THE CRIMINOLOGICAL IMAGINATION by JOCK YOUNG

THE CRIMINOLOGICAL IMAGINATION by JOCK YOUNG,(Cambridge: Polity, 2011, pp. 252. £55.00 (hbk) £16.99 (pbk))

The Criminological Imagination is the final text in a trilogy of Jock Young'sessays on the current state of criminological thought, building on insightsfrom the previous two.1 The title of the book is an explicit reference to C.Wright Mills's account of the sociological imagination in the United Statesduring the 1950s.2 Fifty years on, it is argued, little has changed. Youngargues the social scientific landscape in the United States continues to bedominated by a tendency toward either abstracted empiricism or GrandTheory. In their own way, both of these tendencies frustrate the real promiseof social science, which Mills believed to be an understanding of theintersection of history and human biography to reveal the public issuesbehind personal troubles. Mills summarized the research programme for asociological imagination in terms of three sorts of questions: (i) What is thestructure of a particular society as a whole and how does it differ from othervarieties of social order?; (ii) Where does this society stand in human historyand what are the mechanics by which it is changing?; and (iii) What varietiesof men and women now prevail in this society and in this period?3

The Criminological Imagination discusses why this programme needsreasserting in the early twenty-first century, especially in relation to the crimeproblem, and what theoretical and methodological resources exist to support itsrealization. In doing so, the book moves from a restatement of Mills'sprogramme, through a criticism of current tendencies in the study of crime andcontrol to an account of how a criminological imagination can be rescued.

With wit and verve, Young depicts the contemporary criminologicalexpression of these tendencies in paleontological terms. The `datasaur,Empiricus Abstractus' (p. 15) wanders aimlessly from dataset to dataset, andresearch grant to grant, ravenously consuming empirical facts, giving littlethought to their digestion. By contrast, the `theorodactyl' soars:

high above reality in an endless quest for a fashionable perch, gliding fromtheory to theory, detected from below only by the trail of references it leavesbehind, mouthing near incomprehensible sentences with a hint of a Frenchaccent yet strangely like the datasaur, unsure of where it is going and what it isthere for (p. 218).

Conversely, Young promotes `cultural criminology' as an approach that is:

informed by sociology, which concerns itself with meaning and power, andwhich understands that human beings create cultural solutions to their lifeproblems in social structures which are largely not of their own making(p. 222).

312

1 J. Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007) and The Exclusive Society: SocialExclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity (1999).

2 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959).3 id., p. 13.

ß 2012 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß 2012 Cardiff University Law School

It is fair to say that the focus of criticism is more on the datasaur than thetheorodactyl (the latter making only a fleeting appearance on p. 218).Criticism of the `bogus of positivism' and the specious certainties ofmeasurement and statistical modelling in contemporary criminology takes upthe first third of the book. This preoccupation surely reflects Young's ownbiography, particularly his move to work in the United States and consequentimmersion in the paradigm wars of North American social science. Here, theinterpretative approach that Young favours appears a minority pursuit,beleaguered by the aggressive scientism of the criminological mainstream.Young locates cultural criminology in a tradition which:

traces its lineage through the Victorians, such as Mayhew, Booth and Engels,via the Chicago School of the 1930s to the revolutionary developments of thenew deviancy theory in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s, andthrough to the new criminology and subcultural theory of Britain in the 1970sand early 1980s (p. 222).

This tradition challenges the presumption that `crime' exists as an objectivereality amenable to measurement. The question is posed:

How can we have a notion of fixed objective measurement when all thedefinitions are in flux? How can we possibly have an objective figure of aphenomenon whose nature and parameters are so fiercely contested, whetherin the courtroom, chat show, or public debate? (p. 60).

The answer, from within the interpretative tradition is that, of course, wecannot:

The distinction from the physical sciences is quite clear . . . an atom ofhydrogen is an atom of hydrogen, two litres of gas are two litres, H2 is H2 giveor take isotopes. Atoms do not discuss with each other which element they are,they do not disagree with the chemist, they cannot conflict or be unsure ofeach other and themselves' (id.).

