Full Ebook of Criminology La3025 Module Guide University of London 2020Th Edition W Morrison Online PDF All Chapter

Criminology LA3025 Module Guide
University of London 2020th Edition W.

Morrison
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/criminology-la3025-module-guide-university-of-london
-2020th-edition-w-morrison/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Introduction to Criminology LA2010 Module Guide

University of London 2020th Edition S. Hutchinson
https://ebookmeta.com/product/introduction-to-criminology-
la2010-module-guide-university-of-london-2020th-edition-s-
hutchinson/
Public International Law LA3013- Module Guide

(University of London) 2022nd Edition W. Mansell
https://ebookmeta.com/product/public-international-law-
la3013-module-guide-university-of-london-2022nd-edition-w-
mansell/
Jurisprudence and Legal Theory LA3005 Module Guide

University of London 2022nd Edition J. Marshall & S.
Guest & A. Gearey & J. Penner & W. Morrison & A.
Dolcetti & E. Melissaris
https://ebookmeta.com/product/jurisprudence-and-legal-theory-
la3005-module-guide-university-of-london-2022nd-edition-j-
marshall-s-guest-a-gearey-j-penner-w-morrison-a-dolcetti-e-
melissaris/
Dissertation LA3200 Module Guide University of London

2022nd Edition Beverley Brown
https://ebookmeta.com/product/dissertation-la3200-module-guide-
university-of-london-2022nd-edition-beverley-brown/
Company Law LA3021 - Module Guide (University of
London) 2022nd Edition Chris Riley
https://ebookmeta.com/product/company-law-la3021-module-guide-
university-of-london-2022nd-edition-chris-riley/
Administrative Law LA2008- Module Guide (University of

London) 2022nd Edition M. Varney
https://ebookmeta.com/product/administrative-law-la2008-module-
guide-university-of-london-2022nd-edition-m-varney/
Commercial Law - Module Guide (University of London)

2022nd Edition Rick Canavan & Philip Rawlings
https://ebookmeta.com/product/commercial-law-module-guide-
university-of-london-2022nd-edition-rick-canavan-philip-rawlings/
Evidence LA3007 Module Guide University of London

2022nd Edition Amber Marks & Beverley Brown
https://ebookmeta.com/product/evidence-la3007-module-guide-
university-of-london-2022nd-edition-amber-marks-beverley-brown/
International Commercial Law LA3009 - Module Guide

(University of London) 2022nd Edition James Devenney
https://ebookmeta.com/product/international-commercial-law-
la3009-module-guide-university-of-london-2022nd-edition-james-
devenney/
Criminology
W. Morrison
This module guide was prepared for the University of London by:
u Wayne Morrison, LLB, LLM, PHD, LLD, Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of
London and Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand.
This is one of a series of module guides published by the University. We regret that
owing to pressure of work the author is unable to enter into any correspondence
relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this module guide,
favourable or unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.
University of London
Publications Office
Stewart House
32 Russell Square
London WC1B 5DN
United Kingdom
london.ac.uk
© University of London 2016. Reprinted with minor revisions 2020
Published by: University of London
The University of London asserts copyright over all material in this module guide
except where otherwise indicated. All rights reserved. No part of this work may
be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from
the publisher. We make every effort to respect copyright. If you think we have
inadvertently used your copyright material, please let us know.
Criminology page i
Contents
Module descriptor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a subject?
What are you expecting to study? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 The syllabus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 Core materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2 Crime, globalisation and the/your criminological imagination . . . . . 11

2.1 Developing a criminological imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Placing criminology in context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 Criminology and the advent of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.4 Other relevant characteristics of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.5 The dilemma of criminological knowledge and personal opinion . . . . . . 17
2.6 Some fundamental concepts in criminology: crime and criminality . . . . . 20
3 Competing traditions? Legacies of classical and positive criminology

or the concept of crime versus that of the criminal . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.1 Modernity and the Enlightenment context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 Central figures of the two approaches examined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.3 The positive revolution: the imagery of science replacing the moral
discourse of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.4 Political arithmetic and statistical analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.5 The oral-ethnographic efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.6 The Italian/positivist school . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.7 The return of classicism: populist conservative criminology and
contemporary rational action theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.8 Are the perspectives contradictory or can they be combined? . . . . . . . . 42
4 Sources of criminological data: official criminal statistics and their

limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.1 Criminal statistics and their interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
4.2 The dream of criminal statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.3 Durkheim: suicide as the paradigm example of positivism and statistics . . . 49
4.4 Role of NGOs and other to complement criminal statistics . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.5 Using statistics in search for criminality: the case of the Chicago
school of sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.6 Interpreting rises or declines in official statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
5 Psychology and crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5.1 Historical context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5.2 ‘Nature’ versus ‘nurture’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
5.3 Crime and psychoanalytic theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
5.4 Social learning and behavioural theories of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
page ii University of London
5.5 Trait-based personality theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

5.6 Cognitive theories of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
5.7 Contemporary narrative approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
6 Sociological perspectives – structural and cultural foundations . . . . . 79

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Part A: Classical sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
6.1 Foundational assumptions and the work of Emile Durkheim . . . . . . . . . 81
6.2 Sub-cultural theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
6.3 The work of David Matza: one writer analysed as an example . . . . . . . . 82
Part B: Labelling theory and moral panics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Part I: Labelling, otherwise known as symbolic, or social interactionism
or social reaction theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
6.4 Howard Becker and social interactionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
6.5 Role, status and stigma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Part II Moral panic theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
6.6 The creation of the concept of moral panics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
6.7 Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Part C: Critical criminology, a different view of social structure . . . . . . . . . . . 94
6.8 The rise of critical criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
7 Contemporary cultural criminology and existentialism . . . . . . . . . 99

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
7.1 Directions in cultural criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
7.2 Historical, theoretical and methodological antecedents of
cultural criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
7.3 The method(s) of cultural criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
7.4 Jack Katz and the ‘seductions of crime’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
7.5 Mike Presdee and the ‘carnival of crime’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
7.6 Towards an existential perspective in criminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
8 Feminist criminology: the challenge of gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
8.1 From statistics to explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
8.2 The feminist critique of criminology: an overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
8.3 Women and the criminal justice system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
8.4 Reflection: what does a feminist analysis mean for criminological theory?
Is it social ideology? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
8.5 Transitions: provocation, an example of gender in question . . . . . . . . 130
8.6 Feminism, criminology, the postmodern moment and globalisation . . . . 132
9 Punishment and its institutional framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
9.1 Philosophy and aims of punishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
9.2 Understanding punishment: contrasting philosophical and
sociological accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
9.3 Why punish at all? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
9.4 Punishing as a means to an end? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
9.5 Are compromise theories possible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
9.6 Do we live in a penal society? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
10 Conclusion: criminology under globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

10.1 In place of a conclusion: facing globalism and post-modernism . . . . . . 163
10.2 The challenges of globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Criminology page iii
Module descriptor
GENERAL INFORMATION
Module title
Criminology
Module code
LA3025
Module level
6
Contact email
The Undergraduate Laws Programme courses are run in collaboration with the
University of London. Enquiries may be made via the Student Advice Centre at:
https://sid.london.ac.uk
Credit
30
Courses on which this module is offered

LLB, EMFSS
Module prerequisite
None
Notional study time

300 hours
MODULE PURPOSE AND OVERVIEW

Criminology is offered as an optional subject to students on the Standard Entry and
Graduate Entry LLB programmes. It is also offered for study as an Individual Module.
Credits from Individual Modules will not count towards the requirements of the LLB.
Criminology is a wide term covering a large discipline. As a single 30 credit module

within an undergraduate course of study this module concentrates on criminological
theory as a discipline and in confronting which a way in which students diversely
located can challenge the presuppositions they have about crime and offenders.
The student is asked to think about their own situation, where they are located in the
global order and how they can use criminology to challenge their own ideas and to
better understand the formal and informal sources of knowledge about crime, the
grounds for public policy, labelling of offenders and responses to crime.
MODULE AIM
The module aims to develop a criminological imagination that enables successful
students to engage critically with both their presuppositions and acquired knowledge,
develop a global perspective, separate common sense from scholarly perspectives,
identify information needs and gaps and develop a sense of intellectual integrity that
acknowledges the limits of what we know and the need for further research.
LEARNING OUTCOMES: KNOWLEDGE

Students are expected to have knowledge and understanding of the main schools of
thought within Criminology. In particular, they should be able to:
page iv University of London
1. Understand the inter-disciplinary heritage of criminology and the influence this

has had on the various schools of thought;
2. Describe the different sources of information available to academics, policy-

makers and the public on crime;
3. Understand the contested nature of what is (and is not) considered to be ‘crime’;
4. Describe the main arguments of the various schools involved in explaining crime
and critically analyses their differences;
5. Describe perspectives on the role of punishment and the different functions that it
might be thought to serve.
LEARNING OUTCOMES: SKILLS

Students completing this module should be able to demonstrate the ability to:
6. Distinguish between different conceptual frames of reference and compare and

contrast their strengths and weaknesses;
7. Engage with definitional and conceptual issues relating to crime, deviance and
control;
8. Analyse popular perceptions of crime and punishment and subject these to critical
analysis;
9. Utilise a range of tools and resources available for the study of crime and its
control.
BENCHMARK FOR LEARNING OUTCOMES

The Learning Outcomes are benchmarked against the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA)
benchmark statement for Law 2019.
MODULE SYLLABUS
(a) Objectives and methods of criminology. The idea of a science of criminology. Basic
dichotomies/controversies on nature and scope of criminology, crime as a social
problem verses crime as inevitable and a reflection of social order. Developing a
criminological imagination in conditions of globalism. Defining crime (legal and
sociological conceptions, the role of the nation state and the need for different
focus, social harm and violations of human rights). Historical development of
criminology (in outline only). Classical and positivist schools. Criminology beyond
the nation state and the case of State crime. Sources of data: Official statistics and
alternatives (e.g. self-report studies and victimisation surveys); media images of
crime and offending and ‘moral panics’. Uses, defects and limitations of official data
for purposes of research. Challenges of gender, transnational crime and trafficking.
(b) Criminological Theory. Orientating perspectives in studying crime such as

correctionalism and appreciation, crime as an individual phenomenon verses
crime as a social product: legacies of classicism and positivism, rational choice,
biological, psychological and psychiatric explanations, including idea of
psychopathy, the importance of the situation. Crime as a social phenomenon:
Anomie theory, Durkheim and Merton. Social disorganisation and social ecology.
Concept of spatial justice. Matza, techniques of neutralization and ‘drift’.
Interactionist perspectives. Labelling theory. Control theories. Marxism. Feminism.
Crime as a cultural phenomenon: cultural criminology, moral panics and the
media, Katz and seductions of crime, existentialism.
(c) Institutional Framework of Law Enforcement. Philosophy and aims of punishment,

including deterrence, treatment, ‘justice’, communicative and restorative models.
Whether actual systems of punishment can be explained by philosophical
justifications or sociological approaches (in outline). Community and official
attitudes to punishment and treatment of offenders.
Criminology page v
LEARNING AND TEACHING
Module guide
Module guides are the students’ primary learning resource. The module guide covers
the entire syllabus and provides the student with the grounding to complete the
module successfully. The module guide sets out the learning outcomes that must
be achieved as well as providing advice on how to study the subject. The guide also
includes the essential reading and a series of self-test activities together with sample
examination questions, designed to enable students to test their understanding. The
module guide is supplemented each year with ‘Pre-exam updates’, made available on
the VLE.
The Laws Virtual Learning Environment

The Laws VLE provides one centralised location where the following resources are
provided:
u a module page with news and updates, provided by legal academics associated
with the Laws Programme;
u a complete version of the module guides;
u online audio presentations;
u pre-exam updates;
u past examination papers and reports;
u discussion forums where students can debate and interact with other students;
u Computer Marked Assessments – multiple choice questions with feedback

are available for some modules allowing students to test their knowledge and
understanding of the key topics.
The Online Library

The Online Library provides access to:
u the professional legal databases LexisLibrary and Westlaw;
u cases and up-to-date statutes;
u key academic law journals;
u law reports;
u links to important websites.
Core text
Students should refer to the following core text and specific reading references are
provided for this text in each chapter of the module guide:
¢ Hopkins Burke, R. An introduction to criminological theory. (Routledge: London,

2018) fifth edition [ISBN 9781138700215].
ASSESSMENT
Learning is supported through tasks in the module guide, which include self-
assessment activities with feedback. There are additional online activities in the form
of multiple choice questions. The Formative Assessment will prepare students to reach
the module learning outcomes tested in the Summative Assessment.
Summative assessment is through a three hour unseen examination. Students are

required to answer four essay questions out of a choice of eight.
page vi University of London
Permitted materials
No materials are permitted in the examination.
Please be aware that the format and mode of assessment may need to change in
light of extraordinary events beyond our control, for example, an outbreak such as
the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In the event of any change, students will be
informed of any new assessment arrangements via the VLE.
1 Introduction
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a subject?

What are you expecting to study? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 The syllabus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 Core materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment . . . . . . . . . . 9

page 2 University of London
Learning outcomes
By the end of this introduction you will know more about:
u the style of the course
u the type of materials you will be provided with
u the assessment.
Introduction
The doors are opening. There are our murderers. Dressed in black. On their dirty hands
they wear white gloves. They drive us out of the synagogue in pairs. Dear sisters and
brothers, how difficult it is to take leave of such a beautiful life. You who are still alive,
never forget our innocent little Jewish street. Sisters and brothers, avenge us on our
murderers.
Murdered on September 15, 1942.
(Message left in blood on the wall of a synagogue in Eastern Europe where the Nazi forces
had herded Jewish inhabitants before taking them out to be shot. (Lawrence Langer, The
age of atrocity. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978) [ISBN 9780807063699] p.40.))
I would like to say ‘Welcome!’ with full gaiety… but of course there is our subject
matter…
Criminology – what is it?
In terms of material: there is a vast range, including, but not limited to, the deliberate
infliction of pain; unnatural death such as homicide, murder and manslaughter; sexual
offences (such as rape – and in some countries the mere fact of sexual orientation);
fraud, burglary; ‘mugging’; drug taking; police corruption; torture; terrorism; drug and
human trafficking; responding to crime via social measures, target hardening and/or
punishment, which seem ‘natural’ but which may have resulted in creating a prison
business; atrocity; ‘industrial accidents’… and institutional selectivity by governments
and the media with regard to what are relevant ‘facts’ and perspectives are presented,
and – finally, but often overlooked – ourselves…
As an academic subject:
It is part of the social or human ‘sciences’ which raises complex questions about
objectivity and subjectivity because, unlike the ‘natural’ sciences in which humans
study inanimate (or ‘soulless’) processes, in the social sciences humans study other
humans and their social and cultural institutions. The social sciences are said to be
morally charged or reflexive, normative and unavoidably political. As opposed to the
study of physical and biological processes, social science studies are more historical
and morally orientated. While adhering to notions of scientific integrity and seeking
factually based arguments, the social sciences are more sciences of persuasion; they
may be ‘researching’ a particular policy – such as reactions by police and social services
to youth offending – but the findings have an effect. They either confirm, according
to a set of criteria, the efficacy of the current policy or they seek to change the overall
policy or particular aspects.
As a practical task:
You are encountering it as part of your LLB or perhaps BSc studies as a single, stand-
alone module.
Criminology is increasingly offered as a whole degree, in which case criminology

is broken down into discrete units – presented as a range of specialised modules –
with areas such as crime and the city (perhaps under the title of social ecology) or
psychology or critical criminology as separate modules for study.
However, you are undertaking a stand-alone module and you will be asked to read
a selection of material from a wide and often conflicting array. There is a very large
amount of material that could (and often does) go into criminology courses. At its
Criminology 1 Introduction page 3
simplest the word ‘criminology’ denotes the ‘logos’, the rational discourse, associated
with crime: crimin-o-logos. As seen by many of the late 19th and early 20th century
writers who are credited with forming it as a discipline, it connects with criminal law
and with penal policy (early texts were often entitled ‘Criminology and Penology’).
Thus it connected to ‘common-sense’ arguments about the need for social control and
punishment.
But there are those – like Angela Davis (first activity: research who she is) who say we
must break the seemingly common-sense link between crime and punishment (which
in many, many, cases means being sent to prison).
Contrasts in outlooks and mood: ‘Whose side are you on?’

