Promise and Performance in British Criminology

Abstract

Twelve years ago, in this journal, Terence Morris wrote: 'There is no doubt that of all the specialized branches of inquiry into social behaviour, criminology has grown at a prodigious rate over the last decade.'l In I976, Paul Wiles introduced Volume 2 of the book he first edited with W. G. Carson in I970, by asserting: 'In the time that has elapsed since the first edition of this book appeared, Briiish criminology has undergone a remarkable transformation . . .' and goes on to remark, 'The I960S saw a renaissance in sociological criminology in Britain.'2 Growth, transformation, renaissance, and elsewhere'paradigmatic revolution':3 are these claims to be taken seriously, or are they symptomatic of delusions of intellectual grandeur? What advances in criminological knowledge have occurred to justify such claims ? The extent, direciion and consequences of these trends can be characterized in diverse ways. The commonest is to see the trend as being a move from criminology to the sociology of deviance (and from penology to the sociology of control). The changes referred to in Morris's I965 article are principally the establishment ofthe Cambridge Insiitute of Criminology in I959 and of the Home Office Research Unit in I 957. But he also refers to the growth of sociological criminology in Britain, and welcomes the shift in the parameters of the field to take in such matters as 'the administration of justice, the exercise of police powers, and the definition and redefinition of behaviour as illegal or tolerable'.4 By I97I, two further changes have occurred: one, the increasing polarization of criminology and the sociology of deviance: two, the very marked increase in the sheer number of practitioners of the latter persuasion in particular, a matching of the growth of sociology teaching and higher education in general. Two landmarks in this polarization were the article by Stan Cohen and the text by Michael Phillipson5 which both sought to differentiate traditional criminology from the sociology of deviance in terms of key analytical problems which rendered the two approaches incompatible. Since I97I, in this view, what has happened is the persistence of the break between 'traditional' criminology and the sociology of deviance, but its receding in importance to the point where a somewhat uneasy co-existence prevails. Displacing it in significance has been the