Abstract
The contributions in this themed section developed from conversations that took place at an event hosted by the British Society of Criminology and Criminology & Criminal Justice in April 2019. The papers that follow respond to a ‘think-piece’ presented by Richard Sparks at that event, and engage with the subsequent debate about the future of funding for crime and justice research. Contributors reflect on the opportunities and challenges arising from recent shifts in funding allocations and priorities, from their different vantage points. Highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary and international work, they consider priorities for future investment in crime and justice research and draw attention to the impact of an increasingly restrictive and risk-averse climate on critical research. The papers explore the consequences for criminology as a discipline and warn of the potential reinforcement of existing inequalities in academia unless action is taken to support the development of future researchers.
Introduction – The ‘brief’ and its context
Early in 2018, I was invited by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to prepare a concise (12 page) paper – a ‘think piece’ – on the scope for future Research Council investments in research on crime and justice. 1 This was one of 13 such invitations. These were issued to scholars working in fields that for various reasons (in some cases, perhaps, their comparative newness, in others their interdisciplinary character, among other possible reasons) seemed to have attracted comparatively little investment in recent years.
The papers were to be prepared on a common template in three main parts. These were the following:
An overview of the current landscape, including some indication of its current scope, the identification of major ‘gaps’ and some observations on needs regarding data and capacity building.
Key opportunities and future directions, including topics such as interdisciplinarity, internationalization, impact and collaboration.
Recommendations on where ESRC might best focus its future funding in order to make a distinctive contribution to developing research in the area.
The authors had roughly 3 months in which to prepare these pieces, during which time they were encouraged to consult as widely as possible with people in the field, both researchers and users or commissioners of research, and with one another. A crucial part of the context of this mission (for I chose, rashly, to accept it) was the transition then taking place from the seven existing Research Councils, understood as distinct albeit collaborating organizations, to the creation of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) 2 as an over-arching body. Although these papers were written primarily for the purpose of advising ESRC Council and staff on their strategy, there was also an intention that they should be widely discussed and at least their Executive Summaries published.
I interpreted the injunction to consult to mean trying to open the invitation to comment or contribute as widely as possible. I asked the British Society of Criminology (BSC) to publicize this to its members, and I sent out emails to about 100 people in the United Kingdom and around the world. These included everyone I could identify as Head of a Criminology department or centre, with a request to pass the message on to colleagues. I received about 40 responses from a range of individuals and groups (for all of which I remain very grateful).
At the time of writing, I did not know what use ESRC have determined to make of any suggestion of mine. The project, however, has had a bit of an afterlife, of which this exchange of views in Criminology and Criminal Justice (CCJ) is a significant extension. In April 2019, we held a day of discussion in Edinburgh under the auspices of BSC and CCJ at which I presented the outline of my position, with responses from a number of people and a lively debate from the floor.
It was evident both from the responses I received to my initial request for input, and from the discussions in April 2019 that there is a keen appetite for a serious, structured and inclusive conversation about the future of research on crime and justice. We also know that there are widely divergent views on these matters. This has always been a plural and contentious area, often characterized (as Ian Loader and I have pointed out in other contexts 3 ) by its capacity to generate heat. Part of my responsibility, as I interpreted it, was to convey some of that diversity in what I wrote for ESRC as a source of strength and vitality, even if I was also required to offer some definite propositions.
I acknowledge full responsibility for the propositions, therefore, while also affirming that I made a serious and grateful effort to reflect the range of views that people took so much time and trouble to formulate and send to me. All I am able to present here, then, is a condensed version of my argument. I have removed some of the more technical aspects, concerning data sharing or impact pathways for example, in order to focus on some ‘big picture’ questions about the shape of the field now and, so far as we can glimpse it, in the next couple of decades. I cannot speak for decisions that ESRC may ultimately take, and that in my view is in any case no longer the main topic. I have therefore removed explicit recommendations to ESRC from what follows. The issue is rather how we, as producers and users of research, organize our thinking on actual and emergent problems of crime and control, and in which ways we consider it important to respond to them.
An overview of the current landscape
What is the current scope of research in this area?
The scope of research in the fields of crime and justice is in principle extremely large. It has always been the case that it is difficult – and on some views impossible in principle – to draw boundaries around the questions of crime and justice so as to say that only some topics, concepts, approaches or methods are relevant.
We should not begin by regarding this expansiveness as a problem, or only as a problem. What it means is that crime and justice intersect with many other societal questions and developments. They cannot be successfully ‘thought’ in isolation but go alongside other key institutions, processes and approaches. This is key to their contemporary significance, and central to the contributions that crime and justice researchers can make to interdisciplinary approaches to current and emergent challenges.
