper 2019). Furthermore, historical research is
for its time, in that it tends to resonate with contemporary problems and
concerns. For the philosopher Benedetto Croce, this lends ‘to all history
the character of “contemporary history” … however remote in time
events there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to
present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate’ (Croce
1941: 19; see also White 1978: 41). Hence, historical knowledge is inher-
ently subject to revision – to reinterpretation in the changed conditions
wrought by new developments in the present. No writing of history,
then, is final: ‘every new generation must rewrite history in its own way’
(Collingwood
1961: 248; see also Koselleck 2002: 65–71).
From this situation springs the creative tension of much historical re-
search (see also Dray 1964: 36–9).
It is ‘creative’
because there is always
something new to say about the past – a new interpretation to speak
to present concerns or new insights afforded by increased distance from
the events (see Phillips 2013: 1–4;
de Haan 2015: 792–3).Yet there is a
‘tension’ because the researcher is liable to slip into anachronism in in-
terpreting a time different from their own. Often narrowly construed as
applying contemporary terms to understanding the past (for example,
Garland 2014: 367), ‘anachronism’ is in essence a confusion of times, espe-
cially one involving failure to recognize the historical specificity (even the
historicity) of particular concepts or phenomena. It results from a failure
to appreciate change – to mistake the historically specific for the general
or the culturally alien for the familiar (Croce 1941: 268–9; Hobsbawm
1997: 29, 233; King 2000: 1–24; 10

Bourdieu and Chartier 2015: 62–3).
From recognition of this danger arises the historicist commitment to
study the past ‘on its own terms’, which posits a break dissociating past
from present, the historic from the contemporary (de Certeau 1988: 3–5;
Fritzsche 2004; Hindess 2007: 329–30). Ultimately, it is impossible fully
to describe the past ‘on its own terms’ – we necessarily describe the past
in our terms (including our redescriptions of their terms). Yet historical
thinking demands that we get out of our comfort zone and strive for a
sensitive understanding of other times. It promotes a double movement
from present to past and from past back to present in a bid to comprehend
the resonances between them. As with comparative research, the richest
insights spring from an intimate familiarity with both contexts of mean-
ing (Le
Goff 1992: 18–19;
Nelken 2010: 35–6;
cf. de Certeau 1988: 77–9).

Implications
This discussion of historical time has several major implications for his-
torical criminology. While some have surfaced already, others have been
addressed obliquely at best. First, historical thinking is concerned as
much with the diachronic as with the synchronic – that is, with movement
and change through time as much as with particular phenomena in their
specific times (see
also Aminzade 1992: 457; Abbott 2001b: 91–2; Law-
rence 2019; cf. Corfield 2007). Many fine works of history are, by design,
synchronic; many historians (and not just social scientists) are seemingly
‘more interested in situations than developments’ (Pachter 1974: 459).
Yet they must at least set situations within longer-term movements to
capture the sense of flow intrinsic to historical time. Second, historical
time takes as its basic unit durations of things rather than things in them-
selves (King 2000: 2); it works through meaningful extensions of time
in which things transform, develop or persist and to which they belong.
Third, any given present is a thick present: rather than a fleeting moment
or cohesive epoch, it is a nest of processes which reproduce various pasts
and project towards various futures. Fourth, historical thinking mediates
between the general and the particular. It works from individual happen-
ings, unique conditions and singular effects – yet it gestures beyond them
to synthetic wholes and to wider contexts. Historical enquiry is thus ill-
disposed towards general laws, abstract types or eternal essences; it always
returns such lofty notions to the ground of time and place. And fifth, like
all thinking, historical thinking is itself historically situated. An historical
criminology is a study for its time, not for all time. And as times change,
so old orthodoxies give way to new assessments.
Just as importantly, we wish to stress what the foregoing does not
imply for historical criminology. First, historical criminology does not
mean ‘doing history’. We need not become historians, for there are al-
ready plenty of them working on topics of interest to us (though we
might read them more than we do). Indeed, a more rounded historical
criminology calls for applications of historical thinking that push the
boundaries of conventional historical research – including,
for example,
processual approaches and futures research (cf. Knepper 2016: 233). Sec-
ond, historical criminology does not privilege the past. Making sense of
various pasts falls squarely within its remit, yet so too does understanding
the presence of crime and justice issues and thinking historically about
possible futures. Third, historical criminology presupposes no particular
method. Archival research methods present strong affinities with the te-
nets of historical thinking (see Knepper 2014; Guiney 2020), yet so too
do sequence analysis, ethnography, scenario methods and others (as we
discuss in Chapter 2). Moreover, many methods can be turned towards
historical thinking (just as they are often turned away from it). Fourth,
historical criminology presupposes no particular form of writing. Nar-
rative is the conventional form of historiography, yet other genres or
styles – including ‘lyrical
sociology’ (Abbott
2016: 77–121),
utopia and
biography – can vividly exhibit historical time too. And fifth, historical
criminology entails no specific theoretical commitment beyond fidelity
to historical time. Historical approaches are not allied to Marx against
Durkheim; they are not committed to agency over structure.11 One can
load additional theoretical engagements onto the framework outlined
above, and doing so might make for more interesting scholarship – yet it
does not, in itself, make for more historical scholarship.
Conclusion
This chapter has outlined a conception of the historical and historical
thinking for criminology. It has resisted identifying historical criminol-
ogy with archival research or with research on the past. It has argued
instead that to do historical criminology is, at bottom, to consider crime

and justice with respect to historical time. Furthermore, it has provided
an analysis of historical time in terms of change, eventfulness, flow, tense
and embodiment. This analysis offers not a roadmap for researchers but
a set of starting points; it indicates a range of possible approaches and
suggests sometimes competing priorities for historical research. The
remainder of the book explores how engagement with historical time
might contribute to various broad domains of criminological enquiry,
including the trade-offs and compromises that arise in the context of
practical research. Yet such a short book can develop only a few of the
pathways suggested by the analysis offered here. Therefore, we hope that
the foregoing will provide a stimulus to a wider range of investigations
than we are able to survey in the following chapters.
The analysis outlined above might aid the development of historical
criminology in two additional ways. First, we hope that it will offer a
framework for evaluating the contribution of historical research in crim-
inology specifically as historical research. Perhaps this will, in turn, promote
greater mutual understanding and cross-fertilization between the various
traditions of historical enquiry in criminology (outlined in the intro-
duction), by providing evaluative criteria that stand outside the confines
of any one tradition. Second, we hope that this chapter will provide a
platform for innovation in historical research in criminology, supporting
scholars who seek to chart new directions in the field. With luck, it will
encourage those who broadly subscribe to our characterization of his-
torical thinking to have the courage of their convictions and to pursue
‘the historical’ in ways that transcend established scholarly conventions
and disciplinary orthodoxies.
Notes
1 Hence, we do not think that historical criminology is most fruitfully con-
ceived as an interdisciplinary meeting point between crime historians and
sociologists of crime (cf . Knepper 2014; Bleakley and Kehoe 2021). Such a
view seems to us to construe history as a master discipline to which crimi-
nologists ought to defer concerning the bounds of historical enquiry.
2 These projects (and their objects) are deliberate fabrications; to paraphrase
the standard Hollywood disclaimer, no identification of actual studies, cur-
rent or completed, is intended or should be inferred.
3 For more provisional assessments of the place of time in historical criminol-

ogy, see Knepper (2014) and Churchill (2017).
4 This reflects the tendency to devalue events in social science specifically (see
Abbott 2001a: 175–6) and in the tradition of Western thought at large (see
Quinton 1979; Rescher 2000: 33–47).
5 This holds true even if some foresaw the possibility, upon conviction, that
Douglas might ‘go on to lead a life of crime’.
6 This parallels the divide in natural science between the ‘machine reality’ of
Newtonian physics (serene, ordered, linear, reversible) and the ‘world of bro-
ken symmetry’ evoked by thermodynamics (thundering, chaotic, non-linear,
irreversible – Adam 2004: 33).
7 Temporal ‘embodiment’ differs subtly from the metaphor of historical and
cultural ‘embeddedness’ found in comparative criminology (Melossi 2001).
We feel that ‘embodiment’ better accommodates the plurality of historical
times and the internal dynamics and dissonances of cultures (see also Nelken
2011: 77–82).
8 This parallels the social relations of centre/per iphery highlighted in work
across geographical and geopolitical bounds (see Aas 2012).
9 We say ‘exchange’ rather than ‘dialogue’ because, for historic times at least,
the researched cannot speak back (see Rock 1976: 354).
10 This parallels the danger of ‘ethnocentr ism’ in comparative research (see
Nelken 2009).
11 Some see the structure-agency problem as the basic, essential dilemma of
historical enquiry (Abrams 1982: vii; Guiney 2020: 80).
2
TIME AND METHOD
The previous chapter proposed that a developed understanding of his-

torical time is central to historical thinking.This chapter will explore the
significance of historical thinking with regards to the practice of empiri-
cal criminological research. How, if at all, does criminological research as
it stands exhibit an interest in historical time? To what extent and in what
ways does this interest correspond to the mode of historical thinking that
we have outlined? And how might historical thinking be operationalized
to most fruitfully enhance substantive pieces of research on crime or
social responses to crime? These questions of practice and method lie at
the heart of the discussion that follows.
While it is founded upon a consideration of all five aspects of histor-
ical time we have identified, this chapter coheres around a consideration
of the methodological implications of change, eventfulness and flow.
These pose acute challenges for social science researchers. It is common
for these challenges to be elucidated with reference to the famous para-
dox of the arrow in flight (Abbott 2001a; Clemens 2007; Corfield 2007),
usually attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea. Zeno
saw motion as a problematic concept and used this paradox to tease out
why. At any one instant of time, an arrow in flight is motionless; it can
DOI: 10.4324/9780429196911-3
Time and method 53
only occupy one point in space at one point in time. But, over time, the
arrow moves from one point in space to another (from the archer’s bow
to the target). As the sociologist Andrew Abbott explains, ‘motion cannot
lie in the motionless instants, and yet the arrow moves’ (Abbott 2001a:
213). For our purposes, the pertinent question raised by this paradox is
how to capture motion through social science methods. Or, more exactly,
how can we take subjects or objects of criminological study that exist
in time, that are animated by change and are flowing from one form to
another within the shifting contours of historical context, and analyse
them in a manner sensitive to these temporal dimensions?
Hence, this chapter reviews how empirical research in criminology
currently engages with time and outlines some general methodological
directions for enhancing the purchase of historical thinking. First, it crit-
ically discusses the priority of synchronic over diachronic perspectives in
criminological research – a tendency to focus on things in time (almost
always the present time) rather than charting the movement of things
through time. Second, the chapter explores a series of prominent tem-
poral units of analysis in our field that open up longer-term, diachronic
perspectives. As these temporal units encapsulate the common ways in
which criminologists engage with historical time, it is important to assess
the manner and extent to which each operationalizes historical think-
ing. While some are closely associated with certain methodologies, we
neither prescribe any single method nor advocate for qualitative or for
quantitative research strategies. Rather, we seek to show how different
temporal units are inflected with certain forms and degrees of historical
thinking. Third, the chapter uses these temporal units as a criminological
toolbox that enables the construction of methodological strategies, de-
signs and techniques that are supportive of diachronic perspectives and
generative of historical insights. In this way, it aims to prepare the way
for a more fully historical programme of empirical research in our field.
The synchronic and the diachronic

The historian Penelope Corfield helpfully identifies two ways of look-
ing at historical time: the synchronic and the diachronic. A synchronic per-
spective focuses on things that occur ‘more or less simultaneously at a
54 Time and method
synchronized moment in time’ (Corfield 2007: xv). Studying moments or

situations in time is central to a synchronic approach. A diachronic per-
spective, by contrast, examines things through time. It brings longer-term
developments, including occurrences that precede or exceed the life span
of any individual, into sharper focus. Corfield’s point is that adopting both
synchronic and diachronic perspectives enables us to connect particular
historical moments to long-term developments and to show how long-
term developments are constituted by a plurality of fleeting but formative
moments. The synchronic and diachronic are thus meshed together, or,
to put it another way, Zeno’s arrow is still at any given instant and per-
petually in motion. Resolving the paradox of the arrow thus requires an
appreciation of both synchronic and diachronic views of historical time.
However, social science has a chequered track record of attending to
diachronic perspectives. The historian E.P. Thompson famously attacked
sociologists of social class who try to stop the ‘time machine’ at a particular
moment so that they can locate a static thing called ‘class’. These sociolo-
gists,Thompson asserts, ‘can only find a multitude of people with different
occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies,
and the rest’ because ‘class
is not
this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it
is set in motion – not this interest and that interest, but the friction of
interests – the
movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise’ (Thompson
1965: 357). More recently, the political scientist Paul Pierson (2004) has iden-
tified a continuing inattention to diachrony. Social scientists, he argues, might
sometimes valorize the particularities of the past (as historians often do) or
use it as a static resource that can help test theories by providing additional
cases, particularly of rare occurrences. But, he argues, they rarely turn to the
past for the most important reason. Put simply, ‘social life unfolds over time’
(Pierson 2004: 5): the things they study are not newly and instantaneously
made in each passing moment; rather, they have a certain duration.They are
fluent, dynamic entities with indisputable temporal dimensions, and so they
must be studied on these terms (see also Abrams 1982; Sewell 2005).
Criminology’s unease with the historical, as described in the introduc-
tion, suggests that it shares the deficiencies of wider social science in this
regard. Theoretically, the rational choice approaches that Pierson exten-
sively critiques within political science have also been influential within
our field (from classical criminology to crime science), irrespective of
their tendency (discussed later in this chapter) to bracket off diachrony
Time and method 55
and concentrate on decision-making in isolated instants of time. On a

methodological level, Robert Agnew (2011) argues that most research
on crime causation assumes that independent variables are fixed and does
not allow, for example, for the fact that a person’s relationship with their
parents or level of self-control will change through time. More widely, a
synchronic skew is visible in the dominance of cross-sectional research
designs in criminology. We use questionnaires, interviews and observa-
tions to collect data on a particular phenomenon only at single points
in time. We use techniques of data analysis, such as (qualitative) thematic
analysis or (quantitative) regression models, that examine the relation-
ships between sets of variables at points of time, typically without con-
sidering how these variables and their relationships to each other have
altered over the years or indeed during the term of our studies (King
2009; Agnew 2011). As the ‘time machine’ is stopped, the flow of time
from one moment to the next is obscured and the importance of change
and continuity is overlooked.
Synchronic perspectives thus produce cross-sectional
methods. Blin-
kered by this temporally ‘short view’, the findings of such studies are very
likely to reproduce presentist wisdoms about the novelty and peculiarity
of the current situation and the associated necessity of separating it from
prior happenings. In Jeff Ferrell’s (2018)
terms, these cross-sectional
ap-
proaches equate to ‘slab methods’; they are characterized by a fixity and
boundedness that imposes a faux stasis upon a social world which, in
reality, is temporally dynamic. The result of their employment is that
criminology often struggles fully to capture the temporal nature of our
current historical moment, seeing a contemporary situation while no-
ticing little about how it has come to be. This leads to a host of familiar
laments about the historical deficiencies of criminology: a widespread
‘presentism’ overwhelmingly privileges focus on current or recent hap-
penings (see Far rall et al. 2009; Yeomans 2019a); an ‘historical amne-
sia’ sees origins and antecedents of contemporary problems forgotten
(Pearson 2002: 48); a neglect of past data constrains our understandings
of the present (Lawrence 2019); and a general reluctance seriously to
examine the past means that important ‘lessons’ tend to go unlearnt (see,
for example, Cox 2012; Wilson 2014; Knepper 2015).
Perhaps the most common way in which we criminologists move
beyond a purely synchronic perspective is to locate the present in its
56 Time and method

While these ‘epochalist’ or ‘stadial’ narratives set the present in

long-term perspective, they also clash with certain aspects of historical
thinking laid out in Chapter 1. The plurality of historical time means
that multiple temporalities animate any historical moment; moments of
radical discontinuity are likely to result from the confluence of a mul-
tiplicity of unfolding processes rather than the beginning of one stadial
unit of time and the end of another. As such, welfarist ideas were present
in youth justice in varying forms and degrees across the whole twenti-
eth century, as, indeed, were more retributive concerns for justice and
managerial interests in efficiency (Gelsthor pe and Worrall 2009; Shore
2011). Their relative importance undoubtedly waxed and waned, but the
different ‘models’
also overlapped and co-existed
across large spans of
time, just as they frequently intermingled with the logics and techniques
of youth justice evoked and enacted by generations of practitioners and
Time and method 57
1
policy-makers.
More generally, epochalist and stadial narratives fail really
to exercise the core muscles of historical thinking. There is little concer n
for motion or any form of change other than the revolutionary. Incre-
mental change, long-term
trajectories, deep continuities and cyclical
pat-
terns are all downplayed. In sum, framing the present as new/emergent
reduces the past to a simple prop that supports a construction of the
contemporary as unique and indicative of an emerging social order.
While offering some stuttering diachronic insight, the new/emergent
as a conceptual vehicle ultimately reinforces the wisdom of a synchronic
approach to this purportedly novel present.
To overcome the shortcomings of both cross-sectional
methodologies
and epochalist historical framing, it is necessary to foster new diachronic
perspectives on crime and social responses to crime. The methodologi-
cal route to arriving at this point is to develop techniques that provide
not snapshots of given historical moments but ‘moving pictures’ (Pierson
2004: 1–2) of crime and social responses to crime. A sharper diachronic
focus promises richer understandings of the agents, institutions, struc-
tures and relations that constitute contemporary crime and control. Of
course, redirecting the dominant methodological currents of criminology
to produce enhanced diachronic perspectives is an ambitious objective.
There are, however, at least two reasons to be optimistic about its real-
ization. First, archival historical research now has something of a foot-
hold within criminology. It is cited fairly frequently by us criminologists
(Yeomans et al. 2020) and we increasingly undertake such work ourselves.
As Chapter 1 argued, reading or doing archival research does not neces-
sarily entail practising each element of historical thinking; but it is likely
to sensitize criminologists to the broad sweep of history and to challenge
any perception that the passage of historical time is of limited relevance.
Second, despite the orthodoxy of synchronic approaches, criminologists
do not fixate uniformly and unswervingly upon a single historical mo-
ment. Many criminologists regularly deviate from a preoccupation with
the here-and-now by employing certain ‘temporal units’ (Mannheim
2011: 356) to cast an analytical net over a different span of time.The trend,
the life course and the recurrence, for example, are units of time that have
a common currency within criminology. Each has a given duration that
is determined not by the passage of months, years or some other measure
of clock time, but by factors such as a human life span or the demands of
58 Time and method
narrative understanding.Temporal units are conceptual vehicles that bring

the past into the present and allow us to grasp the objects of criminolog-
ical enquiry in motion.
Temporal units of criminological analysis

This section examines five temporal units – the trend, the life course, the
event, the recurrence and the inheritance – that occupy a notable place
in criminological research. In each case, we assess not simply the logic
of that unit and how it channels aspects of historical time but also char-
acteristic trade-offs
and tensions which research within these temporal
parameters presents for historical thinking.
The trend
Perhaps the principal way through which criminologists express some
connection between present and past is through the notion of the trend.
The trend is a temporal unit which links the current level of some-
thing to the level of the same thing at earlier points in time. Trends
in crime rates, victimization rates, police officer numbers and sentenc-
ing outcomes are but a few examples of trends that regularly feature in
criminological research. Such trends tell us something about the flow
of happenings – their
direction, their speed, their trajectory –
and
they
allow researchers to gauge the extent of change and continuity through
time. By looking at the trend in the prison population in a given coun-
try, for example, we can ascertain whether it is rising or falling, identify
factors which may have instigated or supported this rise or fall, and po-
tentially make some contingent estimate of what the prison population
might be a year or a decade from now. For these reasons, while they
are principally evidenced with quantitative data, trends are commonly
used to contextualize quantitative and qualitative studies of the present.
Discussions of ‘penal populism’, for instance, rest heavily on the use of
survey findings, electoral results and other data that show the existence
of certain trends in public opinion (see, for example, Pratt 2007). Such
uses of trends, however, involve only degrees of historical thinking. They
may usefully help contextualize a study that otherwise provides a cross-
sectional snapshot of a certain point in time, but they may also help
Time and method 59
construct epochalist arguments that reinforce a synchronic focus on the

present. Besides the general limitations of epochalism already discussed,
epochalist uses of trends can leave analysis with only a short shelf-life.
Susanne Karstedt and others (2019), for example, argue that many crim-
inologists have struggled to make sense of recent declines in US prison
populations as they remain wedded to unwieldy meta-narratives
about
how neo-liberalism and penal populism created an era of mass incarcer-
ations between the 1980s and the 2000s. A more diachronic approach,
then, is to focus on the trend itself, connecting the contemporary with
the historic, revealing the flows of historical time and thus helping to
animate an essentially dynamic present.
Literature on the ‘international crime drop’ is an interesting example
of attending to the trend itself. In this literature, the temporal unit of the
trend takes centre stage; not just a prop for context or argument, it is an
object of study in its own right. In fact, trends are doubly important in
many crime drop studies as they express both the thing to be explained
(the dependent variable) as well as the locus of causal explanation (the
independent variable). Most purported explanations of the international
crime drop rest on its coincidence with various other trends, such as de-
creasing exposure of the population to lead, changes in police numbers,
decline in hard drugs markets or the growth in sales of certain security
devices (see Blumstein and Wallman 2006; Farrell et al. 2014). Interest-
ingly, both these explanations and refutations of them typically employ
some of the key tools of temporal analysis. For example, John Donohue
and Steven Levitt’s (2001) proposition that crime rates are linked to lev-
els of abortion rests on a sequence in which the legalization of abor-
tion precedes the crime drop in a particular jurisdiction by 15–20 years
(sufficient
time for the first post-legalization
birth cohort to reach peak
offending age). Critics of this theory have also mobilized a loosely event-
ful conception of time in which timing is key to explanation by arguing
that, in some jurisdictions, the time lag between legalization of abortion
and the decline in crime was longer or shorter than 15–20 years. Some
have even identified jurisdictions in which a crime drop began prior
to the legalization of abortion, violating the sequential order required
for the relationship to be causal (see Far rell et al. 2014). So deployment
of the trend as a temporal unit can do more than just cast an analytical
net back in time; it can also foreground things like timing and sequence
60 Time and method
that are crucial to making sense of how and why change and continuity
occur through time.
However, in other respects, concentrating on trends can constrain un-
derstandings of historical time. Notably, researchers looking at trends of-
ten group data together into large, mostly inert temporal blocks. Much
of Donohue and Levitt’s (2001) analysis, for example, uses US crime data
1985–97 without differentiating it.This 12-year period is largely treated
as a static block; changes to arrest rates are examined across this 12-year
period, but not within it. This research design is similar to the use of
pooled time-series
data. Some researchers –
including
some crime drop
researchers – pool together data from a span of consecutive years in an at-
tempt to move beyond an orthodox cross-sectional approach (see
Stowell
et al. 2009). But, as Pierson (2004: 167–71)
explains, such studies collapse
discrete annual data points together into pools of data that encompass
several years, producing conclusions that pertain to a static, aggregated
set of relationships between dependent and independent variables across
the span of years. As with many regression analyses, this diminishes
the capacity to look at how the relationship between variables may be
multifaceted – or ‘multivocal’ –
and
subject to change within even fairly
short periods of time (Roth 1992; Abbott 2001a).This inattention to both
how variables may change during the period in question and the possi-
bility that how variables relate to each other may change demonstrates
that pooling data largely serves to rearrange the chronological bookends
of an essentially synchronic perspective. Furthermore, the studies cited in
this paragraph, as well as most studies of crime levels, are reliant on annual
crime data. Each single data point encompasses offences recorded over a
spell of 12 months. These yearly aggregations do not omit data, but they
give no indication of any sub-annual fluctuations in crime levels between
data points, and so gloss over weekly, monthly or seasonal variations in
levels of offending. This is akin to a sort of mini-pooling, and it glosses
over some of the granularity of crime. Hence, while studies of trends
can take a viewpoint that is more longitudinal than cross-sectional, their
aggregations of relationships and ‘gappy’ data points mean that they may
still struggle to capture the full range of temporal dynamics at work here.
The problem of linearity further constrains trend studies. While they
may include data on specific variables over long periods of time, studies
of trends almost inevitably privilege the importance of the recent past in
Time and method 61
contextualization or causal explanation. It is the data points immediately

prior to the present which will give a sense of the shape of the trend into
which the contemporary situation is being fitted.This search for explana-
tion in the recent past can be effective; for example, Graham Farrell and
others have convincingly argued that the spread of security devices since
the 1980s has been a decisive factor in causing the crime drop (Far rell et al.
2011). However, studies of the history of violence have found that societal
transformations in the late medieval period, such as the demise of warrior
knights and progress towards the state’s monopolization of violence, have
decisively shaped the level of violent offences that many Western societies
experience today (see, for example, Eisner 2001). It is therefore important
that studies on trends recognize the potential salience of more distant
periods of time (Abbott
2001a: 161–82). As Chapter 1 argued, historical
time should be understood as plural and layered rather than singular. In
this analysis, social conditions at any one instant of time have been shaped
by a multiplicity of social processes, originating at different points in time
and unfolding at different speeds.The crime drop of recent times may thus
result from the rapid impact of short-term changes (include
the proliferation
of security devices) as well as the slow-maturing, long-term
influence of
other processes of change (the decline of feudal societies, the formation of
modern states and so on). Such complex, multi-layered and non-linear
social
processes are difficult – perhaps impossible – to capture within a temporal
unit constituted by lineal changes within particular variables.
So the temporal unit of the trend entails some concern for change
and continuity through historical time. But adopting it involves certain
trade-offs
too. Specifically, the ‘gappyness’
of data and its lineal orienta-
tion mean that the flow of historical time is only partially revealed by the
trend as a temporal unit of analysis.
The life course

The life course –
our
next temporal unit –
offers
a holistic conception
of an individual’s life, comprising a sequence of events, actions and ex-
periences enacted by the individual through time (see Giele and Elder
1998). Life course research is often conducted through longitudinal
panel studies consisting of multiple sweeps of data collection separated
by certain intervals of time. Data is commonly quantitative but many
62 Time and method
criminological panel studies also rely partly (for example, Aldridge et al.
2011) or primarily on qualitative data (for example, Farrall et al. 2014).
Prominent longitudinal panel studies, such as the Cambridge Study of
Delinquent Development and the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and
Crime, have provided significant insights into, amongst other things, the
distinctive life trajectories of different groups of offenders (Nagin et al.
1995) and the most effective means for organizing youth justice (McAra
and McVie 2010). Life course research can also be largely or wholly
retrospective. A growing number of scholars have used archival data to
reconstruct the lives of offenders who lived in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (for example, Farrall et al. 2009; Godfrey et al. 2017;
Watkins 2018). Others have revisited earlier studies, re-examining exist-
ing longitudinal data or adding further data. In all instances, life course
studies explore the connections between individual lives and the chang-
ing social contexts which situate and shape them.
Famously, Robert Sampson and John Laub’s retrospective life course
research was based on a panel study created by Eleanor and Sheldon
Glueck in the 1940s. Sampson and Laub refuted the idea that an individ-
ual’s propensity to commit crime is solely determined during childhood
and, using data collected at different points in around 1,000 individu-
als’ lives, argued instead for a ‘developmental, sequential model of crime
across the life course’ (Laub and Sampson 1993: 302). While acknowl-
edging continuity within different stages of life, they emphasized the
salience of change and specifically the importance of ‘tur ning points’,
defined as ‘abrupt
– radical
– “turnarounds”
or changes in life history
that separate the past from the future’ (Laub and Sampson 1993: 304),
which can lead recidivists to desist from offending. A life course approach
requires researchers to look beyond the current situation and consider,
as the sociologist Melinda Mills explains, ‘the occurrence, timing in life
stage or age, sequencing, duration, or interaction among life events and
domains’ (Mills 2000: 92). A concern for time is thus embedded within
life course studies and the emphasis on potential change within the life
course chimes with our conception of historical thinking.
Furthermore, turning points have an essentially eventful basis (Abbott
2001a: 240–60). Any sense that a person’s life trajectory might be fixed
in childhood or pre-determined
by certain risk factors
– proceeding

thereafter in a linear, predictable fashion to preordained outcome – is
Time and method 63
disrupted by the consequences arising from abrupt, radical turning

points (Sampson and Laub 2005). Seen in this way, individuals’ lives thus
take on an eventful shape, appearing less as smooth curves or straight
trajectories and more as the historian William Sewell described event-
ful temporalities – as
‘lumpy,
uneven, unpredictable and discontinuous’
(Sewell 2005: 9). Building on this eventful vision of the life course, some
recent research has injected an even stronger concern for change. Rather
than the outcome of a one-off tur ning point, desistance is increasingly
seen as an evolving process or sequence of events across the life course,
connected, for example, not just to whether former offenders find
employment, but to whether they work to keep that employment by
maintaining good performance or taking other reflexive steps (Sampson
and Laub 2005; see also Weaver 2019). Thomas LeBel and others (2008)
highlight the importance of fluctuations in subjective endogenous fac-
tors in understanding desistance from offending. Hope, remorse, stigma
and the ability to form an alternative identity are ‘dynamic change fac-
tors’ (LeBel et al. 2008: 133), which ebb and flow through time in a
manner that impacts on the viability and desirability of desistance to in-
dividuals. Additionally, Beth Weaver’s (2016) qualitative life course study
of six members of a co-offending peer g roup stresses the importance of
relational factors – friendship,
romantic relationships, religious ties – in

interacting with subjective and structural factors in the construction of
desistance through time. At their best, life course studies thus exhibit a
dynamic and eventful concern for the interconnections between social
and individual change and continuity through time, harnessing a con-
cern for the interaction of agency, relations and structure in order to offer
valuable insights into why some people offend, and why some people
continue offending while others desist (see Alker and Watkins 2019).
In many respects, then, life course studies are sensitively attuned to the
sort of historical thinking promoted in this book. There are, however,
some potential pitfalls which, if unchecked, can undermine the capacity
of this temporal unit to capture the motion of historical time. First, there
is again the risk of gappyness. This can occur if sweeps of data collection
within longitudinal panel studies – or entries in the records for archival
studies – are separated by long spells of time. Researchers can try to plug
these gaps by, for example, using retrospective and prospective questions
on a panel or seeking new sources to flesh out the biographies of historical
64 Time and method
subjects. Without such efforts, a longitudinal perspective can degenerate

into a set of repeated cross-sectional snapshots. Second, although many
studies illuminate motion in individuals’ subjective sense of self and per-
sonal relationships, less work acknowledges the extent to which such
phenomena are shaped by macro-social
changes through time. Stephen
Farrall and others’ (2009) study of offenders convicted between 1880
and 1940 convincingly demonstrated the historical specificity of generic
turning points. Marriage, for example, did not produce the sort of desis-
tance effect on offenders in 1880–1940 that has been detected in studies
from the mid-twentieth century onwards. The status of marriage as a
turning point thus appears tied to recent historical contexts – perhaps,
the authors hypothesize, because the relative improvement of women’s
social and political status allows them now to exercise a greater ‘civilizing’
influence over male behaviour than at earlier points in time.2 In short,
the micro (personal, subjective, agentic), meso (family, work and the like)
and macro (economy, culture, politics and so on) mechanisms that help
to produce both offending and desistance are all formed of temporally
moving parts; their evolving and dynamic interplays sometimes have
transformative impacts on individual life courses while, at other times,
they produce little or no effect.
Finally, the models used in life course studies sometimes involve a
degree of simplification that could be problematic.The sociologists Mike
Savage and Magne Flemmen (2019) found that depictions of the life
course as a straight or curved line on a graph sloping upwards or down-
wards between point A and point B are out of kilter with people’s lived
experiences of social mobility. Their study participants preferred visual-
izations of their personal social mobility as jagged lines, involving several
changes in direction separated by multiple turning points. However, even
the diagrams preferred by Savage and Flemmen’s participants are linear in
the sense that, as single lines on a graph, they permit movement in only
one direction at any one instant of time. Savage and Flemmen argue for
a more ‘complex and affective’ (2019: 14) approach that recognizes how
parenthood, housing and a host of other factors may impact upon per-
sonal social mobility at certain points in the life course, forcing repeated
changes in trajectory. We would add that full appreciation of this onto-
logical complexity depends upon a recognition of temporal complexity.
At any one instant of time, an individual’s biography is simultaneously
Time and method 65
c o-authored
by various eventful happenings and longer-term processes
of varying durations that unfold at different speeds. A long-simmering