(To paraphrase the famous article by Howard Becker, ‘Whose side are we on?’, Social
Problems 14(3) 1967, pp.239–47)
Throughout this guide, a three-fold distinction will be made between:
1. Criminology, as ‘logos’, in other words, as the ‘scientific’ discipline aiming for

impartiality;
2. You, as the important and subjective element who is to interact with this
discipline and ultimately undergo assessment activities (primarily the summative
examinations); and
3. The world. The world is of course inescapable; it is the context of both the
discipline which seeks to be ‘truthful’ to it and you. The world always escapes being
captured fully and always surprises.
As said above, criminology involves humans commenting on other humans; unlike

doing experiments on physical substances, investigating social life is a changing and
multi-perspective endeavour, one which always involves choices about what to focus
on, where to stand and what perspective to adopt.
With criminology, for example, there are a number of basic distinctions in the
material, such as between seeing it as an applied science in which the aim is to
acquire secure knowledge that overcomes the need for political debate or choice, or
a critical imagination that reveals contingence and choice running through all human
activity; another is between ‘mainstream’ or ‘administrative’ and ‘critical’ criminology.
Mainstream criminology works with the status quo, the existing social structure and
cultural values; even if some of the individuals working as mainstream criminologists
may seek to reform it, they largely work on research agendas as set by the government
(the state) and accept the common-sense definition of a crime and an act or omission
which is subject to punishment (by the state). ‘Critical’ criminology finds the status
quo itself problematic and does not accept the state as the definer or arbiter of what
we should be concerned about as ‘crime’ or social harm.
In the USA, criminology is often taught in schools of Criminal Justice studies, and
students go on to employment in the ‘correctional service’ (such as in prisons), as
police officers and the like. In the UK, it is more commonly taught in departments
of general sociology or social policy or as a sub-set or as part of law courses and the
outlook is more generally critical.
Given that this is an individual module, it reflects choices made as to material and style
of teaching; it is also reflective. In other words it asks you to consider your taken-for-
granted assumptions, to ask you to consider your position in society and how much
do you know or analyse about the world. Do the criminal laws of your society reflect
the views of the whole population, or, in the case of at least some of them, a particular
portion? Are there circumstances in which you consider it right to break the law? More
broadly, consider the simple but also complex question: what were the real sources of
harm to humans in the 20th century? And has humanity progressed in terms of social
ordering? Are ‘we’, for example, more humane, more caring; has violence decreased or
increased and so forth. And what are our frames of reference?
Consider the historical position:
As noted before, social sciences adopt an historical and morally orientated reading or
positioning of people, societies and places. Traditionally, the writers who contributed
to building up criminology seemed to assume that we were getting more civilised,
that the future would always be better (or that we could make it better). It is a product
of the Enlightenment attempt to replace the claims of tradition, the rhetorical appeals
to passion or the privileges of the aristocracy with a commitment to ‘reason’. That
meant, in practical terms, subjecting human arrangements to rational ordering and
making social changes in light of social statistics, of evidence of what worked and of a
rational appreciation of the issues that needed to be addressed.
We now live with many of the advances of post-Enlightenment projects – fantastic

buildings, mega-cities, advanced communication technologies, the freedom to desire
and to consume goods from around the world – with many unforeseen consequences,
for example, the nuclear bomb, the Holocaust and genocides of ‘far off’ places such as
East Pakistan leading to the creation of Bangladesh), Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur.
What does that mean for our moral picture of humans? Langer describes a lesson:
One of the most sinister and melancholy discoveries of our era is that men and nations can
kill under certain circumstances without having to face effective censure from civilisation.
The desolate heritage of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Stalinism, fascist Spain, Algeria, Vietnam
– the length of the list grows frightening – is that torture and or atrocities have failed to
offend the sensibilities of men as one might have expected. (Langer, 1978, p.46)
He wrote that in 1978 – what of today? The message rings even more true today after
the deliberate looking the other way and withdrawal of UN peacekeeping troops in
Rwanda that allowed some 800,000-plus Tutsi to be killed, the abuses at Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq and the USA’s use of torture under President George W. Bush in the
so-called War on Terror and the massacres carried out by the so-called Islamic State in
Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
Yet it is surely an advance to know of these things. In 2020, we live in a globalised

world where our understanding of human existence is mediated by mass media and
we have access (if we want or chose to use it) to an enormous array of information
(and interpretations of that information). This display of information and diverse
interpretations is historically very new and strange but, to those born in the last 30 or so
years, it appears so ‘natural’; we can roughly call this expansion in information a product
(and component of) globalisation and a symptom of inhabiting ‘late modernity’.
Consider language:
Academic criminology has been (and still is) largely language: it is a form of
rational representation. As a discipline it is organised in particular ways and in
your examination you will be expected to write coherently and use references and
arguments drawn from the ‘academic discipline’.
But is the subject matter capable of rational representation and do we, as consumers
or citizens of the world, deal in rational terms? Or do we distort things when we
package social reality into such a language and system of representation; are we really
wanting something other than dry reason, statistics and so forth?
Consider the issue of trust: should we trust ‘experts’, our instincts, our ‘moral
reactions’? And what of non-academic accounts of crime and motivation?
Many, many people read what could be termed ‘popular criminology’ daily, in
newspapers, in novels, and watch a form of criminology on TV and in cinema (whereas
people once thought of Sherlock Holmes as a criminologist, today many would look to
participants in one of the versions of CSI). Larry Lamb, once Editorial Director of
The Sun and News of the World (‘tabloid’ or mass circulation newspapers in the UK)
believed that ‘The basic interests of the human race are not in music, politics and
philosophy, but in things like food and football, money, sex and crime – especially
crime.’ (As quoted in Steve Chibnall, Law-and-order news an analysis of the crime
reporting in the British press. (London: Routledge, 2001; first published 1977)
[ISBN 9780415264082].)
In the literary and popular media world we encounter psychopaths, mass murderers,
detectives with heavy drinking problems, politicians who arrange homicides and
make people disappear, societies losing their moral backbone, crooked deals and
heroic deeds; sometimes (as with for example the early 20th century detective stories
of Dashiell Hammett) we encounter implicit large-scale social theories – Hammett
depicted the American dream as a jungle with human predators, yet we see great
contrasts and collisions: personal honour entangled in corruption, opportunity and
the plays of fate. In the Sweden evoked by the author Henning Mankell, his character
Inspector Kurt Wallander lives in the small town of Ystad, but this is a location that is in
the midst of global flows of trafficked women, drugs and terrorists.
Crime fiction excites and sells: much of academic criminology – particularly that of
positivist criminology in the grip of quantitative analysis – is likely to appear boring in
contrast.
Consider who speaks:
As an academic discipline, criminology has been dominated by the writings of

academics based in Europe and North America (with more recent contributions from
Australia and elsewhere). It is not context-free but represents forms of knowledge
produced in particular locations using specific methodologies; however, its scientific
ethos claimed a universal message. Writers often claimed to be creating ‘general
theory’ applicable everywhere conversely others argue that theories built up in the
conditions of the USA should not be simply applied in Hong Kong or Malaysia or
Trinidad without a deep and critical appreciation of local context and culture.
So context is important:
In light of this, as an introduction to thinking about crime, the power of the state,
punishment, and social suffering, this module is necessarily reflexive; we will not only
read about, sometimes watch (i.e. videos on the internet), human activity but try to
think about the status of the ‘secondary’ activity of writing, watching, prioritising,
relating, defining, using power. Certainly, we should not take ‘crime’ for granted as a
settled concept but also ask how it is conceptualised, what are the harms associated
with it and how we understand the social responses to it.
The specific orientation of this module is on criminological theory but this is not
context-free nor is it without links to other projects. Criminology has, for example,
a close – some say too close – relationship with criminal justice. Critics may ask
‘Why criminal justice’? Why not make the link to social justice? Criminology has
often seemed like a servant of the state, a form of discourse which gives a veneer
of legitimacy to the state’s systems of control, of repression, of classification (and
punishment).
While it will be of benefit to you to have outline knowledge of elements of criminal

justice (policing, prisons and punishment), this is not a criminal justice course.
Today – for better and for worse – the criminal justice system mediates between
the individual and the state. It can be abused, for example, in some countries forms
of policing work to ‘disappear’ political opponents. The nation state has been (and
continues to be, although losing considerable control under globalisation) the
central organising feature of modernity: it is, however, bureaucratic, hierarchical and
formalised. In earlier times, less complex social units treated occasions which we now
regard as crimes (that is, as offences that under the criminal law are specifically liable
to punishment by the agents of the state) as either normal features of life, or sins,
nuisances, or as wrongs against the victim entitling them – or the relatives if they were
murdered – to compensation. The development of the present situation (where such
wrongs are the concern of the state and where suspected offenders are processed by
police and the criminal courts and, if found guilty, are liable to a range of sanctions
ranging from discharges through to measures like probation and community service
to imprisonment, and even death [capital punishment] in some states) has a history
linked to the rise of the modern state and the various agencies of the state.
The nation state continues to be the most important entity, even in the face of
globalism and transnational law. Domestically, it provides the context for your home
(it is your homeland!) and provides a degree of physical, economic, cultural and social
borders; internationally, it is the chief agent in systems of global interdependence
(even the European Union is a union of nation states). But ease of travel, international
commerce and new forms of communication mean that not only are many of our
problems ‘global’ in reach but we are confronted by evidence of our dependency
and engagement with ‘others’ in faraway places. Some of those concerns are
acknowledged and indicated herein but this course is necessarily introductory and
more questions may be raised than answers given!
1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a

subject? What are you expecting to study?
To paraphrase above: criminology is a blanket term for interrelated forms of discourse
that represent attempts to set out and critically analyse our understanding of crime
and of the state’s handling of crime and related matters (or failure to respond!). Thus
we are necessarily concerned with trying to comprehend rationally the relationship
of the individual(s) (group?) who breaks the laws of a state and the operation of the
state’s power to lay down laws and to punish for breaches of those laws (and then
we are in trouble if it is a whole state, such as the Nazi state seeking to exterminate
the entirety of the Jewish people: how do we conceptualise that situation?). Studying
criminology within a law degree may give an expectation that it is an ‘applied law’
subject; on the contrary, much of its history is a battle between those who adopted
a primarily legalist approach towards dealing with crime and those who adopted
approaches from the social sciences, namely, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis
and so forth. Thus the criminal law (or lack of it) has given a core focus, placing
emphasis on the problem of breaches of it, and the practical questions of whose
responsibility it is to know about social harm, victimhood and so forth, and then what
to do with the offender who has breached such a law, and the general problem of how
to minimise the overall incidents of offending (the social problem of crime). But again
bigger questions emerge: how do we deal with a ‘criminal state’? What do you do with
transnational ecological disasters – are they ‘crimes’? The study of criminology is an
invitation to take a stance, to challenge your common-sense perspectives and try to
develop more complex world views.
1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it?

There are many reasons for the existence of criminology, but there are also voices
calling for its replacement. On the one hand, crimes (and related actions) involve
social harm – some internal critics of the state-focused nature of traditional
criminology would have us replace ‘crime’ with other concepts such as ‘social harm’,
‘breaches of human rights’ – however, the state-focused core of criminology has been
difficult to move.
Activity 1.1
To see the idea of ‘social harm’ verses ‘criminology’ go to John Moore’s blog,
beginning Wednesday, 27 October 2010: Drug policy harm part one: social harm
theory v criminology at
http://whose-law.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/drug-policy-harm-part-one-social-harm.
html
Read all four parts. What do you think of his assertion that taking a social harm
perspective allows us to look at all drugs, both legal and illegal, within the same
paradigm?
On the other hand, crime has become a political and media event. While before the
1970s crime was seen more as something that ‘experts’ could deal with, during the
1970s politicians discovered that waging ‘war’ on crime, or drugs, allowed them
to take the moral high ground, identify an enemy and mobilise resources. The
consequences are often irrational, putting many people in prison who do not deserve
to be there, and wastes resources and human lives on fighting imaginary enemies
while a more rational approach to the (real) social problems is made difficult because
of the labels used such as ‘war on crime’ (note the concept of ‘moral panics’ that
will be looked at later). The media have found in crime and associated social harms
sources of fascination, titillation and money making.
Politicians play on crime as a serious social problem as well as media and social anxiety
that our modern societies are ‘out of control’ in certain key respects.
The existence of so much crime in Western societies shows the underside of

modernity’s ‘progress’. The presence of so much desperation and social unrest
complicates the notion that modernity was to create ‘good’ or ‘grand’ societies of
peaceful co-existence and economic plenty in which the conditions for harmonious
social co-existence would be achieved. And the concept of state crime serves to
turn attention on the activities of the power centres of such societies. In addition,
globalisation offers a host of opportunities for new forms of criminal activity: trafficking
of drugs, women, migrants and forms of neo-slavery, not to forget financial transactions
that are increasingly complex and trans-national. Globalisation means that we cannot
ignore issues such as environmental degradation or genocide and this has led to the
development of eco-criminology and the blurring of the boundaries between crime –
as an act internal to the nation state – and war – as the prerogative of the sovereign – as
the rise of war crimes trials and international criminal justice points to.
Activity 1.2
Over five days collect a variety of newspapers.
Perhaps you can easily distinguish newspapers in terms of popular or serious (in the
UK this distinction used to be made between tabloids and broadsheets (the second
being the more ‘serious’).
Go through each and count up the number of stories that have to do with ‘crime’.
Then look at them with the following questions in mind:
a. What are the headlines?
b. What style of language is used? Can you see any contrasts between informal or
colloquial and more formal and sophisticated?
c. What is the length of each article; is there a contrast between newspapers?
d. Are there any basic terms which are used and reused?
e. What way of describing people is apparent?
f. Do any of the ‘crime stories’ involve any notions of economic interdependency,

migration, environmental interdependency, cultural barriers/diffusion, travel
and/or, globalisation?
Take a story: how would you have presented it differently?
Feedback
I have just picked up a copy of a UK daily newspaper I have kept, the Guardian for
early August 2015; there is a two-page story analysing how immigrants are being
presented in many of the newspapers as potential criminals. Another looks at how
other newspapers seem to portray homelessness, that is sleeping in the streets, as a
crime. These are both examples of reflexive media practice where the newspaper is
commenting on other newspaper stories.
1.3 The syllabus

The governing aim of the course is to introduce some of the theoretical issues involved
with the attempts to conceptualise ‘crime’, reflecting on the basic subject matter
(whether it is crime as defined by nation state or some other concept, such as ‘harm’),
continuing controversies, the methodological and ideological issues involved in
attempting to explain ‘crime’ and justify and legitimise the state’s response, such
as policing, the legitimacy of punishment and imprisonment. Because of this wide
coverage, you will be encouraged to obtain a working knowledge of the institutions and
policies at work in the area but it is not expected that your knowledge will be equally
deep across the syllabus. You will soon realise that there are many interconnections and
a continuity of basic themes. You may wish to specialise in some issues more than others
but keep in mind that there are often general questions, which are designed to see if you
have developed a critical appreciation of the subject as a whole and are able to see how
insights from one part of the course relate to other parts.
1.4 Core materials
1.4.1 Texts
Core text
You are expected to purchase:
¢ Hopkins Burke, R. An introduction to criminological theory. (Routledge: London,
2018) fifth edition [ISBN 9781138700215] (hereafter Hopkins Burke).
This provides a readable and reasonably comprehensive introduction to

criminological theorising.
Further reading
¢ Walklate, S. Understanding criminology: current theoretical debates. (Buckingham:
Open University Press, 2007) third edition [ISBN 9780335221233].
¢ Morrison, Wayne Theoretical criminology: from modernity to post-modernism.