Here, in order to try to gain some perspective on this question of ‘scope’, I organize this research area into six broad themes, in roughly ascending order of scale. These are in no sense evaluative judgements (all the themes noted here are vital and intensely topical ones), but they may disclose different opportunities for investment, and different potential impacts among readers and users of research.
Crime-as-conduct. Although explaining or otherwise understanding the actions of people identified as having contravened criminal law (or of other people in interaction with them – victims of crime, for example) is the most traditional goal of ‘criminological’ 4 inquiry it is by no means the sole or even dominant raison d’être of the field today. Nevertheless, some of the best work internationally on crime, social exclusion and urban fortunes (characterized by strong observational research practice and grounding in place), has been done in the United Kingdom, sometimes with ESRC support. 5
The gradually gathering awareness of the centrality of gender in social relations generally, and in questions of crime and justice in particular, has informed much of the most imaginative and compelling recent work. Work has addressed the violences of men against women and children in domestic contexts (coercive control, intimate partner violence) and in public space 6 (including both antique and seemingly more fully contemporary phenomena such as online threats and abuse).
Pathways and trajectories. Longitudinal studies of pathways and transitions, often of a cohort drawn from a single city (Edinburgh, Peterborough), 7 are designed to illuminate questions such as the differing outcomes in terms of crime and victimization among people growing up in different areas or subject to other influences or disadvantages.
The resources required to sustain such studies over time, and to enable them to interact with other large-scale, life-course studies, are clearly considerable. Among the most significant recent extensions of criminal careers research – and one in which UK-based researchers have been in the vanguard – has been the refocusing on questions of desistance from crime (or to follow Farrall, of how people ‘start to stop’). 8 Such work often requires qualitative longitudinal designs, complementary to the larger quantitative studies noted earlier.
Controls and regulations. Another principal focus of research in crime and justice concerns criminal justice institutions and decision-making (domestically, comparatively and – increasingly – internationally). UK-based researchers have been at the forefront of new work posing questions concerning the scale, priorities and effectiveness of actually existing institutions of crime control. 9 Increasingly, this concerns not just the activities of public police forces or probation or prison services and other familiar state agencies but also a host of other regulatory actors in and beyond criminal justice, including those in private and voluntary or ‘third’ sectors.
What was once a radical, disruptive perception, that controls and regulations are not necessarily or intrinsically benign, or without harmful consequences of their own, is increasingly widely acknowledged. The questions, therefore, come to concern a much wider and more demanding array of debates and opportunities, of which regulation through criminalization is just one, bringing in train its own special capacities for harm or help.
New technologies and affordances. There is an obvious yet expansive and extremely complex dialectic between the opportunities for harm and exploitation made available by new technologies (the many forms of cyber-crime and computer-enabled crime, and the other varieties of harm made feasible by new media – social media bullying, grooming, trolling and stalking, for example) and the regulatory and surveillance capacities of new technologies. The relations between crime and justice and technological development are thus of central and constantly growing significance. They include bioethical questions, questions of data privacy and intellectual property, changes in justice process and the nature of adjudication itself, the infrastructural dimensions of situational crime prevention, and many other topics that reach across traditional boundaries between the natural and social sciences and the humanities.
Globality and trans-national flows. Crime and justice research is no longer defined and limited by entirely ‘domestic’ preoccupations. Rather, it increasingly concerns questions such as people trafficking and ‘modern’ slavery, drugs and other criminal networks, money laundering, illegal antiquities and other high-value commodities and a host of other illicit ‘flows’, both mundane and exotic. 10
A major focus in recent UK-based and other European work has been the phenomenon of ‘crimmigration’, 11 and the consequent concern with borders, detention and deportation as responses on the part of the wealthy countries of the North to the disruptive aspects of new mobilities. 12 There are major challenges and opportunities here to re-think the problem-spaces of crime and justice research beyond the primacy of single-jurisdictional specificities, and beyond an unreflexively Northern projection of the world.
Alternative conceptions. Exciting new directions have started to emerge that invite us to re-evaluate traditional conceptions of ‘the criminal question’ in light of a wider range of disciplinary resources. While the notion of ‘decriminalizing criminology’ 13 is not in itself entirely novel, the tasks of rethinking harms and risks (to environment, security, health and human development) and the appropriateness of political and policy responses to these have gained focus and energy. For example, current work in law enforcement and public health, 14 new regulatory frameworks, peace-processes (including their domestic applications and analogies), 15 the security implications of architecture and urban design (as well as of computer ‘architectures’ and other socio-technical developments), among others, all disclose exciting practical opportunities at the same time as opening dialogues between disciplines.