marital row may result in your partner filing for divorce on the same
day that a chance encounter with an old colleague leads to a new job
offer; a long-planned house purchase may coincide with an unexpected
demotion. Thus, individuals’ life courses are shaped by plural temporali-
ties (Mills 2000) and their trajectories, if that term is still appropriate, can
move simultaneously in multiple, potentially conflicting directions. Sav-
age and Flemmen address social mobility, but it is not difficult to see the
relevance of this point to criminal lives. Family background, educational
history, personal friendships, drug habits, current employment status and
levels of impulsivity are among the multitude of factors, with varying
temporalities, that can simultaneously construct an individual’s propensity
to offend.
So, the life course goes some way to capturing the flight of Zeno’s ar-
row.The duration of time studied, the concern for change and continuity
as well as the eventfulness of the turning point all indicate a regard for his-
torical time within life course studies. However, the frequent ‘gappyness’
of data, the need to recognize more fully the temporal motion and histor-
ical contingency of all factors affecting the criminal life course (i.e. micro,
meso and macro), and the tendency to use visual metaphors that down-
play the simultaneity of happenings are somewhat limiting. Of course, all
diagrams are reductionist, and so it is perhaps a little unfair to critique life
course studies’ recourse to the line graph. But the risk is that it reproduces
a narrow, largely linear view of time that detracts from our capacity to
appreciate how individuals’ lives are not the simple movement of a person
along a single trajectory, but shifting, varied and poly-dimensional expe-
riences played out within the multi-layered
unfolding of time.
The event
The eventfulness of historical time is, of course, manifested in specific
events. Events are, to put it rather glibly, things that happen.They are hap-
penings of infinitely varying form and magnitude. They are sometimes
defined by their transformative societal effect although, as Chapter 1 ar-
gued, they can equally reproduce existing social arrangements. In either
case, the event is a temporal unit delimited by a certain narrative arc, in
66 Time and method
the sense that it has a beginning, a middle and an end.The event provides
a – perhaps the – crucial temporal unit in the discipline of history. The
historical study of an event typically involves identifying the sequential
order of its constituent parts, locating this sequence within a wider his-
torical context, and using this to build a narrative explanation. Unlike life
course studies, historians’ examinations of events tend to concentrate on
the simultaneous unfolding of occurrences containing multiple tempo-
ralities, such as long-term
causes, short-term
catalysts, immediate effects
and lasting impacts (Sewell 2005). Sequence, consequence, contingency
and complexity thus feature strongly in how historians formulate nar-
rative explanations of events. As discussed in Chapter 1, there are dis-
agreements concerning the nature and scope of the event as a temporal
category. Our focus here is on conventional studies of events as singular
historical occurrences bounded by the duration of a narrative arc.
Changes in government, economic crises, police shootings and other
events feature prominently in criminology as parts of the background to
many research studies. But, despite its prevalence in history, the temporal
unit of the event is rarely analysed directly in criminology. The study of
riots is an exception to this rule; indeed, the criminological literature
on riots is consistently event-centred.
It typically reconstructs certain
occurrences retrospectively through interviews with key stakeholders,
analysis of criminal justice data or examination of video footage, social
media posts or other media content produced while the riot was unfold-
ing. Occasionally, criminological research provides a more direct window
onto a riot through the use of observational or ethnographic methods.
For example, James Treadwell and his colleagues explain the genesis of
their research on the 2011 English riots in this way:
We headed out onto the streets to see what we could find as soon
as we heard the initial news broadcasts about the riots. We spent a
great deal of time over the four-day duration of the riots observing
stores being looted and, when practicable, we spoke at length to
those involved.
(Treadwell et al. 2013: 3)
Whether a riot is captured by acting out of this sort of documentary

impulse, or more conventionally reconstructed through other empirical
Time and method 67
means, criminological studies of riots frequently produce ‘thick’ descrip-

tions of specific happenings. These seek to establish what happened,
the order in which things occurred, how the actions of specific actors
impacted upon others, as well as the meaning of occurrences for those
involved and how these meanings structured their situated actions. Tim
Newburn (2016: 552–3)
promotes a holistic,‘life cycle’ approach to riots
that requires consideration not just of the triggers, spread and diffusion of
the riot itself but also its historical context and longer-ter m causes. Equally,
Sophie Body-Gendrot locates the explanation of riots in the occasional
confluence of dynamic long- and short-term
factors, asserting that collec-
tive violence ‘is catalysed through a labyrinth of relatively discreet, highly
dispositional events which, at a defining moment, fold into one another’
(Body-Gendrot
2013: 22). So, the concern for sequence, confluence, con-
tingency and consequence indicates that we typically conceive of riots
as events unfolding in historical time and seek to explain them as whole
narrative arcs stretching from beginning through middle to end.
The use of the temporal unit of the event also involves characteristic
trade-offs.
Most obviously, concentrating upon the narrative arc creates
the challenge of fixing the start and end points of that arc (Abbott 2001a:
161–82). Some studies provide detailed, dynamic accounts of events un-
folding over just hours or days, as in Roger Ball and others’ (2019) study
of the 2011 London riots (which is presented as a ‘micro-history’).
Other
scholars insist on a longer view. While it might be tempting to begin
an examination of the 2019 Hong Kong protests with the introduc-
tion of the controversial Extradition Law Amendment Bill at the start of
that year, Newburn (2020) sees them unfolding over a longer duration
of time and suggests that explanation might profitably begin with pro-
tests against British colonial rule in the 1960s. Newburn also argues that
studies of riots should not end when the disorder subsides but should
extend to the ‘afterlife’ of how the response to riots unfolds in courts,
newspapers and subsequent government policies (Newburn 2015; New-
burn 2016).The political sociologist Robin Wagner-Pacifici (2010)
goes
much further, arguing that events have a certain ‘restlessness’, whereby
the continuing (scholarly) process of interpreting and representing events
means that they continue to unfold, without reaching a clear end. The
challenge of delineating beginnings and ends does not preclude success-
ful event-focused studies of cr ime. It is simply another aspect of temporal
68 Time and method
complexity, another means through which the simultaneous unfolding of

multiple temporalities requires researchers’ attention.
A further issue arising from criminological studies of events is the
extent to which their conclusions can be generalized or extrapolated to
other events. It is often said that historians emphasize the particularity of
past events, while social scientists seek generality (see, for example, Burke
2005). While providing thick descriptions of riots to advance narrative
explanations, it is not unusual for criminological studies to compare sep-
arate incidents of rioting (for
example, Body-Gendrot
2013; Newburn
2015; Newburn 2016). Such comparisons deviate from the stereotypical
historian’s valuation of particularity. But comparison is not used here in
a nomothetic sense to extract a set of causal laws that determine social
action and the course of events; rather, it is used to infer general patterns
within occurrences of similar events. Such patterns point towards the
similarities and differences between events of the same type; in this sense,
comparison works to thicken descriptions of specific events. An eventful
criminology, then, need not be restricted to the study of singular events;
rather, as Chapter 1 suggested, it mediates between particular events and
more general event types. It is also important to stress that there is no
intrinsic reason why event-based analysis could not be applied to more
frequent happenings. The relative rarity of riots makes such work espe-
cially appealing (and perhaps necessary), but specific instances of more
common offences or mundane criminal justice operations might simi-
larly be analysed in temporal detail as events. The micro-scale, phenom-
enological study of criminal or deviant actions, as famously explored
in Jack Katz’s Seductions of Crime (1988), was discussed in Chapter 1. Its
concern for the sensuous, aesthetic and emotional foreground of crimi-
nal acts injects some of the narrative aspects of an event into research on
common criminal offences.
The temporal unit of the event thus adds value to historical analysis in
criminology. It promotes a concern for historical time by foregrounding
issues of sequence, contingency and consequence, which, in turn, inten-
sify concentration upon the flow of occurrences as well as the extent
of change produced by the event. It incorporates a span of time that is
variable and determined subjectively by the researcher’s identification of
an end point. Plus the frequent attention paid to temporal complexity
means that the problem of linearity that undermines the trend and the
Time and method 69
life course is largely overcome. However, the difficulties inherent in de-

termining the narrative parameters of an event as well as the tension be-
tween the particular and the general still pose methodological challenges
for criminologists using this temporal unit.
The recurrence
Using the event as a temporal unit moves criminology away from a linear
view of historical time in which the complexities of social change are
reduced to single, unidirectional trajectories. The temporal unit of the
recurrence similarly deviates from a linear view of social change and
historical time and instead implies a circular temporality defined by the
re-occurrence
of certain happenings.This temporal unit is found across
a number of criminological literatures. It can overlap with the temporal
unit of the life course, as in studies examining cycles of crime, abuse or
substance misuse within the biographies of offenders and victims (for
example, Singh et al. 2019). It also features within studies of reform or
policy change, sometimes as an intended feature of certain policies, as in
Letizia Paoli’s (2014) study of the EU policy cycle on serious organized
crime, but more commonly as an unintended pattern within criminal
justice policy or practice, as in Thomas Bernard and Megan Kurlychek’s
(2010) model of the cycle of juvenile justice. Finally, the recurrence is
sometimes found within studies of persistent social anxieties concern-
ing crime or deviance. Geoffrey Pearson’s Hooligan (1983), for instance,
looked at how social anxieties about youth crime in Britain in the 1980s
were not indicative of some recent decay in the moral fabric of society,
as was often presumed at the time, but were actually the latest example of
repetitious moral concerns about the effects of social change upon young
people which have been evident for centuries. Recurrences can there-
fore be intended or unintended, and the intervals between them vary
in duration (see Aminzade 1992). And exposing an apparently singular
event in the present as a recurrent development invites us to re-evaluate
it, as Pearson’s Hooligan suggests.
It is important to emphasize that recurrence is not used here to de-
note the repeated occurrence of exactly the same thing. The term ‘cycle’
unhelpfully implies precisely this sort of historical repetition. This risks
obscuring change by diverting attention from the differences between
70 Time and method
similar historical occurrences and it may increase the chance of anach-

ronism by encouraging scholars to lump together past and present oc-
currences that may be better analysed separately. As noted in Chapter 1,
the notion of events repeating themselves is at odds with a regard for
historical specificity and contingency. Pearson thus distances himself
from a ‘pr imitive theory of the “histor ical wheel” which rolls on through
the ages, as if events move in cycles and periodically repeat themselves’
(Pearson 1983: 208). Hence, we the prefer the term ‘recurrence’ to ‘cycle’
because it more clearly denotes the return of something similar or famil-
iar rather than a repetition of the exact same occurrence. Recurrences
are thus characterized not by the repetitive, mechanistic turning of the
historical wheel but by the sequential utterance of words that rhyme.
Simon Holdaway (2017) deploys this conception of historical recur-
rence in his argument that ‘police claims to professional status are re-
curring, not new’ (2017: 601). He asserts that contemporary attempts
to professionalize the police in England and Wales should be seen as
the latest of a succession of reform initiatives that stretch back at least
to the 1960s. Each of these initiatives is distinct and, in teasing out their
distinctions, Holdaway highlights the existence of change and extent of
continuity within these historical recurrences.The balance of change and
continuity through time further allows the identification of a general
trajectory leading away from regulation of the police profession through
a ‘close coupling’ of police and Home Office and towards regulation
through a ‘loose coupling’ of police, Home Office and other regulatory
agencies. Holdaway thus uses this recurrent sequence to assert that a
profession is not a static object but a ‘dynamic process, with claims made
to sustain its security as it vies with and yields to the regulatory claims of
other actors’ (Holdaway 2017: 598). Focusing on recurrences can, there-
fore, encourage sensitivity to both change and continuity, a recognition
that certain reforms or policy changes embody their historical times,
and a desire to position contemporary criminal justice reforms within a
longer-term
‘flow’
of happenings within which certain trajectories may
be visible.
Of course, utilizing recurrence as a temporal unit also presents certain
challenges for historical research. For example, it is important to attend
to the temporal spaces between recurrences as well as the recurrences
themselves. Providing some coverage of the troughs of the relevant social
Time and method 71
action as well as its peaks provides a fuller presentation of crime and

criminal justice within the motion of historical time. Graham Smith’s
(2005) study of recurrent initiatives to reform the police complaints
system in England and Wales, for instance, pays some attention to such
‘troughs’ by looking at how the impetus for reform dissipates after initial
scandals pass and only builds once more as various smaller pressures to
reform gradually coalesce together over a sometimes lengthy spell of
time. Filling the gaps between recurrences improves temporal coverage
and, at least in this example, can usefully stress the dependence of re-
currences upon certain formative events. But extending the coverage in
this way requires additional research which can be very labour-intensive,
especially when working over long timeframes.The only redress we offer
here is to stress that the payoffs of this approach are significant too. The
recurrence can provide a valuable temporal tool that harnesses temporal
motion to zero in on dynamic, non-linear processes of change and con-
tinuity through time.
The inheritance
The temporal unit of the inheritance postulates that some features of
the present have not been formed by contemporaneous social action
but exist as legacies of earlier periods of time. Such inheritances might
consist of material objects but, for us criminologists, non-material inher-
itances tend to command greater attention. Michel Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish (1991) famously analyses prison buildings, although his prin-
cipal concern was for a particular form of disciplinary power – evident in
prison architecture – that came to prominence in the nineteenth century.
A wider literature similarly traces inheritance in forms of knowledge
concerning crime, traditions for practising criminal justice or enduring
sets of institutional arrangements. To assert that such social, cultural or
institutional phenomena have been shaped by the past will be uncon-
tentious to some. However, recognizing this sits awkwardly with rational
choice models of human action that posit a rational, calculating actor

(homo economicus), who makes decisions in an instantaneous present. Such
models leave little room for how we, as actors, embody extended flows
of historical time and are thus never abstracted from our pasts. Attention
to inheritances is at its most compelling when it reveals the historicity of
72 Time and method
something usually taken for granted as natural, necessary or permanent.

Susan Magarey’s work on the ‘invention’ of juvenile delinquency (1978)
exemplifies this point. A familiar contemporary social problem is shown
to lack the permanence or inevitability that ‘common sense’ might be-
stow upon it and is revealed instead to be a more contingent eventual-
ity generated by the conjuncture of a particular set of occurrences at a
specific point in time. As David Garland explains, identifying such in-
heritances can be ‘powerfully critical and revealing’ (Garland 2014: 379)
in exposing the historical origins, ongoing contingencies and potential
alternatives to present knowledges, institutional forms and practices.
Garland’s work forms part of a genealogical tradition in criminology
(described in the introduction) that has identified historical inheritances
in the governance of crime and other social problems, including in penal
policy and practice (for example, Garland 2001), in modern policing
(McMullan 1998; Valverde 2003) and in the governance of urban space
more widely (Valverde 2011). But inheritance is not the sole preserve of
genealogical scholars. There is a further seam of criminological research
that identifies and explores historical inheritances within post-colonial

societies. Anthony Harriott (2000), for example, examines how the re-
cent crisis of legitimacy within Jamaican policing is tied to the historic
role of policing in upholding British colonial rule in Jamaica as well as
the longer-term effects of colonization as found within a highly unequal,
segmented society often reliant on police coercion to reproduce social
order. Similarly, Eileen Baldry and Chris Cunneen describe the exces-
sive imprisonment of Aboriginal women in contemporary Australia as
resulting not from any recent policy or practice but from an ‘unbroken
chain’ (Baldry and Cunneen 2014: 291) of colonial patriarchy and its
discriminatory methods for controlling Indigenous Australians, stretch-
ing from the late eighteenth century onwards. Such legacies reveal the
potency of continuity through path dependencies (see Thelen 1999) or
other constraints on social change. But it is also possible that, by identify-
ing factors that produce continuity, the study of inheritance can help to
advance social change. Studies of penal populism and the spiralling rates
of incarceration in some Western countries have identified a range of
political, cultural and economic factors that might explain the instigation
and intensification of these conditions and thus point to potential targets
for reform. For example, Nicola Lacey (2008) argues that the ‘prisoner’s
Time and method 73
dilemma’ of competitive penal populism in recent history can be escaped

if penal policy-making is removed from the hands of elected politicians
and given to an independent, non-partisan body. The temporal unit of
the inheritance thus supports explanations of the present and can inform
proposals for how better futures might be engendered.
There are, though, potential pitfalls in historical research on inheri-
tance. The timeframes involved are often large. While this usefully brings
long periods of time to bear on the present, the practical challenge of
conducting such research requires researchers to adopt a precise focus
on their objects of study. This precision can become problematic if it
leads to a narrow account that prioritizes clarity of argument around
the formative impact of certain historical moments over attention to
other relevant historical developments. This criticism has been applied
to genealogical scholarship. Garland, for example, has been criticized for
neglecting the connections between changes to criminal justice and the
regulation of business (Braithwaite 2003). The value placed upon iden-
tifying inheritances may neglect events or periods of time that have left
few lasting effects. As Paul Knepper and Sandra Scicluna (2010) argue,
genealogical ‘dead-ends’
may still be important in providing illustrative
comparisons or useful alternatives worth exploring in the present. The
desire to identify inheritances is therefore accompanied by a risk of over-
simplification. If analytic precision is not grounded in rich historical de-
tail then the complexities of change and continuity may be glossed over,
leaving only a narrow, unidirectional sheen reflective of linearity. Such
accounts will struggle to provide a vivid picture of how social reality
unfolds through time.
The temporal unit of the inheritance thus compels us to look beyond
the present or recent past and to build analyses that draw upon a longer
span of time. In doing so, we may focus attention on both transformative
historical changes that instigate inheritances and subsequent processes
that (re)produce them. The reproduction of a given social phenomenon
can result in its present embodying its past; architectural designs, dura-
ble institutions or persistent patterns of thought shape contemporary
life despite their origins lying in the (often distant) past. The analytical
risks identified with this temporal unit demonstrate that its use does not
necessarily conduce to a strong sense of historical thinking. Neverthe-
less, study of inheritance can helpfully capture the many ways in which
74 Time and method
past melts into present, constraining and enabling ongoing thought and
action.
The foregoing discussion shows that, despite its largely synchronic ori-
entation, criminology already engages with a range of durational per-
spectives. It also makes clear that many of us engage meaningfully with
historical time through the various temporal units outlined. These well-
established conceptual apparatus enable us, in one way or another, to bring
past time into analysis of the present.This is the first key point of the chap-
ter: criminology already exhibits some concern for the diachronic and
for historical time. Of course, the temporal units discussed here generate
historical insights while also, in certain respects, limiting and constraining
historical analysis. Nevertheless, wider and more creative employment of
temporal units would help advance historical thinking in criminology.
There are certainly gaps in the application of these temporal units to be
filled. Much is known, for example, about the life courses of offenders,
but a life course approach might also be adopted in studies of other in-
dividual actors (such as victims), of criminal justice organizations (see, for
example, King 2009) or of the development of criminology itself (Laub
2004). Similarly, one might experiment with the use of temporal units that
are unusual in research on particular topics. For example, the crime drop
is usually studied as a trend – so what might be gained by studying the
historical recurrence of crime drops (see Knepper 2015)? Riots are often
viewed as events but might they also be usefully examined through a life
course study of rioters? Mixing up key research ingredients in this way is
identified by C. Wright Mills (1959) as a means of igniting the sociolog-
ical imagination (see
also Abbott 2001b: 32). Much like the ‘cut-up
writ-
ing’ approach to penning song lyrics, it can offer unexpected meanings
and perspectives. Finally, further insights are on offer via temporal units
little used in criminology, including the generation, the original context
for Mannheim’s (2011) use of the term ‘temporal unit’.
Methodological techniques
Having identified the insights afforded by the various temporal units,
we turn to the methodological techniques they entail and that dia-
chronic perspectives demand. The second key point of this chapter is to
Time and method 75
use existing criminological understandings of time, as embedded in the

temporal units, to help develop long-term, empirical research in crimi-
nology. This section thus identifies constituent methodological tools that
are common to some or all of the temporal units and considers how they
might usefully be deployed across a wider spectrum of criminological
research.
Taking the long view

Taking a long view is the most elementary step in adopting a diachronic
perspective. Even if examining a genuinely novel phenomenon as it un-
folds, it is nonetheless profitable to consider antecedents, comparators
or alternatives from the past. But, for the most part, we criminologists
examine social actors and social arrangements that have very long his-
tories indeed. As such, we can examine the historical origins of what
we study as well as how they have developed through historical time.
Attending to such considerations should help to contextualize a con-
temporary phenomenon historically; or, in other words, to frame the
current situation in the broader sweep of time (see Yeomans 2019a). We
might accomplish this through a survey of existing literature on the his-
tory of crime or social responses to crime. Using (secondar y) historical
literature in this way provides some longitudinal breadth to complement
the cross-sectional
methodologies we often employ. For example, Dick
Hobbs’ Doing the Business (1988) famously examines criminality, law en-
forcement and working-class culture in London’s East End, based on eth-
nographic fieldwork conducted during the 1980s. But the book begins
with an historical survey of the East End and the Metropolitan Police
and finishes with a future-or iented section that identifies a nascent pro-
cess of gentrification and reflects on the likely demise of working-class
East End communities that this portents. Hobbs thus frames his analysis
in historical time, bookending an ethnographic study of a specific con-
temporary moment with retrospective and prospective vistas.
We can usefully go further than this too. The abundance of longitu-
dinal data in self-documenting societies means that it is usually possi-
ble for researchers to ground their research in a consideration of relevant
longer-ter m trends. Readily available data on trends in crime levels or
prison populations, for example, allow specific forms of crime or types of
76 Time and method
penality to be better located in historical time. Of course, trend data of this

sort must be approached with some caution. There are well-known lim-
itations to the capacity of either victimization surveys or police recorded
crime data to capture ‘real’ levels of offending, as well as specifically histor-
ical issues concerning whether, as cultural and legal meanings shift, such
resources actually measure the same thing at different points in time (see
Emsley 2018: 21–54).
William King (2009)
explores a further limitation
with regard to data on civilians employed by the Newark (New Jersey)
Police Department. Suppose we were analysing the civilianization of the
Newark Police in 1985, and we wanted to construct recent trends. We
might start by recording that civilian officers made up 11% of the force in
1983, rising sharply to 22.1% in 1984. The impression of a steep incline
would be complicated, however, if we traced the data back to 1980, when
the figure stood at 21.8%. The fluid, continuous nature of time means
that research designs involving few data points can result in misleading
depictions of trends that obscure historical patterns (King 2009). Multiple
data points spread across long periods of time are much more preferable.
The digitization of large volumes of archival material in recent years
has eased access to historical data on crime. A wealth of historical records
on criminal trials, punishments and offenders’ lives are now searchable
at the click of a mouse, including via The Prosecution Project, Old Bai-
ley Online, the Digital Panopticon and various digital newspaper archives.
Such resources provide quantitative data spanning large periods of time.
But, as with the examples named, they also provide large amounts of
qualitative data. Supplementing quantitative trend data with longitudinal
qualitative sources (court reports, newspaper articles and so on) entails
a sort of triangulation that helps mitigate the problems of measurement
and unstable meanings that constrain quantitative historical methodol-
ogies. Moreover, longitudinal qualitative data can, to paraphrase Sewell,
add ‘flesh’ to the quantitative ‘skeleton’ (Sewell 2005: 32) by providing
intricacy and nuance to long-term patterns as well as revealing potential
new insights into change, continuity and flow. In each of these ways,
readily available digital archives greatly increase the potential for long-
term, diachronic perspectives in criminology.
Actually using these archives, of course, can be time-consuming and
requires the appropriate skills in archival research. Tagging this sort of ac-
tivity onto a standard cross-sectional
research design, therefore, engenders
Time and method 77
certain costs and demands. These challenges are intensified by the need
to consider how long a ‘long view’ should be adopted. The answer to the
timeframe question must, of course, vary according to what is being stud-
ied. Alcohol has been consumed in Europe for centuries and so studies
of drinking, its effects and its regulation in this region might reasonably
stretch back to the early modern or medieval periods (Yeomans 2019b).
Technological changes, however, mean that studies of cybercrime may be
justified in concentrating on the last three decades or so (see Yar 2005). In
each case, a judgment must be formed based on the historical character of
the object of study and available sources of data.This may not be easy but,
helpfully, criminology is now populated by increasing numbers of scholars
with expertise in archival research who are prepared to advocate for it as
a criminological method (Guiney 2020). There is significant value to be
gained, then, from collaborations between scholars of crime and justice
specializing in different historical periods (see Churchill 2019). So crimi-
nology now possesses not just the data but increasingly the personnel and
networks needed to take a more consistently long-term
view.
Taking the long view allows us either to zoom in on specific historical
moments that possess particular importance or to retain a temporally
broader purview by examining longer-term
developments. Either ap-
proach, as Corfield argues, offers a richer view of time ‘as it seems at any
split second but as it also operates when the split seconds accumulate
massively… to become millennia’ (Corfield 2007: xv). Adopting a long
view of our objects of study is both a necessary and realistic starting point
for a more historical criminology. It dovetails the synchronic and dia-
chronic by locating relevant historical instants within the broader passage
of historical time.
Looking for sequences

So, we can locate cross-sectional studies of the cur rent situation in time,
using primary sources or secondary literature to adopt a long view. Such
historical contextualization is useful in itself. But further benefits accrue
from sustained and dedicated attempts to analyse occurrences through
historical time. The usual technique for accomplishing this has cropped
up as a common analytic concern across the discussion of temporal units:
namely, a concentration on sequences.
78 Time and method
Temporal sequences are central to social science. Experimental research

designs, for example, are premised on the proposition that the difference
in an observed phenomenon before and after a specific intervention, all else
being equal, is the effect of that intervention. More generally, any attempt
at causal explanation rests on the premise that cause must precede effect;
to put it another way, explanatory factors must precede the thing being
explained. Researchers can augment this common concern for sequence
by looking for relevant historical events or occurrences within quantita-
tive or qualitative data. These could be periodic reforms to the criminal
law, outbursts of public anxiety about youth behaviour, developments in
policing, terrorist attacks, or a vast range of other things. Whatever they
are, the pertinent occurrences need to be identified within the historical
data and arranged in chronological order. Only when arranged as such, in
sequence, can researchers begin to assess the relationships between these
occurrences.Was a legal reform the consequence of recurrent moral pan-
ics about youth crime? Did a gradual de-escalation of terrorist activities
instigate a change in policing practices? Looking for sequences derives
greater value from the long view. It enables researchers to move beyond
straightforward assessments of increases or decreases in relevant trends,
providing them with a much improved capacity to investigate causality
(see King 2009) or pursue other forms of explanation.
As well as the sequencing of occurrences, Pierson (2004: especially
54–78) argues that understanding events and outcomes rests on the du-
ration of an occurrence and whether it coincided with other relevant
occurrences. Scholars examining whether Norbert Elias’s civilizing pro-
cess explains the long-term decline in violence in Western societies, for
example, have paid considerable attention to the emergence of strong,
centralized states and the spread of commerce (see, for example, Eis-
ner 2001). First, these developments must precede a tangible reduction
in violence for the theory to hold. Second, their late occurrence, non-
coincidence or reversal is at the root of much discussion about national
variations in the chronology of declining violence (see Spierenburg
2008: especially 165–205).
Temporal asymmetry of this sort inevitably
leads to discussion of consequence (violence declined because of cer-
tain historical developments) and often of counter-factual
dependencies
too (violence would not have declined without certain historical de-
velopments). Adding a concern for timing, duration, consequence and
Time and method 79
counter-factuals to a consideration of sequence further enhances analysis.

