Abstract
Recently, long after it was hailed as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, I watched all five seasons of The Wire. Created by David Simon and set in contemporaneous Baltimore, The Wire ran from 2002 to 2008. Viewed in the early 2020s, it is a historical document: a portrayal of crime, policing, race, the drugs trade and sundry other things in the United States of the noughties. In the first season, the police carry out their investigation of the drugs trade via surveillance of the technologies of pagers and burner phones, an approach needed to keep up with serious criminal activity at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the final season, one storyline revolves around news reporting and The Baltimore Sun, a legacy media outlet already in decline.
In the past few years, I enjoyed following another David Simon show, The Deuce. Unlike The Wire, The Deuce is a period piece, set in the gritty New York City of the 1970s and 80s. Sex work, pornography and the burgeoning drugs trade are all key themes. It evokes the films of Martin Scorsese (primarily), William Friedkin and Sidney Lumet who hymned the New York of that era. The Deuce is catnip to viewers of a certain age because it engages with something The Wire does not: nostalgia. The Deuce does not present a city in decline, it depicts a vibrant living city before it has been sanitised and cordoned for the rich.
These two shows invite different ways to experience historical time. With The Wire we experience noughties Baltimore as it was seen at the time. With The Deuce we experience the iconic New York of the 1970s and 80s as it is remembered now. And Scorsese, Friedkin and Lumet have been important to creating globalised collective memories of that New York, whether we recognise their influence as viewers or not.
In Historical Criminology, Churchill et al. argue that history is not simply a method – archival research – and is not simply about things that happened in the past. History is a way of thinking about time. The value of historical thinking to criminology is that it enables greater analysis of how things happen in time. Historical thinking can apply to the past, the present and the future. The staples of historical thinking, continuity and change, are valuable concepts for criminology. As a social science, criminology is frequently guilty of emphasising change over continuity, but recurrences and continuities must also be understood. Doing so reveals changes are not necessarily the major shifts they are presumed to be.
The authors offer a wealth of conceptual tools to apply historical thinking to criminology. They identify five temporal units relevant to criminology: the trend, the lifecourse, the event, the recurrence and the inheritance. These various concepts pertain to quite different types of research, but they all illustrate the importance of attention to time. Thinking about criminological concepts such as ‘drugs’ or ‘terrorism’ over time can defamiliarise them – things were different in the past – but can also highlight continuities in their application. Discontinuities, or the criminological dogs that didn’t bark, are also important and reveal the contingency of the present.
In the final chapter, the authors explore how to think historically about the present, arguing this entails relating the present to the past and the future. One way the past lives in the present is through collective memory, for example of policing or punishment. Collective memory is the shared memory held by groups, which is created and reproduced through media and cultural portrayals, such as the above-mentioned TV show The Deuce. Collective memories are not uncontested or understood by everyone in the same way but these contests in themselves reveal issues of deep contemporary importance.
Mixed reactions to the acquittal in January 2022 of four people charged with criminal damage for toppling the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020 exemplified this contestation of memory. How Britain's past should be remembered and understood was something explicitly addressed during the trial (BBC News, 2022). Seen one way, the people who pushed Colston's statue into Bristol harbour had escaped punishment for committing a crime, setting a (cultural) precedent for further acts of vandalism. Seen another way, the greater crime was the failure of Bristol to reckon with its slave trading past to the extent of continuing to commemorate a slave trader long after doing so had been excoriated as imperialist The statue topplers went some way to correcting an injustice. How far harm should be understood as central to collective memory of Britain's imperial past and whether imperial conquest itself constitutes a historical crime is currently a fraught cultural contest, at least in the pages of legacy media outlets.
Another way the past intrudes on the present is through cultural trauma. Trauma is more insistent than memory; it haunts the present and causes trouble and suffering uninvited. The slave trade was a large-scale human rights abuse, and it can be a source of guilt and shame. For the descendants of enslaved populations, it is a source of trauma. The intention of Barbados and Jamaica to remove Queen Elizabeth II as their head of state emphasises the need to acknowledge and, in some measure, heal the trauma of slavery (Hanna, 2022). And the demand for reparations seeks material recompense for the wealth amassed in Britain as a result of the slave trade.
Criminologists tend to be future oriented in that they intend their research and teaching to intervene in improving or remaking approaches to justice. Futurity is part of reformist or utopian criminological projects. For the authors, reflection on the future can be understood as historical criminology as it requires the analysis of time. Reformism and utopianism envision better futures. Departing from better futures, attention to temporality enables the present to be related to lost futures, destroyed through ecological harm and state crimes such as genocide.
This book is hugely stimulating and inevitably provokes a response from the reader. I would suggest that there are ways to think about temporality that are not historical, but which could be combined with historical thinking to good effect. The lifecourse offers a prime example. The linearity and heteronormative assumptions of mainstream conceptions of the lifecourse have been critiqued and unsettled using the notion of queer temporalities. If we think historically, we can compare the differences between queer adolescence in the 2010s vs the 1980s. We can think what would be different yet again if we were considering queer adolescence in the 1950s – both in terms of experience and in terms of conceptualising ‘queer adolescence’. For me, pinning something to a particular era makes the analysis and thinking historical. The era could be recent but defining it is essential to historicising whatever is being researched. I would also push the authors to further situate their analysis of the value of understanding time historically to criminology in relation to other relevant analyses of temporality found in the discipline, such as prison time.
Historical Criminology is a concise and wide-ranging text containing much that can enrich the practice of criminology. As someone who would class themself as a historical criminologist, it prompts me to reflect on how temporality could receive more explicit attention in my work and how it could help to guide my thinking. I agree with the authors that more historical thinking from criminologists would be of immense benefit to the discipline. There are two widely held misconceptions about history that I suspect also beset some criminologists. One is that history is about narrative and not analysis. The other is the perception that the history of something can be settled. There is no unchanging past to refer back to, only contested reconstructions of that past. Bolstered by reading Historical Criminology, there is no need for these misconceptions to persist.
