History, criminology and the ‘use’ of the past
| Author | Paul Lawrence |
| Published date | 01 August 2012 |
| Date | 01 August 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480611433431 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theoretical Criminology
16(3) 313 –328
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480611433431
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History, criminology and the
‘use’ of the past
Paul Lawrence
The Open University, UK
Abstract
This article considers why, despite an apparent congruence of subject matter and
methodologies, the disciplines of sociological criminology and criminal justice history
are not more closely aligned. It contends that intellectual traffic between the two fields is
not usually limited by institutional barriers, nor is it a legacy of the disciplinary antipathy
which existed between history and sociology in Britain during the mid-twentieth century.
Rather, it is due to the different ‘purposes’ with which sociological criminologists and
criminal justice historians imbue their work and to the differing disciplinary perceptions
of the relationship between the past, present and future which result from this. These
different ‘purposes’ are traced via a consideration of the paths of development of the
two disciplines from the 1940s. The article concludes by proposing an arena for future
collaboration between criminal justice historians and sociological criminologists.
Keywords
criminal justice history, historical criminolog y, historiography, histor y, postmodernism,
sociological criminology
Introduction
Being an academic surely means engaging in an inherently critical enterprise—one that
requires us to ask awkward questions of power and the existent social order.
(Hillyard et al., 2004: 386)
Historians do not count as ‘proper’ history that written … in the hope of changing the way
politics and society function.
(Daddow, 2007: 431)
Corresponding author:
Paul Lawrence, History Department, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 7AA, UK
Email: p.m.lawrence@open.ac.uk
Article
314 Theoretical Criminology 16(3)
As the fields of sociological criminology and criminal justice history have developed
over the last 30 years, there have been a number of what might be termed ‘manifestos of
collaboration’—calls for a closer alignment of the concerns and members of the two
disciplines (Davies and Pearson, 1999; Emsley and Robert, 1990; Lévy and Robert,
1984). More recently, a number of criminologists have reflected on the role of historical
research in contemporary criminology (Bosworth, 2001; Knepper and Scicluna, 2010),
and the temporal foci of the two fields have also increasingly elided. Criminal justice
historians have begun to explore the post Second World War landscape (for example,
Emsley, 2011; Jackson, 2008; Williams, 2007), while a number of criminologists have
moved in the opposite direction (for example, Rigakos and Hadden, 2001; Zedner, 2006).
Despite this, this article is based on the premise that criminal justice history remains both
largely discrete and rather distant from mainstream criminological research.
Contemporary criminology views itself as, pace Downes, a rendezvous discipline. As
such, there are of course some criminologists who have undergraduate or postgraduate
qualifications in history, and who on occasion work from historical sources as well as
using more present-focused methodologies (see, for example, Godfrey, 2008). There are
also a few sociologically trained criminologists who have at times used historical sources
and methods to great effect (for example, Eisner, 2003). However, such practice is not by
any means a mainstream pursuit. A survey of articles published in the British Journal of
Criminology since 1994 shows that just 5 per cent used what might be termed historical
sources or methods, with the figure falling to just over 3 per cent (or 22 out of 644 arti-
cles) if the 1999 special issue on criminal justice history is omitted from the calculation.
The vast bulk of academic criminological discourse and research is undertaken by indi-
viduals trained within departments of sociology, social policy and law, and hence adopts
the methods and perspectives of those disciplines. Indeed, Appendix C of the Quality
Assurance Agency benchmark document for criminology (2007), entitled ‘What is crim-
inology?’, while referring to criminology as ‘a site at which social scientific disciplines
interact’ (2007: 20), discusses overlap with the approaches of sociology, law, political
science, social policy and forensic psychology but omits all mention of history. This
article will thus contend that (with a number of notable exceptions) the past is not some-
thing most criminologists think about very often.
Among criminal justice historians, the obverse is true. They rarely consider anything
but the past. It might seem rather facile to accuse historians of only thinking historically
but, as will be argued, this has not always been the case. Historians of all hues have been,
at various points since the inception of the discipline during the 19th century, more con-
nected to the concerns of the present, more engaged, than they usually are now. While
many criminal justice historians have been (and remain) motivated by a broad concern
for social justice (for example, King, 2000) they usually stop short of making any explicit
intervention in contemporary debates, which is often a primary goal for criminological
writing. Crime, History and Societies, the foremost journal for criminal justice history
has, since its inception in 1997, published only eight articles (5 per cent of the total)
which could in any way be said to incorporate the primary markers of sociological crimi-
nology (which might be taken crudely to include some or all of: commentary on present-
day debates and practices in the criminal justice field; reflection on and use of theory to
inform methodology; a desire to abstract to some degree from the particular; use of types
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