It facilitates nuanced explanations or sophisticated causal models that go
beyond ‘event x produced outcome y’ type formulations by accounting
more directly for the evolving interplay of multiple variables or factors
within related events and occurrences.
So, paying deliberate analytic attention to sequencing and exercising
an attendant concern for timing, duration, consequence and counter-

factuals is hugely valuable. These concerns are often identified as tools
of the historian’s trade; as orthodox means through which historians
(Sewell, 2005) and historically oriented social scientists too (Aminzade
1992; Pierson 2004) make sense of time. As indicated, their usage within
criminology and broader social science is patchier. There are developed
methods, such as sequence analysis and multi-
state event history, which
can be used to study certain sequences (see Abbott 1995; Mikolai and
Lyons-Amos 2017), and they might perhaps be used more frequently
in criminology (see Keatley 2018). But a concern for sequence can also
be enacted with more methodologically straightforward steps. It might
begin with the construction of a timeline or flow chart that breaks down
relevant occurrences into their constituent parts and arranges them in a
chronological order (see Mahoney 2000). This enables the relationships
between the various component occurrences to be examined. These oc-
currences may stretch across a considerable span of time and, when a
broader view is taken, simultaneous historical events or processes can
also be factored in. Pieter Spierenburg (2001) and Manuel Eisner (2001)
pay considerable attention to how changes in long-term homicide rates
correspond to timelines of state formation and other relevant events in
European history. Such studies show what can be gained here. Taking a
long view and then looking for sequences can lead to compelling ex-
planations of how features of historic and contemporary social life have
been made, remade or unmade through historical time.
Filling in the gaps

The analysis of sequences can be hindered by a problem identified above
for multiple temporal units: ‘gappyness’. It arises specifically from moving
beyond purely cross-sectional research designs and incorporating a more
longitudinal approach. Much life course research seeks to overcome the
80 Time and method
constraints of cross-sectional
design by undertaking repeated sweeps of
data collection; much work on trends seeks to measure the contours of
change by plotting annual data points. But, in both instances, the end
product is often a research design that effectively pieces together multiple
cross-sectional
snapshots rather than something truly appreciative of the
motion of historical time. Similarly, studies of recurrence or inheritance
might be weakened if analytical attention is concentrated on certain
chronological episodes and not spread across a longer span of time. More
generally, efforts to develop sequential analyses – especially over a long
period – can be undermined if the major events are analysed but the in-
tervals between them are left unexplored. In all instances, what happens
in the in-between time? A fully diachronic approach moves away from
the study of criminological phenomena at fixed points in time and rec-
ognizes their temporal fluidity. Of course, data will always be collected
at some specific moment(s) of time or grouped together as indicative of
some interval of time. Using weekly crime statistics, for example, would
fill in some of the gaps in the temporal patterning of crime glossed over
by annual crime statistics, but it would still conceal variations at the daily
level or lower. Undertaking a rolling analysis of continually occurring
events, in all their nuance and complexity, is probably impossible. But it
is nonetheless profitable to acknowledge the potential gappyness within
many criminological studies and to reflect on which methods come clos-
est to capturing the essential motion of historical time.
There are various analytic techniques which can – to paraphrase Fer-
rell (2018) – ‘lift the slab’ of traditional methods and allow us to examine
the times in-between the usual points of measurement. In longitudinal
time-ser ies studies, it is helpful to introduce retrospective questions on
participants’ experiences since the last sweep of data collection, rather
than purely at the time of asking, and prospective questions about fu-
ture plans which can be revisited in later sweeps. Agnew describes how
framing questions temporally helps separate experiences that are con-
temporary or recent at the time of measurement (perhaps hours or days
previously) from usual or typical occurrences (over months or years –
Agnew 2011). Requiring research participants to keep daily diaries can
gather further data that is ‘closer’ to the passage of time (Agnew 2011)
and less likely to be undermined by gaps in participants’ memories. Some
innovative statistical techniques offer further insights into historical
Time and method 81
motion.Traditional regression models have been critiqued for inattention

to how the relationships between variables may change (or even cease)
over time (Abbott 2001a; see also Feinstein and Thomas 2002). Rolling
windows regression, however, involves dividing the period studied into
a series of distinct ‘windows’ that form consecutive or overlapping spans
of time. Rather than treating the period as a static pool of data, separate
regression calculations are then run for each time window, enabling an-
alysts to examine, not just how certain variables are related in the period
studied, but the possibility that their relationships may change across the
period studied. Rolling windows analyses may still rely on grouped data
points, such as annual statistics. But the clear attention to change means
that they can allow some study of historical motion (albeit in a stutter ing
rather than entirely fluent manner).Agent-based
modelling offers further
opportunities for close attention to temporal motion. It draws together
qualitative and quantitative findings about the spatial and temporal pat-
terning of individual behaviour to simulate the social patterning of be-
haviour (Malleson et al. 2010). The wonder of this method for historical
enquiry is that it allows us to observe (simulated) social life in the process
of taking place. If the ‘virtual society’ of the simulated model closely re-
sembles real-world patterns of crime then it can be used for a variety of
criminological purposes, including testing theories, modelling the impact
of certain changes and even providing retrospective explanation for past
events (Groff et al. 2019).
Methods more familiar to the discipline of history can also help to
confront gappyness. Analysis of documents created between major sweeps
of data collection might, for example, help to fill in some gaps. More
imaginatively, oral history can be used to examine historical change and
how it is subjectively experienced. It consists, in social research terms,
of a cross-sectional
research design involving purely retrospective ques-
tioning about certain aspects of participants’ lives up until the point of
data collection. The data collection must occur after the things being
studied have ‘finished’ and researchers must, with regard to certain topics
(for example, genocide), be sensitive to the fact that their participants
will be constituted by survivors only (see Mills 2000). It is also weak-
ened somewhat by the fallibility of memory. Nevertheless, oral history
is well-established in the discipline of history. It was once a prominent
criminological method, used by the likes of Clifford Shaw and Edwin
82 Time and method
Sutherland (see Bennett 1981), but it has become more peripheral in re-
cent decades (for an exception, see Carlen 1988). Witness seminars sim-
ilarly hold much criminological potential. They share the retrospective
cross-sectional
design of oral history but involve multiple participants
simultaneously discussing their experiences before, during and after key
historical moments (see, for example, Kandiah and Staerck 2002). They
are thus useful for studying key criminal justice reforms or high-profile
criminal events from recent history – particularly as the personal retro-
spective testimonies they provide can help to fill in the gaps that might
otherwise be left by more typical criminological methods.
While it is not easy to fill the gaps between data points, or spaces
between the moments where the analytical gaze lingers, there are a num-
ber of analytical techniques and research designs available that help to
accomplish this. The techniques and methods mentioned here do not
constitute an exhaustive list of those available; they simply provide indic-
ative examples. Employing these and similar tools can help to shed light
on the otherwise dimly lit temporal spaces in-between the usually fixed
planks of our research designs.
Harnessing complexity
The problem of linearity surfaced several times in our discussion of tem-
poral units, especially with regard to the life course and the trend. Incor-
porating a concern for temporal units into research means moving away
from cross-sectional methods and the synchronic view of time that they
often support. But this shift towards a diachronic perspective can pro-
duce linear understandings of historical time that are inconsistent with
the main tenets of historical thinking. Linearity, as discussed here, has
two dimensions: the perception that historical change moves in a single
direction (tending inexorably towards a certain outcome or limit); and,
relatedly, the impression that historical change can be reduced to a single
trajectory (to movement along a single track, however circuitous). This
section will address these two dimensions in turn, before exploring nar-
rative approaches to criminology as a useful, though not exclusive, way
of rejecting linearity and harnessing complexity.
The first dimension of linearity is somewhat easier to address. Recall
the trajectory and the turning point, both of which were raised in our
Time and method 83
discussion of temporal units. The trajectory denotes a period of stability

or consistent movement in a certain direction. Turning points, by con-
trast, interrupt trajectories; they are instabilities that may lead to a new
trajectory or to further instability (Abbott 2001a). We have highlighted
the potential for events to function as turning points on a meso- or
macro-societal level; indeed, as noted in Chapter 1, the capacity for a
happening to significantly affect what comes after is fundamental to what
makes it an ‘event’. Stark changes of historical direction, such as key
criminal justice reforms, are also central to the study of inheritances,
and the study of trends often zeroes in implicitly on potential turning
points.3 Wherever detected, turning points effectively reveal trajectories
of social or personal change to be directionally nuanced rather than uni-
directional. Indeed, as already discussed, turning points can proliferate,
producing ‘jagged’ trajectories through time (Savage and Flemmen 2019).
Thus, they help make sense of the non-linear direction of social change.
The second dimension of linearity, which reduces historical change
to a single trajectory (of whatever directional shape), must be countered
through a recognition of temporal complexity. The importance of the
plurality of historical time, of appreciating that social life is an ensemble
rather than a solo piece, was flagged up several times within the discus-
sion of temporal units. Actually achieving this in practice is methodolog-
ically challenging. A useful starting point is an open-minded
disposition
with regard to the periods of the past that may be relevant to the present.
Paul Lawrence (2019) has argued that cr iminologists tend to think of
historic data becoming increasingly useful the closer they approach to
the present. This lineal presumption is out of step with the perspective
adopted here in which any historical moment, including the present, is
animated by the simultaneous unfolding of multiple temporal processes
of differing longevities. Accepting this point requires criminologists to
look deeper into the past. Mary Bosworth (2000), for example, argues
that the modern prison did not arise emphatically in the nineteenth
century, as is often claimed; rather, the pronounced continuities in how
prison was used and experienced by female prisoners across the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries indicate an earlier or slower historical
emergence. Similarly, Lucia Zedner (2006) suggests that the recent rise of
private security might be profitably seen as a return to formations of po-
licing characteristic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
84 Time and method
In both instances, departing from a narrow, lineal view of time broadens

the temporal focus beyond recent decades and helpfully allows the causal
or explanatory capacity of earlier periods of time to be investigated. A
non-linear perspective is thus required by the fact that social processes
can unfold at uneven speeds over very long periods of time.
Regrettably, there is a frequent tendency towards the recent or very
recent past in criminology, including in sequential modes of analysis. The
‘crime scripts’ approach, as developed by Derek Cornish (1994), is an
example of this. In practice, it consists of attempts to take specific crim-
inal offences and break them down into sequences of actions. This can
enable criminal justice agencies to target interventions at critical stages
in the sequence, thus halting the ‘unfolding’ (Cor nish 1994: 186) of the
crime and preventing its occurrence. Cornish argues that this is a way of
locating criminal actions in time, of viewing them as sequential chains
of occurrences. In these respects, crime script analysis resonates with as-
pects of historical thinking. However, despite the interest in sequence,
there is a lack of complexity in Cornish’s models. This is evident, first, on
an ontological level as individual offences are described in a fairly ‘thin’
way, with reference to a formulaic set of stages that constitute a deduc-
tive model. These stages consist largely of successive decisions made by
offenders about their choice of actions, with accidents, coincidences or
unintended consequences neglected.4 Second, the sense of immediacy in
Cornish’s crime scripts belies their lack of temporal complexity. His situ-
ationalist orientation means that his interest lies in the instantaneous tem-
poral location of the occurrence. His crime script for an ‘auto offence’,
for example, begins with a ‘preparation stage’, which consists of getting a
screwdriver, getting a scaffold tube and identifying co-offenders.
This is
followed by the ‘entry stage’, which consists of going to a public car park.
Other stages then follow.The point is that any longer-ter m dimensions to
the offence, such as the offender’s family background or economic status,
are ignored. This level of simplification is intended to focus preventive
action on critical temporal junctures. But, at an explanatory level, it means
that the situational crime script approach can only provide a partial, ‘here
and now’ account of an offence rather than a fuller version encompassing
its unfolding through multiple longer-term
sequences of occurrences.
It might seem easy to address this shortcoming by building more con-
sideration of conjuncture into crime script analyses. Perhaps a conjuncture
Time and method 85
of intention and opportunity led to a specific criminal action sequence,

for instance. But this modification would still provide insufficient consid-
eration of wider and non-situational factors. In contrast, Robert Reiner’s
(2016) model of crime synthesizes insights from several schools of crim-
inological thought and posits that crimes always entail labelling, motiva-
tion, means, opportunity and controls. In doing so, he dovetails the ‘here
and now’ of a criminal offence with its longer-ter m genesis as revealed
through consideration of the social interactions and power relations that
underpin labelling, the influence of economic factors on individual lives,
and the presence or absence of a host of formal or informal institutional
controls on behaviour (via religion, the family, the police and so on).
Crucial for us is that Reiner’s model implicitly acknowledges the variety
of temporalities that constitute these various criminogenic factors. The
opportunity to commit a crime might be instantaneous, whereas the mo-
tivation or absence of social controls that facilitate the offence may have
developed at different rates over much longer periods of time. Appreci-
ating temporal complexity is therefore necessary to fully grasp ontolog-
ical complexity. Reiner thus presents a more historical view of crime as
something constituted by the confluence of a set of factors which have
unfolded at differing speeds across greatly varying durations of time.
Just as an interest in turning points protects against the presumption
of unidirectionality, so a sensitivity to confluence (or conjuncture, as
some call it) distances research from a tendency to reduce complex hap-
penings to short, mechanistic chains of events. Arising from non-linear
mathematics, a ‘complexity
turn’ occurred from around the mid-1990s,

whereby a certain ‘structure of feeling’, promoting the recognition and
study of complexity in all its forms, spread across the natural and social
sciences (Urry 2005: 3). In the realm of complexity, causality is multiple
and contingent while change, rather than equilibrium, is recognized as
the normal and natural social state of affairs (Capra 2005; Urry 2005).
Methodologically, this means that relationships between variables are not
constant (Roth 1992; Abbott 2001a; Agnew 2011). It also means that
small changes can produce big effects and that the outcomes of inter-
actions between variables are very hard to predict. The implications of
complexity for criminology generally are varied (see Pycroft and Bar-
tollas 2014). For the historical criminology promoted here, it stipulates
that an attentiveness to a specific set of socio-temporal features is needed
86 Time and method
when looking at sequences of occurrences within potentially long, non-

gappy timeframes. This includes turning points, jagged trajectories and
confluences, as already outlined. It further includes non-linear tempo-
ral features such as thresholds and tipping points, which are relevant to
how small changes can produce big effects (Capra 2005; Urry 2005), and
feedback loops, which are central to the historical study of path depen-
dencies (Pierson 2004; Urry 2005). All of these features guard against the
reductionism that depicts causal relationships as straight lines on a graph
or portrays multifaceted, dynamic processes as formulaic procedures.
Historical scholars often attend to the importance of complexity, intu-
itively or deliberately, through the use of narrative explanations (Abbott
2001a: 161–82).The
significance of narratives, especially for making sense
of the temporal unit of the event, has already been noted. Their wider
usage involves establishing the sequencing of occurrences that constitute
a certain object of study, as well as considering timing, duration, con-
tingency, consequence and non-linearity
(as
turning points, confluences
and other non-linear temporal features often loom large in historical
narratives). In doing this, a ‘story’ starts to take shape; or, to put it another
way, a narrative account makes sense of why certain things were followed
by other things by binding them together into something approaching a
whole.This holistic approach necessitates a concentration upon a tempo-
ral arc of storytelling that stretches from beginning, through middle and
towards end. As ‘theoretically structured stories about coherent sequences
of motivated actions’ (Aminzade 1992: 458), narratives are thus central to
historical explanations (see also Calhoun 1998; Roth 2008). The emerg-
ing field of narrative criminology is predominantly concerned with the
stories that social actors tell, or the sequence-based discourses they pro-
duce, to make sense of past action and shape future behaviour. Narrative
criminologists frequently concentrate upon change and continuity over
the individual life course, usually with reference to offending behaviour.
They typically reject unidirectional trajectories of development and, in
seeking to ‘forge connections among experiences, actions, and aspira-
tions’ (Presser and Sandberg 2015: 1), they pay heed to the plurality of
temporalities that has been highlighted here. In both respects, narrative
criminology helpfully advances non-linear understandings of social life;
but largely on an individual or micro-scale. There is considerable scope
for wider use of narrative approaches in criminology, beyond the study of
Time and method 87
offenders’ lives or a biographical approach entirely. Narrative criminol-

ogy could usefully retain its holistic and sequential interest in stories but
extend its focus to include meso- or macro-level societal occurrences. In
particular, there may be room for a non-linear,
narrative-based
approach
to the study of criminal law reforms, penal policy-making
and large-scale

criminal events.
Confronting linearity thus requires at least three things. First, it is es-
sential to recognize jagged shapes, turning points and other complex
features of social life within the directionality of historical trajectories.
Second, it is useful to look beyond the recent past and consider the pos-
sibility that more distant moments in time may reveal much about the
nature of the present. Third, it is important to appreciate the existence of
temporal complexity and how this highlights the simultaneous existence
of multiple and differing temporal processes within any one occurrence
or instant of time. A broader application of narrative approaches within
criminology is a potential route to achieve these things, but it should be
stressed that this is just one option. More widely too, a consideration of
these three points will promote more vivid accounts of social life and its
historical dynamism within criminology.
Conclusion
This chapter has identified a set of major temporal units in criminology
and explored their advantages and limitations as means of both challeng-
ing the stark separation of past and present and revealing the significance
of prior happenings for contemporary situations. Emerging from this dis-
cussion are a series of signposts which, taken together, point in the direc-
tion of a more historical empirical research programme for criminology.
These are, in turn, taking the long view, looking for sequences, filling in
the gaps and harnessing complexity. These signposts are pertinent to re-
search design, data collection/generation and data analysis, and each has
been elaborated with some more specific suggestions on research tech-
nique. Suggestions for specific methods are indicative; we do not claim
to have offered a full survey of relevant methods and have identified
some potential options principally to demonstrate a larger point. That
larger point is that, whether achieved using methods mentioned here
or not, a sincere engagement with the long view, with sequences, with
88 Time and method
temporal gaps between data points and with non-linearity offers a viable
route away from a criminology dominated by cross-sectional approaches
and synchronic temporal perspective. This sort of research divorces the
contemporary from the historic and reinforces the presentism of much
criminological knowledge. The approach advocated here points instead
towards longitudinal vistas, towards locating the contemporary with re-
spect to the historic as well as identifying the historic within the con-
temporary. It promotes a methodological stance that is concerned with
the production of moving pictures instead of snapshots. It promises a
study of motion rather than stasis that better reflects the reality of society
in historical time. In this sense, both the arrow’s moving dynamic trajec-
tory and its position at key moments can be studied simultaneously. The
four signposts identified here are thus intended as diachronic counter-
weights to the generally synchronic skew of criminology.
It is important to stress that this chapter is not an exhortation for all
criminologists to adopt historical methods. The point is that the largely
synchronic skew of criminology might be usefully corrected if more of
us adopted some of the methodological stances here outlined. For some,
this might mean heading for the archives and engaging in the dedicated
study of historical source material. For others, it may mean continuing
to produce largely cross-sectional research but adapting it with thorough
historical contextualization based on reading the historical literature or
preliminary use of relevant, available historical data. For others still, it
might mean teaming up with historical researchers whose knowledge
and skillset can provide the diachronic counter-weight needed on cer-
tain research projects. Generally, we hope that it entails us thinking more
consistently historically, exercising the faculties of historical thinking
outlined in Chapter 1 by conducting research in some of the ways dis-
cussed in this chapter. If that aim is realized, then diachronic perspec-
tives will spread within criminology. The result will be a more historical
criminology that is better able to make sense of crime and how societies
respond to it.
Notes
1 The underlying messiness of these superficially neat typologies suggests that
their continuing appeal does not arise from their fidelity to the historical
Time and method 89
record. Perhaps, instead, they serve to support boundary maintenance activ-

ities by enabling criminologists to locate contemporary crime firmly within
macro-societal for mations, thus helping to deflect inroads into the study of
crime made by economists, public health researchers and others less con-
cerned with the connections between individual action and socio-historical
context. More obviously, epochalist analysis provides some loose historical
justification for the criminological fixation on the new and emergent.
2 This point chimes with the critique of the perception that variables are univo-
cal. Both Roth (1992) and Abbott (2001a) have argued that variables are not
fixed entities with singular effects and can possess multiple shifting meanings
or causal properties.
3 For example, Donohue and Levitt (2001) effectively posited Roe vs Wade
[1973] as a turning point in the history of violence in the United States.
4 Pierson’s critique of rational choice theory provides a fuller elaboration of
how this approach reduces sequence to selection (2004).
3
THEORY AND CONCEPTS
Why do people break the law? Why do people obey the law? Why do
we have law in the first place? The last chapter suggested several avenues
for historical enquiry in response to these questions: assessing trends in
offending; charting patterns in obedience over the life course; tracing
how legal institutions have been passed down to us. Yet, even to begin
thinking about these (and other, more modest) questions, one must con-
front conceptual and theoretical issues.These are not self-evident terms:
‘theory’, for example, expresses several divergent meanings in the social

sciences (Swedberg
2014: 16–17).
By ‘conceptual’ issues, we mean those
relating to abstract ideas or notions concerning the nature of phenom-

ena. So, what is ‘law’?
What does it mean to ‘obey’ it – simply to avoid
transgression or something more? By ‘theoretical’ issues, we mean those
relating to some abstract system or scheme by which we try to explain
something. So, taking just the first question, is law-breaking driven more
by individual drives or by social conditions? If an interaction of the two,
then how exactly do they interact?
One might doubt that historical thinking has a great deal to offer in
answering such questions. Historical thinking foregrounds change, con-
tingency and flux; it attends to the specificity of things in time and place.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429196911-4
Theory and concepts 91
Yet theoretical and conceptual questions are often cast in transcendental

terms: why do crime rates rise and fall… across times? What is ‘crime’…
heretofore and forever hereafter? Understood in this way, there is a tension,
at least, between the qualities of historical time and the terms of theo-
retical and conceptual enquiry. This tension is reflected in certain broad
differences in disciplinary orientation between history and social science
(see Calhoun 1998: 855–6; King 1999: 161–2; Burke 2005; Sewell 2005),
which manifest themselves in the context of substantive topics. Histori-
ans grumble that such-and-such
woefully fails to situate their suggestive
study in its ‘historical
context’; criminologists bemoan that so-and-so’s
interesting findings are hopelessly ‘under-theorized’.
Historical thinking certainly approaches theoretical and conceptual en-
quiry in distinctive ways – yet this chapter argues that it makes no less
important a contribution for that. Drawing on our analysis of historical
time – notably with respect to change, flow and embodiment – it
shows
that theories and concepts are themselves historical phenomena, shaped by
historical context and caught in flows of historical time, and explores ways
of capturing this historicity and historical dynamism in theoretical and
conceptual enquiry. It argues that historical thinking has both a critical and
a construction contribution to make in this area. On the one hand, it de-
stabilizes certain prevalent ways of conceiving criminological theories and
concepts, highlighting their contingency and historical specificity. On the
other hand, it opens up opportunities for original theorization and con-
ceptualization, drawing on insights afforded by historical difference and
processual perspective. In sum, this chapter suggests that thinking with re-
gard to historical time offers a way of achieving conceptual and theoretical
self-consciousness
in criminology without reifying the world of thought.
Theories and concepts in historical time

Criminology is structured in no small part around a body of theor y –
centrally that concerned with explaining criminal offending – and a
set of concepts – with
‘crime’
foremost among them. Unsurprisingly,
then, theoretical and conceptual enquiry are part of the infrastructure of
our field. Typically, though, we conduct such enquiry in ways that ob-
scure (rather than exhibit) the historical nature of theories and concepts
92 Theory and concepts
themselves. Rather than recognizing them as the products of particu-

lar historical contexts and conjunctures – rather than emphasizing their
historical trajectories and immanent dynamism – we prefer to imagine
them, it seems, as eternal articles of thought, elevated from the vicissi-
tudes of historical time.
Take ‘crime’ –
how
do we commonly approach thinking about this
concept? Perhaps most obviously, we attempt to define it – to
formulate
a clear and stable specification of its meaning(s).1 A common method of
definition is conceptual analysis, where one breaks the concept (‘cr ime’)
down to its core elements (‘act’, ‘transgression’, ‘public morality’) and
scrutinizes each in turn (see, for example, Reiner 2016). One might aim
either at a truly general definition or, more pragmatically, one to suit some
particular study (see Ball and Curry 1995; Lynch et al. 2015: 117–53).

Alternatively, we explore the various senses in which we use the concept.
This leads us to the semantics of crime: ‘crime’ as evil, sinful act; ‘crime’
as violation of the law; ‘criminal’ as shocking, deplorable. Or perhaps
we distinguish the various forms that the concept takes, whether ideally
or empirically. This yields a typology of crime: ‘violent personal crime’;
‘occasional property crime’; ‘public order crime’; and so on (see Clinard
and Quinney 1973).
Each of these methods has in common an attempt to ‘get clear’ on
crime – to fix a given meaning or cluster of meanings. While such ex-
ercises can help guide empirical research (histor ical research included),
fixing meanings diverts us from how a concept embodies historical time.
Stipulating static definitions or frameworks ‘abstracts from process’ (Adam
2004: 151) and so tends to rob concepts of their immanent dynamism. By
contrast, historical perspective frequently breeds scepticism concerning
apparently stable meanings. The key concepts of human affairs typically
crystallize several meanings over time; as such, they tend to elude defini-
tion. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, ‘only something which has no history
can be defined’ (Nietzsche 1994: 57). Furthermore, as a result of their his-
tories, many criminological concepts are deeply contested (see Ball 1988:
13–14).‘Deviance’,‘order’,‘violence’,‘justice’
and the like have acquired
sufficient force of meaning to make them objects of struggle; as long as
they remain so, no definition will garner consensus. Take ‘cr ime’ again:
historians have argued that its meaning in English discourse was trans-
formed by the political and social convulsions of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. For Vic Gatrell, the term came around this
time to denote an aggregate social problem, encompassing amorphous
concerns with social change and social order (Gatrell 1990: 248–57).Yet

by the mid-Victorian
period, according to David Philips,‘crime’ had be-
come a normal social fact, a natural condition of everyday life in a matur-
ing, urban-industrial
society (Philips
1977: 288–9). These are somewhat
impressionistic assessments,2 yet they suggest that ‘cr ime’ has taken on
new meanings and shed old ones over time. Hence, one cannot hope to
capture its enduring essence in the moment of the present.
We encounter similar difficulties with theories. One approach – rooted
in the positivist epistemology underpinning modernist criminology
(Taylor
et al. 1973; Rafter 2010) – assumes that theoretical criminol-
ogy consists of gradual, incremental work towards an ultimate theory
of crime. We can cheerily dismiss old bodies of theory – for example,
Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology –
as either fundamentally mis-
conceived or hopelessly naïve; we know better, and we will soon know
better still. This suggests a succession of theories, ultimately approaching
theoretical synthesis. More pragmatically, we often think of theory as a
toolkit – a suite of approaches, each one potentially useful, to be picked
up, refined and laid down as circumstances dictate (see, for example, Gar-
land 1990). On this view, Lombroso’s ideas are not obsolete – they are
still there, waiting to be put to work. In this way, we approach theor ists –
most of them dead – ‘as if they were contemporaries’ (Elias 2012: 175;
see also Skinner 2002: 57).
Regarded historically, criminological theory appears neither succes-
sive nor simultaneous, but as several streams of thought flowing from past
to present. Theories are works of their time – the fruits of particular his-
torical circumstances and conjunctures – and explicable in their genesis
only on those terms. As Jayne Mooney puts it, criminological theorists
are ‘producers of culture located in particular places, writing in specific
historical periods and situated in precise intellectual networks and phil-
osophical controversies’ (Mooney 2020: 1).Yet any theory still of interest
to us also outlives its time; having entered into an ongoing lineage of
thought, it transcends the circumstances of its origin. Our relation to the-
ory discloses both ‘the power of present thought to think of the past’ and
‘the power of past thought to awaken itself in the present’ (Collingwood
1961: 294). Regarded historically, then, bodies of theory are neither fully
dead nor fully living; we have moved on from them and yet we cannot
let them go. Paraphrasing the philosopher Benedetto Croce (1915), we
are prompted to ask: ‘what is living and what is dead of the criminology
of Lombroso?’
This leads us first to what Lombroso’s theory meant at its origin.Thus,
we would think of his work not as a flawed bid for truth, but as a cultural
production of its time.We would locate it in its several contexts: the pres-
tige of statistical analysis of social problems (Rock 2017); diffuse concerns
about ‘degeneration’ and erosion of national racial stock (Pick 1989); the
marginalization of a substratum of the poor considered unamenable to
‘improving’ or ‘civilizing’ influences (Murphy 2015); and perhaps a wider
‘quest for purity’ in individual and collective life (Spierenburg 2016: 381).
We would also situate Lombroso in the intellectual currents he inherited:
scholarship on the remnants of ancient civilizations; the positivism of
Comte; the evolutionism of Darwin; and the various physical ‘sciences’
of character and conduct such as physiognomy and phrenology (Knepper
2018; Mooney 2020: 83–130). Second, though, an historical approach
leads us to what Lombroso’s work has meant to successive generations
of criminologists and, perhaps especially, what it means to us. We might
thus examine the various ways we call upon Lombroso and so (in some
way) keep his thinking alive: as the founder of ‘scientific’ criminology; as
a biological positivist; as a progenitor of eugenics and a certain strain of
genocidal violence (Jones 2012).This kind of analysis helps expose a cer-
tain ambivalence, within criminology, towards its constituent traditions –
even towards ‘criminology’ as such (see Young 1992: 427; Knepper 2018).
Concepts
We have seen that common approaches to conceptual enquiry tend to
abstract from historical process. How, then, might we explore crimino-
logical concepts in ways that highlight their historicity and dynamism?
This section outlines three such routes to conceptual enquiry. It surveys
two complementary varieties of conceptual history: first, diachronic his-
tories of conceptual descent; second, synchronic histories of conceptual
recovery. And third, it explores how to formulate criminological con-
cerns as processual concepts.
The descent of ‘drugs’

Histories of conceptual descent explore how concepts have come down
to us with their current meanings. They focus on the twists and the
turns – the eventful shifts, departures and reinventions – that punctuate
thought through time. They reject a teleological reading, which sees past
thought as tending inexorably to present thought. Rather, they offer a
contingent history of transformations in meaning, which dethrones the
present iteration of a concept.This kind of history goes by several names.
The most famous is ‘genealogy’, a term identified with Nietzsche’s his-
tories of moral and political concepts (Nietzsche 1994) and with Michel
Foucault’s critical histories of government (see Flynn 2005: 35–7).
‘Genealogy’ is so widely invoked today that one often wonders what links
the works so described.3 Ideally, though, genealogy traces the contingent
descent of a concept or practice through successive transformations to its
present form.4 As a ‘history of the present’, it aims not to evoke past ways
of thinking, but to outline the eventful struggles and contests by which
they have issued into (and shaped) the present (see Foucault 1984; Gar-
land 2014). In this barest of outlines, genealogy parallels Begriffsgeschichte,
a German-language
school of conceptual history theorized by Reinhart
Koselleck (see Koselleck 2011; Richter 1995). Begriffsgeschichte too traces
contingent shifts in concepts and conceptual architectures, emphasizing
qualitative change and transformation, and purports to offer a history
‘oriented
to the present’ (Koselleck
2011: 8; see also Ball 1988: 10–11;
Richter 1995: 53).
Let us develop an example: the concept of ‘drugs’. While closely re-
lated concepts (‘addiction’,‘inebriety’,‘recovery’)
have attracted detailed
historical research, ‘drugs’ itself has largely evaded scrutiny. It bears the
hallmarks of a hotly contested concept; its several meanings – a medicine,
a psychoactive substance, a legally controlled psychoactive substance –
are liable to become confused (Tupper 2012: 464–8).
Tracing the de-
scent of ‘drugs’ promises to show how these meanings have been loaded
successively onto the term over time. In his genealogy of the concept,
Toby Seddon argues that ‘drugs’ was used fairly consistently to denote
medicinal substances over several centuries, up until about the late nine-
teenth century. At this point, he suggests that a novel problematization
took hold, closely connecting ‘drugs’ with intoxication (of self or others)
and forging associations between ‘drugs’ and violence, enslavement and

disease (Seddon
2016: 400–3; see also Seddon 2010: 16–55). Still, though,
‘drugs’ denoted a wide range of substances from opium to drink and
sometimes to coffee. It was early in the twentieth century, Seddon claims,
that drink and tobacco were distinguished from ‘drugs’ and a recog-
nizably modern ‘drugs’ concept emerged. Opium, cocaine and other
substances – closely associated with the lower classes and with racial-
ized ‘others’ –
became
ready targets for an international move towards
prohibition and for interventions via specialist, detoxifying institutions
(Seddon
2016: 408–12; see also Parascandola 1995;Valverde 1998; Diköt-
ter et al. 2002: 331–3; Seddon 2010: 56–77). Thus, in a relatively brief
period, ‘drugs’ was reconceptualized as a set of controlled psychoactive
substances against which society must be defended.This history identifies
the modern ‘drugs’ concept with a particular regulatory architecture: ‘To
accept and work with the notion of “drugs” is, to a certain extent, to
accept the existing system of regulatory branches’ (Seddon 2010: 133; see
also Derrida 1995; Tupper 2012).
This genealogy disturbs the apparent naturalness of ‘drugs’, distancing
us from taken-for-granted
understandings and defamiliarizing our own
vocabulary. While it starts from the position that ‘drugs’ is somehow a
problematic concept (Garland 2014: 376–9),
its full critical force comes
from discovery of discontinuities separating past assumptions from our
own. Genealogy intends to provoke sur prise – less sur prise that past folk
thought in apparently strange ways than surprise at our own, previously
unexamined understandings. It succeeds when we are surprised by our-
selves (cf.
Braudel 1980: 36–7; Runia 2006: 6). Historical ruptures in
meaning undermine the apparent coherence of our concept of ‘drugs’,
exposing it as ‘a histor ically contingent conjunction’, one that bears the
imprint of successive impositions of meaning over time (Geuss 1994:
276; see also Koopman 2013: 28–9). Thus, genealogy ‘fragments what
was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined
consistent with itself ’ (Foucault 1984: 82). In our example, it exposes the
emptiness of ‘drugs’ as a concept for classifying substances chemically
or morally – indeed, its emptiness as anything other than a regulatory
concept (cf. Bevir 2015: 237–8). Immersion in such conceptual histories
might even incline one to the view of Richard Rorty’s ‘ironist’ – a figure
who, aware of the historical contingency and cultural specificity of their
most basic conceptual framework, has ‘radical and continuing doubts’

about it. The ironist is ‘never quite able to take themselves seriously
because [they are] always aware that the terms in which they describe
themselves are subject to change’ (Rorty 1989: 73–4; cf. Nietzsche 1997:
95–8, 107–8). And yet, by revealing that ‘drugs’ is a surprisingly recent
concept, the genealogy also suggests our capacity to rethink the catego-
ries we have inherited and so to free ourselves from the dead hand of
history (cf.White
1978: 39–40).As
Seddon puts it:‘if we wish to create a
new regulatory regime for the psychoactive substance we currently term
“drugs”, we need first of all to construct them differently as regulatory
objects’ (Seddon 2016: 414–5;
see also Bevir 2015: 231).
Genealogy, then, is an explicitly critical form of history; yet its critical
purposes are specific and limited. It may make us less sure of ourselves,
but it cannot invalidate our notion of ‘drugs’ – it does not expose er ror
or offer a normative argument for how we ought to think (Richter
1995: 69; Geuss 2002; Bevir 2015). As the philosopher Liane Carlson
(2019: 197) points out, ‘Contingency is fully compatible with quietism.’
Moreover, Carlson has recently argued that genealogy’s critical moment
may have passed: the superficial appeal of pedigree and tradition has long
since worn off in large parts of the academy, and the historicity and
contingency of our concepts is accepted wisdom in large parts of con-
temporary social science (Carlson 2019: 205–8).
Perhaps we are less easily
surprised than we once were; perhaps genealogy is losing its critical edge.
We suggest that a stronger emphasis on certain aspects of historical
thinking might help to breathe new life into critical conceptual histories.
First, one might profitably enquire into long-term stabilities in conceptual
formations. Focusing on discontinuities easily leaves deeper continuities
unexamined and foregoes an attempt to explain why certain ideas have
persisted for so long. Focusing instead on continuities directs attention to
how particular modes of thinking become encoded – in law, policy and
institutional forms – such that they are reproduced over time. Take, for
example, the concept of ‘drink’, which unified various intoxicating bev-
erages long considered separately, and has remained in many countries a
fairly settled category since the later nineteenth century. What accounts
for its stability? Perhaps the answer is institutional: increasing concern
regarding alcohol as a common intoxicating ingredient in the 1860s and
1870s led to common licensing rules for beer, wine and spirits in England
and Wales (Yeomans 2014a; see also O’Malley and Valverde 2004). Earlier
contestation and greater regulatory divergence gave way as these reforms
encoded a certain set of beverages into law as intoxicating and thus the
proper object of licensing. To a large extent, this regulatory structure
has endured since, institutionalizing a unified conception of (alcoholic)
drink that is now uncontested in British culture, in contrast to countries
with divergent histories of alcohol regulation (Yeomans 2014a). While
concepts are contingent, then, they are also sticky – mutable understand-
ings can become entrenched in governmental structures and embedded
in wider discourses.
Second, in reworking critical conceptual histories, one might focus
less on the twists and turns our concepts have taken than on their depths
of meaning – on how their pasts resurge into the present. As emphat-
ically eventful histories, genealogies tend to privilege transformation
over the accumulation of layers of meaning. Yet contested concepts of-
ten carry connotations from multiple times past. The twists and turns of
conceptual histories never disclose a clean break; successive operations
of power impose new meanings without vanquishing the old (Geuss
1994: 279–82;
Koopman 2013: 31; cf. Nietzsche 1994: 55–7). Consider,
for example, the pre-modern connotations of drug ‘dependence’
as a
kind of slavery or bondage (Seddon 2010: 31–2). Or take Carl May’s
argument that while ‘addiction’ has been thoroughly medicalized since
the nineteenth century, ‘recovery’ has not, leaving the contemporary
addict caught between historical layers of meaning – between a med-
icalized discourse of disease and a moralized discourse of cure (May
2001). The tradition of Begriffsgeschichte is more explicitly concerned
with this issue – with how our concepts manifest the contemporaneity
of the noncontemporaneous (Koselleck 2011: 18).There is also a fit with
Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ approach, which mines successive schemas of
rationality, asking what each contributes to the unacknowledged, un-
conscious foundations of present thought (see Flynn 2005: 30–1; Koop-
man 2013: 29–31; Garland 2014: 368–70;
cf. Bevir 2015: 236). Such
historical perspectives invite us to reflect on the ambiguities – and the
evaluative ambivalence (see Skinner 2002: 153–5) – that follow from
loading concepts with multiple meanings and putting them to the ser-
vice of divergent practices over time.
The recovery of ‘police’