(London: Cavendish, 1995) [ISBN 9781859412206] (hereafter Morrison, 1995).
This text considers criminology in the changing context of modernity. It is

detailed in its reading and poses a host of questions for contemporary times.
Note this was written primarily with Master’s level students in mind, but it will
be assumed that you will read and digest this text in the course of your study.
1.4.2 VLE and web

There is an array of related materials on the web which are easily accessed by routine
searches. These vary in quality but are a quick source for information and definitions
of concepts and terms. In particular, there are numerous entries on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a freely edited source and the quality of the content varies. While it is not
recommended by many academics, it is, however, usually written in an approachable
style and individual entries have been the subject of some editing.
It is our intention to upload materials from time to time: these may include
PowerPoint presentations and podcasts.
1.4.3 Journals, government and NGO material

There are a number of academic journals that publish articles in the field, such as the
British Journal of Criminology; Theoretical Criminology Journal of Law and Society; Law and
Society Review; International Journal of Sociology of Law; New Society.
In the UK the Office of National Statistics produces official statistics and commentaries
on the official ‘state of crime’.
There are a range of NGOs that work in related areas, for example:
u Anti-Slavery International, found at www.antislavery.org
u Amnesty International, found at www.amnesty.org.uk
u Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, found at www.crimeandjustice.org.uk

1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment

The key principle organising this course is alignment: we try to make the assessment
map on to the learning outcomes and reflect the activities and materials provided. To
succeed, you should note the learning outcomes in each chapter, read the chapter of
the study and then the chapters from the set texts and undertake the activities.
Formal assessment is by a three-hour unseen examination. You are expected to do four

questions out of eight. These are essay-style questions and will map on to the learning
outcomes as specified in the different chapters. Examples of actual examination
questions are found in each chapter and you can find examples of past examination
papers on the VLE.
1.5.1 The examination

If you look at several of the past Examiners’ reports, you will see the idea of the
candidate’s voice stressed. As emphasised in Chapter 2, we are looking for you to
develop your criminological imagination and that means by the time of assessment
you make arguments that cut through misleading information and opinion and are
supported by criminological knowledge and appropriately referenced. This is crucial!
To quote from the Introduction to the 2011 reports:
This examination is by essay questions only: criminology is an option in the LLB and BSc
programmes and draws upon material that has either a sociological, psychological or legal
basis.
Candidates are not expected to have achieved an in-depth immersion in particular

theoretical perspectives, but are expected to cover the material provided in the study
pack, have followed the recent developments and any new material introduced on the VLE
along with the recent developments, and the general themes of the subject guide.
To succeed in the examinations the candidates should:
• Focus their answers on the actual words of the questions asked;
• Adopt a stance towards the questions, which are often a quote followed by ‘discuss’;
• Structure their answer so that the introduction shows the examiner that they have
read the actual question and that the material that follows is organised to address
that;
• Articulate a response to the question using appropriate material and set out an
argument.
Candidates can express themselves in the subject and reflect issues debated in their own
jurisdiction. The main problem displayed in the answers is an overreliance upon common
sense and almost journalistic perspectives rather than the more considered approach that
criminological discourse hopes to achieve.
This is also reflected in later Examiners’ reports, for example, in 2012:
In many areas of law subjects candidates are used to answering examination questions
by recalling the names of cases by reference to which legal rules and principles are
introduced into law and into their answers. Criminology is not a case law subject; instead
of cases, there are standard key figures whose work is referred to. Names such as Emile
Durkheim, Karl Marx, Cesare Beccaria, Cesare Lombroso, David Matza, Howard Becker, Stan
Cohen, Jock Young, Travis Hirschi, John Braithwaite, or schools (or general approaches
with shared assumptions), such as classicism, Chicago school, left realism, critical
criminology and so forth provide focal points for the presentation of theories, hypotheses,
and perspectives on crime, social control, social reaction and punishment. In common
with case law subjects, however, good marks are obtained through the articulate and
persuasive use of language; the ability to communicate to the examiner essential points in
the voice of the student.
There were a range of good answers to this paper and features of these will be examined
in the sections on questions as follows. I hope that you can see in the extracts how
important the way the answers are expressed is and what I mean by communicating in
the voice of the student.
What of poor material? The main weakness in the scripts was a tendency (of some)
to use common sense categories or local media reports as if they were self-evident
or in no need of reinforcement or further explanation. Claims made from appeals to
common sense assumptions and media reports are, undoubtedly, part of the everyday
processes criminology relates to since many of the images and assumptions that people
and policymakers are concerned with come from the media and politicians respond to
popular sentiment. However this must be reflected upon and not uncritically accepted.’
2 Crime, globalisation and the/your criminological
imagination
Contents
2.1 Developing a criminological imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Placing criminology in context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 Criminology and the advent of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.4 Other relevant characteristics of modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.5 The dilemma of criminological knowledge and personal opinion . . . . 17
2.6 Some fundamental concepts in criminology: crime and criminality . . . 20

Core text
¢ Hopkins Burke, Chapter 1 ‘Introduction: crime and modernity’.
Essential reading
¢ Morrison, Wayne ‘What is crime? Contrasting definitions and perspectives’
(from Criminology third edition, Oxford University Press, 2013), available on the
VLE (specifically used in Activity 2.7).
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and the relevant readings, you should be able to:
u question your own assumptions about crime and the world
u appreciate some of the contexts in which criminology has been produced
u debate central issues around the definition of ‘crime’
u understand the difficulty in creating a ‘science of crime’
u recognise the need to think globally.
Criminology 2 Crime, globalisation and the/your criminological imagination page 13
2.1 Developing a criminological imagination

We are all located in situations: I am writing from London with my life experiences.
Where are you? What are your life experiences? When you or I read a criminology
text we bring different assumptions. I am, for example, conscious of the years of my
academic career immersed in the subject and of the amount of time and energy
writers have spent over the years discussing the ‘nature’ of the subject and attempting
to lay down basic concepts and methods of study. Criminology has in the main been
defined as ‘the scientific study of crime’ (Hall Williams, 1982, p.1) but this definition is
open to a whole array of qualifications; deeper questions and explanations as to the
nature of crime and what being scientific means in this area confront one.
For Hall Williams, events such as the Holocaust were to be studied in history, or
politics but not criminology. Thus it disappeared, making it in Baudrillard’s terms ‘the
perfect crime’ (as if it had never occurred). Why did he have such a narrow view of
criminology? In part because of the impact of ‘positivism’ and its link to mainstream
or administrative criminology, so criminology was the study of those things which in
everyday life the state deemed crimes. Today many criminologists refuse such narrow
boundaries!
What are the core concepts and how do they limit or extend a criminological
imagination? Should criminology study ‘crime’ or ‘deviance’ or ‘social harm’ or
‘breaches of human rights’? Or should it study not harm but ‘social solidarity (basically
how social orders hang together)? How should writers conceive of themselves?
Should they see themselves as a detached and impartial scientist or an engaged
critical social commentator? In the words of David Matza (2010), should one take a
‘correctional’ perspective (in which one assumes that the reason for studying to be to
ultimately rid ourselves of the object or phenomena) or an ‘appreciative’ perspective
(in which one wants to get close to the object in order to understand it on its own
terms). And what of the role of the state?
As an academic enterprise, criminology has been called a ‘basket’ into which is placed
writings and data from a multitude of disciplines and perspectives, framed with
different assumptions in mind, offering different images. Moreover, criminology is a
subject with a mixed reputation and a strangely ambivalent self image. Some writers
may be defined as ‘law and order’ proponents who argue for a strict defence of the
rules of law and identify any rise in recorded crime as the result of societies ‘going
soft’ on responding to deviance or failing to discipline their children and lacking moral
fibre. Others blame crime on the failure of modern societies to achieve social justice
and see crime as a consequence in failings in social solidarity. Some stay at the level
of individual interactions – interpersonal violence, for example – while others use
criminology as an entry into wider social criticism, the latter clearly adopting ‘morally
charged’ positions rather than attempting ‘value-free’ social science.
Even within any one grouping individuals differ. Some writers espouse ‘value-free’
science, for example, and see themselves as doing detached social science, while
others may see themselves as applied social engineers aiming to fix the ‘social
problem’ of crime. While they may then seek a criminology of numbers and equations,
others seem to want to provide accounts of offenders that make them out to be
exciting, humane, desperate and totally alive.
Many practitioners of what we might call ‘traditional or mainstream’ criminology

appear to see their role as providing accurate information on crime and criminals
for the administrative officials of the state. Other, more critical scholars, appear to
side with those whom the state is pursuing while possibly attacking the state for
overreaction; some even appear to want to escape the power of the modern state to
control events and replace concepts such as abuse of human rights, or causing social
harm, instead of crime as defined by the state. The enterprise of the first group, laden
with statistics and etiological studies of actual and potential ‘offenders’, assumes the
dry mantle of a social science modelled on the precepts of natural science and appears
boring and submissive from the perspective of the second. The second, revelling,
perhaps, in the grand theories of Marxism, or the micro revelations of symbolic
interactionism, or bringing out the diverse cultural meanings of action or even basing
themselves upon existentialism, appears at times politically suspect or scientifically
over-romantic to the first.
2.2 Placing criminology in context

Criminology is not static. Although some texts are recommended and readings are
supplied on the VLE, there is no possibility of finding a single set text which captures
the essence of criminology. To really appreciate it, you need an historical sensibility
and an ability to understand multiple perspectives. History is essential: the Spanish
philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once said ‘man has no nature, he has only a history’;
so it is with criminology. When one reads criminological texts one is engaged in the
self-conscious study of a history. A history that catalogues the various ways in which
members of modern societies, primarily those of the Western ‘developed’ world, have
sought to understand the nature of these processes of modern society with reference
to the problematics of social control, state power, individual socialisation, crime and
deviance.
But this is also a history of absences. What of slavery, what of war, what of imperialism,
what of colonialism…
Most criminology texts are silent on these big, big historical realities: but to appreciate
it and whether you can learn to ask questions that really matter about the world,
we need to at least consider their absence when thinking about the subject’s formal
history, its socio-political context, and its cultural context.
2.2.1 The formal history of the discipline

In the case of criminology, many criminological works provide a history section in
which a formative distinction is presented between the classical approach and the
positivist. These works present the two approaches as containing a separate set of
assumptions as to human nature and the nature of society, with corresponding sets of
policy recommendations.
The classicists (whose heyday was the 18th century and who are represented by names
such as the Italian Cesare Baccaria and the Englishman Jeremy Bentham) are labelled
as accepting the notions of the free will of the individual, of rational choice and, most
importantly, of the social contract ideal or metaphor for the structuring of the social
bond. †
Classical determinism: the
The positivists, arising in the late 19th century and represented by figures such as the theory that every event,
Italians Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri, are seen as accepting human behaviour including every human action,
as being determined by causal conditions;† they interpreted the social bond as is governed by natural laws.
something to be understood ‘naturally’, as if there were natural processes that created Technically, determinism is the
social orders and forms of government. For the positivists, the government of society belief that a determinate set of
becomes akin to a technical enterprise, while for the classicists it is a moral–political conditions can only produce
activity. The classicist sees breaches of the criminal law largely as offences against one possible outcome given
fixed laws of nature.
the social contract and the rights of other members of the pact. But is a government
Many believe this rules out
really to be understood as based on a social contract? When one says this is a moral
human freedom.
approach perhaps it is better to say it is a normative approach, meaning that one is
However, there are at least
putting a particular interpretation upon the social order in which it is possible to say
three different positions:
that some things are right and some things are wrong as they conform or move away
i. Human beings have free will
from the main points of that interpretation.
because determinism is false
The positivist claims to have no direct normative interpretation but simply says how (‘libertarianism’).
things are value free! So, for example, some may say that offending against the laws of ii. Human beings do not
the society is part of social processes and may be functional in that it either created an have free will because
opportunity for a ceremonial reaffirmation of the social bond or displayed itself as a determinism is true (‘hard
‘symptom’ of social pathology. determinism’).
iii.Even though determinism is
In many criminological texts the student is presented with a progressive picture of true, human beings do have
criminological history as if criminology were gaining a closer and closer approximation free will (‘soft determinism’).
to the ‘truth’ of crime and criminality over time. As Vold, for example, put it in his
second edition:
Classical criminology represents the development and application to thinking about

crime, the ideas and intellectual frame of reference that in Europe preceded the
application of scientific methods and experimental procedure to human behaviour.
The positive school represents the first formulations and applications to the field of
criminology of the point of view, methodology, and logic of the natural sciences to the
study of human behaviour. (1979, p.18)
Thus the victory of positivism was presented as a ‘rational advance’ over the
abstractions and politics of classicism. However, the image of criminology gradually
but solidly progressing as a discipline becoming more sure of its knowledge and with
an enhanced ability to make policy recommendations, become problematic in the
1960s and 1970s. In this period, criminology was first criticised by writers such as the
American David Matza for an uncritical belief in ‘determinism’, and then splintered
into a whole series of competing ‘paradigms’ and ‘perspectives’; nevertheless,
positivism remained (and remains) a dominant theme.
The problem with the progressive picture of criminological history is that it seemed
to make criminology self-developmental – as if there was a steady objective world out
there, a set range of things to be investigated, and criminology was slowly refining its
tactics and methodologies in understanding it and coming to understand what to do
to eliminate crime. In other words, that there was an autonomous development of
the knowledges of crime and deviance, a growth which was progressive and that the
changes in fashion or degree of concentration were as a result of the correcting of false
perspectives and slowly ‘getting the correct picture’. This downplays the essentially
pragmatic link between knowledge production and socio-historical location.
2.2.2 The social-political context for the development of criminology as

an intellectual discipline
This traditionally was relatively underdeveloped as most criminological texts
underplayed the impact of politics and philosophical context for the structuring of
social theory (recent texts try to reverse this omission, for example, those of Morrison,
Lilly, Tierney, Hopkins Burke or Garland). Criminology was generally seen either as the
work of individuals, for example, Lombroso, or of groups, such as the Chicago school,
as if the development of social theory were totally responsive to the requirements of
autonomous individuals or like-minded groups facing immediate problems insulated
from broader socio-political evolution. However, one should not ignore the political–
social context in which writers work: it is an inescapable factor!
In broad outline it is possible to see that classicism was a doctrine necessarily linked
to the development of ‘rule of law states’ over feudal society, of the rights of the
bourgeoisie over aristocratic privileges, and of the creation of a more free social space
for the abstract ‘market’ to function as opposed to the settled hierarchies and status
interactions of late feudal society. Positivism, likewise, can be seen as responsive to a
different set of demands linked to the spread of political influence into lower social
classes in society. The restoring of neo-classical or ‘new right’ themes in the mid-1970s,
1980s and 1990s can also be seen, in some countries at least, as responsive to the cost
of the welfare state and the apparent paradox that crime rates were increasing at the
same time as the West appeared to be more prosperous than any time in history. Yet,
we also realise that this prosperity masked a growing gap between the richest sections
of Western societies and the poorest.
The contemporary movement beyond the nation state can be linked to post-colonial
realities and globalisation. Many feel the need to rethink crime and criminal justice but
the grip of the established systems of thought and social control – what, following Jock
Young (2011), we may call the criminological imagination – remains strong.
The institutions and organisational motifs that make up the systems of crime and
deviance control in the modern West originated in the grand transformations that
occurred from the 18th century. Thus these systems are basically the product of
‘modernity’, a term which is difficult to define concisely but which designates what is
essentially new and particular about Western societies since the Enlightenment. In the
field of criminology, these changes are both the context of criminal justice and have
also shaped the institutional form of criminal justice. We can hint at several that have
shaped criminal justice:
u first, the development of the modern nation state with its centralised state
apparatus for the formal control of crime, gathering of statistics and the provision
of ‘care’ and ‘welfare’ for its population;
u second, the typologising and differentiation of the deviant and dependent into
separate types, each with particular sets of ‘scientific’ knowledge, expertise, and
group of ‘experts’;
u third, the development of organisational outcomes that segregate the deviants,

criminals, sick and dependents into prisons, juvenile reformatories, asylums,
mental hospitals, and other closed purpose-built institutions for treatment,
punishment, and custody;
u fourth, reactions against welfare and labelling that return responsibility to

the individual and reinforce notions of blame. At the same time, others stress
restorative justice.
2.3 Criminology and the advent of modernity