What are some important gaps in the current research profile in this area?
The expansive scope of crime and justice, together with their dynamically changing character and their inherent connections to major questions of policy and practice mean that ‘gaps’ are similarly numerous, varied and emergent. As one senior commissioner and user of research put it to me, ‘the gaps are everywhere’:
Dimensions of violence: actions, reasons, contexts. Violence menaces, perplexes and troubles us. Its protean character demands interdisciplinary attention. It presents both explanatory and practical problems at all levels – the interpersonal, the collective, the ‘mass’, the political. Earlier generations of research largely kept such ‘scalar’ problems separate by erecting disciplinary fences, whereas now the opportunity arises to explore those problems differently. While in the past, studies of violence often stood accused of having individuated the problem, contemporary work specifically addresses group-supported and collective action, including at large scale (e.g. the actions of armies and other parties in and after armed conflict 16 ).
Some of the great mobilizations of our time – #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the demonstrations after Parkland, the currently gathering agitation around gun crime in London and elsewhere – are themselves responses to violence. Interest on the part of research users and practitioners in and beyond Government, in media and among wider publics is both diverse and massive.
The gendered basis of violence still demands much further inquiry, not least in the light of current legislative activity and international agreements. There is major scope for international comparative and collaborative activity, spanning the global North and South. There is also a need for further research on questions of hate and extremism, domestically and internationally. This is one of many areas in which work with perpetrators is difficult to accomplish yet entirely necessary. Empirical evidence is key to the development and implementation of more effective responses.
Crime, punishment and after: Despite the excellence of some recent work on pathways into and out of crime (such as the recent turn in research and policy towards questions of desistance 17 ) and on aspects of social control and regulation there are also some striking gaps. As noted below, promising lines of inquiry arising from cohort studies – including more convincing evidence than previously on the frequently counter-productive effects of early contact with the criminal justice system 18 – risk not being built-upon in the absence of new longitudinal work.
Research on prisons is now a significant strength, 19 and suggests what can be accomplished with some investment and a highly focused and committed research community. Elsewhere, however, systematic studies of criminal process and decision-making are more scattered and this leaves very considerable areas of policy and practice (Courts, judgements and sentencing, parole decision-making, systems of surveillance and supervision, re-entry after punishment, and indeed law-making itself) severely under-served by research.
In some of these areas – such as sentencing and its social consequences, including with respect to questions of equity in respect of race, class and gender, for example – there is surprisingly little current empirical research and few noteworthy concentrations of expertise.
Yet, it is also clear that new technologies and innovations (in estimations of risk and the emergence of so-called algorithmic justice, for example, or new surveillance and monitoring technologies) are occurring continually, with major implications for conceptions of justice and the practices of the relevant professions. Similarly, questions of race and increasingly also of citizenship and nationality loom large. This goes on the one hand to familiar, yet, intransigent questions concerning policing (e.g. in controversies about stop-and-search practices and Police use of armed force), prosecution and punishment in relation to racialized disparities, and on the other hand, to new configurations about the treatment of foreign nationals at every stage of criminal process.
Crime and technology. The social and human dimensions of technology extend far beyond the theme of ‘cybercrime’ as such, and many of these are at early stages of exploration. 20 In respect of crime and justice, this clearly includes a host of aspects of technology-facilitated risks (grooming, radicalization, hate-discourse among others), but it also relates to technological developments in respect of investigation, adjudication, surveillance and supervision – in short, every stage of criminal process.
Representations, discourses, politics. An area of major contemporary concern and one with obvious interdisciplinary resonance (with cultural studies, social history, film and media, applied linguistics and other interests) is the representations and discourses in terms of which questions of crime and justice are circulated and socially shared. There are new and promising lines of inquiry – the turn to visual criminology, for example – that offer opportunities to more fully explore these connections. 21
Yet, in general terms, there is a paucity of new work of empirical depth and theoretical ambition on these deployments of the powers of the criminal justice state. This is despite the pressing nature of some current controversies (from phone hacking, to ‘fake news’, to the ubiquity of images of crime and law enforcement in popular culture, and the implications of these for questions of knowledge, trust, security, public participation and other aspects of contemporary life).
Global challenges, global harms. While some aspects of globalization have received attention, others remain to be explored. Crime and justice research has much to offer current debates about security, perhaps not least in respect of commitments to empirical precision and to grounding and to situating these discussions in respect of real places and everyday social practice.
