Nor it to deny that the field is populated by practitioners who self-identify as feminists, or conservatives or social democrats, or who – as social scientists – eschew overt identification with any political ideology at all.
This is not to say that all or most practising criminologists evince some clearly worked through and principled commitment to political liberalism and its focal concern to afford equal concern and respect to all individuals. Here it is possible to give the most emphatic of answers to the question I have posed – and that answer I think is ‘no’. The first way in which one can address this topic is to consider the status of liberalism inside criminology. Though I can this evening only skate over the issues involved, I want at least to make a start. That relationship stands, as such, in need of more sustained and explicit consideration than it has generally tended to receive. Here one enters some tricky and contested territory - not least because liberalism itself remains a ‘deeply contested notion’ even among liberals themselves.3 But the relationship between liberalism and crime is also – as Stan Cohen wisely indicated some time ago – fundamental to the study of, and our responses to, crime – for the simple reason that the prevention, control and punishment of crime inescapably exists at the forefront of what it means for any society to be plausibly described as liberal or illiberal. That answer depends further, of course, on what one means by ‘liberal criminology’ or how, more broadly, one thinks about the connections between criminology and liberalism. I am concerned, in other words, to think sociologically about the (changing) relationship criminology has had to the mundane culture of, and political programmes pursued in, England and Wales over the last several decades – and my lecture this evening forms, in this respect, part of a larger investigation I have commenced along these lines with Richard Sparks.īut there is another reason why my question is not rhetorical, which is that the answer to it is not clear-cut, or at least not as clear-cut as a superficial treatment of it might lead one to suppose. It is to ‘take a step back’ from the present political dynamics of crime, punishment and (since 2001) security in a effort to grasp – and say some things about – the intersections that exist between the claims of criminological research and reflection and the substance, tone and direction of crime control and penal policy. The task I have set myself is a different one. Nor do I see it as my task this evening to either – depending on the answer I supply – rally or depress the gathered faithful. This is to say, I am not seeking to align myself with something called ‘liberal criminology’, or assuming that my audience tonight is comprised only of people who self-identify as liberals (I won’t ask for a show of hands). This is so firstly because I have not set out to answer it in an activist mode.
The reason I worry about this is because my question is not meant to be of that kind at all. The third is a fear I have that my question may be taken by at least some of you to be rhetorical – akin to those (such as: is religion the opiate of the people?) that used to entice people to leftist political meetings back in the 1980s - the ‘correct’ answer to which you could pretty well always accurately take a guess at. The second is that my title takes the form of the question (the first time, I now realize, that I have ever done this) – something which sets up in the audience the not unreasonable expectation that the lecture that accompanies it will deliver an answer.
The first is the usual one: that any title given over six months in advance of the event never quite seems to capture what it is one wants to say when that event finally comes around. Now that I am standing here about to present it I have several reasons for regretting giving my lecture this evening the title that it has. Conversely, every single principle of liberalism carries implications for how we think about crime (Stan Cohen) Liberal criminology – what do you mean? All serious thinking about crime touches on the nature of liberalism.
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