The idea of modernity reflects the understanding that there is something special
and different about modern societies which demarcates them from the types and
methods of social cohesion and social control which have gone before them. Consider
this description of modernity:
There is merit in the ‘modernity’ of a society, apart from any other virtues it may have.
Being modern is being ‘advanced’ and being advanced means being rich, free of the
encumbrances of familial authority, religious authority, and deferentiality. It means being
rational and being ‘rationalised’... If such rationalisations were achieved, all traditions
except the traditions of secularity, scientism, and hedonism would be overpowered.
(Shils, 1981, pp.288–90.)
The concept of ‘modernity’ is troublesome (see Morrison, 1995, and Hopkins Burke).
[You may wish to go to the Wikipedia entry on modernity for some guidance.] Grand
theorists who have been concerned with its themes largely locate modernity in
terms of a spectrum of categorisations differentiating between oppressive and ‘false’
traditions (including religion) and empty, rootless freedom. Within criminological
texts, Durkheim is sometimes used in this way (see Vold Bernard, 1986, Chapter 9
‘Durkheim, anomie, and modernisation’). Interestingly, many social theorists refer to
a social crisis of modernism (using terms such as ontological insecurity) of which two
broad features can be mentioned. First, we can see many current social problems in
terms of a crises of power whereby modern societies find themselves immersed in a
technological ability and knowledge spiral which gives advances in certain powers, but
which outstrip mankind’s ability to assimilate its consequences and link its meanings
(need one mention the present nuclear capability? Or the vast increase in the world’s
population and the possibility of ecological destruction?). Second, the alienating and
nihilistic effects of modern culture on a humanity which has thrust itself free from a
context of traditional positioning and community structures which gave existence
meaning and which allowed people to live in ways that they assumed were natural
and ‘real’. To take a simple example, most people used to live in rural locations, now
cities dominate. Or take Bangladesh where the majority are still living in villages and
many are illiterate. For some of them, modernity means an attack on what they hold to
be natural and, for a great many, an attack on their interpretations of Islam.
The modern Western world, on the other hand, although an urban world where
mankind lives cheek-by-jowl with a multitude of ‘others’, is a place of distance which
demands newer and more complicated forms of social control than previously. For
the modern self-image and self-consciousness, the question of personal identity is
not defined by one’s position in the order of things, some embedment in localised
tradition and custom which ultimately seems some integration of self and cosmos, but
by an insulated individualism mediated by concepts such as authenticity, choice, and
the ‘rationality’ of ends–means relations.
Thus we ‘moderns’ live at a distance from those modes of comprehension and

organisation taken for granted by ‘pre-moderns’. As contrasted to the approaches
which stress the primacy of the group or community, the presuppositions of the ideal
type of our social contract political theory, for instance, is of the normalcy of isolated
individualism, of free and calculating atomistic units.
2.4 Other relevant characteristics of modernity

These include factors such as the development of industrial society, the capitalist mode
of economic organisation, urbanism and the advent of liberal democracy and utopian
socialism, but there are other features which are both basic and hard to appreciate
such as the handling of time and the notion of change. Modern society is both the
product of dramatic transformations, of immense change and itself in a continual state
of change. There appear to be no settled cannons or structures that remain stable and
fixed for a long period. Instead some of the basic canons – the notion of democracy is
a good example – are cast in such an abstract frame that the substantive content, for
example, whether women have the right to vote or whether it is fair to say an election is
democratic when a large proportion of the populace do not bother to vote (as in most
American presidential elections), can be subject to variation.
Alongside the vast increase in population growth, an inescapable feature is the urban
context of social life – the majority of the world’s population live in cities of 20,000
people or more. As a point of comparison, prior to the 19th century, even in societies
considered urbanised, probably less than 10 per cent of the population lived in towns
or cities. London’s population in the 14th century is estimated at around 30,000, and
when at the turn of the 19th century it reached 900,000 it was not only the largest city
in the world but dominated England.
The routines of this urban life are set within structures responsive to the changing
demands of economic performance. Many of the competing interpretations on social
life can be traced to defining modern society’s economic basis as either industrialisation
or capitalisation. The attitude that a theorist takes to issues such as class and the nature
of social interaction differ depending on whether they adopt a more benign functional
theory of industrial society, or engages with the (not only Marxist!) notion of capitalist
society with its relations of exploitation and domination.
2.5 The dilemma of criminological knowledge and personal

opinion
Criminology can sometimes seem like a matter of opinion, and any intelligent
person can have an opinion on the subject. Indeed, part of the pleasure of studying
criminology is to articulate your own ideas and subject them to testing.
However, there is a dilemma, because criminology is also part of the ‘knowledge

project’ of modernity. It has tried to replace opinion (even ‘educated opinion’) by
reliable facts and scientific knowledge. Its aim – as we see with Beccaria (through
classicism), Durkheim (through sociological positivism) and Lombroso (through
biological positivism) as well as openly utopian writers such as Comte and Saint-Simon
– has been to use criminological knowledge to help construct better societies.
In 19th century France, Comte attempted to develop a positive sociology which would
provide a truly scientific basis for the reorganisation of society. He made positivism
a utopian understanding and shared the optimism of such philosophers as the
Englishman Francis Bacon about the benefits of a positive approach to science for
humanity but was not blind to the extent to which this approach clashed with the
traditional hegemony of the ruling class. The very first words he had published make
this clear:
Rulers would gladly have it taken for granted that they alone can see alright in politics, and
consequently are entitled to a monopoly of opinions in such matters. They have doubtless
their own reasons for speaking in this way, while subjects have theirs for refusing assent to
a principle which, under every point of view, is wholly absurd.
(Quoted in Fletcher (ed.), 1974.)
Secure social knowledge was to provide a new basis for developing social structures
and building social relations. The opinions of the rulers would have to give way in a
new form of knowledge–power combination, a position where the organisation of
society would be the responsibility of scientists and the rationality of the knowledge
they produced. Comte proposed a law of three stages through which all human
thinking had to pass: first, the theological or fictive, then the metaphysical or abstract
and finally the scientific or positive. These stages corresponded to the development
of our knowledge of the universe and ourselves, and in the positive stage there is a
clear-cut distinction between science and morals and the operation of all features in
the universe could be gauged by the operation of the positive methodology whereby
science could in time come to control ‘moral’ dilemmas.
Clearly in Comte’s view, Europe was to be the crux of progress and of civilisation, and
the modes of life of Europe were the destiny of the world. The power of the West
has indeed spread throughout the world. But he is confident that the modes of life
which have developed in the West are intrinsically superior to those of other cultures.
Today? Of course the spread of the West has unleashed forces which have corroded
or destroyed many of the features and coherence of the other cultures it has come
in contact with. The metaphysics of progressive evolution has tended to glorify the
dominance of the West as the necessary result of a system of determinate social
evolution; this evolution is judged in terms primarily of technological growth and the
ability to control and change the material environment, and has led to the denial of
the resources of other cultures in favour of the Western solution. Thus Eurocentrism
dominates criminological history – it is almost impossible to find any criminology
from the developing world which can challenge the theories and presuppositions
of that of the West. If you come across examples of such writings, use them to your
advantage to challenge the presuppositions of mainstream criminology.
One strand of thought which opposes the Eurocentric domination is the

anthropological perspective which allows us to appreciate the diversity of modes
of human existence on the globe. Much early anthropology was also ethnocentric –
chronicling the weakness and destruction of ‘primitive’ races in comparison to the
West and, if early anthropological study had one theme in the construction project
of modernity, it can be seen as attempting to locate the ‘normal’ mode of human
existence.
The result, conversely, was to demonstrate diversity and difference rather than
uniformity. At the same time, however, the anthropological dimension to modern
thought also illustrates the essential interconnections of the modern world and
the central unity of the human race. It denies the purported ‘irrationality’ of many
primitive practices and demonstrates the richness of non-state institutions, for
example, and there are now no grounds for supposing that those who live in
‘primitive’ societies are genetically inferior to those of the advanced ‘civilisations’.
However, anthropology also demonstrates the complex processes of socialisation
and signification that go to make up the successful ‘normal’ members of any society.
Moreover, the question of ‘social order’ and conformity, of the normal and deviant, is
not placed on some purely ‘natural’ footing by anthropology. Apart from a basic few
measures, such as some protection of life in the ‘in-group’ (the protection of strangers
is certainly not a universal) or of the domain of groups, the ordering of societies differ.
A contemporary example of overturning of the previous narrative of rational

development lies in restorative justice. Instead of seeing crime as a matter for the
state’s criminal justice professionals, of law and punishment, attention is placed on
who has been hurt, what are the relationship and issues of locality and what kind of
measure and process could be undertaken that would involve the stakeholders so that
causes could be addressed and matter remedied. Zehr (1990) contrasted a ‘retributive
justice’ framework where the criminal justice agencies take ownership of the events
(the crime) and a restorative justice framework, where crime is viewed as a violation
of people and relationships. Zehr credits ‘two peoples’ as inspiring this change: ‘the
First Nations people of Canada and the U.S., and the Maori of New Zealand’, stating
that restorative justice represents a ‘validation of values and practices that were
characteristic of many indigenous groups’, but whose traditions had been ‘discounted
and repressed by western colonial powers’. He gives the example of New Zealand/
Aotearoa, where before the arrival of the Europeans, the Maori had a well-developed
system called Utu that protected individuals, social stability and the integrity of the
group. It should be noted however, that indigenous group justice often involved
physical punishments that are at odds with so-called modern ideas of human dignity –
conversely, many indigenous people find imprisonment a torment.
Thus while all societies have ideas concerning what normal and deviant behaviour
is and mechanisms for controlling social interaction, each may have particular
‘functions’ or roles in that particular context. Once we appreciate this diversity,
criminology becomes more complicated. It cannot simply be the accumulation of
knowledge to control troublesome people in society, although some criminological
knowledge may aid this. Nor can it be solely the provision of knowledge about social
processes to enable the members of the society to better understand social processes,
although this is a laudable aim. It can also be a form of inquiry about the consequences
of what is, and the possibility of what is not but could be, for human existence.
2.5.1 Reflection: labelling, responses and the boundaries of criminology:

is understanding terrorism a criminological issue, political or a
question of ‘war’?
I began this chapter by relating a distinction that used to be common, namely
between politics and criminology. By contrast, today there seem few boundaries
excluding material from a criminological analysis.
In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in the New York in 2001,
the authorities were faced with a choice: did they call the attacks ‘crimes’ or ‘an act
of war’? Some called it both but it ushered in what was termed a ‘war on terror’. Post
the invasion of Iraq, and after early ‘victory’, drawn out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
partial interventions in Libya and Syria, the result seems to be the creation of failed
states and the opening of spaces that defy governance providing havens for terrorists
and actions by Western powers that smell of hypocrisy.
Numerous acts have occurred against Western targets and tens of thousands of lives
have been lost in actions by the ‘so-called’ Islamic State (or Isis, Isil or Daesh, each
name having different political and cultural symbolisms) in the Middle East, while
other ‘radical Islamic’ group have engaged in terrorist attacks in Africa, Bangladesh and
even sacred sites in Saudi Arabia (for instance in Medina in July 2016).
Currently, the terrorist is the new figure of ‘evil’, the outlaw whose apparent
irrationality and rejection of modernity and civilisation makes them seem beyond
normal understanding.
Analysing the factors that contribute to this surge in ‘terrorism’ is now

multi-disciplinary.
Themes common to criminology include utilising Durkheim’s distinction between

mechanical and organic solidarity where the terrorists’ desires for simplicity and
purity all have some role. Certainly publicly, poverty (at least relative), distrust
(of institutions, of media), frustration (see anomie and status frustration), being
victimised (both by their own governments and by the West in its war on terror), being
marginalised, paranoia, social leaning and differential association theory as developed
by Edwin Sutherland (1939), who proposed that through interaction with others,
individuals can learn the particular criminal behaviour, all contribute.
If modernity was meant to be about the use of reason, education, scientific progress,
rise of humanism, then when we see the extreme cruelty practised currently by Isis
– beheading of hostages, random killings of civilians, destruction of cultural heritage,
enslaving of woman, excessive bravado – it seems difficult for many to treat this
as anything to do with the expression of valid ideas/beliefs. Some consider them
psychopaths, scum of the earth, enthused with irrational hatred and so forth. But such
labelling is in itself a subject of analysis.
In a Daily Telegraph posting by Richard Spencer, from Dohuk in northern Iraq on 4

October 2014, Isil’s reign of terror is rooted in the political culture of Iraq and Syria and,
while Isil’s extreme cruelty and filmic savagery has shocked many, he claims ‘it is not
very different from what leaders of Iraq and Syria – and to some extent their colonial
predecessors – have been doing to local people for decades’. He reminds us of colonial
imagery of atrocities, but sees the current surge in videoed killings in terms of ‘a need
to show a continuous momentum. Success, however horrific, breeds success.’ Of
course, many have made the Hobbesian point that the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq
led to a situation without a central power to impose order (as Hobbes maintained was
required) but Spencer goes on to highlight the extreme violence that the Iraqi state
has used, thus: ‘The lawlessness … is not just a product of the absence of a state, but
written into the state.’ In both Iraq and Syria ‘ordinary people routinely tell stories
of similarly pointless horrors, that served some political purpose while having little
apparent rationality, from long before the civil war’.
For others, Isis is a throwback to pre-modern religious positions and we fail to

understand if we only interpret them in terms of modern factors.
See the following article which has as its central claim that ‘Islamic State is no mere
collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs,
among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means
for its strategy – and for how to stop it.’
Read more at:
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
See also Hopkins Burke, Chapter 21 ‘Section terrorism and state violence and terrorism
and postmodernism revisited’.
2.6 Some fundamental concepts in criminology: crime and

criminality
The concept of crime may seem common sense, but it is not. The boundaries
between war, crime and terrorism, for example, are fluid and open to the plays of
power. Criminology, broadly defined, is the ‘logos of crime’. That is to say it is ‘rational
dialogue concerning crime’.
As said before, in many texts criminology was simply assumed to be the ‘scientific
study of crime’ (Hall Williams, 1982, p.1), but why should the only kinds of discourse
considered ‘proper criminology’ be those called ‘scientific’? What are the appropriate
roles of scientific perspectives and ‘lay’ or common-sense claims? What are the limits
of each? Further, is the concept of crime a ‘scientific’ or a ‘common-sense’ category?
In the ‘common-sense’ or natural perspective, the content of criminological study is

clear: we study crime and criminals. The law defines what is illegal, people charged
with, convicted and sentenced for criminal offences are criminals, and for the most
part, there is something naturally anti-social about the kinds of acts/omissions that are
defined as criminal. An important aspect of the certainty about that approach to the
study of crime lies in the creation and affirmation of a world which appears natural, in
which the institutions seem rational and the processes reasonable, outcomes secure
and predictable. Thus we save ourselves from ambiguity, ambivalence and vagueness.
But what are the processes involved when we use the word ‘crime’ in respect to some
†
Reading You will find it
event/activity/omission/aspect of human behaviour?†
useful to consider the issues
Does the answer differ depending upon the historical and social context in which it is/ raised here in Morrison,
was asked? Theoretical criminology, Chapter
1: ‘Narrating the mood of the
Is the very reason for criminology so tied up with human fears, emotions and attitudes
times: confusion, self-doubt,
to social life (including notions of progress and trust) that it is impossible to accept
and ambivalence’.
that the understanding of crime and the policies to be used with respect to it should
be in the hands of ‘scientific’ experts?
Ask yourself what your presuppositions in beginning the study of criminology are/
were? Do you believe that ‘crime is a social problem’? If so, does that give rise to the
question ‘What causes crime?’ And is the reason for asking that question to develop
measures to ‘cure’ society of crime?
Are you assuming that there is some natural thing or sets of characteristics which
constitute(s) the essential element to all crimes? Are you also assuming that there are
‘criminals’ who are different from ‘normal’ people?
Consider what the link is between assuming that ‘crime’ is a natural entity and our
attitude to those adjudged ‘criminals’?
There has been an historical connection between criminological theorising and a

