Book review: Janne Kivivuori, The Discovery of Hidden Crime: Self-Report Delinquency Surveys in Criminal Policy Context
| Author | Nicole Rafter |
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612470988 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
136 Theoretical Criminology 17(1)
References
Shaw C (ed.) (1938) Brothers in Crime. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Stein N and Mennemeier K (2011) Addressing the gendered dimensions of harassment and
bullying: What domestic and sexual violence advocates need to know. Critical Issue Brief.
Harrisburg, PA: National Resource Center on Domestic Violence.472548
Janne Kivivuori, The Discovery of Hidden Crime: Self-Report Delinquency Surveys in Criminal Policy
Context, Oxford University Press: New York, 2011; 204 pp.: 9780199639199, US$120
Reviewed by: Nicole Rafter, Northeastern University, USA
Janne Kivivuori’s Discovery of Hidden Crime is one of the best social histories of crimi-
nology in print. It focuses on the scientific, cultural, and political origins of the self-
report delinquency survey, but in many ways is a broader history of criminology itself, a
sociology of criminological knowledge. It offers a sociology and social history of not
only US but also international criminological knowledge, for Kivivuori casts his net
broadly, dealing with the advent of self-reporting in the United States and Nordic coun-
tries and, to a lesser extent, Germany and the UK as well. In addition, the book is so well
written that it is hard to put down. It is, as he puts it, the ‘story of an idea’ (p. 4), the idea
of hidden crime.
The book even has a plot line. It starts with a mystery—how can we break into that
locked room to discover the amount of hidden crime?; it chronicles the long search for
the tools to pry open the lock; and it shows how criminologists finally broke into the
room where the treasure lay. Kivivuori does not argue with others who attribute the first
use of self-reports to the sociologist Austin Porterfield, who initiated the first published
self-report study in 1940. However, he goes back and back, to Quetelet’s constant ratio
doctrine,1 Charles Booth’s social surveys, the many examples of hidden crime in the
novels of Emile Zola, the Progressives’ social survey method, WEB DuBois’s proxy
reporting method,2 a small, unpublished self-report survey that Sutherland evidently
conducted in the 1930s (p. 79), and the early sex researchers. Porterfield was not alone
when he jimmied that lock.
So successful is the self-report method that today it may be the most frequently used
method to study crime and delinquency (p. 2). It has become so popular, Kivivuori
writes, because ‘the method allows international comparisons that by-pass problems
caused by national differences in criminal law and recording practices’ (p. 2). Thus we
can speak ‘of standardized mass confessions on an industrial scale’ (p. 5).
Let us compare Kivivuori’s book with another recent work that deals extensively
with crime statistics, Jock Young’s (2011) The Criminological Imagination. Young
(2011: 19) writes of criminology’s ‘obsessive concern with natural scientific and statistic
method, of numerical othering, of distancing from the subject matter, of bracketing off
issues of power and inequality’. He pays a lot of attention to self-report studies but
believes that ‘it is rare’ for the latter ‘to have any internal check as to validity’ (2011:
28). Indeed, he mocks as ‘rank implausibility’ (2011: 35) the self-report finding that
‘there is little variation between the levels of juvenile delinquency’ in terms of class,
sex, and race. Although Young (2011: 40) thinks it acceptable to use survey research for
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