Abstract
If it is true, as Pat Carlen (2010) claims, that contemporary ‘justice’ policies are exhibiting all the signs of ‘penal populism’ and ‘risk crazed governance’, then social democratic criminologists face the dual challenge of explaining why these policies are not only not working but also how this fact continues to be explained away. At stake here are two central questions: firstly, what grounds are available to secure the intellectual legitimacy of criminology; and, secondly, what ways of knowing could secure the legitimacy of a social-democratic criminology. The paper begins by exploring what is at stake when what appears to be a very large number of criminologists claim that theirs is an ‘empirical scientific’ discipline. The paper argues that neither mainstream criminology nor social democratic criminology can base any claims to intellectual legitimacy by relying on an ‘empirical scientific’ frame. The paper draws on Spencer (1987) to advance the ‘unpalatable thesis’ that, as far as the actual practice by conventional criminologists of their kind of social science goes, ‘they do not know what they are doing’ (Spencer 1987: 333) and that their ignorance of this fact has serious consequences for the progress of their field. The paper shows that there is a gap between the actual practice of conventional criminology and its claims to ‘scientific empiricism’: what is actually on offer is an ‘imperfect empiricism’.The long-forgotten work of Bentham, adumbrated by Vaihinger (1935) and Fuller (1967), is then traced and some of the implications of this theory of fictions for contemporary representations of crime are noted. One implication briefly charted here is that any social democratic criminology needs to rehabilitate the proper role played by fictions as they grapple with the ‘wicked problems’ that currently populate this field. The long-standing affectation of ‘scientific empiricism’ by many practicing criminologists has long camouflaged the inability of conventional criminologists to address what are properly ‘wicked problems’.
Highlights
Neo‐liberalism is a notoriously fuzzy category rendering it open variously to misuse (Clarke 2008) or to encouraging unwarranted pessimism (Ferguson 2009)
As Hogeveen and Woolford (2012) point out, mainstream criminologists are implicated in the expanding domain of neo‐liberalism, something which prescient critics like (Wacquant 1996) and Young (1999) had argued back in the 1990s, threatened even to push conventional criminology into respectively ‘self‐inflicted irrelevance’ or ‘administrative complicity’
I want only to show that there is a gap between the actual practice of conventional criminology, which in its dominant mode deploys an ‘imperfect empiricism’, and the putative practice of criminology as ‘scientific empiricism’claim to credible knowledge stands out
Summary
Neo‐liberalism is a notoriously fuzzy category rendering it open variously to misuse (Clarke 2008) or to encouraging unwarranted pessimism (Ferguson 2009). Keywords Criminology; social democratic criminology; empiricism; fictions; Bentham; wicked problems.
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