‘correctional perspective’ which saw criminology as a practical discipline, a discipline
that was defined in ‘cause-and-cure’ terms. Thus the terms crime and the criminal
were taken as standing for real, observable entities and it quickly followed that the
policy implication was to remove, or at least incapacitate, the problem. Of course, the
connection between theory and practice is essential to the enterprise but consider
the following statements from leading writers:
Criminology, in its narrow sense, is concerned with the study of the phenomenon of crime
and of the factors or circumstances ... which may have an influence on or be associated
with criminal behaviour and the state of crime in general. But this does not and should
not exhaust the whole subject matter of criminology. There remains the vitally important
problem of combating crime ... To rob it of this practical function, is to divorce criminology
from reality and render it sterile.
(Radzinowicz, 1962, p.168)
The scholarly objective of criminology is the development of a body of knowledge

regarding this process of law, crime, and reaction to crime… The practical objective
of criminology, supplementing the scientific or theoretical objective, is to reduce the
amount of pain and suffering in the world.
(Sutherland and Cressey, 1978, pp.3, 24)
Research in criminology is conducted for the purpose of understanding criminal

behaviour. If we can understand the behaviour, we will have a better chance of predicting
when it will occur and then be able to take policy steps to control, eliminate, or prevent
the behaviour.
(Reid, 1985, p.66)
Let us state quite categorically that the major task of radical criminology is to seek a
solution to the problem of crime and that of a socialist policy is to substantially reduce the
crime rate.
(Young, 1986)
Are these statements similar? Perhaps not. They also, almost certainly, were only
concerned with crime as a nation state issue, although with only a subtle, yet large,
change in emphasis, we could change the focus to ‘law, crime, and reaction to crime …
as a global concern’.
And while crime is a ‘problem’ if one is trying to understand the nature of that
problem then, for me at least, one should escape from an attitude that David Matza
once called correctionalism. Matza (1969) defined correctional perspectives as
accepting that the aim of study was to achieve the practical result of elimination of
crime and the criminal, further that a commitment to the methodological principles
of positivistic social science was appropriate. Thus one never could emphathise with
the subject, never attempt to see the world from their point of view.
2.6.1 Crime or deviancy?

Sociological criminologists tended to substitute the concept of ‘deviancy’ for that
of ‘crime’. Why? This was an attempt to control the subject matter: the aim was for
sociologists to talk about a ‘fact’ that sociologists could understand. As the following
extract from Paul Rock illustrates:
A sociological conception of deviancy must dwell on its peculiarly social qualities. As a

significant social entity, the ‘deviant’ is the occupant of a special role which is recognised
and ordered in a process of interaction. If a person is not assigned to this role and not
treated as deviant, he cannot be regarded sociologically as a deviant. No matter how
much he may be assumed by some to be a disturbed, disruptive or atypical individual,
his social meaning is not that of deviancy but something else. Those who would explain
his behaviour do not account for social deviancy or a deviant role, but disturbance,
disruptiveness or atypicality as they conceive it. Deviancy is a social construct (social
constructs are the interpretations which men collaboratively give to the objects and
events around them. They are rather more than interpretations, however, because they
are also the social phenomena which men create through their activities and as a result
of these interpretations) fashioned by the members of the society in which it exists. They
endow it with importance and distinctiveness and they assign it to a special place in the
organisation of their collective lives. As Quinney remarks:
‘a thing exists only when it is given a name; any phenomenon is real to us only when
we can imagine it. Without imagination there would be nothing to experience. So it
is with crime. In our relationship with others we construct a social reality of crime.
This reality is both conceptual and phenomenal, a world of meanings and events
constructed in reference to crime.’
… Deviancy is a part of the social reality which organises people’s lives, and this social
reality must be the primary material of analysis. (Rock, 1973, pp.19–20).
Activities 2.1 and 2.2

2.1 Can you identify different deviant roles in your society?
a. What are their features?
b. Why are these roles defined as deviant?
c. Whose interests are served in their definition?
2.2 What does the sociological concept of ‘role’ mean? What function does Rock
attribute to deviant roles in society?
No feedback provided.
Activity 2.3: How is the definition of crime constructed?

Read Morrison, Wayne ‘What is crime? Contrasting definitions and perspectives’
in Hale, C. et al. Criminology. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) third edition
[ISBN 9780199691296] (available on the VLE).
Activity 2.4: Interrogating your criminological imagination

Read both these short stories:
u ‘Angelic butterfly’ in Levi, P. The sixth day and other tales. (London: Simon &
Schuster, 1990) [ISBN 9780671626174] (available on the VLE).
u ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’ Cortázar , J. A change of light and other stories. (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980 [ISBN 9780394507217] (available on the VLE).
Then watch the short film ‘Unwatchable: is your mobile phone rape free’ at www.
youtube.com/watch?v=fIePzz_CEuQ. Also read the article ‘Unwatchable: connecting
the UK and rape in the Congo’ by Marc Hawker at www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/marc-
hawker/connecting-the-uk-and-rape-in-the-congo_b_994678.html
Re ‘Angelic butterfly’:
a. What is the story about and does it help to know that Primo Levi survived the
Holocaust to understand it?
b. What is the ‘crime’ in this short story?
c. What message, if any, do you think Primo Levi is trying to send to past and
possibly future perpetrators?
Re ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’:
Cortázar is noted as a ‘magic realist’ writer: he wrote ‘Blow-up’ about a photo he
took of a situation where he thinks a crime has occurred; this was made into a film
of the same name. ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’ has the narrator (Cortázar) going on
a trip to Latin America to escape comments about ‘Blow-up’.
d. What is the point of the story?
e. Why do you think he never told Claudine what was in the photographs?
f. Is this connected to ideas about witnessing (a very legal concept) and silence?
Re ‘Unwatchable’:
g. What is the meaning of the project?
h. Is it similar to Cortázar’s?
i. Why did the director feel the need to film in Oxfordshire?
j. Do you consider it successful or not? You may like to read some of the blog posts
on it in the media.
References
¢ Fletcher, R. (ed.) The crisis of industrial civilisation: the early essays of Auguste
Comte. (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974) [ISBN 9780435823030].
¢ Hall Williams, E. Criminology and criminal justice. (London: Butterworth, 1982)

[ISBN 9780406593214].
¢ Matza, D. Becoming deviant. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010; first published 1969)

[ISBN 9781412814461].
¢ Radzinowicz, L. In search of criminology. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1962).
¢ Reid, S. T. Crime and criminology. (New York: Holt McDougall, 1985)

[ISBN 9780030707520].
¢ Rock, P. Deviant behaviour. (London: Hutchinson, 1973).
¢ Shills, E. Tradition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)

[ISBN 9780226753263].
¢ Sutherland, E.H. and D.R. Cressey Criminology. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1978)

[ISBN 9780397473847].
¢ Vold, G.B. Theoretical criminology. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)
[ISBN 9780195025309].
¢ Vold, G.B. and T.J. Bernard, Theoretical criminology. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986) 3rd revised edition [ISBN 9780195036169].
¢ Young, J. The criminological imagination. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011)

[ISBN 9780745641072].
¢ Zehr, H. Changing lenses – A new focus for crime and justice. (Scottdale, PA: Herald
Press, 1990) [ISBN 9780836135121].
Sample examination questions

It is premature to try to answer these examination questions at this stage, since you
would need material from the whole of this course just to illustrate the concerns
raised by the questions. However, as you proceed, you may find it is useful to think
about how you would answer these questions.
Question 1 Consider whether criminology is, or should be, a science.
Question 2 ‘Criminology cannot be a science because its subject-matter – crime – is
defined by shifting moral and political concerns.’ Discuss.
Question 3 ‘Why has it proved so difficult to agree on the core concepts of
criminology study?’
3 Competing traditions? Legacies of classical and
positive criminology or the concept of crime versus
that of the criminal
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.1 Modernity and the Enlightenment context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 Central figures of the two approaches examined . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.3 The positive revolution: the imagery of science replacing the moral
discourse of crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.4 Political arithmetic and statistical analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.5 The oral-ethnographic efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.6 The Italian/positivist school . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.7 The return of classicism: populist conservative criminology and

contemporary rational action theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.8 Are the perspectives contradictory or can they be combined? . . . . . . 42

Introduction
In the 18th century the modern concept of crime and of criminal justice took shape.
In the late 19th century the concept of the criminal as an identifiable type capable of
identification and empirical study developed. The former is identified with classical
criminology, the latter with the development of positivism. The contrast between
classical, positivist and, later, non-positivist approaches to the study of crime underlies
much of the discussion of crime and the policy implications of such study. For David
Garland (2017) Criminology as an academic subject has been deeply shaped by a
rather contingent convergence between a ‘governmental project’ (of which classical
criminology is an important strand) and a ‘Lombrosian project’ of a science of the
‘criminal’ and ‘criminality’. The nature of these distinctions is clearly linked to the
historical development of the discipline; this chapter outlines the early history of
these approaches and provides a foundation for later study.
Core text
¢ Hopkins Burke, Chapter 2 ‘Classical criminology’, Chapter 3 ‘Populist
conservative criminology’, Chapter 4 ‘Contemporary rational actor theories’ and
Chapter 5 ‘Biological positivism’.
Essential reading
¢ Morrison, 1995, Chapter 4 ‘The problem of classical criminology’, Chapter
5 ‘Reading the texts of classical criminology’ and Chapter 6 ‘Criminological
positivism I’ (available in Dawsons via the Online Library).
¢ Beccaria, C. On crimes and punishments (first published as Dei delitti e delle pene in
1764). (Seven Treasures Publications, 2009) [ISBN 9781438299006] Chapter 16 ‘Of
torture’ (available in Cambridge Core via the Online Library).
Further reading
The list of texts that reference the classical and positivist schools is huge.
¢ Ferri, E. Criminal sociology. (HardPress Publishing, 2010) [ISNB 9781407628363].
¢ Foucault, M. Discipline and punishment: the birth of the prison. (London: Penguin,
1977) [ISBN 9780140137224].
¢ Garland, D. Punishment and welfare: history of penal strategies. (Aldershot:

Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1985 [ISBN 9780566008559].
¢ Jenkins, P. ‘Varieties of Enlightenment criminology’ 1984 British Journal of

Criminology 24 112.
¢ Jones, D.A. History of criminology: a philosophical perspective. (Westport:

Greenwood Press, 1986) [ISBN 9780313236471].
¢ Jones, S. Criminology. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) sixth edition [ISBN
9780198768968] Chapter 4 ‘The classical and positivist traditions’.
¢ Lanier, M., S. Henry and D.J.M. Anastasia Essential criminology. (Abingdon:

Routledge, 2015) 4th edition [ISBN 9780813348858] Chapter 3 ‘Classical,
neoclassical, and rational-choice theories’.
¢ Lilly, L., F.T. Cullen and R.A. Ball Criminological theory: context and consequences.
(London: Sage, 2019) seventh edition [ISBN 9781506387307] Chapter 2 ‘The search
for the “criminal man”’.
¢ Mannheim, H. (ed.) Pioneers in criminology. (London: Stevens and Sons, 1960).
¢ Radzinowicz, L. Ideology and crime: a study of crime in its social and historical
context. (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1966) [ISBN 9780435827427].
¢ Roshier, B. Controlling crime: the classical perspective in criminology. (Maidenhead:

Open University Press, 1989) [ISBN 9780335158737].
Criminology 3 Competing traditions? Legacies of classical and positive criminology page 27
¢ Snipes, J.B., T.J. Bernard and A.L Gerould Vold’s theoretical criminology. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019) 8th edition [ISBN 9780190940515] Chapter 1
‘Theory and crime’, Chapter 2 ‘Theory and policy in context’ and Chapter 3
‘Classical criminology’.
¢ Taylor, I., P. Walton and J. Young The new criminology: for a social theory of
deviance. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013; first published 1973) 40th anniversary
edition [ISNB 9780415855877].
¢ Walklate, S. Understanding criminology: theoretical debates. (Maidenhead:

McGraw-Hill, 2007) 3rd edition [ISBN 9780335221233] Chapter 2 ‘Perspectives in
criminological theory’.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and the relevant readings, you should be able to:
u identify the main features of the classical and positive traditions in criminology
u give an account of their formation and the major figures involved
u assess their continued influence
u be aware of some of the criticisms of positivism and classicism.
3.1 Modernity and the Enlightenment context

The Enlightenment underpins modernity. It denotes replacing the medieval synthesis
with its ideas of the natural order of humankind and Christian Europe with notions
of mankind’s need to assert control, to analyse afresh and construct new practical
frameworks such as national states, sovereignty, law and ideas of the human
subject. Instead of an understanding of totality in which the world is conceived of as
being created by an outside force – namely God – and mankind as creatures of that
creation whose purpose or ‘telos’ is to serve God’s will and find ultimate happiness
in life after this in heaven, the world is to be analysed on its own basis and mankind
is to be depicted as an operating entity within this new conception of the world.
Two contrasting frameworks for gaining knowledge became clear: that between
rationalism – which held that pure reasoning and building upon foundations that
were by definition true (such as narratives of the natural condition of humans being
that of individual solitary mankind and their use of reason to form social contracts)
gave epistemological security, and empiricism – which held that the only security of
foundations was knowledge of actual substances, such as physical substances (like
rocks) or their human equivalent, with humans viewed in the same way that the
objects of the physical sciences were.
Hall Williams (1982) called classical criminology: ‘a school of criminal justice