A complementary approach to conceptual history focuses less on trac-
ing the descent of concepts through time than on recovering historic
concepts. It aims to recoup a cluster of meanings that has slipped out of
current streams of thought – to retrieve a way of thinking that has not
descended to the present. This means getting to grips with an unfamiliar
way of thinking; it means mining the difference between past thought
and present thought. An historicist endeavour, it aims at ‘seeing things
their way’ (Skinner
5 It is not, though, an antiquarian pursuit:
2002: 1–7).
once recovered, historic concepts can be put to work on contempo-
rary problems, affording original perspectives and inspiring novel lines
of enquiry. Thus, understanding past thought can offer fuel for our own
thinking.
Let us explore this approach through the concept of ‘police’. For many
years, we did not subject ‘police’ to sustained conceptual enquiry: unlike
‘policing’ (see, for example, Kempa et al. 1999), it seemed to apply straight-
forwardly to a particular institution –
the
police. More recently, though,
several researchers – zeroing in on a particular strand in Foucault’s gene-
alogies of government – have recovered a quite different, historic concept
of ‘police’. From roughly the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, ‘police’
denoted an exceptionally broad ideal of (urban) government, oriented
to promoting security, public morality and ‘good order’. Exceeding the
bounds of any specific institution, ‘police’ infused municipal government
at large, from street cleansing to welfare provision, controls on drink-
ing houses to regulation of commodity prices (Neocleous 2000a: 1–21;

Dodsworth 2008).Also termed ‘policy’ in England (Neocleous
2000a: 9–
11; Carroll 2002: 465–9), this was a governmental ideal widely shared in
early modern Europe and, later, in America (see Foucault 2009: 311–32;

Knemeyer 1980; Dubber 2005).
To recover a concept, one must be alive to the possibility that, in past
societies, it meant something profoundly different from what it means to-
day. Scholars of ‘police’ went to historic texts – legal and political treatises,
moral and religious tracts, municipal records and the like – not searching
for preconceived ideas, but listening to what they had to say (Skinner
2002: 1–7; cf. Nelken 2009). Of course, one cannot exactly understand
the past ‘on its own terms’: all histories are engagements between past and
present; we cannot leave our preconceptions at the door (de Haan 2015:
793).Yet it is neither impossible nor fruitless to try – to open one’s mind
to possibilities of meaning beyond our own, parochial terms of reference
(Skinner
2002: 77). This entails turning to original historical sources –
for anything else is bound to reproduce received understandings – and
reading them in light of the unique circumstances and discursive forma-
tions of their times. Like genealogy, conceptual recovery should surprise
us; it feeds from ‘that per petual renewal, that constantly reborn surprise,
which only the struggle with [original] documents can supply’ (Bloch
1953: 86; see also Knepper and Scicluna 2010: 413–4). It is a sensitive
art; it rewards patience. Nothing is more destructive of the sympathetic,
historicist pursuit of another point of view than the scholar in a hur ry –
chasing after what some canonical thinker ‘must have said’ on the point
at hand. When historic materials simply confirm our preconceptions, we
must ask ourselves what we have failed to see (cf. Nelken 2009: 292).
Again like genealogy, conceptual recovery distances us from received
understandings. As the historian Quentin Skinner argues, by offering a
sense of the wider possibilities of human thought, it affords a critical
vantage point on current ways of thinking (Skinner 2002: 6). Moreover,
it presents us with ‘candidates for belief ’: once recovered, an historic
concept becomes, so to speak, a live option for contemporary enquiry
(Farr 1989: 40–1). In this respect, it helps to compensate for the sense of
rootlessness that can result from other forms of conceptual history (such
as genealogy). Rorty argues that the ‘ironist’ overcomes doubt not by
searching after some higher, transcendental truth, but by remaking their
beliefs for themselves (Rorty 1989: 97). And recovered concepts can pro-
vide the materials for such intellectual refashioning, helping us attain a
measure of independence from inherited conceptions. They help us ‘to
do our own thinking for ourselves’ (Skinner 2002: 88).
What use, then, is the archaic concept of ‘police’? The simple fact that
‘police’ has to do with more than crime does not get us far – sociologists
of policing have always known this (Reiner 2010b).Yet there is more to
the historic concept than this. First, it centres attention not on emer-
gency response – often
deemed central to the police role –
but
on wider
preconditions of order. In early modern usage, ‘police’ was a social police
(Neocleous 2000b), concerned with assuring free exchange, civil order
and social stability. Second, ‘police’ pushes us to think less of what police
institutions do than of what regulations they enact. In practice, ‘police’

government amounted to a manifold of minute rules and ordinances
(Knemeyer 1980). Whereas sociologists of policing emphasize discretion
in law-enforcement,‘police’
redirects attention – we think fruitfully – to
the very body of laws, orders, regulations and prohibitions which policing
agencies embody and symbolize.Thus, it might help us grasp the generic,
transposable aspect of formal regulation today – to discern what the
police officer shares with the public health officer, dog warden, parking
attendant and others. It suggests approaching police discipline as a fam-
ily of practices rather than an institutional prerogative (Foucault 1977;
Valverde 2008: 30–1).And third,‘police’ prompts us to take seriously the
locality of social ordering. Municipal ordinances are often highly particu-
laristic, regulating certain practices, by certain people, at certain times, in
certain places. Conceptions of community and social order are perhaps
still local conceptions first and foremost, just like the usually quotidian
offences against them (see Carroll 2002; Levi 2008;Valverde 2011).These
points underscore that ‘police’, in the old sense, still enjoys fertile con-
texts of application long after its demise from governmental discourse
(see also Knemeyer 1980: 191–3; Stenson 1998;Valverde 2008).
We have focused so far on recovering the content of historic
concepts – yet we might also seek to recover their function. As figures
in the so-called ‘Cambridge
School’ of intellectual history have argued,
to understand an historic concept, one must ask what past actors were
doing in deploying it. The meaning of a concept arises partly from what
it can accomplish in argument – from the political purposes to which it
can be put (Dunn 1980: 22; Farr 1989: 26; Skinner 2002). To get at such
purposes, one must locate a concept in specific speech acts (or thought
‘events’), taking place within particular discursive exchanges (Pocock
1980; Skinner 2002: 77–8). Francis Dodsworth has done this best for
‘police’,
specifically in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century
England. He
argues that proponents of ‘police’ reform in this era operated amid con-
cern regarding the impact of commerce on public virtue. Against those
who equated ‘police’ with arbitrary government, reformers prophesied
imperial Britain’s coming fall – like Rome before it – under a corrupt
culture of ‘luxury’ (Dodsworth 2007; Dodsworth 2008). In this context,
reformers deployed ‘police’ to press for a new, systematic approach to
moral reform. In a culture that prized individual public virtue, use of
‘police’ suggested that public morals were a social problem that required
collective, preventative solutions (Dodsworth 2007; Dodsworth 2008;
Dodsworth 2019: 156–62).
Thus, via ‘police’,
reformers legitimized an
extension in the ‘problem-space’
of the state into arenas that ‘exceeded

the moral capacity of the individual’ (Dodsworth 2008: 603).
Most of us are not historians of our own vocabulary – we are inter-
ested simply in formulating concepts fruitful for practical enquiry. And
we are free to repurpose words to suit our purposes – we owe the dead
nothing in making of their terms what we see fit (cf. de Haan 2015).Yet
the kind of deeply contextual, historicist enquiry outlined here has merit
for us too. Attending to what our concepts have done in argument may
prompt us to reflect more fully on what we are up to, what our intentions
are in formulating concepts and what unforeseen effects they may have
(see
Pocock 1980).6 Moreover, a contextualist approach to conceptual
recovery is perhaps especially likely to produce genuinely original in-
sights. We have seen that the very concept ‘police’ was implicated in the
formation of powerful state (police) institutions and the legitimization of
states themselves. Hence, our references to ‘the police’ are not innocent,
for the term bears a history of legitimating the institution that it pur-
ports simply to identify. And if ‘police’ is such a loaded term, what light
does that cast on the prospects for ‘police reform’ – or, indeed, on the
logic of ‘police
abolition’? To learn most from past writers on ‘police’ –
not merely to find interest in what they wrote, but to be moved by their
words – we have to get as close as possible to what they were getting at.
That may well lead us some distance from what it first appears they were
saying (Dunn 1980: 24). But the more authentically we recover a con-
cept, the more likely it is to help us break with tired dogmas and think
anew for ourselves.
The process of terror

The conceptual histories outlined above emphasize the eventful careers
of concepts and the historical specificity of our vocabulary.Yet one might
also think historically by temporalizing concepts themselves – by probing
how they unlock particular temporal horizons of thought and action,
suggest a certain mode or direction of movement, or direct analysis to
events, conditions and consequences (see also Koselleck 1997).7 In this
section, we focus on how to embed process and temporal flow within

criminological concepts.
When formulating concepts, it is easy to slip into thinking of fro-
zen forms unmoved by the flow of time. As Norbert Elias noted, the
basic categories of social science –
‘norm,
‘value’,
‘structure’,
‘function’,

‘class’,‘system’,‘society’,‘individual’ –
are often presented as ‘isolated and
motionless objects’, which social analysis must somehow fire into life.
By contrast, historical thinking presses us to imagine such concepts as
intrinsically relational, contingent and dynamic (Elias 2012: 108). As we
saw in Chapter 2, the historian E.P. Thompson conceived of social class
in processual terms: not as an artefact of social structure but as an aspect
of social process; as ‘a relationship, and not a thing’ (Thompson 1991: 11).
To think about ‘class’ in this way is to fashion it as a processual concept –
a concept that embraces and exhibits temporal flow rather than abstract-
ing from it.
Let us develop this point through concepts of terrorism. Defining
‘ter rorism’ is almost a field of scholarship in its own right. Hundreds
of definitions have been put forward, and while most overlap on cer-
tain points – a violent act, political and communicative in character, ex-
ecuted within a context of asymmetric power relations (see Schinkel
2009: 181; Ramsay 2015: 213–6; Innes and Levi 2017: 458–9) – they
still seem somehow unsatisfactory. ‘Terrorism’ bears the hallmarks of a
concept that defies definition. It is a term rich with history: its meaning
has shifted markedly over time, encompassing a wide variety of actors,
strategies, means and ends (Smelser 2007: 230–3; Erlenbusch 2014). It
bundles together several semantic applications – including ‘terrorist’ as
opposed to ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘ter rorist’ as opposed to ‘ordinary’ crim-
inal (Ramsay 2015). It figures in a range of contexts, from mass-mediated,
political violence to private, domestic violence (see Pain 2014). It is also
a hotly contested term with almost invariably pejorative connotations.
‘Terrorism’, then, is exactly the kind of term we cannot hope to get clear
on in any conventional sense. As such, it is a prime candidate for the kinds
of conceptual histories discussed above (see Erlenbusch-Anderson
2018).
Yet we might also learn something from a processual concept of ter-
rorism. Generally, ‘terrorism’ is conceived as a certain kind of intentional
act – violent,
ideological, fearsome – or as a certain species of organi-
zation or group. In either case, it is understood as a thing that can be
grasped, fixed and analysed. Yet suppose we think of terrorism instead

as a certain kind of process – where might that thought take us? Some
years ago, the sociologist Eugene Walter outlined the ‘process of terror’,
constituted successively of an act or threat of violence, an acute emotional
reaction and consequent social effects (Walter 1964). This offers a basic
processual framework for conceptualizing terrorism (or, more exactly,
‘terror’). Walter asserted that terrorist violence is always ‘directed toward
an end beyond itself ’ (Walter 1964: 251) – whether seizing control of the
state (in a ‘siege of ter ror’) or eliciting obedience from the population (in
a ‘regime of terror’ – Walter 1964: 249). Focusing on the intended end of
violence helped Walter distinguish terror ideal-typically
from other pro-
cesses of state violence, including war (which aims at annihilation of the
enemy) and punishment (which aims to cor rect transgression).8 Yet iden-
tifying a process (ter ror) with its end (political control) somewhat lessens
the sense of temporal flow that we are concerned to capture; it risks
reducing dynamic processes to formulaic procedures. We are centrally
concerned instead with the immanent change, disposition or ‘becoming’
of the process itself. Hence, we are inclined to conceive of terror not
teleologically (with reference to intended outcomes) but in terms of a
‘structural
identity of operation’ (Rescher 2000: 25) – the
temporal and
logical sequence of violence, emotional reaction and social effects.
Amplifying Walter’s processual framework in this way furnishes a con-
cept of ‘terror’ that accommodates some of the richest insights from re-
cent scholarship. It centres attention not on the characteristics of terrorist
acts or actors but on what best distinguishes such acts from apparently
similar occurrences – namely the quality and effects of terror itself (see
Tilly 2004; Pain 2014). It foregrounds consideration of the emotional
specificity of terror, which Walter suggested involved an intense, irratio-
nal fear that instils insecurity in the innocent (cf . Ahmed 2015). It also
breaks down analytical dichotomies that bedevil terrorism scholarship
(Walklate
2018) – including the division of state from non-state terror-
ism (see Schinkel 2009: 182–4; Erlenbusch 2014: 472), and the separa-
tion of public, ‘global’ terrorism from private, ‘everyday’ terrorism (see
Pain 2014). Loosening Walter’s ideal-typical model also suggests how war
and punishment too may channel terror. Indeed, Walter himself noted
that punishment in specific social contexts (including in slave societies)
comes to operate ‘at the edge of the terror process’ (Walter 1964: 253).
If terror is a process unfolding through time, then we might well ask

how it affects those caught up in it. The answer will vary from one con-
text to another, but certain effects seem characteristic. One is the drive to
react – to meet suicide attack with assassination, to answer death squads
with car bombs (see Brym and Araj 2006). Under the process of terror,
people often terrorize others.This illuminates the dynamic interaction of
terrorism and counter-terrorism –
the
reciprocal reaction of defence and
attack and the rivalrous contest over the legitimacy of violence (Smelser
2007: 148–9;
Innes and Levi 2017: 472–3). Another is the tendency to
sharpen collective identities, strengthening collective solidarity while ste-
reotyping and denigrating ‘outsiders’ (Pyszczynski
et al. 2003: 100–11;
Collins 2004; Smelser 2007: 139–45; Mythen et al. 2009;Waxman 2011).
Then there are the broader economic, social and cultural effects of terror:
diversion of public funds to defence and security; reduction in economic
output and investment; escalation in psychological distress and exacer-
bation of underlying psychopathologies; experiences of cultural trauma,
memorialization and associated shifts in cultural norms (Pyszczynski
et al. 2003: 115–42; Smyth 2004; Smelser 2007: 157–9; Waxman 2011;
Pain 2014).
Understood as a process, we can perhaps better understand the iro-
nies and perversities of the social experience of terror. We can see how
responses to terror – forceful counter-offensives, intrusive surveillance,
arbitrary policing
– often sustain the process of terror in a counter-
productive or even self-defeating manner (Smelser 2007: 169–73;Verti-

gans 2010; Ahmed 2015). We can see too how apparently distinct forms
of terrorism are intimately and reciprocally connected (Pain 2014): for
instance, how the militarization and economic stagnation brought about
by insurgent suicide bombing may produce new patterns of (lethal)
domestic violence (see Sela-Sheovitz
2010). In turn, such points invite
fuller reflection on the dynamics of the terror process itself. Clearly, ter-
ror is sometimes self-reinforcing – feeding off itself, it enters a vicious
spiral. Specific arenas of social life – even social relations at large – may
degenerate into a self-sustaining cycle of threat, violence, trauma and
distrust (Ahmed
2015: 556–7).Yet this is a reversible dynamic: the vicious
circle of deepening terror can be unwound and re-spun into a process
of peace (Smyth 2004). In other contexts, the process of terror may pla-
teau: people may become habituated or de-sensitized to violence, such
that – however marked their effects – they

constitute a ‘new
normal’
(see
Smyth 2004: 560; Waxman 2011; Pain 2014: 539–40). Finally, wid-
ening the temporal lens, we might explore how the dynamics of terror
might feed into longer-term
processes: the monopolization of protective
violence by the state; the civilization or de-civilization of social rela-
tions (Vertigans
2010); or processes of settler-colonization,
dispossession
and genocide (Shalhoub-Kevorkian
2016). In these ways and others, the
intended, agentful process of terror may connect with and sustain un-
planned, directional processes unfolding across a much longer duration
(cf. Elias 2009: 4–5).
Theory
Any effort to theorize about crime and justice entails abstracting from
particular times and places. The danger is that theorizing cuts loose en-
tirely from the kind of historical sensibility we are determined to ad-
vocate. Hence, the remainder of this chapter turns to how historical
thinking intersects with criminological theory. First, it assesses the rela-
tionship between theory and historic mater ials – how theory can help
make sense of historical sources, and how historical sources can help us
evaluate theory. Second, it discusses the fertility of historical perspec-
tive in developing theory through theorizing from historic contexts and
through theorizing historical change.
Applying and testing theory

One way of thinking about theory is as a portable model – a transpos-
able explanatory device that one can apply to data from here or there,
now or then. This describes not just ‘covering-law’
theories – such as
rational choice theory or self-control
theory (Calhoun
1998: 856) – but
also ‘grand’ theories of historical development, which style the course
of (moder n) history as the process of some master dynamic (such as
class struggle or civilization). Such theories promise to illuminate historic
data, helping us make sense of the past, and to lend them ‘explanatory
value’ in the context of contemporary debates (cf. Lawrence 2019). Over
the years, despite a certain lack of theoretical self-consciousness
(Burke

2005; Sewell 2005; Lawrence 2012), historians have made increasing use
of social theory. Criminal justice historians specifically have fruitfully

applied criminological frameworks – concerning statistical patterns in
offending, for example, or the intersection of responses to crime with
norms of gender and ethnicity – to historical source materials.
The logic of ‘theory-borrowing’
is well illustrated by applications of
‘police culture’ to police history. Sociologists of policing have used a
certain ideal-typical
sketch of police occupational sub-culture to explain
certain general biases in police decision-making and so to shed light on
police corruption, secrecy, racism and other forms of discrimination (see
Reiner 2010a: 115–38, 164–73). For some sociologists of policing, the
basic features of this occupational sub-culture demonstrate remarkable
continuity over time (Loftus 2010). Furthermore, via oral history tran-
scripts and police memoirs, historians of the English police have traced
aspects of this culture – including the valorization of violence in police
work and an ‘us and them’ attitude towards the general public – back at
least to the early twentieth century (Clapson and Emsley 2002; Lawrence
2010; Dodsworth 2011). Unsurprisingly, then, historians have sometimes
retrojected the explanatory framework afforded by ‘police culture’. Thus,
Paul Lawrence (2010) links police culture historically to occupational
bonds and identity, arguing that the self-image and internal narratives
of the police help sustain morale and cohesion. Similarly, Dodsworth
(2011)
suggests that cultures of masculine authority in late-Victorian
and Edwardian policing were implicated in bringing ‘respectable’ values
to ‘rough’
urban communities – a point that resonates with contempo-
rary research linking police self-presentation and ‘the
theatrics of the
thin blue line’ to the management of an apparently unruly ‘underclass’
(Linnemann and Medley 2017: 69).
Just as theory can be applied to make sense of historic materials, so too
the past offers a vital testing ground for criminological theory. For exam-
ple, using evidence from late-Victorian and Edwardian magistrates’ court
cases for common assault, Barry Godfrey and colleagues (2005) tested
the claim that gendered sentencing patterns arise mostly from contextual
factors relating to the offence rather than from the gender of offender
and victim. The results suggest that while contextual factors account for
some gendered patterns – including
differentials in conviction rates –
there remains a basic, gender-based divide in sentencing, with women
typically receiving more lenient sentences than men.Taken together with
work presenting divergent findings in other historical contexts (for ex-

ample, Boritch 1992), this suggests that the role of gender in sentencing
is historically contingent and so illuminates the limitations of theory on
gender and sentencing.
The power of such research to test theory derives from the effects of
historical change. It operationalizes the difference, the alterity, produced
by historical change – the sense of histor ical distance separating present
from (historic)
past –
to
interrogate the reach of criminological theory
across times. History takes contemporary theory, so to speak, out of its
comfort zone: social science models ‘are “essayed” by history in areas
foreign to that of their elaboration’ (de Certeau 1988: 80). The empirical
basis for criminological theorizing is strikingly thin; most theory springs
from contemporary Western (especially Anglo-American)
societies. Just
as it tends to ride roughshod over cultural difference across the globe
(Karstedt
2001: 295; Nelken 2009;Young 2011: 73–81;Aas 2012), so too
criminological theory is frequently oblivious to its narrow terms of his-
torical reference (cf. Elias 1987: 229–30). Testing theory with historic
materials mobilizes the past as a point of comparison with the present,
radically enlarging the dataset that purportedly general theories must ex-
plain and exposing their hidden assumptions or limiting cases (Karstedt
2001: 291–5; Lacey 2006: 223). Historical research thus offers important
‘negative’ findings on the reach of criminological theory that might re-
orient ongoing theoretical work, altering the starting points from which
theorizing proceeds and so exacting ‘concessions to the deviousness of
history’ (Abrams 1982: 160).
This point about historical difference, though, suggests a certain gen-
eral hazard in juxtaposing historic data with ‘portable’ theory.Taking his-
torical time seriously, we are enjoined to consider each situation as unique
in its historical context. This concern for historical specificity haunts the
application of theory.We might fall for ‘false friends’ – allowing
apparent
correspondences between the theory and historic materials to obscure
deeper differences separating the two contexts of application. For exam-
ple, one might agree that police occupational culture and certain aspects
of police practice co-exist
in both past and present contexts – yet while
one helps to explain the other in the contemporary setting, this might
not be true in the historic. We are tempted to slip into anachronism –
to mistake surface similarities for fundamental equivalence. Deeper,
structural differences in policing

– social and technical – might better
explain police practice in the past, robbing police culture historically of
the explanatory value posited by contemporary theory.
More prosaic difficulties with historical sources also trouble ap-
plications of theory in many contexts. Very often, primary sources are
a fragmentary and arbitrary collection of documents that afford only
impressionistic assessments of the issues that concern us (see Steedman
2001: 68–9). Indeed, we often turn to theory precisely to ‘get more out’
of the sources.Yet this brings with it the danger of erasing the individu-
ality of those materials and the specificities of experience they document.
Their contents may be impressionistic, but historical sources are also
impressionable – they offer little resistance to the impositions of theory.
This problem is hardly unique to archival research (cf. Downes and Rock
2011: 196); yet dusty old volumes are less likely to forge an emotional
connection with the researcher commensurate with in-depth interviews
or first-hand
observations (though
see Bosworth 2001a). Hence, we can
easily find ourselves subsuming all this inert paper under whatever the-
oretical framework we have to hand. Reflecting on the dissonance be-
tween her own working-class childhood and the standard Marxist and
psychoanalytic accounts, the historian Carolyn Steedman stresses the
danger of slotting faint traces of human experience into a coherent, pre-
formed framework – coherent
only because it is pre-formed –
and thus
of losing touch with the specificity of past times and the singularity
of past happenings (Steedman 1986). This difficulty helps account for
historians’ somewhat ambivalent embrace of theory. As the philosopher
Michel de Certeau observed: ‘The historian comes to circulate around
acquired rationalizations. He or she works in the margins’ (de Certeau
1988: 79, original emphasis).
Theorizing historically
We have suggested that while ‘portable’ theory often leads to new per-
spectives and insights in historical research, it also sits in tension with the
specificities of historical phenomena and their contexts.Yet the problem
is perhaps less ‘theor y’ as such than the inescapable difficulties of his-
torical explanation; after all, wherever there is explanation, there must
be some species of theory (self-conscious
or otherwise). Furthermore,
portable theory is not the only kind of theory, and borrowing theory is
not the only way of theorizing historical enquiry. Indeed, those histori-
ans more at ease with social theory have occasionally chided their col-
leagues for borrowing and repurposing theories from the social sciences
rather than developing theory for themselves (Stedman Jones 1976; see
also Sewell 2005: 3–6). Hence, the central question emerges: how might
one theorize historically?
One option is to theorize from historic materials themselves – to the-
orize, in other words, for other times. This approach expresses, in Steed-
man’s words, ‘the urgent need…to find a way of theorizing the result
of…difference and particularity’ (Steedman 1986: 16). It also aligns with
the determination of comparative criminology to ‘indigenize’ theory –

to cultivate theorizing from within the cultural context of application
(Karstedt
2001: 295–6; see also Aas 2012: 15–17).
Clearly, one cannot
stimulate theorizing from times long past – yet one can at least theorize
from their remaining sources. One might thus recuperate and extend the
works of perceptive observers from those times. Foucault’s (1977: 200–
28) elaboration of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ writings into a fully-

fledged theory of ‘panopticism’ exemplifies this approach. Of course, it
helps to have such an inventive theorist on hand; it can be difficult to
take less august ‘theor ists’ seriously. Crime historians have spent more
time refuting contemporary explanations for crime and deviance in the
past than they have sympathetically reworking them. Looking back, the
historical researcher in some respects occupies a privileged position, able
to grasp much that was unclear or inaccessible in times past (Phillips
2013: 1–4); yet theirs is also a distant vantage point, from which profound
misunderstandings and confusions are liable to arise. At least some of the
time, we are better off choosing which contemporary account to trust
rather than substituting for them all the latest portable theory.
There are also, though, opportunities to theorize from more dispa-
rate, archival materials. Indeed, close scrutiny of recognizable problems
in a culturally distinct setting can prompt original and rewarding theo-
rizing. Take Thompson’s work on the ‘moral economy’ of the plebeian
crowd in eighteenth-century
England (1971), which sought to counter
the ‘spasmodic
view’ of eighteenth-century
crowd violence as explicable
simply in terms of economic distress and rising food prices. Thompson
considered these explanations crudely reductionist: they did not consider
the complexities of motive, behaviour and function in relation to pro-

test. He argued instead that, in almost all crowd actions, a detectable
‘legitimizing notion’ (commonly a defence of traditional r ights or cus-
toms), combined with a wider communal consensus, enabled collective
action to prevail over fear and deference. It was not just deprivation,
then, that caused disorder; outrage at immoral and illegitimate ruling-
class practices legitimized direct action from the crowd. Or consider an-
other example – Louis Chevalier’s classic work on Labouring Classes and
Dangerous Classes (1973). Using extensive literary and statistical materi-
als from early nineteenth-century
Paris, Chevalier developed a concep-
tion of crime patterns as indicators of ‘social deter ioration’ in the city
(Chevalier
1973: 269–70).
Especially at times of acute social distress, he
claimed (echoing Durkheim) that crime becomes ‘a nor mal social fact’
(Chevalier 1973: 9), the prime indicator of the pathology of the urban
condition, and crime can thus be read as an instance of the biological
and physical determination of individual and collective experience more
widely (Chevalier 1973: 439).
These examples, unusual though they are, indicate that historic ma-
terials provide a fertile ground for theorizing. Fundamentally, it is once
again the historical distance separating present from past that helps stim-
ulate the theoretical imagination. Research across historical distance –
like other forms of cross-cultural enquiry (Karstedt
2001; Nelken 2010:
37–9)
– presents a challenging combination of strangeness and famil-
iarity, of puzzlement and recognition. Research with historic materials
helps to ‘exoticize
the domestic’ – to distance us from ‘modes
of life and
thought which remain opaque…because they are too familiar’ (Bourdieu
1988: xi; see also Lacey 2006: 202). As such, it draws out explanatory
tasks and challenges that are not apparent at first glance (Lawrence 1984).
In Elias’s terms, research across times affords us a degree of detachment
from the parochial concerns of the now (Elias 2007: 11–12; see also
Bourdieu and Charter 2015: 45–6). It demands a measure of critical dis-
tance from the contingencies of the present situation and challenges us
to integrate our habits of thinking into a longer and more variegated
chain of human experience. It also prompts us to see our own situation
from another point of view – to think ourselves through the eyes of
others – affording us a keener sense of the specificities and eccentricities
of our own time. By contrast, attempts to formulate wide-ranging theory
from a ‘preoccupation
with short-term,
present-day
causes’ are bound
to failure (Elias 1987: 230). Of course, insofar as we criminologists are
implicated in the object of our study, our research necessarily evinces
a relatively low degree of detachment (Elias 2007: 13). And the more
one thinks of criminology as an activist field (broadly understood), the
more detachment or distance might seem a pretext for ‘othering’ our
research subjects (see Young 2011).Yet any effort at theoretical reflection
demands some degree of abstraction from the issues of the moment –
that we think beyond immediate circumstances and concerns. Research-
ing across times tends to inculcate in the researcher a certain appreciative
worldliness, affording them a broader perspective from which to think
about structural similarities between phenomena encountered in quite
different contexts (cf. Swedberg 2014: 29–51).
Theories derived from historic materials often spill over into the inter-
pretation of other times, including our own. Indeed, Thompson’s ‘moral
economy’ thesis has been appropriated in historical and contemporary
research across a range of disciplines.Within criminology, Susanne Karst-
edt and Stephen Farrall (2006) have reworked the theory to explain how
‘respectable’ citizens in contemporary Europe engage in diverse forms of
everyday crime.Where Thompson’s context concerned the liberalization
of corn markets, Karstedt and Farrall’s centred on the rise of neo-liberal
market policies. As citizens are enjoined to become consumers, their
relationship with the state and welfare services is marketized, helping
to breed anomie and to normalize justifications for committing certain
subtle illegalities. Similarly, Stephen Wakeman’s (2016) research on heroin
users in ‘austerity Britain’ illuminates how a ‘moral economy’ of infor-
mal exchange and reciprocal support within marginalized communities
provides crucial support for users, limiting resort to crime.Together with
other social histories of the crowd, Thompson’s work provided inspira-
tion for the ‘social identity’ model of crowd behaviour in social psychol-
ogy, which, in turn, has informed innovations in public order policing
(see Stott and Drury 2017). Of course, as successful theories circulate in
ever-wider
contexts, trivial and gestural invocations tend to proliferate,
as do ‘applications’ which barely relate to the concerns of the original
work (see Fassin 2009). Yet translating historical theories into contem-
porary enquiry is perhaps less hazardous than retrojecting contemporary
theory into historic contexts. This is because one never theorizes purely
from an historic context. Rather, historical theories are informed by two

temporal contexts: the historic context of the source materials and the
contemporary context of theorization. The historian could not escape
‘present-day modes of thought’ even if they wished to; rather, they in-
variably reach an understanding of the past ‘distinctly of [their] own time’
(Lowenthal 1985: 216). Hence, theories designed to apply in historic
contexts are in a sense predisposed to contemporary application, for they
are themselves (as much as any other theory) products of their time.
Another way of theorizing historically is to theorize issues of continuity
and change directly. This approach immediately orients theory to a core
aspect of historical time. Theories of change figure prominently in the so-
ciology of punishment, where there is as much interest in the development
of penal forms as in their abstract nature. Here, the theoretical task lies
largely in explaining how and why purportedly transformative episodes
of penal change occurred at particular times. This leads to consideration
of connections between penal change and wider social change. A Marxist
account of penal change issues from Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939), and
their thesis that penal sanctions adapt to shifts in labour demand and con-
ditions.Thus, the coming of the prison coincided with the rise of industrial
capitalism, as economic priorities tended towards the use of prison labour
rather than corporal or capital sanctions (see also Melossi and Pavarini
1981). An Eliasian account of penal change hinges on the operation of the
civilizing process, leading to a focus on concurrent, long-term processes of
change in penal form and administration and in cultural mentalities, social
institutions and psychic structure (see Spierenburg 1984; Pratt 2002). Fou-
cault himself examined penal change as an aspect of changing techniques
and mentalities of government. The prison exemplified a shift from pun-
ishing the body to punishing the soul and reflected the ascent of surveil-
lance and discipline more widely, extending to hospitals, schools, barracks,
factories and other institutions of the ‘disciplinary society’ (Foucault 1991:
193). Notwithstanding their differences, each of these accounts is at once
historical and theoretical: they combine a sense of how penal change un-
folded in specific historical cases with a sense of the characteristic or par-
adigmatic quality of such cases; they operate simultaneously as analyses of
particular historical events and as suggestive allusions to the ways in which
social processes and formations tend more widely to take shape (see also
Abrams 1982: 197–200;
Lacey 2006).
Such theories of penal change, then, are historically specific theories.