Young restates this well-worn phenomenological critique of positivism tocounter the amnesia of the criminological mainstream in which the pos-sibility and desirability of objective measurements of crime and control hasrecently been reasserted, most notably through experimental researchdesigns such as the randomized control trial, regarded as a gold standardfor establishing `what works, what doesn't and what's promising' in theprevention of crime.4 If the pursuit of causal certainties, or even satisfyingèffect sizes', through experimental methods forgets the profoundlysubjective character of `crime', Young argues this is especially the casegiven the ìmpact of late modernity' (p. 60, and throughout). In this socialcondition, the intersection of history and biography is characterized by aproliferation of cultural norms, a `hyperpluralism', especially in the great

313

4 L. Sherman et al., Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising ±A report to the United States Congress (1997); D.F. Farrington and A. Petrosino, `TheCampbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group' (2001) 578 Annals of the Am.Academy of Political and Social Science 35±49.


melting-pot cities of the West. This condition defies any objectiveassessment of the crime problem where, for example:

Definitions and tolerance of violence vary widely throughout the population:where one part of the population views `spare the rod and spoil the child' as auseful guide to childrearing and another views the physical hitting of childrenas rampant child abuse (p. 72).

Such fundamental disagreements multiply in the culturally diverse ìconiccities of the Western world' when, as in London, over 30 per cent of thepopulation are born abroad, coming from 15 or more countries (the com-parable figure in New York being 33 per cent and in Toronto, 45 per cent). Inthis urban context, `The heterogeneity of class and status which Louis Wirth. . . discerned in the Chicago of the 1930s, is far overtaken in the hyperpluralcity of the present' (p. 97).

In this condition, `crime' cannot be other than context-dependent, indeed,it must be so context-laden as to escape meaningful generalization to otherplaces and times. Whereas positivist research designs, such as randomizedcontrol trials, victim surveys, and self-report studies perpetuate the fallacy ofan objective experience of `crime', `cultural criminology' offers a means ofrescuing the criminological imagination, of rendering it fit for the purpose ofunderstanding the present, variegated, experiences of deviance and socialcontrol. Cultural criminology is `quintessentially late-modern' for two basicreasons:

the extraordinary emphasis on creativity, individualism and generation oflifestyle in the present period, coupled with a mass media which has expandedand proliferated so as to transform human subjectivity (p. 103).

To illustrate the promise of cultural criminology and the particular value ofits method of choice, that of urban ethnography, Young considers the struggle toexplain the principal empirical challenge for contemporary criminology in theWest: explaining the apparent sustained drop in crime in many industrializedcountries from the mid-1990s (at least until the effects of the current economicdownturn are felt) despite increasing levels of social inequality. Young regardsthis phenomenon as a `second aetiological crisis' confounding àll predictionsthat I know of' (p. 111). This follows the `first aetiological crisis' ofcriminology, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, during which time:

the crime rate increased remorselessly in the majority of industrialisedcountries, despite the fact that all the factors which had been identified asreducing crime were on the increase (e.g. wealth, education, employment,housing) (id.).

In either case the causal relationship between anti-social conditions and anti-social behaviour is broken, defying the most sophisticated analyses ofstatistical variation. Young recounts a meeting of the American Society ofCriminology in November 2000 in which epidemiologists from variousdisciplinary backgrounds factored in their favoured correlates to account forthe American experience of declining crime:

314


I listened with fascination to how they factored each of the developments overthe period to explain the phenomenon, from changes in the distribution ofhandguns, the extraordinary prison expansion, zero-tolerance policing, downto changes in crack-culture and technology (p. 112).

In the audience, a Canadian colleague noted a similar downward trend in crimein her country in which there hadn't been a major expansion in the penalpopulation, where zero-tolerance policing had found little favour, and wherecrack-cocaine markets were negligible. A Spanish colleague noted a similardecline in crime in her country and still further variations in social context.

The point is made; even if there were an objective reality of crime to bemeasured, the revelation of statistical patterns would tell us little about thesocial dynamics behind the correlations. For this, Young argues, we needethnographic insight of the kind exemplified in the work of the urbananthropologist Ric Curtis,5 whose study of street drug markets in Americancities in the 1990s identified a `little brother effect'. Noting the unglamorous,often lethal and, for the most part, miserably recompensed existence of theirolder brothers' experiences in these markets, a younger cohort of Americanmales has opted for a life of conformity. Flipping burgers has, after all, wonout against the muck and bullets of life with the corner boys (pp. 121±2).Such appreciative, contextualized, knowledge is portrayed as the veryepitome of Mills's concern with biography and history:

It is a criminology that exists within sociology; it is the application of socio-logical thought to the problem of crime and deviance. It denies criminology anindependent existence: for crime and deviance is just the `disorder' whichmirrors order or, indeed, frequently very much part of that order itself (p. 223).

