BA (Hons) Criminology and Law course preparation

What are criminological issues? At first glance, it might be assumed that they are simply to do with what the law says are ‘crimes’, and who the law says are ‘criminals’. In both cases the assumption is often that ‘criminals’ are people who are different from ‘us’, the law abiding majority: that there is something fundamentally wrong with them as people. These sorts of assumptions indeed do run through a particular tradition of criminology – ‘positivism’ – in which criminologists tended to see themselves as scientists, explaining crime and criminals as if they were some sort of naturally occurring things, like trees or atoms, or climate.

However, during the twentieth century, drawing on thinkers from other disciplines, some criminologists began to do a couple of important things. First, they increasingly saw the ‘crimes’ defined by criminal law as being ‘caused’ by social as well as individual factors. This didn’t fundamentally critique the concept of ‘crime’, but it did widen the area of criminological focus. Poverty, for example, became a criminological issue insofar as it was thought to cause crime.

More fundamentally, many criminologists recognised that ‘crime’ doesn’t actually exist as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, with some sort of essential quality that makes it ‘crime’: taking drugs, taking property (say as tax), and even killing can be legal. So, on this account, what makes an act ‘criminal’ is not something inherent to the act, but simply that the state – the government – makes it a crime. It passes a law that says this and pays police to arrest, and employs prison officers to punish people who transgress that law. So here, the idea is that what should demand our attention is ‘deviance’, the transgression of social norms, including those that are codified in law as crimes.

This leads to some problems for criminologists and there are a couple you might want to think a bit about before you come up to university.

• The first problem is that if crime is just what governments say it is – that there is nothing about the act itself outside of this process of legal definition that makes it a crime – then we need to be aware that this could have criminologists studying one sort of behaviour in one country, but not in another. For example, criminologists in Nazi Germany studied inter-racial marriages, because they were illegal. In the nineteenth century slaves who tried to escape were the subject of attention, because this was a crime. In Soviet Russia people could be arrested for thinking or acting politically in ways that the state forbade. In some countries today there are behaviours that whilst legal for men, are criminal for women. At a very simple level, just following the state’s legal definition of crime would leave criminologists studying very different and often contradictory behaviours from country to country and from time to time. Similarly, if what we are concerned with – and maybe looking to persuade governments to criminalize – is deviant behaviour, then what counts as deviant in say, Saudi Arabia, would not be deviant in the UK, or vice-versa.

• The second, related but even more important problem that follows from this is that when we think about some of the examples above, simply following state definitions of crime can implicate criminology in some pretty terrible state-crimes. Many German criminologists for example, did a lot of racist research along the lines of Nazi thinking. Surely, we would not want to be spending our time researching causes of supposed ‘crimes’, when we think that they shouldn’t be crimes? What is actually wrong with people of different ethnicities marrying? To use a more recent and UK based example, was it right that criminologists and other academics looked for ways to control, punish or treat homosexuality until it was made legal?

• Third, and this is the main issue I would like you to think about – if there are problems with simply following what the particular state you are in happens to define as crime, then what should be at the centre of criminological attention? This question has been brought to the fore in recent years, with criminologists not only asking why states criminalise some behaviours and groups of people and not others, but also asking what should we study? A very important development in the last twenty years has been the emergence of what is called a ‘social harms’ approach, or as it is sometimes known, a ‘zemiological’ perspective. In this view, many criminologists suggest that what really matters about an act is not whether it breaks a rule that a government happens to have established – which might be changed next month – but whether that act is socially harmful. Does it hurt someone? If so, how much? Can the hurt be justified? What causes individuals, organisations like big corporations or even governments to act in ways that cause harm? What should be done about the harm to reduce it? Maybe this will include criminalising the behaviour – but maybe not?

One of the interesting things of this zemiological approach is that it significantly widens the areas that criminologists now study. So, for example, the rise of ‘Green Criminology’ has been closely associated with zemiology. Here, attention has been drawn to the fact that potentially disastrous environmental and social harm has been the result not of what the state labels as criminal or deviant acts, but as the results of legal acts – of people, like us, conforming to social norms including laws. Another interesting development has been ‘Peace-making Criminology’, which looks at how violence at all levels is generated and how it might be reduced or resolved. There has been a renewed interest too in so-called crimes of the powerful, in which harms that may or may not be criminalised in law, are studied. They include extremely harmful human activities such as war, genocide, torture, the generation of inequality and poverty, pollution and financial harms that draw wealth upwards and lead to financial crises.

In these areas and more, a zemiological orientation has stimulated intense research, debate and theorisation. This has been especially welcome and relevant because – as you won’t need to be told – we are living through some profound crises right now. The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote about historical ‘conjunctures’ of crises, which have the potential to lead to very significant social changes – good or bad. As you enter university you do so at a time of acute and chronic environmental crises, financial and economic crises, and therefore, ultimately, social crises. None of the harms associated with these have been produced only, or even mainly, by activities formally defined as ‘crimes’ in the legal sense. Maybe that should change.