They are not truly general accounts of how penal change necessarily de-
velops in all times and places, but rather interpretations of its characteristic
dynamics, inferred from specific historical cases yet applicable somewhat
more broadly (Calhoun 1998; see also Knepper 2019). As such, they un-
derstand penal forms as historically specific phenomena, each related to
the others in a sequence of change (cf. Calhoun 1998: 859). For example,
‘penal-welfarism’ is not some generic form that may emerge at any time,
but a specific form, arising out of the monochrome, moralistic world of
Victorian penality and developing in conjunction with the growth of
welfare states (Garland 1985). Penal-welfarism
necessarily develops in
this way because that is its nature – its historical essence – as a penal form.
Thus,Victorian penality is an historical precondition of penal-welfarism,
while penal-welfarism is but one possible transformation of Victorian
penality (cf. Elias 2012: 156–7;Abrams 1982: 145–6).

As historically specific theories, a promising path towards refining and
developing theories of penal change leads from an examination of how
they handle historical time. First, one might scrutinize the timing and
sequencing of change within these theories. For example, Ashley Rubin
challenges canonical theories of the birth of the prison by examining the
prison’s ‘pre-history’;
by taking a longer view of penal change, she argues,
we can identify ‘subdominant ideational and physical precursors’ to the
institutionalization of the prison (Rubin 2018; see also Spierenburg 2007).
Shifting the temporal range in this way alters the basic explanatory prob-
lem at hand (see also Knepper 2016: 147–8). Second, one might decom-
pose the eras of long-term theories into distinct sub-periods to obtain
a more subtle grasp of the dynamics of change. Thus, Raymond Mich-
alowski and Susan Carlson (1999) deepen Rusche and Kirchheimer’s
account by distinguishing successive eras of political-economic forma-
tion within the capitalist era, demonstrating that the unemployment –
imprisonment relationship varies significantly between them. Finally, by
tracing regularities in penal change over long periods, one might progress
from theorizing specific penal changes to theorizing the ‘shape’ of penal
history (cf. Calhoun 1998: 868; Corfield 2007). For example, reflecting
on cultural and penal change in Europe and America since the eigh-
teenth century, Dario Melossi (2008) argues for inter-connected,
‘long

wave’ movements in socio-economic conditions, representations of the
criminal, and penality. Such movements operate cyclically, he suggests,

alternating between an incorporationist and an exclusionist penal pole,
each associated with certain broad social conditions and cultural under-
standings of crime and criminality. Thus, Melossi outlines a distinctive,
cyclical theory of penal change, in contrast (for example) to the devel-
opmental model offered by Eliasian accounts connecting penality with
(de)civilizing
processes.
All this suggests that eclecticism in theories of penal change might be a
virtue. David Garland, in particular, has argued against the idea of an over-
arching theory of penality. Punishment is not reducible to some essential
social function – it is not, somehow, ‘all about’ class conflict, discipline or
social solidarity (Garland 1990: 19–21;
see also Daems 2008: 40–3).
Fur-
thermore, if we need ‘a developmental as well as a functional perspective’
in penal theory (Garland 1990: 21), then we might plausibly find value in
as many theories as there are varieties of penal development. We might,
for example, need different theories for each phase of penal change; early
adoptions of the prison, for example, may raise quite different explana-
tory demands from its subsequent adoption more widely (Rubin 2018).
The same point applies to penal developments unfolding simultaneously
in different places or in different sectors of the penal field. Though much
attention has been paid to punitive developments in recent decades –
pre-eminently
in the United States and the United Kingdom (Garland
2001a) – other parts of the world have witnessed rather different pe-
nal trajectories, including ‘Scandinavian exceptionalism’ (Pratt 2008) and
post-Soviet
‘carceral
collectivism’ (Piacentini
and Slade 2015). Hence, we
are confronted with the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous –
the occurrence in the same time of things not of the same time.Viewing
processes of penal change as individual movements of historical time, we
have no need to bring them under a master theory. Rather, we require
multiple theories for the various processes of change, together perhaps
with a theory of their conjunction (cf. O’Malley 1999).
For some, all this will not look less like ‘theory’ and more like ordi-
nary historical explanation.They may complain that concern for historical
specificity necessarily detracts from ‘proper’ theoretical development (see
Kiser and Hechter 1991).There is a tension here, as we have noted, but no
fundamental opposition. There are many kinds of theory, including the-
ory derived from analysis of specific events and processes (Calhoun 1998).
Indeed, part of the value of historical thinking is to temper the allure of

‘grand theory’ (Mills 1959). Historical thinking encourages a certain theo-
retical parsimony – to make do with just enough theory to problematize, to
provoke or to tie events and processes together (see Osborne 2002: 182–3).
Hence, it narrows the gap between theory and historical explanation –
yet a gap remains nonetheless. Historical explanation tends to work from
a given theoretical framework (explicit or otherwise) towards the partic-
ularities of a given case, often ‘singling out’ its special or unique factors
(Dray 1964: 48). Its closing rhetorical flourish returns us to the singularity
of events. By contrast, historically specific theory works in the opposite
direction, reaching from the given case to some allusion of wider relevance.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that historical thinking has much to contribute
to theoretical and conceptual enquiry in criminology. Some of its contri-
butions are disruptive, but they are no less important for that. Forays into
other times provide our theories with some of their toughest tests; excur-
sions through time disclose how deeply contested and ambiguous our core
concepts are. In important respects, historical enquiry undermines foun-
dations that we might otherwise take for granted. But such foundations
need undermining in this way – otherwise, our work rests not on secure
categories and dependable laws but on the misplaced confidence of an
amnesiac.The point is now often made that criminological theory derives
largely from highly select and unrepresentative parts of the world (Karstedt
2001; Nelken 2009; Aas 2012). It is less often noted just how selective is
our historical inheritance, in terms of both the theories and concepts that
help constitute our field. Just as it is incumbent on us broaden the geo-
graphical range of criminological thought, so too we need to harness the
past and the historical as resources for intellectual renewal in criminology.
We need aim, if not at ‘rights of equal (historical) representation’ (Symes
2011: 717), then at least at a more encompassing historical consciousness
with respect to theoretical and conceptual enquiry.
Historical contributions to theoretical and conceptual enquiry are
critical, even unsettling, insofar as they threaten to shake the rather pa-
rochial, presentist foundations upon which much work in our field rests.
Yet they also have more constructive contributions to make. Thinking
across historical times opens up worlds of difference, from which we

may gather perspectives or gain insights that exceed our own experience.
Equally, it showcases the longevity and versatility of strains of thought
that refuse to be forgotten. Theorizing developments through time al-
lows us to make sense of processes of change and continuity that are
occluded by short temporal horizons. These are distinctive and valuable
contributions to understanding criminological theories and concepts,
and we neglect to develop them at our peril.
Notes
1 Though systematic attempts to define crime are less common than one might
think (see Lynch et al. 2015; Reiner 2016).
2 Regrettably, we await a dedicated conceptual history of ‘crime’.
3 As the philosopher Colin Koopman (2013: 5) notes: ‘It sometimes seems as if
anyone who does history and is not themself a historian is eager to describe
their work as a “genealogy”’.
4 Foucault’s own genealogies focused more on governmental practices than
concepts.Yet, more generally, he wrote: ‘The role of genealogy is to record…
the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the
concept of liberty of or the ascetic life’ (Foucault 1984: 86).
5 Thus, it contrasts with ‘rational reconstruction’ (which systematises past think-
ing into coherent ideas) and conceptual ‘retrieval’ (which pursues the noblest
ideal of a given concept – Loader and Walker 2007: 17).
6 For an exemplary study of the origin and implications of a criminological
concept, see de Castelbajac (2014).
7 Consider, for example, the future-oriented, promissory quality of ‘security’,
in contrast to the retrospective orientation of key concepts (‘just deserts’,
‘retribution’) of criminal justice (Zedner 2007).
8 Writing in the protracted aftermath of the Holocaust,Walter’s focus was more
immediately on state terror than on revolutionary terrorism.
4
PASTS AND FUTURES
Almost by default, most research in criminology focuses on the present.

Relatively few studies venture sustained discussions of times past or times
yet to come. We have already advocated longer-term,
diachronic per-
spectives; in this chapter, we discuss how to think historically about the
present itself. One might suppose that focusing on the present obviates
the need for sustained reflection on historical time (see de Haan 2015:
798), and we criminologists seldom subject ‘the present’ to serious scru-
tiny. True, a significant body of work seeks to characterize contemporary
crime and control by situating it in its historical context (see Churchill
2019); but otherwise the present is approached as a given arena of social
life, in which one gathers data and reports findings. The social world is
simply here, and it is here all at once.
This chapter develops a quite different understanding of the present.
Deploying notions of tense and embodiment developed in Chapter 1,
it thickens this common-sense view of the present by incorporating the
ways in which individuals and groups, in the present, relate to pasts and
futures. In place of a flat, homogeneous present, it offers a more rugged
and varied terrain, with darkened depths of retained pasts and soaring
peaks of imagined futures. We are not concerned with ‘the past’ and
DOI: 10.4324/9780429196911-5
Pasts and futures 119
‘the future’ as such, but with pasts and futures as they figure in and bear
upon the present – as memory or myth, prophecy or plan, fact or fancy.
This notion of a present shot through with relations to other times
resonates with prominent interpretations of the present as a frame of
temporal experience and cultural meaning. From the phenomenologi-
cal tradition, following Edmund Husserl, we inherit the idea of an ex-
periential present constituted by the ‘retention’ of a previous, just-past
and the ‘protention’
of a coming, near-future (see
Carr 2014: 34–8). For
the historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck, social groups orient them-
selves in present time through a ‘space of experience’ (the ‘present past,
whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered’) and
a ‘hor izon of expectation’ (‘the future made present…[which] directs
itself to the not-yet,
to the non-experienced,
to that which is to be re-
vealed’ – Koselleck 2004: 259; see also Churchill et al. 2018). In a more
interpretive vein, the cultural theorist Raymond Williams suggested
that a given cultural present is composed not just of ‘dominant’ but also
of ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ currents, such that hangovers from the past
and glimpses of the future mingle with the temporal mainstream of
the now (Williams
1977: 121–7).
And finally, from the historian Harry
Harootunian, we derive the image of the ‘thick’ present, which in-
corporates distinct, non-contemporary
temporal regimes (Harootunian

2007).
What follows aims to showcase variety in how we relate to pasts and
futures. We seek to show that the present is suffused with multiple, in-
commensurable connections to pasts and futures, that operate according
to quite different temporal logics. These past and future connections il-
luminate key themes in crime and justice; yet most are rather obliquely
addressed in the criminological literature. Specifically, this chapter advances
two broad claims. First, the way we relate to pasts and futures is culturally
specific. Hence, pasts and futures are diagnostic of the present – they re-
flect present purposes and concerns. Second, experiences of crime and
(in)justice do not simply exemplify how we relate to other times; rather,
they themselves rework connections to pasts and futures in the present.
Hence, attending to pasts and futures yields insights into both the culture
of the present and the role of crime and justice in shaping the temporal
architecture of the present.
120 Pasts and futures
Pasts
This section addresses how the past figures in the present, at both the in-
dividual and the collective level. It foregrounds a basic contrast between
two present pasts: a recollected past of memory and history, which looks
back from the present across historical distance; and an immediate past of
trauma and haunting, which repeats or lingers, inseparable from the life
of the present. After exploring each of these pasts in turn, we examine
the role of criminal justice actors and criminologists in ‘fixing’ authori-
tative accounts of past crimes and atrocities, examining the political pur-
poses such efforts serve and the ethical issues they raise.
Memory and history

We relate to the past in part through memory, drawing past events and
situations into the present through acts of recollection. One aspect of
memory is strictly solipsistic – an internal, mental process of recollecting
personal experiences – though even individual memories are commonly
produced through interpersonal exchange, prompting and suggestion
(Halbwachs 1992: 38). Beyond this, though, is collective memory – a kind
of memory that relates to (and often reinforces) collective identities such
as family, nation and religion. As members of social groups, we accu-
mulate shared experience and reproduce such experience through col-
lective mnemonic practices (Halbwachs 1992; see also Karstedt 2009a:
3–7).
Collective memory is ‘necessarily
a mediated memory’, related
and conveyed by texts, artefacts and images (Assmann 2008: 55; see also
Lowenthal 1985). Through such media, individuals ‘remember’ pasts that
lie beyond their own lifetime; they identify with pasts outside subjective
experience yet within intersubjective experience (Assmann
2008: 51–2;
Carr 2014: 52–5). Socially dominant narratives, emotional connections
or outlooks on the past – with which we, as individuals or as group mem-
bers, may have only an indirect connection – enter into public memory.
These various forms of memory – individual,
collective, public – share
certain features in common. First, memory is always selective: the past
is never recollected as a totality, and so recollection proceeds in tandem
with forgetting. Second, memory is decidedly the work of the present.
Recollection pertains not to the past as past (the past in all its pastness)
but to the past made present. As the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs put it,
‘the past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present’
(Halbwachs 1992: 40). And third, we do not simply remember that which
is near at hand; we call upon memories not because they are recent
but because they are relevant to our concerns and purposes (Halbwachs
1992: 52–3). Hence, memory is a past not simply of the present but for the
present – a past to suit present requirements.
Memory shares many of its core features with history. History also
makes the past present, selectively, according to present circumstances.
The nineteenth-century founders of professional historiography may
have professed Olympian distance from their subject matter – dreaming
of a history severed from collective memory (Assmann 2008: 58–61) –

yet their histories too cultivated collective identities. They were deeply
implicated in forging national unity and identification with the newly
formed and centralizing European nation states (Nora 1989: 10–11;
Anderson 2006; Burke 2005). State-sponsored, nationalist histories pro-
vided dominant public narratives, reproduced through school history
curricula and textbooks (Assmann 2008: 64–5).
In 1923, history teacher
Gaston Clémendot told the national teachers’ union in Paris: ‘I come
before you to demand the total suppression of the teaching of history
in primary schools’. History, he reasoned, ‘inspired hatred of foreigners,
glorified the experience of battle, and laid the moral groundwork for
future wars’ (Siegel 2002: 770). Indeed, for the historical theorist Keith
Jenkins (1999: 27), foundationalist histories birthed the European nation
state, ‘perhaps
the most efficient (rational)
killing-machine
that has ever
existed’. Yet public memory arises from a polyphony of representations
of the past: novelists, musicians, filmmakers, politicians, museum workers,
tourism promoters and others speak louder than historians (Assmann
2008: 53–4).
The novels of Charles Dickens, Walter Scott or Alexander
Dumas – together with subsequent cinematic adaptations – trump works
of history in public memory (Lowenthal 1985). Free from the constraints
of historiography, such popular genres better capture the imagination
and so more powerfully shape perceptions of the past. As Thomas Car-
lyle wrote, Scott’s novels showed ‘bygone ages… actually filled by living
men… with colour in their cheeks, with passion in their stomach…
not by the protocols, state-paper,
controversies and abstractions’ (Carlyle
1838: 214, cited in Lowenthal 1985: 225).
A confluence of history and popular media has shaped the public

memory of English policing. A ‘Whigg ish’ strain of police historiogra-
phy, developed in the first half of the twentieth century, propounded a
narrative of progress from chaos and corruption to rational order and
public service, a transition embodied in the Metropolitan Police, estab-
lished in 1829 by Robert Peel (Robinson 1979). This narrative chimed
with wider representations, which emphasized the measured demeanour
and good sense of the English ‘Bobby’ (Emsley
1992: 125–8).
As pub-
lic perceptions of policing became more contested from the 1950s, this
‘indulgent tradition’ (Emsley 1992) was sustained through both scholarly
and popular depictions of a past ‘golden age’. On the one hand, most
Anglo-American policing textbooks incorporated a Whiggish interpre-
tation of history, reproducing and sustaining the mythology of a set of
foundational, ‘Peelian principles’ underpinning the Metropolitan Police
(Lentz
and Chaires 2007). On the other hand, post-war film cultivated
nostalgia for an ‘imagined community’ of ‘long, hot summer days, village
greens, quiet meadows and cricket matches’ at a time of concern sur-
rounding rising violent crime and juvenile delinquency (McLaughlin
2007: 10). Basil Deardon’s film The Blue Lamp (1950) juxtaposed past
idyll and present anxieties: standing for stability and community were the
iconic PC George Dixon, his family home, the police profession and a
united nation; the seed of unrest was Tom Riley, the young petty criminal
who shot and killed Dixon, communicating the dangers of individualism
and the breakdown of informal social controls (McLaughlin 2007). This
idealization of the police helped to forge the memory of a ‘golden age’
of policing that many scholars argue never existed (Reiner 2010a: 68; see
also Pearson 1983).
Behind such public narratives, though, lie more complex, fractured
formations of collective memory. As Ian Loader and Aogán Mulcahy
expertly illustrated, collective memories of and attachments to the
English police differ across class, ethnic and generational lines. Loader
and Mulcahy argued that public attitudes towards the police issue from
‘durable
dispositions’ – formed
through collective experience and re-
produced through collective memory – that
are more pre-conscious
and
fantastical than the result of conscious evaluation of police performance
(Loader and Mulcahy 2003: 42–4). Hence, diverse perspectives on po-
licing’s past arise across social and generational groups. Regard for the
traditional ideal of the ‘Bobby’ persists, though as a residual strain in pub-

lic consciousness. It is accompanied by alternative perspectives, including
disenchantment at the increasing bureaucratic distance of modern police
organizations, and bitter antagonism steeped in memories of racial dis-
crimination or picket-line
violence. Thus, attitudes towards the police
cannot be understood apart from the place of the police in collective
memory, and how the divergent historical fortunes of individuals and
communities intersect with those of state and nation.
In the context of such varied attachments to the past, critical schol-
arship serves to challenge dominant narratives and so to revalue the
collective identifications and attachments which they sustain. This crit-
ical function is now commonplace in historiography; for the most part,
today’s historians are eager hunters of myth. As the philosopher David
Carr argues, historians tend purposely to dissociate themselves from the
received and remembered pasts of their social milieu – they ‘alienate
themselves from this living past’ (Car r 2014: 76; see also Tosh 2018: 29).
Some critical histories work by illustrating that dominant understandings
of the past have not arisen organically but were purposefully constructed
(see Hobsbawm 1983). Thus, police historians have exposed how the
‘indulgent tradition’ was rooted in tacit restrictions on press investigation
of police abuses and misconduct in the early twentieth century (Emsley
1992: 123–4).
Others, though – recognizing the selectivity inherent in
collective memory – seek to illuminate faces of the past hidden in public
discourse, constructing a ‘counter memory’ in pursuit of ‘a more honest
and complex self-image of the nation’ (Assmann
2008: 63; cf. Foucault
1984: 93). Critical histories of crime and policing provide ample material
for such a project, challenging us to recognize experiences that trouble
the complacent self-image of the peaceable English nation and its tra-
dition of ‘policing by consent’ (see, among others, Gatrell 1990; Emsley
2005).
Collective memory, then, is always plural; the present hosts multiple,
dissonant pasts. Images of the past vary not just across social groups but
also according to the social context of recollection. For example, Per Jør-
gen Ystehede (2016) suggests that crime museums are ambiguous spaces
of memory, which afford distinct connections to the past for different
social purposes (for professional training, scholarship, business and so on).
In other contexts, more profound disjunctures and incommensurabilities
between individual and collective memory arise, leading to subtle dis-

tinctions in relations to the past even where the hold of public memory
is strong. Koselleck observed that late twentieth-century
German culture
was saddled with a ‘negative memory’ in relation to the Holocaust, in that
survivors had a direct, indelible experience of suffering that could not be
shared by those who were not victimized or those born later. Most Ger-
mans, then, had to live with a certain lack of memory, even of an episode
that so profoundly shaped their public consciousness (Koselleck 2018:
240–1;
see also Assmann 2008: 65).
Trauma, haunting and the presence of the past

The notion of ‘negative
memory’ – of
an absence or void in memory –
leads us to ways of relating to the past that exceed the frame of rec-
ollection. Both memory and history look back on the past from the
present; chronological distance is accompanied by a sense of historical
displacement. Yet we do not always relate to the past in this way. Some-
times the chronological distance from a past – notably a ‘difficult’
past
marked violence, conflict, war or atrocity – belies its histor ical proximity,
its immediacy. We struggle to put such pasts behind us. They undermine
the assumption that the ‘hot topics’ of the present naturally cool with the
passing of time – that contested presents inexorably give way to histori-
cized pasts (Lorenz 2010: 85).
The art of recollection is thus deformed by experiences of trauma.
Classically, ‘trauma’ refers to a kind of psychological injury (resulting
from suffering or witnessing terror or atrocity) that one can neither ex-
press directly nor disregard. Traumatic episodes overwhelm our normal,
adaptive responses to threat, resulting in persistent, ‘defensive’ responses
in exaggerated form (Herman 1992: 34). Of particular interest here are
‘intrusive’ symptoms, in which the survivor repeatedly relives the episode
over a protracted period. As the psychiatrist Judith Herman explains: ‘It
is as if time stops at the moment of trauma. The traumatic moment be-
comes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks sponta-
neously into consciousness, both as flashbacks during waking states and
as traumatic nightmares during sleep’ (Herman 1992: 37; see also Cohen
2001: 118–9). More recently, scholars have also conceived of trauma
as a collective experience, in which our social identities – themselves
culturally constructed – are wounded or endangered (see, for example,

Alexander 2012). Individually or collectively, traumatic experiences are
not recollections, for there is no sense of distance separating past from
present. Rather, past and present run in parallel: the past is repeated, re-
lived, in the now. Trauma thus disturbs the flow of time, making a mock-
ery of accumulated experience and of past-present-future as an orienting
scheme for action (cf. Koselleck 2004: 215). As Dale Spencer notes, it
‘reduces temporality to a mere repetition of the identical, an indefinite
stagnation of a perpetual present, closed to any futurition’ (Spencer 2011:
47; see also Riley 2012: 34–5).
One observes traumatic relations to the past among survivors of
genocide and atrocity. For example, Julia Viebach documents recurrent,
cyclical incursions of violent pasts into present time among survivors
of the Rwandan genocide, whose experiential present is made up of
both continuous, flowing time and the return of the past (Viebach
2019: 291–4).Yet
trauma does not simply happen to such individuals –
they also ‘work through’ their experience via practices of memory.
Thus, Viebach notes how some survivors invest considerable energy
and labour in caring for the preserved remains of the dead that are
found at many memorial sites in Rwanda. This practice of care-g iving
restores dignity to the dead, reinstating them symbolically in the com-
munity of the living. At a more fundamental level, Viebach suggests,
this practice serves to remake temporal continuity out of the traumatic
rupture of mass killing, thereby reinstituting the flow of time (Viebach
2019: 278–9).
A similar, repetitive dynamic is manifested by pasts that haunt us
in the present. Issuing from the work of Jacques Derrida (2006) and
cultural theorist Mark Fisher (2012), there is a growing criminolog-
ical interest in ‘hauntology’ and its ‘dyschronic’ conception of time,
characterized by repetition and disruption, in which the ghosts of
past violence refuse to rest and continually interrupt the present
(Coverley 2020). This offers a frame for understanding the reso-
nances and reverberations of mass-mediated criminal cases long after
they occurred (see Linnemann 2015). Consider, for example, the
Whitechapel murders – the serial killing of women on the poverty-
stricken streets of the late-Victor ian East End of London by an un-
identified culprit known as ‘Jack the Ripper’. Besides producing a
whole industry of popular history and entertainment in ‘r ipperology’

(see Gray 2018), these sensational crimes have continued to haunt
the popular imagination. As Judith Walkowitz observed following the
‘Yorkshire
Ripper’ murders of the 1970s and 1980s – an apparently
similar series of killings of young women from Leeds and Bradford in
the north of England – the police and press were led hopelessly astray
by bogus letters and tape recordings received, thanks to the delusion
that they were in pursuit of another ‘Jack’, a publicity-seeking sex-
ual monster, rather than an unassuming and softly spoken local man
(Walkowitz
1992: 229–32). More generally,Walkowitz claims that the
iconography of the ‘Ripper’ and of female mutilation still serve to
‘intensify fears of male violence and convince women that they are
helpless victims’ (Walkowitz 1982: 569). Thus, it seems that the social
and psychological effects of these murders are still playing out, after
more than a century has passed.
More broadly, acts of violence can linger in specific locales and spaces
as a haunting presence. According to Michael Fiddler, particular sites
function as a ‘crypt’, providing a space for encounters with ghosts of
the past. Returning to Whitechapel, Fiddler analysed an art installation,
Die Familie Schneider, consisting of two neighbouring terraced houses
in which ‘signs of living, of dwelling, were absent… [revealing] no im-
prints, of family life other than piles of cigarette butts in an ashtray’
(Fiddler 2019: 472). The piece was designed to reconfigure domestic
space in disorientating ways, disassociating it from any particular time.
For Fiddler, the ghosts of troubled pasts from the surrounding area –
including those of poverty and deprivation, the ‘Ripper’ murders, the
Battle of Cable Street (clashes
between police and anti-fascist
demon-
strators in 1936), and the racist murder of Altab Ali in 1978 – haunt the
installation, which becomes a splintered crypt in which spectres speak
to its visitors.
The role of space and material culture in connecting us to the past is
developed further in work on the ‘presence’ of the past. For the histori-
cal theorist Eelco Runia, ‘presence’ describes a sense of ‘being in touch’
with the past (Runia
2006: 5–6). Rather like the hauntological ‘crypt’,
Runia speaks of ‘storehouses
of “presence”’ –
sites with hidden depths
through which the reality of the past rushes up to the surface (Runia
2006: 13). The material belongings of the dead, for example, serve as
repositories of past reality for relatives left behind. As the sociologist

Mary Gibson remarks: ‘We remember, hold on to or let go of the de-
ceased through their material possessions’ (Gibson 2008: 3). By retaining
their most personal artefacts – clothing, jewellery, locks of hair – we
make present an absent past, reproducing a certain kind of connection
with the dead themselves. Keeping things, then, is a way of ‘keeping
company with the dead’ (Gibson 2008: 191). Memorials sometimes
collate such intimate items – photographs, toys, articles of clothing –
to evoke the absent dead. According to Jeff Ferrell, roadside shrines to
victims of high-speed
automation in the south-western
United States
present ‘a symbolic life histor y of each individual’ (Ferrell 2003: 187; see
also Viebach 2019: 288). Over time, though, as these personal mementos
are eroded by dust and weather, they become more anonymous, uni-
versal markers of death. Taken together in this condition, they evoke ‘a
roadmap of sorrow and loss, a vast graveyard splayed out along the open
road, a suggestion of something more insidious than individual tragedy’
(Ferrell
2003: 187).
The power of personal possessions to evoke the past illustrates some-
thing of the mechanics of ‘presence’. Runia claims that the past is made
present less by representing or narrating what happened and more by
giving the past a place; ‘presence’, he argues, is not metaphorical but met-
onymic. Very roughly, a metonymy is something that stands in place of
something absent. Linguistically, it substitutes one term, one context of
meaning, for another (for example, ‘put the GBH [grievous bodily harm]
in cell B’). Yet Runia extends metonymy to any surprising or disruptive
substitution of one thing for another, in a way that helps us make sense
of the material presence of violent pasts. In her study of the memorializa-
tion of locations used as detention, torture and execution sites in Pino-
chet’s Chile, psychosocial scholar Margarita Palacios directs attention to
the ‘limit of representation and the impossibility of “saying it all”’. Rather
than signifying and making meaning, she proposes that sites of violence
best stand as ‘critical witness’ to unspeakable pasts (Palacios 2019: 604).
Hence, for Palacios, one of the most powerful of these ‘memorials’ is the
Casa Memoria – the site of a bungalow, used as a detention centre by the
secret police, which was hastily pulled down after the fall of the regime.
The plot is bare, save for the house’s exposed foundations and a simple
wooden sculpture. ‘As an uncovered scar’, Palacios explains, ‘it simply and
unapologetically disrupts’ (Palacios 2019: 617, original emphasis). Specif-

ically, it disrupts through a metonymic manoeuvre – it makes the past
present, indeed unavoidable, through the absence of that which cannot be
represented. Rather than trying to ‘say it all’, the Casa Memoria dramatizes
urgent need for meaning’ (Runia 2006: 19, original emphasis; see also
‘an
Koselleck 2018: 248).
Fixing the past

Both the plurality of memory and the presence of the past are potential
sources of discord and conflict. In this section, we examine how various
actors seek to govern these issues by ‘fixing’ the past – by authorizing sta-
ble, durable narratives concerning past happenings and their implications,
and thus by providing closure from troubling pasts. We turn, in other
words, to attempts to govern difficult pasts in the present. What follows
demonstrates that the implications of such practices are contingent and
often ambiguous.To ‘fix’ the past can be to repair, to heal; yet so too it can
be ‘a fix’ – a fraud, a sham, in defence of vested interests.
It is surely a key social function of the criminal justice process –
particularly of investigation and trial – to fix authoritative narratives con-
cerning ‘what happened’ in certain contested episodes, and to mandate
what must happen as a result. In investigating complex cases, police de-
tectives seek to construct plausible narratives of what took place and why
from the mass of evidential data accumulated in case files (Innes 2003:
144–73). To a considerable extent, the outcome of criminal trials hinges
on the plausibility of such narratives; where they prevail they become
nothing less than ‘the legally and socially sanctioned record of the past’
(Innes 2003: 270). Of course, such sanctioned narratives remain contest-
able; they can be officially revised, or even overturned, but only on the ba-
sis of a competing account with sufficient authority. In their study of ‘cold
case’ investigations, Martin Innes and Alan Clarke termed this process
‘retroactive social control’ (Innes and Clarke 2009). Cold case reviews seek
both to disturb the received narrative of events and to fix an alternative
account in its place, producing anew ‘an unchanging and stabilized nar-
rative’ explaining what happened and why (Innes and Clarke 2009: 548).
We encounter a similar effort to fix an official record of contested
pasts in public inquiries. Many such inquiries arise from the kinds of

