Lifting the cover from undercover operations: J. Edgar Hoover and some of the other criminologists

Abstract

Concern over the invasion of privacy, restrictions on liberty, entrapment, corruption, and stigmatizing of the justice system as a result of its alliances with criminals have been constant features accompanying the use of covert practices. Gary Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (1988: 33) In the mid-1930s, when J. Edgar Hoover first was invited to contribute biographical details to Who's Who in America, he listed himself as a "criminologist" and a "lawyer". That self-categorization persisted until 1948, when Hoover deleted "criminologist". Then, the following year, he altered his identification to "Dir. F.B.I.". It is a reasonable presumption that Hoover's removal of himself from the ranks of criminologists was a consequence of the company that he found himself in: as we shall see in this paper, contretemps with academic criminologists was one of the features of the surveillance work that preoccupied Hoover during his 48 years (1924--1972) as FBI director. As one of his closest associates wrote of Hoover: "He was suspicious of the academic community, of any intellectual - of any scholar. He disliked them instinctively."x In this paper, we will attend to Hoover's surveillance of two preeminent criminologists: Harry Elmer Barnes, the co-author of New Horizons in Criminology (lst ed., 1943), and Edwin H. Sutherland, author of Criminology (lst ed., 1924), and generally regarded as the doyen of American criminology. We will also examine the FBI's dealings with Jack Shaw, a FBI agent who got into trouble with the FBI while he was studying in New York City at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. Our review of the FBI undercover operations against representatives of the criminological establishment employs case study information to address several issues raised by Gary Marx in Undercover. Though Marx views covert police actions with considerable esthetic and intellectual distaste, he grants that under "proper" circumstances, they may have a role to play in law enforcement. "On balance," he notes in his Preface, "the book neither argues for the