And yet, the intellectual landscape looks rather different from Europe andcertainly from Britain. It was, after all, in the British context that Younghimself called for a `left realist' criminology that:

takes seriously the complaints of women with regards to the dangers of beingin public places at night . . . takes note of the fears of the elderly with regard toburglary . . . acknowledges the widespread occurrence of domestic violenceand racist attacks . . . [that] does not ignore the fears of the vulnerable . . . [andthat] is only too aware of the systematic concealment and ignorance of crimesagainst the least powerful.6

In relation to this research agenda, however, the method of choice was thelocal victim survey used to capture the social structure of victimization,particularly the concentration of personal and property crimes on vulnerablepopulations characterized by other indices of multiple deprivation. Yes, theexperience of crime is culturally mediated but its objective reality, as the leftrealist manifesto puts it, needs to be taken seriously by critical social sciencebecause it is the least powerful that suffer the greatest harm from criminal

315

5 See, for example, R. Curtis, `The Changing Drug Scene in Brooklyn, N.Y.Neighborhoods' in Crime and Justice in New York City, ed. A. Karmen (1998).

6 J. Young, `The failure of criminology: The need for a radical realism' in ConfrontingCrime, eds. R. Matthews and J. Young (1986) 24.


predation.7 Quite how dramatically concentrated this suffering is sub-sequently emerged through work on the distribution of personal and propertycrime in England and Wales, which discovered that the top 10 per cent ofhigh-crime areas revealed through the 1992 British Crime Survey (BCS)accounted for a third of all property crime recorded through this survey andtwo thirds of all personal crime.8 Work on the characteristics of these highcrime areas, linking data from the BCS to the census, revealed the multipledeprivation of their resident populations.9 More recently, this kind of `leftepidemiology' has been promoted through an account of the correlationsbetween income inequalities, criminal victimization, and other indices ofdeprivation in `Bankrupt Britain',10 whilst Wilkinson and Pickett's `spiritlevel' thesis contrasts levels of imprisonment and violence across advancedindustrialized countries, noting the greater the income inequalities, thehigher the level of violence and imprisonment per capita.11

Of course, both quantitative and qualitative research methods, ethnog-raphies, and surveys can complement the pursuit of a criminological imagi-nation; some of the most renowned studies of crime and neighbourhoodchange in British criminology entail such an admixture.12 The more chal-lenging argument concerns the choice of research strategy, for whilst Youngprovides a corrective to the `bogus of positivism', the tensions betweeninterpretive and realist social research are left unexplored. Recognizing, inMills's own terms, the need to understand the `structure of a society', how itvaries from others, how it changes and how people's biographies are situatedwithin it, we might note both the limitations of ethnography and the prob-lems of denying the objective measurement of victimization for accounts ofcrime and social inequality. In the epistemological terms of this book, wemight question how the structure of societies can be meaningfully accessedthrough ethnography alone, in order to discover the historically situatedsocial actor of Mills's imagination.

ADAM EDWARDSCardiff University School of Social Sciences, Glamorgan Building, King

Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, Wales

[email protected]

316

7 J. Lea and J. Young, What is to be done about law and order? (1984).8 T. Hope, `Communities, crime and inequality in England and Wales' in Preventing

Crime and Disorder: Targeting Strategies and Responsibilities, ed. T. Bennett (1996).9 A. Trickett et al., `Crime victimisation in the Eighties' (1995) 35 Brit. J. of

Criminology 343±59.10 D. Dorling and B. Thomas, Bankrupt Britain: An atlas of social change (2010).11 R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why equality is better for everyone

(2009).12 A. Bottoms, R.I. Mawby, and P. Xanthos, À tale of two estates' in Crime and the

City, ed. D. Downes (1989); T. Hope and J. Foster, `Conflicting forces: changing thedynamics of crime and community' (1992) 32 Brit. J. of Criminology 488±504.


Documents

THE CRIMINOLOGICAL IMAGINATION by JOCK YOUNG