Each of these techniques seeks to propound or buttress a certain un-

derstanding of the past – yet they also, sometimes subtly, tend to put the
past behind us. They are means of fixing past events in the past, effecting
‘official closure’ and allowing public life to ‘move on’ (Burton and Car-
len 1979: 14). One finds this same combination of authorizing an ac-
count and distancing from the past in the operation of truth commissions,
which have been established widely around the world in response to a
range of traumatic or haunting pasts (see Hayner 2011). Truth commis-
sions are concerned partly with establishing the truth – or rather, various
registers of truth – regarding past happenings (Cohen
2001: 227–8).
One
such register is factual truth: through documentary and forensic investi-

gations, commissions seek to establish an account of what took place that
carries authority in public discourse and has probative value in relation to
legal proceedings (Leman-Langlois and Shearing 2004: 230; Moon 2012:
157–8). Another register is interpretive truth: commissions (along with
other transitional processes) are concerned to authorize a certain inter-
pretation of what took place – of
what those facts amounted to – that

stands apart from traditions of official and popular denial (Dudai 2018:
696). Still another register is the personal truths of victims and survi-
vors (Leman-Langlois and Shearing 2004: 228–9; Karstedt 2010a: 18–20,
22–3).
Here, commissions strive for ‘narrative accrual’ – for a multitude of
highly personal stories of suffering to flower into a new public acknowl-
edgement of the past (McLeod and Thomson 2009: 46–7; see also Cohen
2001: 225). Hence, truth commissions combine the documentary au-
thenticity of the historian with the subjective authenticity of witness and
survivor; they fix a specific public narrative of past events while authoriz-
ing multitudinous personal experiences of those events (see Chakraborty
2007; McLeod and Thomson 2009: 44–5; Lorenz 2010: 84–5).
Besides establishing and authorizing these various truths, though, truth
commissions aim to fix these events and experiences in the past, purging
public life of their presence. As the historical theorist Berber Bevernage
(2008, 2010) has argued, commissions seek to enact a break between past
and present; they sequester the dead ‘so that the living can exist else-
where’ (de Certeau 1988: 101; see also Scott 2020). Commissions, then,
construct a past in order to renounce it, and to open up a new future
that overcomes the repudiated past (Leman-Langlois and Shearing 2004:
230–1; Scott 2020: 35–9).This is perhaps less a matter of reinterpreting
the past than of re-evaluating it; commissions formally express and au-
thorize a new pantheon of public saints and sinners, through gestures of
approbation and censure, so as to reposition the present with respect to
a univocally moralized past (Leman-Langlois and Shearing 2004: 231;
Dudai 2018: 698–701).This is also purportedly a therapeutic enterprise,
in which acknowledgement of wrongs and injuries, identification and
restoration of the remains of the dead, effect the closure of a painful past,
releasing the life of the present from its hold (Kovras 2017: 88–92). As
Claire Moon observes of forensic expertise in transitional settings, most
striking ‘is its claim to be able to finalize social and political contests
about past atrocity’ (Moon 2012: 151). Or, as Carr remarked in another
context, truth commissions delimit, interpret, evaluate and exorcize the
past in order to ‘make a case for a particular future’ (Carr 2014: 130).
Ultimately, attempts to settle the course, meaning and implications of
past events are liable to come unstuck. It remains possible – as cold case
reviews demonstrate – to overturn a seemingly definitive narrative and
even to substitute a more authoritative account in its place. Even where
the basic facts concerning what happened are not in dispute, though, there
is much still to be fought over. Any attempt to fix the meaning of what
happened sits in tension with the ‘ongoingness’
of events (Wagner-Pacifici

2010) and the drive to revise historical interpretation.As Koselleck argued,
there is an inevitable gap between historical reality and its articulation in
language; hence, narratives have a limited capacity to ‘contain’ contested
events and experiences (Koselleck
2002: 68–70;
Koselleck 2004: 233). It
is not possible, as some forensic experts claim, to ‘protect’ history from
‘revisionists’ (Moon 2012: 158), whether these ‘revisionists’ are motivated
by self-interested denial or by the promise of an understanding of the past
better suited to new formations of social experience (Jenkins 1991: 16;
Koselleck 2018: 154–7). This also suggests that attempts to curate public
memory are bound to be frustrated by shifting contexts of interpreta-
tion. For example, the historian John Tosh has highlighted how Trafalgar
Square in London, created as a monument to British imperialism, has
since hosted a range of political demonstrations that have recast public at-
tachments to the space, which now reflect a much wider range of political
interests (Tosh
2018; similarly, see Koselleck 2002: 324–6).The
plurality of
collective memory creates space for cultural fragmentation and conflict,
resisting efforts to encode the meaning of the past in the ongoing present
(Bevernage 2008; Adam 2009; Karstedt 2009b).
Equally, attempts to dispel the ‘presence’ of troubling pasts tend to
conflict with the immediacy of the past for many of those affected.
One may exorcize the past from the public sphere without lessening
its traumatic or haunting quality in everyday life (Bevernage 2010; Vie-
bach 2019). Moreover, some groups may resist attempts at official closure,
struggling to keep the past alive as an object of contention. Social move-
ments in many countries have successfully challenged the compromised
‘fixes’ of transition from conflict and kept alive the struggle for justice
(Karstedt 2010a; Kovras 2017). Famously, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo – a
group of Argentine mothers of individuals ‘disappeared’ under the mili-

tary dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s – refused to lay the past to rest
(Bevernage
and Aerts 2009; Kovras 2017: 61–83). Concerned that a pro-
gramme of exhumations and reparations might undermine prospects for
holding perpetrators directly accountable, the Madres refused to comply,
returning the newly exhumed remains of loved ones to the government
(to be preserved as evidence) and campaigning vigorously for criminal
sanctions (Moon
2012: 163–5).
One also encounters resistance to official
closure in other contexts. For example, critical analysis of the findings
of official inquiries, together with efforts to document and disseminate
alternative memories of what happened from those directly affected, may
undermine attempts to evade corporate or governmental accountability
(Burton and Carlen 1979: 14; Scraton 2013).
It would be wrong, though, to suggest that efforts to ‘fix’ the past nec-
essarily have conservative effects (see also Dudai 2018). Criminologists
too have engaged in retroactive social control in pursuit of acknowl-
edgement and justice. Consider, for example, Phil Scraton’s longstanding
work to overturn the narratives of police and official investigations into
the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989, which blamed the deaths of
96 football supporters on drunken and unruly fans. Scraton (2013) de-
scribes how ‘liberating truth’ involved curating the collective memory
of survivors and the bereaved to challenge the official narrative. Mobi-
lizing memory ‘from below’ helped to destabilize authorized accounts
and ultimately contributed to a new official investigation in which
Scraton played a major part. By analysing specially disclosed documents,
this investigation established a new authorized narrative, vindicating the
memories of survivors and the bereaved, and attributing blame to the
organizations responsible (Hillsborough Independent Panel 2012). This
case exposes the potential of documentary analysis and memory work –
yet other methods too have been put to work in retroactive social control.
Consider John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond’s analysis of the
Atrocities Documentation Survey, conducted by the US State Depart-
ment, which collected data from survivors of atrocity in the Dafur region
in the early twenty-first
century. Hagan and Rymond-Richmond’s work
demonstrated that some earlier estimates of deaths from the conflict,
based on mortality data from refugee camps, systematically understated
the scale of killing during the early phases of the conflict (Hagan and
Rymond-Richmond 2009: 93–100).Their

revised estimates of the scale
of lethal violence provided important evidence of Sudanese government
direction of violence in the region.
This discussion raises the issue of the appropriateness (or otherwise) of
judging the past. After all, part of the purpose of fixing the past is to pass
judgement on it. It might seem that judging the past is anachronistic and
so inappropriate: if the past is a ‘foreign country’, distant and irrevocable,
then it should be understood strictly on its own terms.Yet some element of
anachronism is inevitable in studying the past (see Chapter 1); furthermore,
persistent ‘histor ical wounds’ give rise to complex cocktails of memory and
history, blurring the ideal-typical
distinction between emotional, involved,
intimate identification on the one hand and serene, detached, distant schol-
arship on the other (Lorenz 2010: 83–5; see also Bevernage 2008; de Haan
2015: 796–8). Hence, if it is sometimes appropriate to regard the past em-
pathetically, on its own terms (so far as we can), then it is also sometimes
appropriate to pass judgement on the past, on terms we take to be right
and just.We sometimes concern ourselves with the ‘historical past’ – the
distant past of the historiographical gaze – other
times with the ‘practical

past’ – the past relating to action and judgement (White 2014: 3–24).The

question of when one approach is more needful than the other – when
anachronism is ‘senseless’
and when it is ‘useful’ (de Haan 2015: 789–90;
Rubin 2017) – is a standing question for enquiry into troubling pasts, and
one that admits no simple answer.1 Yet it involves asking both what we need
from the past and what we owe to survivors and to the dead. To reiterate,
we engage with the past according to the needs of the present; sometimes,
our rightful purposes entail passing judgement on past actions and events.
Yet the rightfulness of our present purposes also depends upon what duties
we recognize we hold in relation to witnesses, survivors and the dead (see
de Baets 2009). And perhaps we have a special duty, as citizens, to confront
the ugly side of our own country’s pasts; this, at least, demands more of us,
emotionally and politically, for it entails passing judgement on an aspect of
ourselves as historical subjects (Cohen 2001: 19).
Futures
Just as the past manifests itself in varied forms in the present, so too does
the future. This section outlines some of these futures that bear upon
crime and justice in the present, tacking once again between the individ-
ual and the collective level. We address first futures of change – through
visions for reform – and
second futures of continuity – through strategies
of security.We turn finally to the absence of a creative future – to futures
devoid of hope or promise – and reflect upon how they complicate
commonplace understandings of our responsibilities towards the future.
Future as horizon
Stanley Cohen once spoke of a ‘great unwritten book’ in criminology –
a serious study of liberalism and its relation to crime and punishment
(Cohen
1988: x). Another contender for this title – overlapping sub-
stantially in content with Cohen’s – must be a searching examination of
the idea of ‘reform’ in relation to crime, criminal justice and criminol-
ogy. ‘Refor m’ runs everywhere just under the surface of criminological
thought; it is something always needful yet seldom accomplished. Fur-
thermore, ‘reform’ suggests a specific relation to the future. Notwith-
standing the unhappy career of ‘reform’ in many sectors of contemporary
criminal justice,2 reformist schemes still gesture to new possibilities, ap-
parently within reach, which are to be realized by conscious and delib-
erate action. Seen thus, the future is ours to make – we can break loose
from the dead hand of history, escape the straightjacket of our inheri-
tance and overwhelm the historical record by force of action. Reform,
then, appeals to an empty, ‘open’ future – a horizon onto which we
project our desires for a better world (see Koselleck 2002: 165; Adam and
Groves 2007: 11). And, in turn, the metaphor of the horizon speaks both
to a sense of future promise and to uncertainty regarding its fulfilment:
it is ‘that line behind which a new space of experience will open, but
which cannot yet be seen’ (Koselleck
2004: 260–1).

For individuals, expectations of reform include images of better selves
that one may yet become. Such projects of self-reform figure prom-
inently in scholarship on how individuals desisting from crime recast
their life stories and ‘internal narratives’ (Vaughan 2007). Ray Paternoster
and Shawn Bushway (2009) descr ibe two visions of the future self at
work in desistance – a positive, reformed self and a negative, ‘feared’ self.
Desistance springs, they argue, from a resolution to strive towards fulfil-
ment of the preferred self – from committing oneself to become what
one currently is not (see also Denzin 1993: 162–3;Vaughan

2007: 394).
Once settled upon, the preferred and feared selves each provide a stand-
ing guide to conduct, illustrating an intended outcome and exemplify
situations to avoid (Paternoster
and Bushway 2009: 1114–5). On this
account, successful desisters really do become different people (see also
Denzin 1993: 174; Maruna 2001: 10; cf. Rorty 1989: 24–9): casting off
their old selves, they perhaps acquire new preferences, navigate everyday
life differently or develop a new (perhaps more prudential, less sponta-
neous) relation to the future (Paternoster
and Bushway 2009: 1128–9).
Of course, striving for a future self is no small undertaking. Reform
may be possible and preferable, yet rarely is it probable. Repeat offenders
face all manner of obstacles to ‘going straight’. Faced with setbacks in
pursuit of a new self, most have to recalibrate their future goals, setting
aside more sentimental aspirations (for example, of domestic bliss) for
more basic goals (such as secure accommodation or appropriate addic-
tion treatment – Gålnander 2020: 269–71).
For some, desistance is less
a matter of committing to a new self than committing to a future for
oneself at all. Perhaps especially those embedded in serious substance
misuse may live in continual conflict with the flow of time. The sociol-
ogist Norman Denzin suggested that alcoholics wield drink as a weapon
against the time structure of modern industrial societies, using it to shut
out unspeakable pasts and fearsome futures, and exiling themselves to a
suspended, purposeless time of their own (Denzin 1993: 97–101). Even
the progressing desister, though, must continually wrest between their
practised, ‘working self ’ and the desired, reformed self they wish to real-
ize. Such conflict between past and future selves leads to profoundly am-
bivalent emotional responses to decisions to forego offending in present
time (Hunter and Farrall 2018).
Given such obstacles, reformist approaches to the future bring to the
fore questions of agency and will. Future selves dramatize offenders’
struggles to take control over the course of their lives: while they tend
to construe criminal pasts as determined by difficult circumstances, they
project reformed futures into an arena of agency (Maruna 2001: 9–10,
148–50). Hence, perhaps, the tendency for successful desisters to present
themselves almost as heroes in the morality plays of their own lives: they
are somehow stronger, nobler for all their past mistakes thanks in part to
the sense of wilful endeavour and moral action that suffuses narratives
of reform (see
Maruna 2001: 98–9). This suggests a thoroughly agentic
view of desistance, in which individual volition bears a heavy load; yet,
in other contexts, reform narratives may emphasize the collective will
of supportive institutions. Thus, Denzin showed that Alcoholics’ Anon-
ymous (AA)
is an organization elaborately structured – with
its distinc-
tive rules, codes and rituals – to press alcoholics into a quite specific
‘reforming alcoholic self ’, which scarcely exists beyond the social world
of AA groups and their members (Denzin 1993: 307–45).

At the societal level, visions of reform find expression in hopes for
institutional change. Consider penal reform: ‘In what it has achieved pe-
nal reform belongs to history; in what it aspires to achieve it belongs to
the future’ (Grünhut 1948: 1). Prison reform in particular is a perennial
project: indeed, part of the prison’s appeal has always been its versatility –
its scope for reform as much as its claim to reform those confined within
it (Foucault
1991: 233–5; O’Brien 1982: 29). A certain conception of
the reformed prison
– the
‘penitentiary’
– rose to startling acclaim in
Europe and America late in the eighteenth century. Much more than a
repository for convicts, this reformed prison – rebuilt, cleaned, ventilated,
ordered, rationally governed – was envisioned as a didactic, reformatory
institution, which would mould inmates’ characters, fortify their morals
and save their souls (see Foucault 1991; Ignatieff 1978; McGowen 1995).
This ideal prison was but one component of a much broader reforming
programme, which aimed to reconstitute the fractured relations of indus-
trial society through bonds of sympathy and fellow-feeling while root-
ing out the corruption vested in established institutions and entrenched
elites (Ignatieff 1978; McGowen 1986). As Patricia O’Brien remarked
of French penitentiaries, ‘these institutions were, for humanitarians and
reformers, the new hope of a better society’ (O’Brien 1982: 13; see also
Melossi and Pavarini 1981: 148–9; Meranze 2016: 675–6).
The basic dream of a reformed and reformatory institution has re-
curred since the mid-nineteenth century in the face of repeated setbacks.
There was already considerable disillusionment with the English peni-
tentiary by the 1860s: it seemed incapable of reforming – perhaps even
of deterring – many offenders (McGowen 1995: 103–5).Yet, late in the
century, the same basic ideal spread beyond Europe and America. For
colonial rulers and subjugated political elites, the penitentiary ideal was a
means of demonstrating their pretensions to a modern, ‘civilized’ mode
of government (Dikötter 2007; Gibson 2011; Meranze 2016). Mean-

while, reformers in Europe and America invested their hopes in new
reformatory projects, each designed for a specific class of offender: juve-
nile reformatories, women’s prisons, inebriate reformatories and the like
(Garland 1985; Rafter 1990a). Notwithstanding further disappointments
and disillusionment, the reformist flame was later rekindled in yet new
guises, such as the therapeutic prison; as much a ‘hospital’ as a ‘prison’,
this institution would host self-regulating
communities of offenders, who
would progress through successive stages of healing and reintegration
(see
Rock 1996: 119–43).These
various ideal penal institutions exemplify
contrasting aspects of reforming expectations. Loosed from the ground-
ing of past experience, expectations flow freely across space; reforming
ideals, visions and blueprints travel cheaply across institutional sites, even
across national borders. Equally, though, expectations are programmed
into institutional spaces and systems – through prison architecture, for
example, or penal bureaucracies –
and hence re-grounded
in local con-
texts and constraints (see Churchill et al. 2018: 538–9).
The futures promised in reformist projects are never perfectly real-
ized. Abstract expectations cannot be translated directly into concrete
experience; we march towards the promissory horizon, yet we never
arrive there. The horizon of reform is ‘the future that cannot begin….It
moves away if we try to approach it’ (Luhmann 1976: 143; also Koselleck
2004: 261). This very fact means that reform can become self-sustaining.
Consider penal reform once again. As Michael Ignatieff observed: ‘the
prison is perhaps the classic example of an institution which works badly
and which nonetheless survives in the face of recurrent scepticism as to
its deterrent or reformative capacity’ (Ignatieff 1983: 202, original em-
phasis; see also Foucault 1991: 264–8). The prison has long drawn upon
powerful cultural and ideological supports; yet its persistence also owes
something to the way it holds out the prospect of its own reform. Its
failings are made tolerable insofar as they are construed as temporary,
contingent and surmountable.Thus, a subtle function of reformist futures
is to counteract radical movements for change and to sustain institutions
that, in their present form, may otherwise appear obsolete.
This leads to the distinction between reformist and utopian orien-
tations to the future. There is, to be sure, a certain fabulous optimism
in many reformist schemes: late in life, Jeremy Bentham described his
panopticon model as ‘a magnificent instrument with which I…dreamed

of revolutionizing the world’ (Bentham 1843: 572, cited in Semple 1993:
288).Yet the reformer dreams of attaining something that seems, in prin-
ciple, possible; that point on the horizon is within sight and so, seemingly,
within reach. By contrast, a full-blooded utopian envisions another world
altogether, in space or time. Though utopian futures necessarily link to
the present in some way (Koselleck 2002: 88), they also exceed historical
experience and so the perceived bounds of historical possibility (Young
1992: 427–8). 3 They do not indicate goals to be realized; rather, they
offer a standing impetus to action, an ironic inversion of the here-and-
now or compensation for present disappointments (Koselleck 2002: 88).
Consider perhaps the strongest utopian current in contemporary crim-
inal justice and criminology: abolitionism. Penal and police abolitionists
strive not simply to implement alternative ‘solutions’ to social problems
but to imagine new values and forms of social relation that might call
into being ‘solutions’ that do not yet exist for ‘problems’ that currently
go unrecognized (Davis and Rodriguez 2000: 215; Vitale 2017: 226).
While abolitionists sometimes engage in practical struggles to improve
prison conditions, for example, they do so warily, for fear of coming to
terms with (or even legitimizing) existing criminal justice institutions
(Mathiesen
1974: 23–5; Davis and Rodriguez 2000: 216). Ultimately, for
them, reform is something of a sham – it
buttresses the very institutions
and practices it purports to change (Vitale 2017: 32; Bell 2021: 41–4).
Famously, for Thomas Mathiesen, the richest resource for abolitionist
politics was not reform but ‘the unfinished’. ‘The alter native society’, he
explained, ‘lies
in the very development of the new, not in its comple-
tion’ (Mathiesen 1974: 17, original emphasis). This abolitionist project
aims not at re-forming penality –
substituting
one form for another –

but at perpetual overthrow of forms as such (Mathiesen 1974: 22). Thus,
reformers and abolitionists are distinguished by a basic difference in the
kind of futures they envision and seek to enact.
Securing the future

Reform invokes a future to be realized by force of will. It posits the
present a switch point between what we inherit and what we choose.
Sometimes, though, we engage with futures not to effect change but to
assure continuity – to ease the passage of the present in the face of uncer-
tainty. ‘Security’ serves as a master label for such ways of envisioning and
enacting futures (see also Crawford 2018: 162). Security practices aim to
mitigate risk, to cope with uncertainty, to ensure that harmful potential-
ities give way to non-events. They are associated with the turn towards
a ‘pre-crime
society…in which the possibility of forestalling risks com-
petes with and even takes precedence over responding to wrongs done’
(Zedner 2007: 262).This section contrasts various ways in which security
actors understand and enact futures.
Some security strategies deploy probabilistic means of knowing and
acting upon the future. Insurance, for example, uses probabilistic methods
to calculate premiums required to indemnify policy-holders against the
materialization of particular risks (though see O’Malley 2004: 117–9).

Actuarial methods of offender risk management work on broadly sim-
ilar principles. Based on associations inferred between particular groups
or group characteristics (age, ethnicity, criminal history and so on) and
criminal offending, individuals are categorized into distinct risk profiles
and actions are taken to mitigate those risks (Harcourt 2007: 16–17).

This might take the form of early intervention programmes, designed to
avert ‘potential delinquents’ from a probable life of crime (Glueck and
Glueck 1964), or more punitive measures, such as preventive detention
of ‘dangerous’ offenders (Pratt 1997). Similarly, predictive policing brings
the lessons of experience to incoming data to forecast likely develop-
ments in crime patterns. For example, following a reported burglary at a
particular premises, police patrols might be re-deployed to the surround-
ing area to deter possible repeat or near-repeat offences (see Bowers et al.
2004). Each of these techniques calculates the probabilities of particular
outcomes from past data and established associations among them, as-
suming that such associations will continue to hold in conditions yet
to come (see Adam and Groves 2007: 26–7; Urry 2016: 41; also Kosel-
leck 2002: 131–2). On this basis, they suggest fairly generic interventions
to address abstract risks. Such strategies, then, offer abstract, rationalized
perspectives on the future for the purpose of making decisions in the
present (see Adam and Groves 2007: 28–32).

In recent decades, though, scholars have charted the rise of a dis-
tinct family of techniques for governing the future. Alongside actuarial
practices for governing regular, population-level risks, a host of security
practices seek to govern exceptional, catastrophic future events. This

suggests a distinction – however blurred and incomplete in practice –
between governing ‘risk’ and governing ‘uncertainty’ (O’Malley
2004:
15–24; see also Klima et al. 2011; O’Malley 2011; McCulloch and Wil-
son 2016: 36–55). Whereas ‘risk’ governance projects knowledge of the
past into the future, governing ‘uncertainty’ springs from the assump-
tion that future risks exceed our experience. It posits a future pregnant
with surprise (Anderson 2010: 228); it attends to ‘unknown quantities’
(Klima et al. 2011: 17). Strategies for governing uncertainty imagine and
act upon singular events. Hence, they attend to a contextualized, imag-
ined future present rather than an abstract, rationalized present future
(see
Adam and Groves 2007: 36–7). Some such strategies envision future
crimes or disasters and devise means of anticipating or pre-empting them
in the present. As such, they demand imagination and creativity more
than calculation (McCulloch and Wilson 2016: 43–4).Yet others accept
that future happenings will inevitably exceed creative foresight: assuming
that some catastrophic events will not be prevented, they seek to improve
responsive decision-making and bolster the resilience of key systems in
the face of instability (see Klima et al. 2011: 22–3; O’Malley 2011: 8, 10–
13; also Foucault 2009: 45–7).
For many, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in particular brought home
both the capacity of the future radically to exceed probabilistic calcu-
lation and the disruptive force of the unanticipated event. Hence, for
decision-makers in many parts of the world, such singular, devastating
threats – including terrorist attacks but also other criminal hazards, such
as large-scale
cyberattacks – have sponsored techniques for governing
uncertainty (O’Malley 2011; Amoore 2013; McCulloch and Wilson
2016). Counter-terrorism strategies work in significant part by imag-
ining future terrorists (and their attacks) and implementing coercive
measures against them ahead of time. In Western societies, such mea-
sures have included preventive detention, ‘control measures’ limiting free
movement and communication, highly restrictive bail conditions and
more besides – all targeted primarily at ‘suspect’ populations defined in
terms of nationality, ethnicity or religion (Ashworth and Zedner 2014:
171–95; McCulloch and Wilson 2016). Such discriminatory profiling is
based less on data concerning probable perpetrators of political violence
and more on the fact that these are the sorts of people who best fit
the imagined future terrorist attack (McCulloch and Wilson 2016: 8).
Emergency exercises – in which major attacks, disasters and other sce-
narios are constructed and gamed by decision-makers and front-line

responders – offer an especially elaborate medium for envisaging future
crimes. According to the geographer Ben Anderson (2010: 231–4),
such
exercises proceed via three moves: first, the future event is identified
(‘named’), grounding it as an event of a certain kind; second, it is imbued
with immanent dynamics and effects (‘staged’); and third, participants are
immersed in the exercise and prompted to participate (so far as possible)
as if it were happening (‘played’). As Anderson explains, such exercises
dramatize a range of future possibilities; while actuarial calculation nar-
rows down from a bewildering range of possibilities to a set of probable
futures, exercises broaden out from an envisaged event to a range of
plausible consequences (Anderson 2010: 229).
In their different ways, both families of security strategies – whether
attending to ‘risk’
or to ‘uncertainty’ –
aim to make the future action-
able in the present. In Niklas Luhmann’s terms, security futures are
‘defutur ized’: the opaque, open future is translated into sequences of
possible presents, causally connected. Even emergency exercises, which
may start from a surprising gap between the present and the posited
scenario, are designed to elucidate various possible consequences and
effects that may follow from that scenario.Whether as probable outcome
or as possible event, this defuturized future is ‘used as a feigned present
from which we choose our present present to make it a possible past
for [preferred] future presents’ (Luhmann 1976: 143–4). Each of these
‘feigned
presents’ – the ‘transient
make-believe
world’ of emergency ex-
ercises (Anderson
2010: 230), the projected rash of near-repeat burglar-
ies, the insurance underwriter’s revised risk tables – offers a medium for
engaging with future threats (in the present) and a basis for intervening
(again, in the present) so as to mitigate or alleviate the impact of such
threats.
Much work on ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ seems to suggest that security is
ultimately concerned with future acts – with terrorist attacks, predatory
assaults, burglaries and so on. Yet, behind these acts, one might discern
another kind of future
– the
future states of affairs to which such acts
(individually or collectively) might give rise. Perhaps authorities fear the
exceptional terrorist attack, for example, for what it might lead to – a
more fearful public, diminished inward investment, support for ‘strong

man’ politics or impatience with the rule of law. On this reading, pre-
ventive justice aims not to eliminate future crimes, but rather at ‘the re-
duction of (potentially) harmful behaviour to a tolerable level’ (Ashworth and
Zedner 2014: 5, original emphasis; cf. McCulloch and Wilson 2016: 36).
This suggests that the architects of preventive justice fear certain acts
specifically as (intolerable)
events –
as
potential junctures between past
and future. Thus, a further form of future-knowing stows itself away in
security strategies – namely, prognosis of what states of affairs may follow
from a certain class of event (see also Douglas 1990: 9–10). Such insights
rest not on actuarial calculation, creative imagination or scenario gam-
ing. They derive instead, one suspects, from a tacit, socially habituated
sense of historical possibility –
from
the sense that ‘x follows y’ – derived
from encounters (direct or mediated) with such sequences in the past
(Koselleck
2018: 142–5; see also Koselleck 2002: 131–47). Critical anal-
ysis of pre-emptive crime control often gestures to a dystopian future of
hyper-prevention –
something
like Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report
(see, for example, McCulloch and Wilson 2016); we pay less attention to
the nightmarish futures that haunt the architects of pre-emptive security
and rarely subject the plausibility of such futures to critical scrutiny.
No future
‘Refor m’ and ‘secur ity’ share something in common: they both posit the
future as something we can make. They envision futures as a basis for
present practice – seeking either to br ing them about or to avert them.
Yet we also relate to futures in quite different ways. Sometimes the future
is not a terrain lying before us, but an absence, a void casting a shadow
back over the present. Of course, there is always time yet to come – but
not always times imbued with the opportunities (or risks) of an open
future. In this sense, the ‘not yet’ can be drained of futurity. Such grim
non-prospects
have perhaps increasingly coloured collective imaginaries
over recent decades (Urry
2016: 33–53).
Political disappointments and
lost causes have played their part (Harootunian 2007: 472) – though so
too have experiences of terrorism, civil war and economic crisis. Most
generally and heavily of all, though, the sense of a lost future finds expres-
sion in the prospect of global environmental catastrophe.
Climate change dramatizes characteristic experiences of living with

lost futures. At least in significant part, open futures – futures for us to
make – are replaced by latent futures – futures approaching over the
horizon. These are futures not merely possible or even probable – they
are futures already produced (Adam and Groves 2007: 35–8). For some at
least, this is signalled in the arrival of the ‘Anthropocene’ – a new era in
geological time that marks the deep impact of human activity on the
planet (see Shearing 2015). However much our collective environmental
impact may be ameliorated, the epochal solidity of ‘Anthropocene’ be-
speaks an already produced future – a past that cannot be undone, cannot
be de-effectuated
(Nordblad
2021; cf. Crawford 2018: 174). The future
warming effects of current greenhouse gas emissions are already ‘baked
in’; as the literary scholar David Collings observes, emissions linger as ‘a
historical pollutant, fogging up the future with past events’ (Collings 2014:
95, original emphasis). The catastrophic implications of global warming
style the future as a world laid waste – as the ruin of both the natu-
ral world and our way of life (Collings 2014: 103–13; Jackson 2015).
Depriving our projects of a lasting legacy, they threaten to rob present
action of much of its meaning – that part derived from the idea of the
open future. Hence, the future begins to take on qualities usually asso-
ciated with the past: it assumes a sense of fixity, facticity and loss; it may
haunt us, just as we may mourn it (Cunsolo Willox 2012; cf. Derrida
2006; Fisher 2012). Again, as Collings puts it: ‘we might almost sense that
our very present should be rendered in the past tense – as if…we live in
a society that is already dead without knowing it’ (Collings 2014: 116–7).
As criminologists, we might well observe that the sense of open and
fertile futures is not so much lost, but – at
least in part –
stolen.
As the bur-
geoning field of ‘green criminology’ testifies, impending environmental
disaster and ecological collapse can be understood in part as a result of
criminal activity – as a massive violation of human rights, even of the
basic preconditions for human and non-human life as we have known
it. Such work advocates substantial criminal sanctions for ‘crimes against
nature’ – for example, by formalizing the long-mooted international
law against ‘ecocide’, widely understood to denote criminal activity that
threatens the future survival of a given group (whether a human popu-
lation or non-human species –
see
Higgins et al. 2013). Less often noted
is the threat that ecocide poses to futures in the present. Imperilling the
survival of human populations, acts of environmental destruction steal