philosophy’. It is fair to say that philosophy, in particular the rationalist methodology
of constructing intellectual systems, constitutes the procedures of classicism, while
forms of reasoning, largely empiricist in nature, developed with an image of natural
science in mind as providing the template for real science, influence positivism as the
pursuit and study of the actual criminal and criminality as the actual propensity to
engage in crime.
The chapters in Morrison (1995) should be read closely, even if they are difficult at first
reading. Hopkins Burke may be approached first. For an introductory account of the
full range of perspectives read Walklate (2007).
What does the phrase ‘the modern human subject’ mean? It denotes trying to see
humans as devoid of the religious tradition of created objects; it is a secularity that
underpins a new and secular gaze. The 18th century in Europe worked many changes
in science, religion and the mechanical arts and effectively overturned the settled
notions of the natural order of social and natural life that the medieval period had
given primacy to. However, modern secular social theory did not emerge in one
dominant form. Certainly we can agree with Foucault’s notion of the birth of the
sciences of man that the Enlightenment is characterised by placing man and the
structures of the world as the new frames of reference. But the ways in which it does
this exhibits qualities of both pessimism as well as extreme optimism and is romantic
as well as ‘realist’ on its views of the human condition. It can be either empiricist
or rationalist, indulgent of a priori reasoning and the grappling with ‘essences’ or
determined to be based only of ‘observation’ of phenomenon and inductions therein.
It can be ‘methodologically individualist’ (i.e. assume man as an analytically individual
and complete object of study) or holist (i.e. deny that man can be studied as individual
phenomena but is necessarily social) or it can lay stress on man as voluntarist or
determinate objects, to mention only some of the possible contrasts it is possible to
draw.
When we think of the classical tradition we think philosophy. It is the use of reason
to undercut previous positions and expose them as myths. Take Thomas Hobbes. In
his classic work, Leviathan (1651), he argues for the need for strong government and
so is, to that extent, against the revolutionaries and reformers, but he helped found
Enlightenment political theory by stripping government of any non-rational defence.
In particular, he sets up social contract theory; thus political authority is grounded in
an agreement (often understood as ideal, rather than real) among individuals, each
of whom aims in this agreement to advance his rational self-interest by establishing
a common political authority overall. In this general contract model (taken up with
variations by Locke and Rousseau), political authority is grounded not in conquest,
natural or divinely instituted hierarchy, or in obscure myths and traditions, but rather
in the rational consent of the governed and officials of the state perform rational tasks.
As the basis, Hobbes takes a naturalistic, scientific approach to the question of how
political society ought to be organised (constantly asking the reader to agree on the
basis that that is how the reader reads mankind – in a pessimist rationalist fashion).
Hobbes paves the way for secularisation and rationalisation in political and social
philosophy.
The early Enlightenment rejected mythology and religious belief and thereby
introduced many ethical issues and positions that remain contemporary today.
Instead of religious doctrines concerning God and mankind’s position in the afterlife
(with our highest good and thus also moral duties conceived in immediately religious
terms), we speak in terms of human desires, human wants and needs and satisfying
them in this life. Thus contexts such as industrialisation, urbanisation and the
expansion of education, turn our attention to the contexts and factors influencing
human progress in this world, rather than union with God in the next. Also, the
violent religious wars that devastated Europe in the early modern period (which end
with the Treaty of Westphalia at roughly the same time Hobbes published Leviathan)
require a secular, this-worldly ethics, insofar as they indicate the failure of religious
doctrines concerning God and the afterlife to establish a stable foundation for social
and political interaction. If the ancient Greeks had dealt with many gods (and gods
that could not be trusted) the development of monotheistic religions (Christianity,
Islam and Judaism) had surpassed classical Greek and Roman ethical systems. Now
there could be no return to the answers on nature and cosmology offered by Plato
and Aristotle. The Platonic identification of the good with the real and the Aristotelian
teleological understanding of natural things are both difficult to square with the
Enlightenment conception of nature. The general philosophical problem that emerged
in the Enlightenment was how to understand the source and grounding of ethical
duties and how to conceive the highest good for human beings, within a secular,
broadly naturalistic context, and within the context of a transformed understanding of
the natural world.
Hobbes founded social order upon individuals, their reasoning and their desires. His
reasoning was nominalisitic and relativist: what is good, as the end of human action, is
‘whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire’ and evil is ‘the object of his
hate, and aversion’, ‘there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common
rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves’ (2017,
Chapter 6). Hobbes’ conception of human beings as fundamentally motivated by their
perception of what is in their own best interest demands that duties of justice and
benevolence relate to such individualist material. Man is reduced to basic drives; this
allows only a set of moral duties to be constructed that is demystified, and almost
mechanical.
Writers such as Beccaria and Bentham owe a large debt to Hobbes. After Hobbes, a
crime is not an evil act against God but simply an act or omission which the sovereign
has not allowed. Crime and one’s reaction to it should be understood rationally and
without reference to God. It is often said that classicism is not concerned with the
causes of crime and you may wish to see whether you agree with this. Alternatively,
some argue that classicism clearly acknowledges a link between crime and social
conditions but that writers such as Beccaria were actually conservatives (see Morrison,
1995 and Jenkins, 1984) and mostly concerned with how criminals should be dealt with
in a way that promoted social stability. Moreover, classicism gives the state the role of
defining and mediating the social conceptions of crime and the reaction and control
of it. For classicism, the state is central, the influence of positivism, conversely, is to
lower the attention given to state power.
Positivism is a subset of the growing empiricist science of man. In its critique of

the social contract theory that Beccaria assumed as the basis of social order, it
re-orientated the focus of study away from questions depicting a hypothetical
origin of society and the ideal social order. It substituted an empirically orientated
inquiry combining a sociological interest in social-cultural development and an
anthropological interest in the structure of human nature. The positivist approach
holds that ultimately science can disclose an objective reality. As Michael Gottfredson
and Travis Hirschi state in a text simply entitled Positive criminology (1987):
certainly one feature of positive criminology has always been its belief in an objective
external reality capable of measurement. Public disclosure of the understood reality, the
procedures used for its measurement, and frequent independent replication are essential
tenets of this perspective.
You should be careful not to use the term positivism in criminology as simply
denoting individualist approaches. It has also a wide sociological use influenced by
Durkheim or Marx as is apparent when looking at the way criminal statistics are often
used to denote perceived changes in social and economic conditions. However, the
individualist version of positive criminology is characterised by the search to discover,
within the composition of the individual, the causes of criminal and delinquent
behaviour. The scientific method is used to differentiate offenders from non-offenders
on a variety of characteristics. The method of positive criminology assumes that there
are identifiable factors that make people act as they do (the logic of determinism)
and that the variability to be explained is associated with the variability in the casual
agents (the logic of differentiation).
3.2 Central figures of the two approaches examined
3.2.1 Beccaria
It has been common to describe the work of Cesare Beccaria as a reaction to a time
when the criminal law and its enforcement were barbarous and arbitrary and to see
him as a humane reformer. This interpretation stresses a social context of secret
accusations, brutal executions, torture, arbitrary and inconsistent punishments and
class-linked disparities in punishments.
To depict Beccaria as a humanitarian is to simplify but neither is it sufficient, at least

without unpacking the conception to characterise the classical school as simply
‘administrative and legal criminology’ which ignored all other factors which interfered
with ease of administration.
This image of classical criminology as rationalising the operation of the criminal

justice system captures a wider range of effects than the simple humanitarian model
but we have to be aware of the cultural and political implications and effects which
the acceptance of classical criminology leads on to. Implicit in classical criminology,
for example, is the issue of the limits of criminal justice. How could a criteria of
justice be constructed which could provide legitimation for new social institutions
and withstand the sceptical/critical attitude which philosophers such as Kant had
declared all ‘modern’ institutions had to withstand. Moreover, classical criminology
should be understood within the development of philosophical radicalism and the
full consequences of the developing notion of ‘the rule of law’, the changing political
struggles where a growing middle class sought political power to accompany their
economic power and break down the political monopoly enjoyed in England, for
instance, by the landowning class, and for the hopes of progressive social engineering
epitomised here by the Englishman Jeremy Bentham.
Beccaria considered crime as an injury to society; a notion which fitted well with
the development of a rule of law ideology. It was the injury to society, rather than to
the immediate individual(s) who experienced it, that was to direct and determine
the degree of punishment. Behind this thinking was the utilitarian assumption that
all social action should be guided by the goal of achieving ‘the greatest happiness
for the greatest number’. From this viewpoint, the punishment of an individual for a
crime was justified, and justifiable only, for its contribution to the prevention of future
infringements on the happiness and well-being of others. In today’s world, these ideas
may seem common enough but they needed to be ‘constructed’ to reform the world
of Beccaria and lead on to our own. For example, Beccaria reasoned that certain and
quick, rather than severe, punishments would best accomplish the above goals:
in order for punishment not to be ... an act of violence of one or many against a private
citizen, it must be ... public, prompt, ... the least possible in the given circumstances,
proportionate to the crimes, [and] dictated by the laws. (2009 [1764])
Torture, execution and other ‘irrational’ activity must be abolished. In their place,
there were to be quick and certain trials and, in the case of convictions, carefully
calculated punishments. Beccaria went beyond this to propose that accused persons
be treated humanely before trial, with every right and facility extended to enable
them to bring evidence on their own behalf. Note, at Beccaria’s time accused and
convicted persons were detained in the same institutions, and subjected to the
same punishments and conditions. In place of this, Beccaria argued for swift and
sure punishments, to be imposed only on those found guilty, with the punishments
determined strictly in accordance with the damage to society caused by the crime.
It is often said that classical criminology has no idea of the causes of crime but Beccaria
certainly held that economic conditions and bad laws could cause crime. Additionally,
he was clear that property crimes were committed primarily by the poor and mainly
out of necessity. Moreover, he was aware of what has come to be called opportunity
transfer; that is, when putting a severe punishment on a particular crime could deter
someone from committing it, but at the same time make another crime attractive by
comparison. Beccaria was also aware of the cultural power of severe punishments to
add to the desperation of the populace and encourage them to indulge in violence.
As he put it, laws could promote crime by diminishing the human spirit. A careful
matching of the crime and its punishment, in keeping with the general interests
of society, could make punishment a rational instrument of government. Jeremy
Bentham extended this with his notion of a ‘calculus’ for realising these interests.
Activity 3.1
Read the following extract from Beccaria (2009 [1764]), Chapter 16 ‘Of torture’.
a. What are Beccaria’s arguments against torture? In particular what is the
relationship between torture and truth? Why would the innocent confess to
crimes they did not commit?
b. Are they still valid today?

The torture of a criminal during the course of his trial is a cruelty consecrated by custom in
most nations. It is used with an intent either to make him confess his crime, or to explain
some contradictions into which he had been led during his examination, or discover his
accomplices, or for some kind of metaphysical and incomprehensible purgation of infamy,
or, finally, in order to discover other crimes of which he is not accused, but of which he
may be guilty.
No man can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty; nor can society take from him
the public protection until it have been proved that he has violated the conditions on
which it was granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorise the punishment of
a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt? This dilemma is frequent. Either
he is guilty, or not guilty. If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained by the
laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is unnecessary, if he be not guilty, you
torture the innocent; for, in the eye of the law, every man is innocent whose crime has not
been proved. Besides, it is confounding all relations to expect that a man should be both
the accuser and accused; and that pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in
the muscles and fibres of a wretch in torture. By this method the robust will escape, and
the feeble be condemned. These are the inconveniences of this pretended test of truth,
worthy only of a cannibal, and which the Romans, in many respects barbarous, and whose
savage virtue has been too much admired, reserved for the slaves alone.
What is the political intention of punishments? To terrify and be an example to others.

Is this intention answered by thus privately torturing the guilty and the innocent? It
is doubtless of importance that no crime should remain unpunished; but it is useless
to make a public example of the author of a crime hid in darkness. A crime already
committed, and for which there can be no remedy, can only be punished by a political
society with an intention that no hopes of impunity should induce others to commit
the same. If it be true, that the number of those who from fear or virtue respect the laws
is greater than of those by whom they are violated, the risk of torturing an innocent
person is greater, as there is a greater probability that, cæteris paribus, an individual hath
observed, than that he hath infringed the laws.
There is another ridiculous motive for torture, namely, to purge a man from infamy. Ought
such an abuse to be tolerated in the eighteenth century? Can pain, which is a sensation,
have any connection with a moral sentiment, a matter of opinion? Perhaps the rack may
be considered as the refiner’s furnace.
It is not difficult to trace this senseless law to its origin; for an absurdity, adopted by a
whole nation, must have some affinity with other ideas established and respected by
the same nation. This custom seems to be the offspring of religion, by which mankind,
in all nations and in all ages, are so generally influenced. We are taught by our infallible
church, that those stains of sin contracted through human frailty, and which have not
deserved the eternal anger of the Almighty, are to be purged away in another life by an
incomprehensible fire. Now infamy is a stain, and if the punishments and fire of purgatory
can take away all spiritual stains, why should not the pain of torture take away those
of a civil nature? I imagine, that the confession of a criminal, which in some tribunals is
required as being essential to his condemnation, has a similar origin, and has been taken
from the mysterious tribunal of penitence, were the confession of sins is a necessary
part of the sacrament. Thus have men abused the unerring light of revelation; and, in
the times of tractable ignorance, having no other, they naturally had recourse to it on
every occasion, making the most remote and absurd applications. Moreover, infamy is a
sentiment regulated neither by the laws nor by reason, but entirely by opinion; but torture
renders the victim infamous, and therefore cannot take infamy away.
Another intention of torture is to oblige the supposed criminal to reconcile the

contradictions into which he may have fallen during his examination; as if the dread of
punishment, the uncertainty of his fate, the solemnity of the court, the majesty of the
judge, and the ignorance of the accused, were not abundantly sufficient to account for
contradictions, which are so common to men even in a state of tranquillity, and which
must necessarily be multiplied by the perturbation of the mind of a man entirely engaged
in the thoughts of saving himself from imminent danger.
This infamous test of truth is a remaining monument of that ancient and savage
legislation, in which trials by fire, by boiling water, or the uncertainty of combats, were
called judgments of God; as if the links of that eternal chain, whose beginning is in the
breast of the first cause of all things, could ever be disunited by the institutions of men.
The only difference between torture and trials by fire and boiling water is, that the event
of the first depends on the will of the accused, and of the second on a fact entirely physical
and external: but this difference is apparent only, not real. A man on the rack, in the
convulsions of torture, has it as little in his power to declare the truth, as, in former times,
to prevent without fraud the effects of fire or boiling water.
Every act of the will is invariably in proportion to the force of the impression on our
senses. The impression of pain, then, may increase to such a degree, that, occupying the
mind entirely, it will compel the sufferer to use the shortest method of freeing himself
from torment. His answer, therefore, will be an effect as necessary as that of fire or boiling
water, and he will accuse himself of crimes of which he is innocent: so that the very means
employed to distinguish the innocent from the guilty will most effectually destroy all
difference between them.
It would be superfluous to confirm these reflections by examples of innocent persons

who, from the agony of torture, have confessed themselves guilty: innumerable instances
may be found in all nations, and in every age. How amazing that mankind have always
neglected to draw the natural conclusion! Lives there a man who, if he has carried his
thoughts ever so little beyond the necessities of life, when he reflects on such cruelty, is
not tempted to fly from society, and return to his natural state of independence?
The result of torture, then, is a matter of calculation, and depends on the constitution,
which differs in every individual, and it is in proportion to his strength and sensibility;
so that to discover truth by this method, is a problem which may be better solved by a
mathematician than by a judge, and may be thus stated: The force of the muscles and the
sensibility of the nerves of an innocent person being given, it is required to find the degree
of pain necessary to make him confess himself guilty of a given crime.
The examination of the accused is intended to find out the truth; but if this be discovered
with so much difficulty in the air, gesture, and countenance of a man at case, how can
it appear in a countenance distorted by the convulsions of torture? Every violent action
destroys those small alterations in the features which sometimes disclose the sentiments
of the heart.
These truths were known to the Roman legislators, amongst whom, as I have already
observed, slaves only, who were not considered as citizens, were tortured. They are known
to the English a nation in which the progress of science, superiority in commerce, riches,
and power, its natural consequences, together with the numerous examples of virtue and
courage, leave no doubt of the excellence of its laws. They have been acknowledged in
Sweden, where torture has been abolished. They are known to one of the wisest monarchs
in Europe, who, having seated philosophy on the throne by his beneficent legislation, has
made his subjects free, though dependent on the laws; the only freedom that reasonable
men can desire in the present state of things. In short, torture has not been thought
necessary in the laws of armies, composed chiefly of the dregs of mankind, where its
use should seem most necessary. Strange phenomenon! That a set of men, hardened by
slaughter, and familiar with blood, should teach humanity to the sons of peace.
It appears also that these truths were known, though imperfectly, even to those by whom
torture has been most frequently practised; for a confession made during torture, is null,
if it be not afterwards confirmed by an oath, which if the criminal refuses, he is tortured
again. Some civilians and some nations permit this infamous petitio principii to be only
three times repeated, and others leave it to the discretion of the judge; therefore, of two
men equally innocent, or equally guilty, the most robust and resolute will be acquitted,
and the weakest and most pusillanimous will be condemned, in consequence of the
following excellent mode of reasoning. I, the judge, must find someone guilty. Thou, who
art a strong fellow, hast been able to resist the force of torment; therefore I acquit thee.
Thou, being weaker, hast yielded to it; I therefore condemn thee. I am sensible, that the
confession which was extorted from thee has no weight; but if thou dost not confirm by
oath what thou hast already confessed, I will have thee tormented again.
A very strange but necessary consequence of the use of torture is, that the case of the
innocent is worse than that of the guilty. With regard to the first, either he confesses
the crime which he has not committed, and is condemned, or he is acquitted, and has
suffered a punishment he did not deserve. On the contrary, the person who is really guilty
has the most favourable side of the question; for, if he supports the torture with firmness
and resolution, he is acquitted, and has gained, having exchanged a greater punishment
for a less.
The law by which torture is authorised, says, Men, be insensible to pain. Nature has indeed
given you an irresistible self-love, and an unalienable right of self-preservation; but I create
in you a contrary sentiment, an heroic hatred of yourselves. I command you to accuse
yourselves, and to declare the truth, amidst the tearing of your flesh, and the dislocation
of your bones.
Torture is used to discover whether the criminal be guilty of other crimes besides those of
which he is accused, which is equivalent to the following reasoning. Thou art guilty of one
crime, therefore it is possible that thou mayest have committed a thousand others; but
the affair being doubtful I must try it by my criterion of truth. The laws order thee to be
tormented because thou art guilty, because thou mayest be guilty, and because I choose
thou shouldst be guilty.
Torture is used to make the criminal discover his accomplices; but if it has been
demonstrated that it is not at a proper means of discovering truth, how can it serve to
discover the accomplices, which is one of the truths required? Will not the man who
accuses himself yet more readily accuse others? Besides, is it just to torment one man
for the crime of another? May not the accomplices be found out by the examination
of the witnesses, or of the criminal; from the evidence, or from the nature of the crime
itself; in short, by all the means that have been used to prove the guilt of the prisoner?
The accomplices commonly fly when their comrade is taken. The uncertainty of their fate
condemns them to perpetual exile, and frees society from the danger of further injury;
whilst the punishment of the criminal, by deterring others, answers the purpose for which
it was ordained.
Supplementary contemporary viewing