There are major challenges for empirical research on smuggling, piracy and other international crimes, and on illicit flows in finance and services, among many other problems. The level of mutual knowledge between the majority of crime and justice researchers and those working in international law, international relations, development studies and related fields, or indeed of the work of key international agencies and institutions, is very low.
Key opportunities and future directions
What are the opportunities for interdisciplinary research in this area?
To say that crime and justice are interdisciplinary questions is both to state the obvious, and to understate the challenges and opportunities that they present to us.
It has never been possible for a single discipline – Criminology, for example – to claim exclusive ownership over crime and justice, even to the same degree that Economics ‘owns’ economics relations or Geography exercises jurisdiction over questions of space and territory. To the contrary, these problems are shared (excitingly, if not always entirely peaceably) between Law, sociology, psychiatry, psychology, politics, geography, demography, ethics, literary studies and history, to name only some of the more traditionally prominent. Latterly, these have been joined by a new constellation of discourses – public health, organization and management studies, computing and informatics, bioethics and genomics, international political economy, behavioural economics and many others. 22
There is thus massive scope for interdisciplinary collaboration, but within which the contributions of the social sciences require to be defined and affirmed. There are also, thanks to developments such as the creation of sentencing councils in both England and Wales and latter Scotland, 23 a wider and more diverse set of potential research users than has traditionally been the case.
There is a host of current problems that can only be explored fully in interdisciplinary modes, but we cannot at present always be confident that interdisciplinary working will take place successfully. For example, among social scientists, knowledge of ‘cyber-crime’ remains the domain of a limited number of specialists, and this is some distance from enhancing wider understanding of the spectrum of relationships between new technologies and questions of crime and justice. Yet, such questions are central to every aspect of contemporary security, from the most commonplace retail purchase to the stability of entire institutions, economies and political orders. This, therefore, invites greater integration between crime and justice research and social studies of technology and its uses more broadly considered.
In other words, both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ problems pose important challenges. It seems arbitrary to pick out only a few of these. However, in the interests of space, I will nominate just the following three:
Crime, justice and public health. We know that gradients identified by health researchers in terms of unequal exposure to risks of disease, incapacity and mortality have counterparts in the lives of perpetrators and victims of crime. This has major implications for mapping, documenting and explaining these distributions, their consequences and their persistence. But it also draws problems of crime and justice into diverse policy spaces, presenting challenges that involve those working in the domains of children and families, education, health, housing and de-centring the predominance of policing and criminal justice as responses. Thus, the emphasis earlier (and extended in conclusion) on the multiple dimensions of violence is by definition plural in disciplinary terms, but necessarily regards health as crucial.
Empirical legal research remains, on the whole, at small scale more than a decade after the Nuffield Foundation’s important report. 24 Similarly, the specifically legal dimensions of many crime and justice problems receive limited attention from social scientists. This inhibits the development of certain forms of work in crime and justice, perhaps especially with regard to legislation, law reform, adjudication and sentencing.
The relations between conventional conceptions of crime and justice and the production of environmental harms on a planetary scale (such as climate change, the reduction of biodiversity by, for example, logging and deforestation, the pollution of the atmosphere, waterways and oceans) present unprecedented challenges for interdisciplinary cooperation, and of course, for intervention. These and other consequences of human action for life on earth are literally un-thinkable from within the horizon of single disciplines, and they certainly pose questions about security that reach far beyond, though they doubtless include traditional debates about criminalization, enforcement, sanctions and so on. 25
In these respects the absence of ‘disciplinary’ purity or unity among scholars working on crime and justice is an undoubted, if paradoxical, strength. It enjoins interdisciplinary co-working on these matters and it emphasizes their connection with other problems and other fields.
What are the opportunities for international research perspectives in this area?
The scope for comparative and trans-national research in this field is also enormous. It is true that historically the connection between conceptions of crime and justice and the sovereign powers of individual nation-states has tended to lead to a degree of particularity and sometimes insularity. Many factors combine to invite us to move beyond that state of affairs. Many of the most urgent and difficult problems of our times are inherently trans-national in character, whether that be the illicit movement of money, people, and commodities or the flow of images and information. Both security threats and enforcement efforts increasingly exist in trans-national, cross-jurisdictional networks and spaces.