from such populations today the promise of an open future; thus, they
effect a dispiriting, even debilitating shift in future imaginaries in the
here-and-now.
Of course, environmental catastrophe is not the only context in which
theft of futures occurs. The idea of a law of ecocide is closely related –
indeed, partly modelled upon – the law of genocide.Though frequently
identified with mass killing, the broader notion of effecting the ‘social
death’ of any distinctive cultural group (Short 2016: 33–4)
touches more
directly on the deprivation of creative future imaginaries. It suggests that
various specific practices systematically employed to undermine the via-
bility and sustainability of particular groups and their cultural traditions –
including restrictions on distinctive cultural practices, forced removal of
children, compulsory sterilization programmes and so on – may be im-
plicated in the theft of futures (see also Cunneen 1999). Consider, for
example, the cultural and psychological impacts of occupation and settler
colonialism on subject populations. Those subject to a pervasive regime
of social control – population controls, identity revocation, police harass-
ment, incarceration and so forth – are deprived of the conditions in which
to make their own collective future.As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian sug-
gests, this is perhaps especially marked in the coercive regulation of chil-
dren. Wide-ranging,
coercive policies tending to the elimination of the
Palestinian population from East Jerusalem, she argues, strike fear into
the Palestinian community and constitute an attack, through their chil-
dren, on ‘the
Palestinian familial and community structure’ (Shalhoub-
Kevorkian 2016: 148). These ‘stolen childhoods’, one might add, tend to
erode the very idea of an imaginable future for the Palestinian people in
East Jerusalem. Andrew Jefferson and Lotte Segal argue similarly that the
futures of those stuck in such circumstances are coloured by tiredness and
foreboding by the interminable, exhausting battle through day-to-day
adversity and by the tragic aspect of a future ‘that seems overdetermined
by present poverty or violence (or both)’ (Jefferson and Segal 2019: 106).
They are saddled with an already-produced future, and they know their
fate: ‘Foreboding is not only fear of the unknown but fear of the known’
(Jefferson and Segal 2019: 105).
Once again, the notion of a stolen future resonates on both collective
and individual levels, even if violation of self-creative futures is a rather
muted theme in work on criminal and political violence. Though not

concerned with a death through violence, the poet Denise Riley’s re-
flections on the loss of a child offer a glimpse into the temporal rupture
produced by such experiences. Six months following her son’s death,
Riley wrote: ‘I’ve no sense of my time as having any duration or any
future. Time now is a plateau’ (Riley 2012: 20, emphasis added). Thus,
futures lost through violent death may suffuse survivors’ own experience
of time as historical subjects. This certainly resonates with historian and
ethnographer Emery Kalema’s research on survivors of torture from the
Mulele Rebellion of the mid-1960s, in what is now the Democratic
Republic of Congo. Kalema underscores how scarring and bodily mu-
tilation in this context contributed to ‘the annihilation of future time’
(Kalema 2018: 265). Survivors were indelibly (and purposely) marked
as rebels by their scars as well as physically and sexually debilitated. As a
result, they either feared for their future or, increasingly with the passage
of time, simply felt its absence. As one individual remarked: ‘Why should
I continue to believe in the future?….The future means something for
them [his friends]. For me, however, it is nothing at all’ (Kalema 2018:
281). Here again, we see a foreboding relation to the future, produced
through state violence and reproduced by survivors’ families and com-
munities (Kalema 2018: 276).
It is but a short step from futures lost to mourning lives unlived. In
this connection, creative approaches offer perhaps more vivid insights
than conventional scholarly methodologies. Take, for example, the re-
cent film Anthony (2020), which speculatively tells the early life story of
Anthony Walker, a black teenager murdered in a racist attack in Liver-
pool in 2005. Written by Jimmy McGovern with substantial input from
Walker’s mother, the film narrates Anthony’s counterfactual life in reverse
chronology from the age of 25, before closing with a reconstruction of
his factual death at age 18. Chronicling the prime years of a young man’s
life – finding love, helping friends, forging a career – Anthony poignantly,
though without sentimentality, evokes a future that might have been
and the tragedy that it never was. Speculative and provisional through
and through, the film nevertheless communicates directly the connection
between criminal violence, victimization and stolen futures.
This discussion helps to broaden out the ethical issues raised by our
relations to the future. Reflections on ethics with respect to futures
commonly centre on questions of intergenerational justice on our ob-

ligations to future generations. Returning to the issue of environmental
protection and climate justice, thinking towards the future clearly raises
considerations of intergenerational distribution and fairness (Crawford
2018: 166–7). This points to the ethical weight of produced futures and
our responsibility for futures we create, perhaps even for those we could
not have anticipated. This aligns with Barbara Adam and Chris Groves’s
argument that an ethical relation to the future depends on orienting
ourselves away from ‘present futures’ (what the future means to us) and
towards ‘future
presents’ (the
presents we create for future generations –
Adam and Groves 2007).There is undeniable force to this argument –
yet it perhaps evacuates too quickly the space for ethical deliberation
concerning present futures. As we have seen, ‘what the future means to
us’ varies enormously between social groups; the sense that there is any
meaning in the future is jeopardized by debilitating forms of offend-
ing and suffocating systems of social control. As Collings observes: ‘The
future is never just for the people of the future…. Climate change isn’t just
about our obligation to others. It’s about our own lives, too’ (Collings
2014: 19, original emphasis). As criminologists, we have much to con-
tribute to thinking both about justice for future generations and about
the equitable distribution of future imaginaries in the world of the
present.
Conclusion
Most of us are neither historians nor futurologists: we study crime and
justice as manifested in the present. Rarely, though, do we dwell on those
images and practices that connect our subjects, in the present, to pasts
and futures. As a result, we tend to miss important insights into the cul-
ture and experience of crime and control in present time. This chapter
has demonstrated that present pasts and present futures are of interest
primarily for what they tell us about the present; the way we relate to
other times (via memories and expectations) illuminates the culture of
our time, and many practices we undertake (from public inquiries to
emergency exercises) cannot be understood fully apart from their designs
on pasts and futures (see also Koselleck 2002: 131–2). Hence, those of us
concerned with understanding crime and justice in the here-and-now

have as much reason to engage in historical thinking as anyone. In some

areas – transitional justice research, for example, or security studies –
there is already a developed interest in the tensed character and historical
embodiment of present thought and action. Yet the other areas touched
upon here indicate the fruitfulness of this approach much more widely.
The thickness of the present is noteworthy not only in specific, more-
or-less ‘exotic’ enclaves; rather, it matters across the landscape of crime
and justice.
Furthermore, this chapter has argued that experiences of crime and
(in)justice play an important role in (re-)configuring individual and
collective relations to other times. Attending to pasts and futures does
not just illuminate themes that we might grasp in other ways – it also
exposes the specifically temporal and historical effects of practices of
crime and control. It shines a light on cultural resonances and psycho-
logical implications of what we study that we might otherwise miss. As
such, enquiry might fruitfully focus on the interplay between happen-
ings in the crime and justice field and shifts in relations to pasts and
futures – between eventful histories and tensed frameworks – and vice
versa. And, in this respect, one should note the connections between
present pasts and present futures, separated though they were in the
foregoing discussion. Attachment to a past ‘golden age’ may link to ex-
pectations of decline (see Pearson 1983); the ongoing, traumatic effects
of violence may rob the future of a sense of creative promise; memories
of abortive institutional change may undermine hopes for future re-
form (see also Koselleck 2002: 111–4). Fleshing out such connections,
and how they link with eventful dynamics in the field of crime and
justice, forms a major line of work for an historical criminology of the
present.
Notes
1 Willem de Haan’s (2015: 798) suggestion that anachronism is inappropriate
for understanding the past but appropriate for judging the past perhaps ne-
glects the confluence of judgement and understanding in historical thinking
(see Chakrabarty 2011: 672–5).
2 Consider, for example, the record of police reform in the United States: see
Vitale (2017: ch. 1) and Skogan (2018).
3 There are, of course, many varieties of utopian thought, some more ‘realistic’
than others – for a useful discussion, see Malloch and Munro (2013).
CONCLUSION
Ten points of historical
criminology
This final chapter sums up ten points of historical criminology.The first

five points serve chiefly to summarize the main tenets of the argument
presented in this book, either reiterating key points which have already
been made or drawing out and emphasizing points which were im-
plicit. The subsequent points identify and elaborate on some important
issues that lay outside of the scope of this book. This monograph has
set out a vision of historical criminology and explored the implications
of this vision for methodology, theory, concepts, pasts and futures in
criminology. We have not explicitly grappled with what this means for
the wider enterprise of criminology: for teaching, learning and other
aspects of the public and political life of our field. The latter parts of
this chapter do not attempt to resolve these weighty issues, but simply
to offer some initial thoughts or reflections which we hope others may
explore further. These are preliminary drawings only, but they sketch
some of the connections between our vision of historical criminology
and these wider issues. As such, we hope they provide at least an indi-
cation of what more criminology, in general, has to gain from historical
thinking.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429196911-6
Conclusion 149
1. Historical time
Others have identified historical criminology with concern for things
that happened in the past (for example, Flaatten and Ystehede 2014) or
with use of the historian’s traditional methods, most obviously archival
research (see Knepper 2014; Bleakley 2021). This book has projected
an alternative vision of historical criminology as an approach defined
by a serious engagement with historical time. We argue that engag-
ing with historical time is manifest in a scholarly concern for change,
eventfulness, flow, tense and embodiment. It entails using these analyt-
ical concerns throughout the research process; for example, pitching
research questions towards social change, designing methods that rec-
ognize plural flows of happenings, using events as part of explanations
or building historically specific theories or normative recommenda-
tions. A research project that invokes one of these analytical concerns
at one stage of research might be partially historical; but a research
project shaped by a dialogue with several across the research process
will more fully exercise the intellectual muscles of historical thinking.
Historical criminology, therefore, is not a niche concern that can be
attended to in one part of a research project, any more than it is a
method or a topical field. It is a style of thinking or an approach, rooted
in an appreciation of historical time, that underpins how many of us
conduct our research.
In this sense, historical criminology can be seen as an epistemological
standpoint – as a way of knowing the world. But it can also be seen as an
ontological position. It is an ontology made up of happenings, stability
and flux: it is an ontology of historical events, experienced by individuals
and groups; of configurations of actors, networks and structures, evolving
through time; of co-present
actors and organizations that embody non-
contemporaneous ideas and practices; of social relations and institutions
that are continually reproduced or reformed; of historical legacies and
personal or collective memories whose meanings and significance wax
and wane in response to pertinent, ongoing happenings. Historical crim-
inology is thus about how we come to know the world we live in as well
as the nature of existence in this world.
150 Conclusion
2. A core approach
Historical criminology, then, is an approach to research arising from a
specific conception of historical time. Conceiving historical criminology
in this way means that it is not a subfield of criminology. Historical crim-
inology is not constituted by a specialized focus on a certain subject mat-
ter (like, for example, penology or green criminology). Nor is it a school
of criminological thought, whether tied to certain theoretical bases (like
Marxist criminology), specific methodological preferences (like quantita-
tive criminology) or shared normative or political concerns (like critical
criminology or public criminology). Instead, we have argued that histor-
ical criminology is an approach based around historical time and a result-
ing set of epistemological and ontological commitments.This means that
it is broader, and perhaps more fundamental, than many of the subfields
and schools mentioned. Any aspect of crime, deviance, harm, criminal
justice, criminal law or regulation can be studied historically.
The breadth of historical criminology suggests the virtue of a healthy
pluralism. Mary Bosworth’s (2000; 2001b) pioneering contributions are
examples of feminist historical criminology, concentrating upon how the
existence, function and experiences of prisons historically have been fun-
damentally gendered.Victoria Nagy (2020b) calls for a Southern historical
criminology that does not simply transpose criminologies made in and
for the global north to the global south but, instead, reconciles or replaces
these with criminologies sensitive to historical experiences of settlement,
colonization, genocide and continuing racial or ethnic inequalities. As a
fundamental approach to criminological enquiry, historical criminology
offers widely applicable, non-exclusive
heuristic frameworks. Thinking
of historical criminology as a basic approach has the additional, useful
effect of guarding against what the sociologist Craig Calhoun (1996) has
called the threat of ‘domestication’. Calhoun lamented the domestication
of historical sociology, arguing that it had been transformed from an
exciting practice with the potential to rejuvenate the discipline into an
insular subfield with little capacity to influence mainstream sociology. A
similar fate will be easier to avoid if historical criminology is approached
and appraised as an inherently pluralistic approach founded on a com-
mon set of analytical dispositions, capable of bonding covalently with a
range of subfields and schools of thought.
Conclusion 151
Plurality of this sort might be seen as problematic. Criminology itself

is a pluralistic, multi-disciplinary field, and this has led some to fear frag-
mentation into antagonistic or incommensurable subfields, approaches or
disciplinary groupings (Garland 2011; see also Loader and Sparks 2011).
But, whatever spectres loom over criminology as a whole, historical
criminology has actually emerged from fragmentation. Its practitioners
study diverse topics across a range of disciplines (most commonly crimi-
nology, history, law and sociology) and align themselves to one of a num-
ber of areas, such as social history, legal history, criminal justice history,
social science history, historical sociology or genealogy. The growing use
of the term ‘historical criminology’, especially over the last decade or so,
has encouraged scholars to make connections outside their silos and find
common ground. Furthermore, conceptualizing the historical as consti-
tuted by engagement with historical time avoids inflaming some of the
old dislocations and sensitivities that exist between certain fields, such
as historical sociology and social history (see Skocpol 1987). Rather, it
helps to connect and reconcile disparate bodies of work by pointing to a
set of common dispositions that each possesses – a mutual and recurring
interest in change, eventfulness, flow, tense and embodiment.
Thus, we have conceptualized historical criminology as an approach,
exploring its manifold uses and values, and providing a range of the-
oretical, conceptual and methodological tools beneficial to its further
development. We seek partly to support the nascent growth of a self-
conscious, reflective and integrated historical criminology. But we also
seek to position this approach at the heart of criminology. It is a plu-
ralistic, heterogeneous approach with roots in many existing areas of
criminology – even if those areas do not always explicitly recognize their
concern for historical time. Raising the profile of historical criminology
and increasing recognition of the historical within criminology more
broadly will help to build an historical criminology that can inform and
enrich criminology as a whole.
3. De-centring the present

Several scholars have identified and critiqued a ‘presentism’ or ‘amnesia’
that sees criminology frequently paying insufficient regard to the past (see,
among others, Laub 2004; Rafter 2010;Yeomans 2019a). Contemporary
152 Conclusion
criminology tends to privilege the present, setting it up as unique, novel

or somehow deserving of almost exclusive attention. A parallel tendency
to privilege happenings in certain countries has been identified in crim-
inology and comparative research has been promoted as a counterweight
to this ethnocentrism. Comparing societies, cultures or jurisdictions
entails encounters with difference, often requiring scholars to stretch
their imaginations in order to make sense of unforeseen variances and
possibilities (Karstedt 2001; Nelken 2009). Encounters with difference
are equally integral to historical research (Knepper and Scicluna 2010).
They can unsettle assumptions about how things are or must be, reveal-
ing radical discontinuities and uncovering a range of alternative realities.
Comparison of past and present inevitably results in the identification of
similarity and difference in varying degrees. Hence, we can only begin
to appraise the particular qualities of the present through comparison
with other historical periods. As the historical theorist Reinhart Kosel-
leck (2018: 116) put it: ‘Only when we know what can repeat itself at
any time… can we ascertain what is truly new in our time.’ So historical
criminology does not challenge attention to the present to criminology;
rather, it challenges the centrality of the present to making sense of the
contemporary in criminology.
As indicated, this position implies the need for criminological re-
search that looks beyond the contemporary and adopts a chronologically
broader purview. It also reinforces the need for a criminology with a
good memory of its own past. Joachim Savelsberg and Sarah Flood’s
(2004) study of citations in US criminology journals concluded that in-
dividual criminologists often change topics, theories and methods in line
with prevailing intellectual and institutional currents. Paul Rock’s (2005)
examination of articles in The British Journal of Criminology found that
citations were dominated by publications from the preceding 15 years.
Shortened temporal horizons of this sort create a risk that research be-
comes repetitive as we continually reinvent the wheel, dressing up the
same findings in new theoretical terminology or making negligible ad-
vances in knowledge (Laub 2004). For some, this is a potent reason why
the history of criminology must be cultivated and placed centre-stage in
criminology degree programmes (Rafter 2010; Dooley 2016).
De-centring
the present would help criminology understand the pres-
ent and shape its future. We need a criminology that routinely learns
Conclusion 153
from the past, absorbing the lessons of past scholarship and reflecting on
its shortcomings while being inspired by historical difference and em-
boldened by similarity. Some think that such a rejuvenated criminology
would accumulate scientific knowledge more efficiently and effectively
than it has hitherto (see Rock 2005). Others believe that it would cre-
ate fruitful retrospective and reflective dialogues that enrich substantive,
methodological and theoretical enquiry (Rafter 2010; Dooley 2016). On
a more banal level, it might direct scholarly time, energy and resources
away from repeating old projects and reiterating familiar findings. All or
any of these would be welcome outcomes.
4. Between the general and the particular

A tension between the general and the particular is at the heart of much
criminological debate. Do the findings of a large, country-wide study
of crime rates have any relevance to the lived experiences of people
residing in high-crime areas? Or do the conclusions of an ethnographic
study of a particular gang in a certain place and time tell us anything
about criminal collaborations more generally? Such tensions, however,
are particularly acute within historical criminology. This might result
partly from sustained contact with the discipline of history, a discipline
often said to be given over to the particular and concerned with the
‘dense texture of detail’ (Abrams 1982: 194; see also Skocpol 1987). It is
certainly due in part to the challenges posed by archival research meth-
ods. The historical sources that researchers wish to study might not have
survived or might never have existed. Even in the modern era, the vast
majority of people left little documentary trace – a point particularly
true of women, the working classes and other disempowered groups.
Even when they are available, it is only when conducting oral histories
that historical sources talk back. The gaps in a written source cannot
usually be filled, nor can the ambiguities be clarified, the contradictions
resolved or the obfuscations challenged. The historian Julia Laite (2020)
urges researchers to embrace these radical uncertainties by drawing links
between fragments of evidence, braiding together the threads of (what in
retrospect are) almost invisible lives and, where sources are lacking, to of-
fer multiple possible branching narratives. Laite thus sees meta-narratives

and general theories as distant from, perhaps even incompatible with, the
154 Conclusion
particularities of lived historical experiences (see also Steedman 1986;

Bosworth 2000; Bosworth 2001a).
In a similar vein, Philip Goodman and others (2015) consider the
separation of macro-narratives of penal change at the national or in-
ternational level from micro studies of penal change within particular
locations. Recognizing the inherent connection between these levels, the
authors argue that the micro and the macro are different ends of the same
dialectic. In particular, they elucidate an agonistic approach to studying
change. This approach assumes that penal change results from struggles
between actors with different types and reserves of power, that conflict
is perpetual (consensus
is mostly illusory) and that macro-level
changes
exercise only a limited impact over local experiences of punishment. By
recasting oppositions as dialectics, this explicitly meso theory of change
adeptly weaves together the micro and the macro, as well as structure
and agency, thus braiding together the general and the particular within
penal change (see also Karstedt et al 2019).The wider application of such
approaches within criminological studies of change and continuity could
reduce recurrent tensions between the general and the particular.
5. A world in motion
This book has underscored the importance of temporal motion to his-
torical understanding. The flow of time from one moment to the next
is central to the form of historical thinking outlined in Chapter 1, and
its relevance to methodologies, theories and concepts was explored in
Chapters 2 and 3. Sitting behind this argument is a more fundamental
proposition about how, in the flow of time, change is, as the sociologist
Andrew Abbott argues, ‘the nor mal state of affairs’ (Abbott 2001a: 254).
Abbott justifies this claim on the basis that, while perpetual stasis cannot
produce change, perpetual change can produce continuity, as some social
arrangements are reproduced by certain changes. Hence, historical crim-
inology should be concerned with the flow of crime, deviance, order,
justice, security and other things as evinced through the often delicate
interplay of change and continuity over spans of time. There are two
related points we wish to add or emphasize here.
First, it is valuable for historical criminology to consider temporal flow
across shorter periods of time. The examples mentioned so far examine
Conclusion 155
change over decades or centuries, and such temporal purviews are par-
ticularly apposite for illuminating historical variation or for highlighting
how chronologically distant events and processes can still shape the world
we live in today. But long-term timeframes have no monopoly over his-
torical criminology. It is, in our view, no less intrinsically historical to
study a timespan of a few hours, days or weeks than it is to study a period
of decades or centuries. The crucial thing is to find motion within a du-
ration of time; or, to put it another way, to animate flow within the given
span of time. Some criminological ethnographies accomplish this through
immersive studies of short or constrained periods of time, including, for
example, those which examine criminal justice agencies during periods
of intense change (see, among others, Pearson and Rowe 2020).
Second, whatever timeframe is used, studying continuity is equally
important to studying change. Abbott’s argument that change is the nor-
mal state of affairs casts continuity as a puzzle that requires explanation.
The starting point for such explanations is the acceptance that continuity
involves historical reproduction rather than stasis. To put it another way,
if something appears to remain still or unchanging over a period of time,
it is not due to an absence of social forces acting upon it, but due instead
to social forces holding it steady through time. The challenge, then, is
discerning the factors that reproduce a given, stable social arrangement.
Some scholars find answers to these questions in vested political or eco-
nomic interests. Others look to institutional factors. For example, Ashley
Rubin and Keramet Reiter (2018) seek to explain the persistent use of
solitary confinement in US prisons despite repeated denunciations of the
practice as immoral and inhumane. They argue that its continuing use
stems from the primacy of internal control for successive generations of
penal administrators. Solitary confinement has not, therefore, remained
static; instead, it has been recurrently re-legitimized by the decisions and
actions of key agents over long periods of time. Continuity thus requires
explanation and the locus of explanation lies in factors that reproduce
certain policies, practices or institutions across time.
6. Historical reflexivity in teaching and learning

The number of historical modules or courses available to criminology
and criminal justice students has, in concert with the wider recognition
156 Conclusion
of historical criminology, expanded rapidly in recent decades (see God-

frey et al. 2008: 18;Yeomans 2014b). While this may mean that criminol-
ogy and criminal justice students are more exposed to historical thinking
and historical knowledge than previously, it is not clear whether such
insights and perspectives have been incorporated into mainstream teach-
ing and learning in criminology. It is common, for example, for courses
and textbooks to treat history as prologue, as something to be covered in
one chapter or one lecture before moving on. This structure represents
history as something static and finished, to be reviewed before proceed-
ing to the seemingly more pressing and contemporary matters that crim-
inologists should apparently be concerned with (see Jones 1994). Yet, as
a range of authors have shown, the study of the past provides wonderful
opportunities for active learning (Gray 2014), enquiry or research-based

learning (Skousen 2014; Davies et al. 2015), reflexive learning (Alker
2015) and other widely valued pedagogical practices. More pertinently
for us, the standard characterization of the past runs counter to the con-
cern for historical time advocated in this book. So how can historical
thinking be embedded, not within standalone historical modules, but
within mainstream teaching in criminology?
Rather than simply devoting more time to teaching the history of
crime and criminal justice, one might deliver core criminological con-
tent in a more historical way. To an extent, this can occur through the
use of historical comparisons. Finding historical examples comparable
to contemporary phenomena not only requires us to learn about some
period of the past – it also fixes a mirror in a certain historical position,
allowing us to view the contemporary from a different angle. This can
highlight both the extent of change between the two points in time as
well as scope for further change. For example, the murder of James Bulger
in 1993 figures strongly in courses that cover the ‘punitive turn’ in UK
youth justice in the 1990s. Judith Rowbotham and others (2003), how-
ever, use a case study of a similar child-on-child
murder in 1861 to show
that public anger and punitiveness are not the inevitable outcomes of
such crimes; even shocking offences that are heavily reported in the me-
dia can, in certain contexts, be met with public support for rehabilitation.
Contextualization is a further means of embedding historical awareness
in core criminological teaching. Exploring historical background, spe-
cific origins and the wider political, economic and cultural conditions
Conclusion 157
of objects of study, such as criminal justice practices and institutions, are

important means of situating them in historical time (see Yeomans 2019a).
As Ros Watkiss-Singleton
(2014)
has argued, historical sources like oral tes-
timonies can also serve to critique and supplement official measurements
of crime, providing insight into the historical conditions which produced
certain levels of offending or victimization and into the lived experiences
which often highlight the shortcomings of these statistics. Historical think-
ing can also be built into mainstream criminology curricula through a
concern for development. This requires a knowledge of the origins of the
institution, practice or thing under consideration and some appreciation
of how historical motion has taken it from its historic to its contemporary
manifestation. Joining up the chronological dots in this way positions our
objects of study as flowing, dynamic entities, helping to delineate direc-
tions of travel and so to sketch out possible futures.
Aside from the content of teaching, historical thinking further neces-
sitates that teaching itself be historically reflexive. Appreciating the dyna-
mism and plurality of historical time means recognizing that the theories,
concepts and methods that we use are historically embodied. They come
from certain times, they are shaped by the social conditions of their
birth and their ongoing relevance sometimes rests on the endurance of
such conditions. This is often easier to recognize with respect to the past
than the present. It would be perverse to subscribe to physiognomical
or phrenological explanations of crime today, but they had significantly
more purchase when first coined in eras when social Darwinist ideas
circulated widely and fears of racial degeneration gripped many educated
commentators. Hence, even if the substantive content of older literature
seems outdated, it can remind us of the historical specificity of crimi-
nological knowledge. The continually shifting contours of knowledge
also necessitate that teaching materials are perpetually revised. Reflecting
upon and updating materials is widely considered good practice, but it
is not advisable purely because the law might change, offending might
spike or some other new thing might happen. It is also advisable because
the world is changing and we ourselves are changing. As historical con-
texts shift and social actors change, the knowledge needed to make sense
of our time alters. The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man,
by police officers in Minnesota in 2020 sparked a wave of civil unrest
and prompted many criminologists to hastily re-write curricula so as
158 Conclusion
to foreground race and ethnicity. Historical experiences of slavery, seg-

regation, violence and prejudice did not alter as such, but many people
quickly came to perceive their proximity or connectedness to contem-
porary policing and criminal justice. Current events thus require that the
visions of the past animating our curricula are regularly redrawn in line
with the crime and criminal justice issues of the day.
In short, both the content and practice of teaching and learning
in criminology are themselves historical. The things we teach about
and the way we teach them embody certain times. Furthermore, as
time flows from one moment to the next, our proximity to different
pasts alters and can necessitate revisions or radical overhauls of what
we teach. Recognizing and reflecting upon these qualities would help
make mainstream criminology more historically informed and histor-
ically sensitive.
7. Historical alternatives and pathways to reform

Conclusion 159
prescription for policy and practice, but it often ends with an illuminating
and constructive policy analysis.
Pamela Cox and Barry Godfrey (2020) analyse the declining use of
youth custody in England and Wales from the 1880s to the 1940s as a
lens through which to re-consider the punishment of young offend-
ers today. While they identify four key factors that contributed to this
earlier period of decarceration, they do not simply propose that we
recreate or reengineer these factors today. The passage of time means
that change has occurred, and profound differences in context now
exist; time cannot be rolled back and the past cannot be reconstructed.
Instead, they argue for a renewal of the Victorian valuation of educa-
tion and positive relationships within a more contemporary orientation
towards community, rather than custodial, settings. While some take
forward-looking
inspiration from past experiences, historical analysis
of policy and practice can also react to historic injustices, failures and
serious harms (see, for example, Jarman and Lanskey 2019). Here, an
attentiveness to past events, their causes, their (often lasting) effects and
the extent to which these have been affected by change and continuity
through time allows historical criminologists to engage meaningfully
and powerfully in debates about contemporary and future reform of
law and criminal justice.
Besides identifying areas where reform is needed or the direction that
reform might take, there is a rich seam of historical criminology that
illuminates the various barriers that have hindered previous attempts at
reform. There is a frustrating lack of reform in some areas of criminal
justice, often in spite of available evidence and the weight of expert opin-
ion. Rubin and Reiter’s (2018) conclusion that the durability of solitar y
confinement rests on the decision-making
of local penal administrators
has already been mentioned. Their analysis implies that the abolition of
solitary confinement cannot be achieved by macro-level
policy changes
and can only be effected by altering prison administrators’ pursuit of
control or by constraining their power to pursue it (cf. McAra 2017). Of
course, other approaches to research can identify barriers to reform too.
But taking the long view, attending to change and continuity through
time and focusing on key moments or junctures – all of these hallmarks
of historical thinking – makes historical criminology well placed to ac-
complish this.
160 Conclusion
Finally, historical criminology adds significantly to the capabilities of

reformers to envisage alternatives and create better futures. Historical
thinking entails an encounter with difference, an encounter that provides
what the historian John Tosh describes as an ‘inventory of alternatives’
(Tosh 2015: 26–7) that alerts us both to what human beings can attain
and, conversely, to the depths to which they can sink. Lucy Williams and
Sandra Walklate (2020) har ness this spirit of the encounter with differ-
ence in their historical interrogation of the ‘cr iminalization thesis’ on
domestic violence, under which a criminal justice response to instances
of domestic violence is prioritized. They argue that the now-dominant

criminalization approach was not an historical inevitability, but a contin-
gent development probably resulting from the coincidental conjunction
of a second-wave feminism that promoted a strong legal response to
domestic violence with a nascent neo-liberal politics of law and order
in the 1960s and 1970s. Recognizing both long and deep continuities in
how criminal justice responses have failed generations of victims, Wil-
liams and Walklate urge us to reconsider the utility of Victorian responses
to domestic violence which more frequently entailed civil law proce-
dures around divorce, property and custody of children. They show that
recognizing historical change and continuity, as well as being attentive to
the importance of events and complex flows of time, enables researchers
to take new perspectives on contemporary debates and to identify re-
formist routes to alternative futures.
Historical criminology thus helps identify areas of criminal justice that
are ripe for reform, specific reforms that may be beneficial, as well as
persistent barriers to the enactment and implementation of reform. It is
a rich pasture of enquiry for those pursuing change in the way we col-
lectively respond to crime.
8. Historical evocation as public engagement

In many respects, historical criminology lends itself very well to public
engagement.The interval of time that has passed since relevant events oc-
curred frees researchers from many of the ethical or risk-based concerns
that can constrain public discussion of recent crimes or, indeed, from
the kind of sensitivities that cause many researchers to self-censor their
accounts of more disturbing topics. Manuel Eisner’s Interactive Medieval
Conclusion 161
Murder Map (2018), for example, features detailed accounts of 142 mur-
ders that occurred in fourteenth-century
London.As Eisner explained to
the news network CNN, these detailed accounts help depict a medieval
society ‘where conflicts could erupt, where male honor and a sense of
having to be able to defend yourself played an important role, where
many young men would have a weapon with them – a sword, a knife or
fighting stick’ (CNN 2018). Such high-profile
public engagement builds
dialogue with various publics and prompts reflection on the disparities
between then and now.
However, such strategies need to guard against the risk that fore-
grounding the curious or ‘exotic’ aspects of the past might create a sense
of ‘histor ical distance’ (Philips 2013) that detaches the histor ic from the
contemporary. Bosworth (2001a) argued that the violence and suffer ing
entailed in much crime and punishment can transcend time and emo-
tionally affect those learning about it whether it occurred 400 years ago
or four days ago. Temporal detachment therefore needs to be counter-
balanced with attempts to build empathic connections between contem-
porary audiences and historic subject matter. Narrative story-telling can
be useful for these purposes. For example, the Digital Panopticon’s linking
of historical criminal justice datasets reveals many detailed stories of in-
dividual offenders journeying through judicial processes – their family
backgrounds, their working lives, their health – and so, in revealing more
of the person behind the charge sheet, it helps to humanize historical
subjects (see Ward and Williams 2016). Thick sensory descriptions can
help build further empathic connections (see Roscoe 2020). Plus, the
advent of virtual and augmented reality technologies offers the possibil-
ity of deeper immersion in reconstructed historical settings. The Culture
and Heritage Exchange group based at the University of Plymouth have
been particularly active in this field producing, for instance, a virtual
reality experience of a Victorian convict ship (CHEx 2019). Narrative,
sensory and immersive strategies all help to bring audiences nearer to
historical experiences of crime and justice.When successful, they help to
put contemporary audiences, if not quite ‘in’ the historical moment, then
certainly much closer to it.
Public engagement activities can also provide identity-based con-
nections between contemporary individuals, groups, communities, na-
tions and historical actors, thus cultivating collective memory. The Our
162 Conclusion
Criminal Ancestors project led by Heather Shore and Helen Johnston pro-
vides a wealth of resources and guidance for those curious to explore the
criminal histories of their families, communities or regions.1 Aiding ac-
cess to crime and justice records can, as Mark Finnane and Yorick Smaal
assert,‘answer the needs for information of those exploring their personal
pasts as well as those seeking to understand our contemporary conditions
through histories that explore both connections and fractures between
the past and our present’ (Finnane and Smaal 2018: 94). Finnane, Smaal
and others worked on The Prosecution Project, an innovative initiative to
digitize and connect Australian court records that crowdsourced research
assistance from volunteers (Finnane et al. 2018). The resulting database
is freely available and provides huge opportunities for the exploration
of histories of families, local places or communities. As Kristyn Harman
explains, it has already suggested that the racial and ethnic constitution of
mid-nineteenth-century
New Zealand was much more diverse than the
orthodox British colonizer/Maori colonized
binary tends to recognize
(Harman
2018).
Our main point, here, is that efforts to engage the public in research
on crime and social responses to crime benefit from incorporating his-
torical thinking. Building empathic, identity-based
or familial connec-
tions between historic and contemporary actors can highlight change
and continuity, draw attention to linkages through the flows of time and
connect chronologically separate individuals or groups in a manner that
sees some pasts reinterpreted in light of their contemporary relevance.
9. The politics of memory

Historical criminology can offer useful correctives to the half-truths

and mistruths that circulate within political debates about crime and
criminal justice. Such debates frequently invoke history by depicting
contemporary criminality as more serious, more widespread or other-
wise more alarming than the criminality of earlier times. Right-wing
discourses stereotypically contrast our troubled present with an imag-
ined past of stability and security – a ‘golden age’ that can be recreated
through a return to certain ‘traditional’ values (Pearson 1983). Historical
research frequently reveals precedents and antecedents that cut through
the presumed uniqueness of the present and often demonstrates that
Conclusion 163
the historical experiences of those who lived through certain ‘golden

ages’ were not always as happy and peaceable as may be imagined. Cox
(2012) thus argues that historical criminology helps to defuse moral pan-
ics. More widely, its capacity to interrogate dominant presumptions and
prevailing myths, as well as to challenge political misinformation and
disinformation, means that historical criminology can perform crucial
functions of the ‘democratic
under-labourer’
that Ian Loader and Rich-
ard Sparks (2011: 117) see as central to criminology’s public role. This
brings us to the politics of memory, discussed in Chapter 4, and the
dynamics of power that influence what we remember and what we for-
get. For example, we may see historical criminology challenge common
narratives of the past, such as the role of the police and the idea of the
traditional British ‘Bobby’ or the assumption that we are less punitive
today than we were in times past – a point challenged above in relation
to the response to the murder of James Bulger. Thus, there is a politics to
how historical criminology uncovers, highlights or reconstructs pasts in
dialogue with the political context within which it is produced.
Historical criminology can play more specific roles within the politics
of memory too. With respect to some issues, huge importance can be
attached to individuals and societies either remembering or forgetting.
Nagy (2020b) asserts that ‘intergenerational trauma originating from col-
onization by the British plays no small part in the poverty, oppression
and violence experienced by Australian Aboriginal communities today’.
Recognizing such pasts requires a consideration of the legacies of set-
tlement and colonization in Australia and elsewhere, undermining any
attempt to depict indigenous or colonized peoples as inherently either
troubled or troublesome. Remembering, in such contexts, can therefore
be a political act in and of itself. Friedrich Nietzsche (1997) argued that
both remembering and forgetting are fundamental, necessary aspects of
human culture. While forgetting the sufferings of peoples past may seem
a gross injustice, some commentators have developed Nietzsche’s line of
thinking to explore whether, in some contexts, forgetting may possess
political virtue. The writer David Rieff (2016) provocatively argues that
it is better to forget some past traumas rather than use silences, stat-
ues or educational curricula to ensure their remembrance. This might,
he argues, allow individuals and societies to ‘let go’ of past injustices,
thus healing historic rifts between groups and producing greater social
164 Conclusion
harmony (see also Adam 2009). Of course, actively seeking to erase past
events from collective memory swims directly against the current of his-
torical thinking. Generally, historical research aims instead to reshape or
redirect memory by, for example, uncovering ‘hidden’ pasts, puncturing
popular historical myths or soberly reassessing the importance of well-
remembered aspects of our past. In these senses, historical criminology
can be made with a pinch of forgetfulness as well as the usual helping of
memory.
Thus, historical criminology is frequently
– perhaps
inherently
–
political in the way that it scrutinizes invocations of the past in public
discourse, reframes the issues of the day and supports or enhances cul-
tural memory of historic injustices. It engages, then, with the politics of
memory and the political dynamics of power which influence what we
remember, how we remember it and what we forget. Like criminology
at large, historical criminology cannot escape its political character, even
though it is not tied to any particular political agenda.
10. Facing towards futures

This book hinges on the argument that historical criminology is best
understood as based around a particular conception of historical time.
It follows that historical criminology should be seen not as a purely
backward-looking
enterprise, but as something equally concerned with
the present and future. The points detailed above indicate some of the
ways in which this temporal orientation is manifested within historical
criminology. Several are premised on a conception of time as flowing
from the past through present to the future, so that the development
of historically sensitive understandings of crime today, or the imple-
mentation of historically informed policies and practices in the present,
may help to produce a brighter future. Other points identify ways in
which past events continue to shape the lived experiences of social ac-
tors through, for example, collective memory of historic injustices, or
affective or identity-based
connections linking contemporary individ-
uals and groups to historic actors. Further points have been informed
by a valuation of education, and potentially public engagement also, as
forms of inter-generational
communication aiming to cultivate histori-
cal understandings among younger people specifically. Seeking to make
Conclusion 165
interventions in the future is precisely what much existing criminol-

ogy does. However, historical criminology does this in the more specific
manner just described; by working to reveal the many and varied ways in
which the past is imbricated into the present and positing these overlaps
as potential opportunities to intervene in the future. Finding pasts within
presents, prospect within retrospect or looking forward by looking back
are all more specific attributes of historical criminology (see also Chur-
chill et al. 2018).
Finally, historical criminology posits a certain view of the future as
plural. This does not mean that any and all futures are possible; given the
complexities and contingencies of historical change and continuity, we
cannot build the world exactly as we would have it. But there are multi-
ple possible futures contained within any historical moment. Some will
be chronologically distant and others closer to the present. Some could
co-exist with each other while others are mutually exclusive. Some are
almost predetermined to be realized while others have only a sliver of
a chance of happening. Some are extremely similar to the present and
others are wildly different. And most will be both positive and nega-
tive with respect to their effects on different social actors. Which futures
come to exist will be shaped, as the past and present have been, by new
social processes and contingent events as well as longstanding and ongo-
ing changes, enduring memories, persisting legacies and other stabilizing
forces. But, within certain parameters, it is possible for individuals, groups
and other social actors to try to fashion their preferred futures. We hope
that this book helps to make historical criminology a vehicle for the
furtherance of such efforts. We hope that it helps others to recognize
problems within the present, to visualize alternatives, to identify and con-
front constraints on change or, indeed, to work to conserve worthwhile
aspects of contemporary society for future generations. In all these ways
and more, historical criminology can be much more than a backward
looking body of scholarship; it can simultaneously serve as a forward-
looking intervention in our collective well-being. This is, we are sure, a
future for historical criminology that we would all like to see.
Note
1 See https://ourcriminalancestors.org/about-us/
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INDEX
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to end notes.
Abbott, Andrew 32, 53, 89n2, theory to 109; gaps in 153–4;

154, 155 theorizing from 110–11; see also
abolitionism 138 historical sources
Aboriginal communities see arrow in flight paradox 52–3, 54, 65
indigenous peoples Atrocities Documentation Survey 132
abortion 46, 59
Adam, Barbara 146 Baldry, Eileen 72
addiction 95, 98 Ball, Roger 67
agency 26, 41, 135–6 Begriffsgeschichte 95, 98
Agnew, Robert 55, 80 Bentham, Jeremy 110, 137–8
alcohol 77, 96, 97–8, 135, 136 Bergson, Henri 24, 36, 38, 41
Alcoholics’ Anonymous (AA) 136 Bernard, Thomas 69
Ali, Altab 126 Berridge,Virginia 158
Aminzade, Ronald 86 Bevernage, Berber 45, 130
anachronism 47, 70, 108, 133, 147n1 biographical interviewing 12–13
Anderson, Ben 141 biography 49, 64, 87
Anthony (film) 145 Bloch, Marc 10, 23, 100
Anthropocene 143 The Blue Lamp (film) 122
archival research 22, 49, 57, 62, 76–7, ‘Bobby’ (police) 122, 123, 163
88; and historians 9; applying Body-Gendrot, Sophie 67
200 Index
Bosworth, Mary 83, 150, 161 Cohen, Stanley 134

Bourdieu, Pierre 41 cold case reviews 128, 131
Braudel, Fernand 27 collective memory see memory
British Journal of Criminology 152 Collings, David 143, 146
Bulger, James 156, 163 Collingwood, R. G. 24, 30, 36,
Burton, Frank 129 47, 93
Bushway, Shawn 134 colonialism 24, 67, 72, 129, 136, 144,
162, 163
Cable Street, Battle of 126 comparative criminology 15, 110, 152
Calhoun, Craig 150 complexity 66, 68, 82–7
‘Cambridge School’ 101 concepts 94–106; descent of 95–8;
Cambridge Study of Delinquent historicity of 91–3; processual
Development 62 concepts 102–6; recovery of
capitalism 27, 113, 114 99–102
carceral collectivism 115 conflict 13, 42–3, 131
Carlen, Pat 129 consequence 66, 67, 68
Carlson, Liane 97 contemporaneity 45–6, 98, 115
Carlson, Susan 114 context see historical context
Carlyle, Thomas 121 contingency 25, 28, 66, 67, 68, 70,
Carr, David 123, 131 96, 97
Casa Memoria 127–8 continuity 26–7, 31–2, 70–1, 72,
causality 33, 78, 85, 86 113, 155; in life course 62–3; and
change 24–9, 31–2, 34–5, 82–3, narrative 86; securing 138–9;
85–6, 154–5; and continuity 26–7, theorizing continuity 113
113–14, 155; life course 62–3; convict ships 161
orders of change 27, 36, 38, 64–5, copycat crimes 43
68, 83, 86–7, 89n1, 154, 159; penal Corfield, Penelope 27, 53–4, 77
change 113–15; theorizing change Cornish, Derek 84
106, 108, 113–14 Cox, Pamela 159, 163
Chevalier, Louis, Labouring Classes and crime drop studies 59–60, 61, 74
Dangerous Classes 111 crime museums 123
Chicago School 13 crime scripts analysis 84
children 144–5, 156 criminal anthropology 93
chronology 45, 78, 79 criminal law 9, 46, 78, 87, 150
citation patterns 152 criminological imagination 5
civilizing process 8, 78, 113, 115 criminological theory see theory
Clarke, Alan 128 Croce, Benedetto 47, 94
class 54, 103 crowd behaviour 110–11, 112, 129
classical sociology 7–8, 11 cultural memory see memory
Clémendot, Gaston 121 Culture and Heritage Exchange
climate change 143, 146 group 161
coevality 45 Cunneen, Chris 72
Index 201
cybercrime 77, 140 Eddington, Arthur 35–6

cycles 69–70 Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and
Crime 62
Dafur conflict 132–3 education 21, 44, 121, 155–8,
dark tourism 14 159, 164
data: analytic techniques 55; gaps in Eisner, Manuel 79; Interactive Medieval
60, 61, 63, 65, 79–82; and theory Murder Map 160–1
106, 108 Elias, Norbert 7, 8, 18n4, 24, 40, 78,
Deardon, Basil, The Blue Lamp 122 103, 111
death and the dead 41, 126–7, embodiment, temporal 6, 23, 43–8,
133, 145 51n7, 118
de Certeau, Michel 109 emergence 36
decolonization 129 emergency exercises 141
degeneration 94, 157 environment see climate change
de Haan, Willem 147n1 epistemology 20, 149
Denzin, Norman 135, 136 epochal analysis 56–7, 59, 89n1
Derrida, Jacques 125 ethics 145–6
desistance 21, 33, 34, ethnocentrism 51n10, 152
62–4, 134–6 ethnography 12, 38, 66
detachment 111, 112, 161 eugenics 94
diachronic perspective 8, 48, 53–8, 59, events 29–32; and complexity 83;
75–7, 82, 88 eventfulness 29–35; event-structure
diaries 80 distinction 34; in life course 62–3;
Dickens, Charles 121 ‘inner life’ of 36, 38; restlessness of
Dick, Philip K., The Minority 34, 67; as temporal unit 65–9; see
Report 142 also occurrences
Die Familie Schneider 126
digital archives 76 family history 162
Digital Panopticon 76, 161 Farrall, Stephen 64, 112
disciplinary power 71, 113 Farrell, Graham 61
distance see historical distance female prisoners 72, 83, 107–8,
Dodsworth, Francis 101, 107 137, 150
domestic violence 103, 105, 160 feminism 150, 160
Donohue, John 59, 60, 89n3 Ferrell, Jeff 55, 80, 127
drink 77, 96, 97–8, 135 Fiddler, Michael 126
drugs 59, 95–8, 112 films 121–2, 145
Dumas, Alexander 121 Finnane, Mark 162
duration 36, 41, 48, 54, 57, 78 Fisher, Mark 125
Durkheim, Émile 49, 111 Flemmen, Magne 64, 65
Flood, Sarah 152
East End, London 75 Flow, temporal 35–9, 52, 103, 104,
ecocide 143–4 154, 155
202 Index
Floyd, George 157 Groves, Chris 146

forecasting 139 Guiney, Thomas 25
forensic expertise 130, 131
forgetting 120, 163, 164 Hagan, John 132
Foucault, Michel: Bentham’s Halbwachs, Maurice 121
panopticon 110; on concepts Hansen Löfstrand, Cecilia 30
95, 96, 98; on disciplinary power Harman, Kristyn 162
71; Discipline and Punish 71; on Harootunian, Harry 45–6, 119
genealogy 10, 25, 28, 95, 96, 99, Harriott, Anthony 72
117n4; on penal change 113 haunting, and hauntology 13, 18,
future present 140, 146 125–6, 131
futures 39–41, 164–5; defuturized Heraclitus 35, 36, 37, 40
141; dystopian 142; as horizon Herman, Judith 124
134–8; latent futures 143; no Hillsborough stadium disaster 132
future 142–6; open future 41, historians: of crime/criminal justice
134, 141, 142, 143, 144; securing 2, 10, 21, 50n1, 107, 110; regard
the future 138–42; utopian for particularity 68; and historical
137–8, 147n3 context 91; and historical thinking
19, 47, 49; police historians 123
‘gappyness’ see data historical change see change
Garland, David 1, 11, 72, 73, 115 historical context 22–3, 55–6, 101–2,
Gatrell,Vic 38, 93 106–9, 112–13, 155–8
gender, and sentencing 72, 83, 107–8, historical data 5, 76, 78, 83, 88, 106,
137, 150 108; see also data
genealogy 25, 28; of concepts 95, 96, historical distance 26, 38, 45, 108, 111,
97, 98; and conceptual recovery 99, 124, 161
100; and Foucault 10, 25, 28, 95, historical methodology 22, 76, 88; see
96, 99, 117n4; as inheritance 72, 73 also methodological techniques
generality, and particularity 48, 68, 69, historical reflexivity in teaching and
153–4 learning 155–8
genocide 13, 31, 81, 94, 125, 144 historical sociology 4, 23, 150, 151
ghosts see haunting historical sources: as basis of historical
Gibson, Mary 127 thinking 22; and conceptual
global warming see climate change recovery 88, 100; critical analysis
Glueck, Eleanor and Sheldon 12, 62 of 22; and genealogy 10; gaps
Godfrey, Barry 107, 159 in 153–4; and historians 9, 22;
‘golden age’ 122, 147, 162–3 primary sources 9, 22, 77, 100, 109;
Goodman, Philip 154 relation to theory 106–9, 110–13;
government, and governance 10, 11, secondary sources 9, 75, 77
95, 99, 101, 113, 117n4 historical time: central to historical
green criminology 3, 143 criminology 6, 23–4, 149; and
Index 203
change 24–9; an embodied time Irish Policing Authority 30

43–8; an eventful time 29–35; and ‘ironist’ figure 96–7, 100
flow 35–9, 154–5; implications
for historical criminology 48–9; ‘Jack the Ripper’ see Whitechapel
plurality of 27, 51n7, 54, 56, 83, 86, Murders
157, 165; relation to theory and Jefferson, Andrew 144
concepts 91–4; a tensed time 39–43 Jenkins, Keith 121
historicism 48, 99, 100, 102 Jerusalem 144
historicity 25, 26, 44, 47, 71, Johnson, Walter 26
91, 94, 97 Johnston, Helen 162
historiography 9, 10, 44, 49, juvenile delinquency 29, 72
121, 122, 123 juvenile reformatories 137
history, and memory 120–4; see also
historians; historiography Kalema, Emery 145
history of crime 14, 18n5, 26, Karstedt, Susanne 59, 112
44, 75, 156 Katz, Jack, Seductions of Crime 68
Hobbs, Dick, Doing the Business 75 King, Rodney 37
Holdaway, Simon 70 King, William 76
Holocaust 117n8, 124 Kirchheimer, Otto 113, 114
Home Office 70 Knepper, Paul 73
homicide 29, 79 Koopman, Colin 117n3
Hong Kong protests 67 Koselleck, Reinhart 24; on
horizon of expectation 119 change and continuity 27; on
Husserl, Edmund 119 Begriffsgeschichte 95, 98; on event
and occurrence 34; on experience
identity 31, 105, 112, 120, 121, 124, and expectation 119; on historical
161, 164 comparison 152; on ‘layers of time’
Ignatieff, Michael 137 27, 45; on language and historical
imperialism 24, 101, 131 reality 131; on negative memory
indigenous peoples 3, 72, 163 124; on temporal structure
inheritance 71–4, 80, 83 of law 46
Innes, Martin 128 Kubler, George 23, 31
inquiries, official 128–9, 132 Kurlychek, Megan 69
institutions: persistence 32; police 32,
37, 99, 102; social institutions 32, labelling theory 12, 37, 85
113; reform 136–7 Lacey, Nicola 72–3
insurance 139, 141 Laite, Julia 153
interactionism see symbolic late modernity 8, 44, 56
interactionism Laub, John 62
intergenerational justice 146 law see criminal law
intergenerational trauma 163 Lawrence, Paul 83, 107, 158
204 Index
Lawrence, Regina 37 methodological techniques 74–87;

LeBel, Thomas 63 filling in gaps 79–82; harnessing
Le Goff, Jacques 25 complexity 82–7; looking for
Levitt, Steven 59, 60, 89n3 sequences 77–9; taking the long
licensing laws 97–8 view 75–7; see also historical
life course 12–13, 57, methodology
61–5, 74, 79 metonymy 127, 128
linearity 60, 64, 68, 69, 82–3, 87 Metropolitan Police 75, 122
Loader, Ian 122, 163 Michalowski, Raymond 114
Lombroso, Cesare 93, 94 Mills, Melinda 62
longitudinal research 12, 30, 61–4, 75, Moon, Claire 130–1
76, 80 Mooney, Jayne 93
Luhmann, Niklas 42, 137, 141 moral economy 110, 112
lyrical sociology 49 moral panics 30–1, 163
moral reform 101–2
Madres de Plaza de Mayo 131–2 motion 52–4, 65, 71, 80–1,
Magrey, Susan 72 154–5, 157
Mannheim, Karl 74 Mulcahy, Aogán 30, 122
Marxism 7–8, 11, 113, 150 Mulele Rebellion 145
Marx, Karl 7, 49 multi-state event history 79
mass incarceration 34, 59 Murphy, Arthur 34, 36
mass violence 13, 21, 42
material culture 126–7 Nagy,Victoria 150, 163
Mathiesen, Thomas 138 narrative: explanation 82,
Mau Mau Rebellion 129 86–7; historical evocation as
May, Carl 98 public engagement 161; and
McGovern, Jimmy 145 historiography 49; internal 134; and
McTaggart, John 39–40 memory 128, 130, 131; narrative
Mead, G. H. 24, 31, 36 arc of event 65, 66, 67
media 66, 122, 156 narrative criminology 14, 86–7
Melossi, Dario 1, 114–15 nation state 121
memorials 105, 125, 127 natural experiments 30
memory: collective memory 2, 120–4, negative memory see memory
131, 132, 161, 164; criminological neo-liberalism 59, 112
work on 13–14; cultural memory Newburn, Tim 67
164; filling gaps in 80, 81; fixing Nietzsche, Friedrich 92, 95, 163
128–3; and history 120–4; negative 9/11 attacks 140
memory 124; plurality of 131;
politics of 162–4; public memory O’Brien, Patricia 136
120, 121, 124, 131, 164; trauma, occurrences 31, 33, 66, 78; see also
haunting and presence 124–8 events
meta-narratives see theory, grand Old Bailey Online 76
Index 205
O’Malley, Pat 1 culture 107–9; police history and

ontology 20, 149 historians 107, 122, 123; predictive
oral history 12–13, 22, 81, policing 139; professionalization 70;
82, 107, 157 ‘police’ concept 99–102; reform 21,
order 92, 99, 100, 112 26, 28, 37, 70–1, 101, 102, 147n2;
organized crime 69 scandals 30, 37, 71; strikes 30
Our Criminal Ancestors 161–2 policy change 69, 70, 99
post-colonialism 72
Palacios, Margarita 127–8 power 71, 113, 164
Palestinian community 144 present: de-centring the present 151–3;
panopticon 110, 138 embodied time 46, 47, 48; facing
Paoli, Letizia 69 towards futures 164–5; fixing the
Paris 111 past 133; harnessing complexity 83;
Parmenides 35, 40 historical thinking implications 49;
particularity see generality memory and history 120–1; pasts
pasts 40–1; as basis of historical and futures 118–19, 146; presence
thinking 21; fixing 128–33; of the past 126–7; synchronic
historical past 133; as memory and diachronic 55–6; tensed time
and history 120–4; practical 133; 39–43
trauma, haunting and presence present futures 40, 140, 146, 147
124–8 presentism 55, 88, 151
Paternoster, Ray 134 present pasts 43, 146, 147
path dependencies 72, 86 Presser, Lois 86
Pearson, Geoffrey 1, 69, 70 preventive justice 142
Peel, Robert 122 primary sources see historical
penal abolition see abolitionism sources
penal change and reform 113–15, Prior, Arthur 42
136–7, 154 prisoner’s dilemma 72–3
penal populism 58, 59, 72–3 prisons: abolitionism 138; and
penal-welfarism 114 gender 72, 83, 107–8, 137, 150;
penitentiary 136 penal change and reform 113–15,
periodization 44–5 136–7, 154; penitentiaries 136;
phenomenology 37, 38, 119 prison buildings 71; prisonization
Philips, David 93 39; prison labour 113; prison
phrenology and physiognomy 94, 157 population 58, 59, 75; solitary
Pierson, Paul 54, 57, 60, 78, 89n4 confinement 155, 159
Pinochet, General Augusto 127 private security 30, 83
police, and policing: abolition 102, process 17, 31–2, 36–9, 49, 102–6
138; complaints 71; corruption processual thought 31–2, 37
107; Hillsborough 132; historical profiling 139, 140
legacies in 72; institutions 32, 37, The Prosecution Project 76, 162
99, 102; memory of 122–3; police psychoactive substances see drugs
206 Index
public engagement 160–2 Rock, Paul 1, 18n1, 37, 38, 152

public inquiries see inquiries, official Rorty, Richard 96–7, 100
public order see order Roth, Randolph 89n2
public sociology 4 Rowbotham, Judith 156
punishment 8, 11, 39, 104, 113, Rubin, Ashley 114, 155, 159
115, 159 Runia, Eelco 126, 127
Rusche, Georg 113, 114
qualitative research 30, 55, 58, 62, 76 Rymond-Richmond, Wenona 132
quantitative resesarch 55, 58, 61, 76
Sahlins, Marshall 31
race, and racism 43, 94, 107, 157–8 Sampson, Robert 62
Radzinowicz, Leon 1, 3 Sandberg, S. 86
Rafter, Nicole 1 Savage, Mike 56, 64, 65
rational choice theory 54, 71, Savelsberg, Joachim 152
89n4, 106 scandals, in policing 30, 37, 71
rational reconstruction 117n5 Scandinavian exceptionalism 115
recollection see memory Scicluna, Sandra 73
recurrence 57, 69–71, 80 Scott, Walter 121
reform: as future horizon 134–8; Scraton, Phil 132
moral reform 101–2; pathways secondary sources see historical
to 158–60; penal reform 113–15, sources
136–7, 154; police reform 21, 26, security 117n7, 138–42
28, 37, 70–1, 101, 102, 147n2; self- security devices 59, 61
reform 134–6; cycles of 69–71 Seddon, Toby 95–6, 97
regression models 55, 60, 81 Segal, Lotte 144
regularity 34–5 self-control theory 106
regulation 70, 73, 101 selfhood 25, 134–5
Reiner, Robert 85 Sellin, Thorsten 1
Reiter, Keramet 155, 159 sentencing 39, 107–8
repeat offenders 62, 135, 139 sequence analysis 49, 79, 80, 84
research see archival research; sequences 33–5, 40, 59–60, 66–8,
historical research; qualitative 77–9, 84–6
research; quantitative research Sewell, William 27, 29, 31, 32, 63, 76
retroactive social control 128 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera 144
revision and revisionism 47, 131 Shaw, Clifford 81
Rieff, David 163 Sheldon, Sally 46
Riley, Denise 145 Shore, Heather 162
riot 30, 43, 66–8, 74 Simon, Jonathan 1
‘ripperology’ see Whitechapel Skinner, Quentin 99, 100
Murders ‘slab methods’ 55
risk 56, 139, 140, 141 slavery 26, 98, 104, 158
Roberts, Paul 3, 4 Smaal,Yorick 162
Index 207
Smith, Graham 71 temporal flow see flow

social change 32, 39, 46, 113 temporality see historical time
social class 54, 103 temporal motion see motion
social constructionism 11–12, 37 temporal units of analysis 58–74; the
social Darwinism 157 event 65–9; the inheritance 71–4;
social history 9, 14, 112, 151 the life course 61–5; Mannheim’s
social mobility 64, 65 ‘temporal units’ 57–8, 74; the
social movements 131 recurrence 69–71; the trend 58–61
social order 32, 101 tense, and time 6, 23, 39–43, 118
social stability 32, 100 terrorism 78, 103–5, 117n8, 140–1
social structure 8, 25, 29, 31–4, 103 terror, process of 102–6
sociological imagination 74 thematic analysis 55
sociology: classical sociology 7–8, 11; theory 106–16; applying and testing
historical sociology 4, 23, 150, 151; theory 106–9; ‘covering law’ theory
and history; public sociology 4; 106; grand theory 106, 116, 153–4;
sociology of deviance 12; sociology portable theory 108, 109–10;
of punishment 113 theorizing historically 109–16
solitary confinement 155, 159 thick description 67, 68
sources see historical sources ‘thick’ present 45, 48, 119, 147
space of experience 119 Thompson, E. P. 54, 103,
Sparks, Richard 163 110–11, 112
Spencer, Dale 125 time see historical time
Spierenburg, Pieter 79 time-series studies 60, 80
stadial narratives 56, 57 tipping points 86
state violence 61, 104, 145 torture 127, 129, 145
Steedman, Carolyn 109, 110 Tosh, John 131, 160
storytelling 86–7, 161; see also Trafalgar Square, London 131
narrative trajectories 27, 57, 62–5, 69–70, 82–3,
structure see social structure 86–7, 88
surveillance 105, 113 transitional justice 13, 129–32, 147
survivors 81, 124, 125, 130, 132, trauma 13, 18, 105, 124–8, 131, 163
133, 145 Treadwell, James 66
‘suspect’ populations 140 the trend 17, 57, 58–61, 74, 75, 76, 83
Sutherland, Edwin 81–2 truth 130
symbolic interactionism 11–12, 37 truth commissions 129–31
Symes, Carol 116 turning points 62–5, 82–3, 85–7
synchronic perspective 48, 53–8, 59, typologies 92
77, 82, 88
UK Abortion Act (1967) 46
Taylor, Barbara 25 uncertainty 134, 139, 140, 141
teaching 121, 155–8 underclass 107
technology 46, 77, 161 utopia see futures
208 Index
Valverde, Mariana 1 Whitechapel murders 125–126

variables 55, 60, 85, 89n2 White, Hayden 23
‘variables paradigm’ 28 will 134–6
Vegh Weis,Valeria 8 Williams, Lucy 160
victims 38, 58, 74, 76, 130, 160 Williams, Raymond 119
Viebach, Julia 125 witnesses and witnessing 42, 82, 127,
130, 133
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin 34, 67 Wright Mills, C. 74
Wakeman, Stephen 112
Walker, Anthony 145 Yorkshire Ripper 126
Walklate, Sandra 160 Young, Jock 18n1
Walkowitz, Judith 126 youth justice 56, 62, 69, 156
Walter, Eugene 104, 117n8 Ystehede, Per Jørgen 123
Watkiss-Singleton, Ros 157
Weaver, Beth 63 Zedner, Lucia 1, 83
Weber, Max 8 Zeno of Elea 52, 54, 65

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HISTORICAL CRIMINOLOGY

This book sets an agenda for the development of historical approaches to

• What is historical criminology? What does thinking historically

In this book, Churchill,Yeomans and Channing situate ‘historical think-

David Churchill is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the

Henry Yeomans is Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal

Iain Channing is Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the

These books will appeal to students, teachers and researchers in crimi-

Tim Newburn is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, London

Other titles in the series:

John Pratt: Penal Populism

‘The past is a foreign country, and this book is a perfect companion to

‘Historical Criminology demands criminologists of all persuasions ask

David Churchill, Henry Yeomans

There is a difficulty, an unease, in how criminology relates to ‘the his-

cultivate historical research in criminology (Braithwaite 1993: 394; LaFree

To this collective project, we offer the current book. Building upon

overlapping ­­sub-​­​­​­divisions. The divisional labels listed above serve various

In this book, we set out to harness as fully as we can the opportuni-

One can think of crime as a phenomenon of various kinds – social,

of punishment traced the evolving connection between modes of pro-

Genealogy has made a highly significant

environment, and how those individuals, in turn, are interpreted by

Life course research

Memory and justice

the furthest reaches of this literature – and of particular importance for

The above tour of historical research traditions is far from complete. A

Aims and scope

mediate our relations to pasts and futures. Concerning pasts, it analy-

We do not intend here to delineate a neatly bounded mode of enquiry

What counts as historical research?

of each – which aims to uncover how educational attainment af-

Alternatively, one might suppose that research is ‘histor ical’ by virtue

in light of the conditions and circumstances specific to the time from

centrality of change exposes a limit of historical thinking: things that

between historian and subject made possible by a common human sub-

would be an instantaneous new beginning. Let us return to our project

assessments of the order of change in particular contexts may stimulate

Influential traditions of longitudinal research in criminology treat life

his desistance from crime: how do we make sense of this as an eventful

events of his desistance narrative. Less obviously, perhaps, earlier events

social dynamics. An eventful analytic, then, is committed to ‘reciprocal

sociologists of punishment have explored the often protracted process

McTaggart (1908) contrasted two conceptions of time. The first is a

the prospect of a ‘repeat’ in another part of the world (as we sometimes

to designate a singular present. ‘The present’, he explains, is distinguished

1997: 29, 233; King 2000: ­­1–24; ­­ ​­​­​­ 10

instead that to do historical criminology is, at bottom, to consider crime

3 For more provisional assessments of the place of time in historical criminol-

The previous chapter proposed that a developed understanding of his-

The synchronic and the diachronic

synchronized moment in time’ (Corfield 2007: xv). Studying moments or

and concentrate on decision-making in isolated instants of time. On a

While these ‘epochalist’ or ‘stadial’ narratives set the present in

narrative understanding.Temporal units are conceptual vehicles that bring

Temporal units of criminological analysis

construct epochalist arguments that reinforce a synchronic focus on the

contextualization or causal explanation. It is the data points immediately

The life course

overlapping sub-divisions. The divisional labels listed above serve various

1997: 29, 233; King 2000: 1–24; 10

counter-factuals to a consideration of sequence further enhances analysis.

that – however marked their effects – they

culturally constructed – are wounded or endangered (see, for example,

Rymond-Richmond 2009: 93–100).Their

one currently is not (see also Denzin 1993: 162–3;Vaughan