Watch Taxi to the dark side the 2007 documentary film which won the 2007
Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The film positions the December 2002 killing of an Afghan taxi driver named
Dilawar, who was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in
extrajudicial detention and interrogated at the Parwan Detention Facility at Bagram
base.
The reality of a modern superpower’s (the US) policy on torture and interrogation
in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory
deprivation is examined.
a. What explains the systematic use of torture by US forces?
b. Is the Convention against torture useless?
3.2.2 Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism

The Englishman Bentham always saw himself as a reformer. He attended lectures
on law and English common law given by William Blackstone in Oxford as a young
man and rebelled against what he considered their uncritical approach. He adopted
Beccaria’s concern for achieving ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, a
criteria of a philosophical approach called utilitarianism that Bentham attributed to
the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Bentham gave precision to this idea, in part,
through a pseudo-mathematical concept he called ‘felicity calculus’. This ‘calculus’ was
intended as a means of estimating the goodness or badness of acts, the only ‘measure
of right or wrong’. Thus Bentham declared the entire notion of indefeasible rights
and contractual limitation on the power of government to be either meaningless or
else confused references to the principle of utility. The basis of government was not
contract but human need, and the satisfaction of human need is the sole justification.
Bentham meant to make the law an efficient and economical means of preventing
crime. Like Beccaria, Bentham insisted that prevention was the only justifiable
purpose of punishment, and furthermore that punishment was too ‘expensive’
when it produced more evil than good, or when the same good could be obtained
at the ‘price’ of less suffering. His recommendation was that penalties be fixed so as
to impose an amount of pain in excess of the pleasure that might be derived from
the criminal act. It was this calculation of pain compared to pleasure that Bentham
believed would deter crime. These ideas were formulated most clearly in his
Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and
pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine
what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain
of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. (2009 [1789] Ch. 1 Sect. 1)
Is Bentham an enlightened reformer? He seeks a scientific approach to government

and this overwhelms the humane or rights-based approach – his confidence in utility
enables him to think of justice as a quantifiable conception. While Beccaria kept to
some Kantian notions as to the dignity of man, Bentham would have none of these
limitations upon the scientific reorganisation of utility. For example, Bentham argued
that capital punishment should be restricted to offences ‘which in the highest degree
shock the public feeling’. He went on to argue that if the hanging of a man’s effigy
could produce the same preventive effect as the hanging of the man himself, it would
be a folly and a cruelty not to do so (Radzinowicz, 1948, pp.381–82). He also suggested
how capital punishments might nonetheless be used to maximum effect:
A scaffold painted black, the livery of grief – the officers of justice dressed in crepe
– the executioner covered with a mask, which would serve at once to augment the
terror of his appearance, and to shield him from ill-founded indignation – emblems of
his crime placed above the head of the criminal, to the end that the witnesses of his
sufferings may know for what crimes he undergoes them; these might form a part of
the principal decorations of these legal tragedies ... Whilst all the actors in this terrible
drama might move in solemn procession – serious and religious music preparing the
hearts of the spectators for the important lesson they were about to receive ... The
judges need not consider it beneath their dignity to preside over this public scene.’
(Bentham, quoted in Radzinowicz, 1948, pp.383–84.)
The article by Douglas Hay, ‘Property, authority and the criminal law’, in Fitzgerald
et al. (1981), will give you some idea of the actual conditions which surrounded the
operation of the criminal law in England at this time. The opening chapter of Foucault
(1977) gives a graphic illustration of the spectacle of public punishment.
Bentham also attempted to radicalise imprisonment, an institution then used

mainly merely to hold persons awaiting trial or debtors. He spent much of his life
trying to convince authorities that an institution of his design, called a ‘Panopticon’,
would solve the problems of correction. For Foucault the panopticon was highly
representative of a new style of penal reason, one concerned with disciplining
individuals rather than punishing.
There were three features to the panopticon. First the architectural dimension; the
panopticon was to be a circular building with a glass roof and containing cells on every
story of the circumference. It was to be so arranged that every cell could be visible
from a central point. The omniscient prison inspector would be kept from the sight
of the prisoners by a system of ‘blinds unless ... he thinks fit to show himself’. Second,
management by contract; the manager would employ the inmates in contract labour
and he was to receive a share of the money earned by the inmates, but he was to be
financially liable if inmates who were later released re-offended, or if an excessive
number of inmates died during imprisonment. Third, the panopticon was to open
to the inspection of the world which would control the manager. Two prisons of the
panopticon design were actually built in the United States; however, the first was
rebuilt seven years after construction, and the second was redesigned before it was
finished. Foucault has used Bentham’s ideas for the panopticon as a prime example of
developing penal rationality which he believes developed into ‘disciplinary power’ in

contrast to ‘judicial power’. For Foucault, the prison became linked to the knowledges
of positivism and together they gave rise to a whole new method of social control.
This was not the control of command and obedience, which he believes is the method
of the law, but the regulation through knowledge and conceptions of normalacy,
where individuals come to internalise perceptions of appropriate behaviour and be
subjected to surveillance and accounting. It is an intriguing exercise to see whether
you can agree with Foucault, whatever your opinion is. Reading Bentham or Foucault
on imprisonment should give rise to a multiplicity of doubts as to what imprisonment
is meant to achieve.
In time several of Bentham’s ideas were picked up. He argued strongly for the
establishment of the office of public prosecutor, and he furthered the notion that
crimes are committed against society rather than against individuals. Beyond this, he
argued that many victimless crimes were imaginary rather than real offences, and he
argued for the development of official crime statistics or ‘bills… indicating the moral
health of the country’.
Self-assessment question
Is Bentham a humanitarian reformer or a ruthless servant of power?
3.3 The positive revolution: the imagery of science replacing

the moral discourse of crime
Modern science is empiricist in nature which means it relies upon observation,
description, and measurement to build up theories and create its image of the
world. Positivism broke with the classical image of free will and the self-determining
individual and suggested that man is an entity determined in the world by his
constitution and his environment and that his behaviour is the result of an array of
biological, psychological or social factors.
Crime does not therefore consist of actions rationally chosen by the offender; the
notion of free will was seen by the positivists as inhibiting the study of the causes
of crime and as diverting attention away from the real causes. Positivism shifted
study away from crime to the criminal and sought the answers in differentiating the
offender from the normal member of society.
But therein lies a danger, for it assumes that the criminal exists as some determinate
entity, or, as Gottefredson and Hirschi (1987) redefined it, that criminality as a stable
propensity of individuals exists. The search for the criminal (type, mind, etc.) and
criminality (as a stable propensity such as rates of self-control) is a constant theme
in individualistic forms of positivism. Positivism is also said to be uncritical in that its
authors often appear to assume a consensual culture where all deviation is simply
attributed to lack of socialisation or deficiency of the individual.
3.4 Political arithmetic and statistical analysis

The 18th century saw a developing interest in secular techniques of governing and
the use of statistics to gauge the makeup of the population and various factors of that
population. Foucault termed this the development of political arithmetic, and this has
intensified today with vast networks of statistical analysis on the economy, health and
social interactions.
A linkage between a technical interest in crime control and the positive approach in
criminology was first evident in the work of the so-called ‘cartographic criminologists’
of 19th century Europe, such as the Belgian Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1842), the
Frenchman André-Michel Guerry (1833) and the Englishmen Rawson (1839), Alison
(1840) and Fletcher (1849). Their work attempted to match spatial patterns of crime
and offender rates as visible from the developing ‘criminal statistics’ with other
indices of the ‘moral’ health of the nation (including such mixed features as literacy,
population density, wealth, occupations, nationalities) and the physical environment

(such as climate). Guerry, for example found a correlation of offending rates in France
between 1825–30 with convicted criminals’ age, sex and the season of the year. Rawson
concentrated upon employment and the changing features of urban industrialisation.
Quetelet argued the effect of obvious instances of economic inequalities in small areas.
3.4.1 The work of Adolphe Jacques Quetelet

Quetelet (1796–1874) was trained in mathematics and early success in this field made
him a professor with a large reputation. He applied mathematical techniques to a
range of issues, including astronomy, meteorology, and sociology. He illustrates the
fact that so much criminological data and knowledge is the result of applied study
rather than a concentrated long-standing effort. For Quetelet, scientific evidence
resulted from, and was a reflection of, large numbers of observations rather than
individual occurrences. Quetelet highlighted a fundamental problem with crime
statistics, namely the gap between ‘known and judged offences’ and what statistics
may in commonsense be thought to measure, ‘committed offences’. He was clear that:
‘our observations can only refer to a certain number of known and tried offences, out
of the unknown sum total of crimes committed’ (Quetelet, [1842] 2013, p.82).
Quetelet argued that in well-organised societies this ratio would be close to unity
for serious crimes, and further from unity for less serious crimes. Thus we could be
relatively certain of the ‘moral statistics of crime’ within these constraints. These
statistics showed that men commit more crimes and thus we could infer that they
have a greater ‘propensity’ for crime than women, and that the young have a greater
propensity than the old. Using findings constructed out of many observations and in a
variety of times and places:
we can enumerate in advance how many individuals will soil their hands in the blood of
their fellows, how many will be frauds, how many prisoners; almost as one can enumerate
in advance the births and deaths that will take place. Society contains within itself the
seeds of all the crimes that are to be committed, and at the same time the facilities
necessary for their development. It is society that, in some way, prepares these crimes,
and the criminal is only the instrument that executes them. (ibid., p.97)
Such patterns were material to work upon to effect improvements. Statistics provided
evidence of a moral condition of society that required remedy:
there is a budget which we pay with a frightful regularity – it is that of prisons, chains, and
the scaffold: it is that which, above all, we ought to endeavour to abate. (ibid., p.96)
3.5 The oral-ethnographic efforts

Rather than seeking to determine hard scientific laws or knowledge for control, the
oral-ethnographic tradition attempts to communicate the human experience and
offer an understanding-based vision of the human consequences of social conditions,
poverty and crime. Using direct observations, life histories, unpublished documents
and a range of first-hand data sources we are offered commentaries on the effects of
socio-economic change on the structure of social relations.
3.5.1 Fredrich Engels

In The condition of the working class in England (1845) Engels used his own impressions
of Manchester to comply a radical and sensitive account of working class life. You
should note that Manchester had been called by a character in Disraeli’s Coningsby
‘the most wonderful city in Modern times’ and was the major city of England that had
come to symbolise the achievement of capitalist industrialisation in all its grandeur
and grimness. Engels used a combination of first-hand observation, economic
data, contemporary accounts, pamphlets and newspapers. The themes of relative
deprivation and of crime as a rational reaction to the visible inequalities produced by
the industrial revolution run through his account:
The worker lived in poverty and want and saw that other people were better off than he
was. The worker was not sufficiently intelligent to appreciate why he, of all people, should
be the one to suffer – for after all he contributed more to society than the idle rich, and
sheer necessity drove him to steal in spite of his traditional respect for private property.
(2009 [1845], p.242)
Crime was understandable and a taste of justice for the powerful:
Acts of violence committed by the working classes against the bourgeoisie and their
henchmen are merely frank and undisguised retaliation for the thefts and treacheries
perpetrated by the middle classes against the workers. (ibid., p.242)
Engels saw the growth of criminality not only among the deprived working class but also
in the ‘surplus population’ of casual workers, what Marx called ‘the lowest sediment’, and
others ‘the residuum’. Engels saw the position is starkly determinist terms:
Apart from over-indulgence in intoxicating liquors, the sexual immorality of many English
workers is one of their greatest failings. This too follows from the circumstances in which
this class of society is placed. The workers have been left to themselves without the moral
training necessary for the proper control of their sexual desires. While burdening the
workers with numerous hardship the middle classes have left them only the pleasures of
drink and sexual intercourse. The result is that the workers, in order to get something out
of life, are passionately devoted to these two pleasures and indulge in them to excess and
in the grossest fashion. If people are relegated to the position of animals, they are left with
the alternatives of revolting and sinking into bestiality. If the demoralisation of the worker
passes beyond a certain point then it is just as natural that he will turn into a criminal... as
inevitably as water turns into steam at boiling point. (ibid., pp.144–45)
This sounds not unlike recent American writings on the ‘underclass’ (see Morrison,
1995, Chapter 17 ‘Contemporary social stratification and the development of the
underclass’; Walklate (2007), Chapter 6 ‘Crime, politics and welfare’). The emphasis
upon faulty ‘training’ early in life is very familiar if you consider recent writings from
the control perspective. However, Engels is clearly putting this behaviour into a social
context, albeit with a reductionism to environmental determinism, which is missing
from much recent conservative writings. (See the criticisms of the conservative
position made by Elliott Currie (1988).) Furthermore, Engels located the worthy
working class as prospective radicals whose criminality was an inarticulate and
unconscious social rebellion.
In all his work, Engels did not merely describe conditions but chose to interpret his
material. In his work the author’s values are obvious, indeed self-consciously exposed.
His work is deliberately a treatise against capitalism and the absence of any concern
with the general welfare of society or of social justice on the part of the capitalists.
The weakness with his writing is the possibility that the immediacy and purity of the
experience of the subjects being communicated will be distorted and twisted by the
interpretation.
The surplus group (lumpen-proletariat or residuum, which is currently the focus of

‘underclass’ writings) became of considerable interest to social commentators of
different persuasions, for example, Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew.
3.5.2 Henry Mayhew

Downes and Rock refer to Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) as one of the ‘shadow
criminologists’ whose work
contains much that is repetitive, conjectural, and fanciful. It also contains a great deal
of valuable material and sensible observation. Properly read, it may be recognised as an
anticipation of the theorising that now passes for the sociology of deviance. (1982, p.51)
His ‘street biography’ appears as an early form of social ecology approach to the
study of crime based on observation and description of the social conditions of the
developing urban centres. His four volume London labour and the London poor offered
vivid accounts of the expanding masses which filled the growing cities of Victorian
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
„Fl.… fliseteer”, zeide de kleine oolijk lachend.
„Goed, en niet vergeten, hoor!”
Een gezet heer met langen grijzen knevel kwam dicht onder het hek
voorbij. Hij keek aandachtig naar het groepje, en lichtte toen den
hoed, bleef nog even staan, en richtte zijn schreden naar den ingang
van het hek.
„Wie is dat, Jan? Gauw!”
Van Vleuten had de beteekenis van deze uitroep begrepen, en was

opgestaan, den bezoeker tegemoet loopend. [236]
„Meneer van Vleuten, u kent mij misschien niet meer?”
„Inderdaad.…”
„Boom! Uit den Haag.”
Van Vleuten keek hem vragend aan, alsof hij op nadere

mededeelingen wachtte.
„Ik hoorde, dat u hier was komen wonen,” ging Boom voort. „Mijn
vrouw en ik brengen hier ’s zomers meestal een paar weken door,
en.… toen herinnerde ik mij een oude schuld.…”
„Ja,” deed van Vleuten, onverschillig. „Voor ’n uitvinding, of zoo iets,

niet waar? Is u geslaagd?”
„Geslaagd wel,” antwoordde Boom. „Maar ik heb besloten de

uitvinding te laten rusten. Ze is mij steeds ten voordeele geweest, en
ik heb gewetensbezwaren haar te publiceeren. De geweldige
gevolgen.…”
„Wat verschaft mij eigenlijk de eer?” vroeg van Vleuten.