Whilst international collaborative enterprises in the fields of crime and justice research are not new (and indeed reach back far further than many are aware), they have also increased in scope and intensity lately. Recent years have seen the emergence of confident, critical and active research communities in Asia and Latin America. These developments both invite new collaborative and comparative initiatives and challenge researchers in the global North to decolonize their received conceptions of their disciplines. The impetus provided by the emergence of an explicitly self-described Southern Criminology has latterly given additional focus to these reversals of flow, from ‘core’ to ‘periphery’. Thus, for example, we see new work on environmental hazards emerging from countries directly impacted by deforestation, mineral extraction, population displacement or rising sea levels. 26
Similar trends seem apparent in relation to studies of the (often intensely conflicted) place of crime and justice in transitions to democracy; of memory and denial in respect of atrocity crimes, disappearances and other legacies of dictatorship; state crime, corruption and police brutality; constitutional change, the development of human rights cultures and the reform of state institutions. 27
Three propositions for investment in crime and justice research
Violence
The opportunities for new conceptual development and new interdisciplinary discovery are large. Methodologically, violence can be explored in a host of ways from the minutely observed (biographical, ethnographic) to the collective and political levels. It demands exploration in disaggregated ways, most obviously in respect of gender; but it also speaks to a wide range of trans-national and comparative questions and to issues of human development, global public health and so on.
Violence raises a host of policy enigmas, inviting contrastive evaluations as between ‘traditional’ criminal justice-focused responses and approaches grounded in public health, peace-making and a range of regulatory alternatives. Scope for collaboration is thus very considerable. Also very large, therefore, are the impact potentials, not just among the ‘usual suspects’ in police services and other state agencies but a wide variety of NGOs and civil society groups. The diversity of possible topics and approaches under this theme tends to encourage a Network or Programme model that invites multi-disciplinary contributions from a wide range of potential participants.
Punishment, conviction and beyond?
The post-conviction phases of criminal justice have received little attention, relative to their significance. Yet, there is much promising and some outstanding work taking place in and beyond the United Kingdom on themes of incarceration, supervision, desistance, restorative processes, re-entry (and more broadly on work, citizenship and the social consequences of intervention).
There is very little serious, current, well-funded empirical work on sentencing, and almost none on major current controversies such as the parole system. The scope for interaction with philosophy, history and law is great.
Scope for international comparison is very large here, including for North–South collaboration. The politics of punishment are prominent (and intimately related to understandings of such contemporary phenomena as populism, on the one hand, and of global diffusion of human rights consciousness, on the other hand). Any such initiative should specifically seek new conceptual development (including ‘purely’ theoretical pieces) and invite explorations of alternative conceptions of regulation that depart from, challenge and critique established responses. This theme thus incorporates questions of technology, data, comparison, representation, governance and trust. It thus seems ripe for active collaboration across Council boundaries, most obviously between ESRC and AHRC in the first instance and may lend itself to consideration for Centre funding.
Global challenges, global harms
Crime and justice have historically been so identified with nation-states and their sovereignty that current realities of their relation to world-systemic problems of governance, regulation and co-operation under international agreements still seem to take us by surprise. Trans-national organized crime is an aspect of this; as are crimes within the global financial system.
Such an initiative would therefore expressly be concerned with relationships between questions of crime and justice (and conceptions of harm) and other current arenas of ‘security’ discourse. Specific dimensions might include questions of mobility and borders (migration detention, deportation, etc.); liabilities for and responses to environmental harms (marine environments, deforestation, trafficking in endangered species, etc.); and international criminal law properly so-called (including crimes of war and crimes against humanity). Many disciplinary dimensions are engaged here, but they include (more explicitly than previously) the relations between empirical social science research on these questions and problems of international law, and by extension of political coordination, the roles of international agencies and NGOs and so on.
Final thoughts
Researchers want to see investments that produce new knowledge, generate debate, develop early career colleagues and help make change in the world. Interestingly, research users tend to define the unique contributions of larger scale publicly funded research in strikingly similar terms.
Opportunities for researchers to migrate between disciplines appear important, as do specific efforts to encourage the formation of multi-disciplinary collaborative teams. Cyber-crime, broadly considered, and environmental harms are two areas in which crime and justice researchers might play fruitful roles within such extended groupings.
Above all, I want to argue for the internationalization of perspectives on questions of crime and justice and towards fully grasping the contribution of social science perspectives on new dimensions of technology (especially including risks to the natural environment). This favours comparison and collaboration generally, and especially co-working with colleagues in the Global South. Nonetheless, certain deep and intractable problems remain at the core of the enterprise: violence; justice and punishment; harm, security and risk in the international sphere.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is based on work conducted by the author under a consultancy awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Notes
Author biography