„Zooals ik zeide. We hebben nog een oude schuld te vereffenen. Ik
ben daartoe nu in staat.”
„Meneer Boom, ik wil voor u niet onder doen. Laat ons de

menschheid niets in handen geven, wat haar ongelukkig zou maken.
Mocht u dus omtrent het geld, dat u mij indertijd ontfutseld hebt, ook
gewetensbezwaren hebben, welnu, er is een armenbus. Ik zie er van
af, en tevens van voortzetting onzer kennismaking.”
Boom wijfelde een oogenblik. Hij scheen de kansen te berekenen,

die hij kon hebben bij een persoonlijken aanval. Van Vleuten keek
hem bedaard in de oogen, en haalde een zilver fluitje uit zijn
vestzak.
Op dat gezicht wendde Boom zich om, en vertrok zonder groet.
Van Vleuten kwam terug bij Betsy.
Op hetzelfde oogenblik, dat Boom, zich zooveel mogelijk

[237]houding gevend, het erf verliet, reed een jongmensch op een
fiets hem rakelings voorbij naar binnen.
„Hoera, er door!” riep hij, springend van zijn rijwiel, dat in de mulle
grond bleef steken.
En wuivend met een bedrukt papier, liep hij naar de plaats waar van
Vleuten en Betsy zaten.
„Fliseteer!” riep de kleine meid, toen Jan haar hoog in de lucht hief.
„Er was bijna een ongelukje gebeurd,” vertelde Jan. „Een der
jongens had notities, en meenende gesnapt te worden, gooide hij die
onder mijn plaats. Gelukkig had een der leeraren het gezien, anders
was ik er misschien bij geweest. Nu is hij de eenige die gezakt is.”
„Wat leert je dat, Jan?” vroeg van Vleuten.
„Eerlijk te zijn?”
„En nog wat. Op te passen voor schelmen.” [238]

[Inhoud]
UITGAVE A. W. BRUNA & ZOON,

UTRECHT.
VERSCHENEN:
TOP NAEFF,
DE DOCHTER,
Prijs ing. f 2.40. In prachtband f 2.90.
Rotterd. Cour. schrijft: Het is een goed geschreven

verhaal met knappe karakterverbeeldingen, vol mooie
details—van gevoel—Een literair—ernstig werk enz.
Zwolsche Cour.: Dit is nu pas eens een boek, waar men

wat aan heeft.
Vaderland: De groote psychologische studie van Top

Naeff, het verhaal van het leed van Julie Veemer, bleek
een ware verrassing.
Kerk. Cour.: Ook hierin heeft zij getoond, hoe groot hare
gave van waarnemen en beschrijven is.
Rotterd. Nieuwsbl.: Dit voortreffelijke boek is een der

beste boeken, die er in den laatsten tijd geschreven zijn.
Weekblad: Tot de weinige goede boeken, die in de
laatste jaren zijn verschenen, reken ik de nieuwe roman
van Top Naeff.
Wereldkr.: Gezondheid, jeugd, kracht, stralen U uit deze

bladzijden tegemoet.
[Inhoud]
UITGAVE A. W. BRUNA & ZOON,

UTRECHT.
M. W. MACLAINE PONT,
OVERWINNING
GESCHIEDKUNDIGE ROMAN.
Prijs ing. f 3.25. In prachtb. f 3.90.
Bred. Cour. schrijft: Dit werk draagt al de teekenen van

haar grooten geest, diepe geschiedkundige kennis en
levendige fantasie.
Prov. Gron. Cour.: Het is als roman een boeiend verhaal

en met warmte geschreven geschiedenis.
Inhoudsopgave
HOOFDSTUK I. 7
HOOFDSTUK II. 17
HOOFDSTUK III. 25
HOOFDSTUK IV. 39
HOOFDSTUK V. 48
HOOFDSTUK VI. 55
HOOFDSTUK VII. 66
HOOFDSTUK VIII. 80
HOOFDSTUK IX. 89
HOOFDSTUK X. 99
HOOFDSTUK XI. 110
HOOFDSTUK XII. 123
HOOFDSTUK XIII. 136
HOOFDSTUK XIV. 149
HOOFDSTUK XV. 162
HOOFDSTUK XVI. 173
HOOFDSTUK XVII. 184
HOOFDSTUK XVIII. 196
HOOFDSTUK XIX. 209
HOOFDSTUK XX. 218
HOOFDSTUK XXI. 231
Colofon
Beschikbaarheid
Dit eBoek is voor kosteloos gebruik door iedereen overal, met vrijwel
geen beperkingen van welke soort dan ook. U mag het kopiëren,
weggeven of hergebruiken onder de voorwaarden van de Project
Gutenberg Licentie in dit eBoek of on-line op www.gutenberg.org ↗️.
Dit eBoek is geproduceerd door het on-line gedistribueerd

correctieteam op www.pgdp.net ↗️.
Metadata
Moderne
Titel:
Schelmen
Info
Auteur: J. Dermoût
https://viaf.org/viaf/286476990/
Aanmaakdatum 2022-06-25
bestand: 17:14:30 UTC
Nederlands
(Spelling De
Taal:
Vries-Te
Winkel)
Oorspronkelijke
[1906]
uitgiftedatum:
Codering
Dit boek is weergegeven in oorspronkelijke schrijfwijze. Afgebroken

woorden aan het einde van de regel zijn stilzwijgend hersteld.
Kennelijke zetfouten in het origineel zijn verbeterd. Deze
verbeteringen zijn aangegeven in de colofon aan het einde van dit
boek.
Documentgeschiedenis
2022-06-24 Begonnen.
Externe Referenties
Project Gutenberg plaatst geen actieve externe links in haar

eboeken. De volgende URL's worden puur ter informatie getoond. U
kunt ze desgewenst kopiëren en in de adresbalk van uw browser
plakken.
Bladzijde URL
https://classic.biblegateway.com/passage/?
n.v.t.
search=1%20jn%201:1&version=HTB
https://classic.biblegateway.com/passage/?
n.v.t.
search=1%20pt%205:6&version=HTB
Verbeteringen
De volgende verbeteringen zijn aangebracht in de tekst:
Bladzijde Bron Verbetering Bewerkingsafstand

n.v.t. nuchteren nuchter 2
n.v.t., 149 [Niet in bron] . 1
7, 7, 8, 9,
10, 24, hotel hôtel 1/0
212
8 kamnr kamer 1
8 hotel-thee hôtel-thee 1/0
9, 9, 9,
hotelhoudster hôtelhoudster 1/0
10, 11, 15
10, 28,
96, 103,
[Niet in bron] ” 1
114, 194,
213
10 .,.. .… 1
11 eu en 1
11 hotel-houdster hôtelhoudster 2/1
11, 72,
” [Verwijderd] 1
191, 192
12, 16,
19, 179,
, . 1
195, 196,
234
13 beroerste beroerdste 1
16, 26,
37, 54,
56, 62,
116, 135,
[Niet in bron] „ 1
145, 168,
188, 193,
194, 198,
234, 234
20, 25,
48, 60,
[Niet in bron] , 1
128, 168,
227
Morgen
22 Morgenmiddag 1
middag
24 Verbeelje Verbeeld je 2
30 vau van 1
30 er en 1
35 bronde bromde 1
35 .. . 1
35, 49,
64, 99,
104, 143,
onmiddelijk onmiddellijk 1
152, 164,
177, 185,
185, 216
38 Bedaard Bedaar 1
39 ”, ,” 2
42 omiddellijke onmiddellijke 1
45 eenlge eenige 1
46 boroerte beroerte 1
49 ! ? 1
50 grogramma programma 1
51 billeten biljetten 2
54 wordt word 1
54 ?? ? 1
55 bezet bezit 1
59 ’, ” 2
63 voereu voeren 1
69 volgeu volgen 1
75 begrijt begrijpt 1
76 exouus excuus 1
76 [Niet in bron] te 3
77 Daruit Daaruit 1
78 maatregen maatregelen 2
79 ; . 1
83 zulks zulke 1
morgen
86 morgenmiddag 1
middag
94 allen allen allen 6
94 eeue eene 1
94 waarop waarop waarop 7
95 zòóveel zóóveel 1/0
95 missohien misschien 1
103 oogenlik oogenblik 1
Dinsdag
109 Dinsdagmorgen 1
morgen
110 onbeschrijftelijk onbeschrijfelijk 1
112 geplakt gepakt 1
113 ,, , 1
117, 171, . , 1
180, 212,
236
120 eén één 1/0
125 creditenren crediteuren 1
125 aaar naar 1
126, 179 . [Verwijderd] 1
128 f ƒ 1
132 den dan 1
133 opgetrokkea opgetrokken 1
137 nu nu nu 3
139 . ?” 2
144 Cbineezen Chineezen 1
147 „ [Verwijderd] 1
149 on en 1
150 ’ ” 1
150 En Een 1
152, 191 Maar maar 1
152 weer meer 1
153 heefd heeft 1
155 hebbeu hebben 1
156 ziju zijn 1
156, 158 dat dan 1
159 zij zijn 1
159 drijgen krijgen 1
163 Erans Frans 1
164 zijn zij 1
166 evelop envelop 1
167 dle die 1
167, 167 , [Verwijderd] 1
167 nnmmer nummer 1
167, 175 [Niet in bron] ,” 2
168 teposten te posten 1
169, 187 . ? 1
169 bij hij 1
170 lihgend liggend 1
175 ts te 1
176 Eenklaps Eensklaps 1
177 welkra weldra 1
178 scheel- scheelde 2
179 bepeurde bespeurde 1
180 bad had 1
185 or er 1
187 uemen nemen 1
faillissements.
189 faillissementsaanvraag 2
aanvraag
189 voedden voelden 1
190 Indie Indië 1/0
190 ”. .” 2
193, 214 eeu een 1
194 berinner herinner 1
196 de de de 3
197, 227 jou jouw 1
197 gerechtelijkz gerechtelijke 1
200 clienten cliënten 1/0
201 client cliënt 1/0
201 kniëen knieën 2/0
202 gogaan gegaan 1
206 afgesprokon afgesproken 1
208 ik in 1
208 tassten tastten 1
209 gemeest geweest 1
210 bankbilletten bankbiljetten 1
210 andern andere 1
210 Maat Maar 1
211, 211 billet biljet 1
212 Tiene Tiens 1
213 velgenden volgenden 1
214 enkole enkele 1
214 .., .… 2
215 pasage passage 1
215 passagebillet passagebiljet 1
215 billetten biljetten 1
216 menscheu menschen 1
218 mirtral mistral 1
219 lachtte lachte 1
223 zioh zich 1
225 .. … 1
228 zeidde zeide 1
235 toestandals toestand als 1
237 grind grond 1
238 teeken teekenen 2
238 [Niet in bron] : 1
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERNE
SCHELMEN (INDIË IN DEN HAAG): OORSPRONKELIJKE ROMAN
***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

will be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright
in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and without
paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General
Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to
abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using
and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright
law in the United States and you are located in the United
States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will
support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project
Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this
agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms
of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with
its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it
without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project

Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project
Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the

United States and most other parts of the world at no
cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may
copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the
Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or
online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the
country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to
anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges.
If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of
paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use
of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth
in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder.
Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™
License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright
holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files
containing a part of this work or any other work associated with
Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute
this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1
with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the
Project Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at
no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a
means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™
works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or

providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different
terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain
permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3
below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on,
transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright
law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite
these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the
medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,”
such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt
data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other

Full Ebook of Criminology La3025 Module Guide University of London 2020Th Edition W Morrison Online PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Full Ebook of Criminology La3025 Module Guide University of London 2020Th Edition W Morrison Online PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Full Ebook of Criminology La3025 Module Guide University of London 2020Th Edition W Morrison Online PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Criminology LA3025 Module Guide

University of London 2020th Edition W.

Introduction to Criminology LA2010 Module Guide

Public International Law LA3013- Module Guide

Jurisprudence and Legal Theory LA3005 Module Guide

Dissertation LA3200 Module Guide University of London

Administrative Law LA2008- Module Guide (University of

Commercial Law - Module Guide (University of London)

Evidence LA3007 Module Guide University of London

International Commercial Law LA3009 - Module Guide

© University of London 2016. Reprinted with minor revisions 2020

Published by: University of London

2 Crime, globalisation and the/your criminological imagination . . . . . 11

3 Competing traditions? Legacies of classical and positive criminology

4 Sources of criminological data: official criminal statistics and their

5 Psychology and crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

5.5 Trait-based personality theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

6 Sociological perspectives – structural and cultural foundations . . . . . 79

7 Contemporary cultural criminology and existentialism . . . . . . . . . 99

8 Feminist criminology: the challenge of gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

9 Punishment and its institutional framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

10 Conclusion: criminology under globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

Courses on which this module is offered

Notional study time

MODULE PURPOSE AND OVERVIEW

Criminology is a wide term covering a large discipline. As a single 30 credit module

LEARNING OUTCOMES: KNOWLEDGE

1. Understand the inter-disciplinary heritage of criminology and the influence this

2. Describe the different sources of information available to academics, policy-

3. Understand the contested nature of what is (and is not) considered to be ‘crime’;

LEARNING OUTCOMES: SKILLS

6. Distinguish between different conceptual frames of reference and compare and

BENCHMARK FOR LEARNING OUTCOMES

(b) Criminological Theory. Orientating perspectives in studying crime such as

(c) Institutional Framework of Law Enforcement. Philosophy and aims of punishment,

LEARNING AND TEACHING

The Laws Virtual Learning Environment

u a complete version of the module guides;

u online audio presentations;

u past examination papers and reports;

u Computer Marked Assessments – multiple choice questions with feedback

The Online Library

u the professional legal databases LexisLibrary and Westlaw;

u cases and up-to-date statutes;

u key academic law journals;

u links to important websites.

¢ Hopkins Burke, R. An introduction to criminological theory. (Routledge: London,

Summative assessment is through a three hour unseen examination. Students are

1.1 What is your interest in criminology: as a discipline and as a subject?

1.2 Why have criminology? Do we need it? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

1.3 The syllabus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

1.4 Core materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

1.5 Using the materials and preparing for the assessment . . . . . . . . . . 9

Murdered on September 15, 1942.

Criminology – what is it?

Criminology is increasingly offered as a whole degree, in which case criminology

Contrasts in outlooks and mood: ‘Whose side are you on?’

Throughout this guide, a three-fold distinction will be made between: