In the
wake of the March for Science last month (April, 2017), the internet buzzed
with debate over the “neutrality” of science. Jesse Singal at Science of Us parsed
the two sides: while some marchers argued that science is intrinsically
political (and, therefore, ought to be social justice-oriented), others
(including renowned psychologist Steven Pinker) accused organizers of
compromising their “goals with anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric.”
Singal concludes that while “Science is a human enterprise that has been
frequently used for abusive and oppressive ends,” “there is something uniquely important about the scientific method and
empiricism in general.” Over at Cyborgology, Joseph Waggle called apolitical science a “fantasy” and a “myth.”
Being both for and against science are “two strategies toward the same end of
winning and keeping political power,” with elites using science-talk to cloak
deeper political struggles.
Criminologists
have entered the fray in a big way. In March, more than 25 former presidents of
the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and other academic luminaries wrote
an open letter to President Trump, entitled “Keep Science in the Department of Justice.” The signatories argued that federal justice
agencies should continue to support and follow “good science” that is “free of
ideological bias, and conducted without political interference.” As we were
writing this post, the ASC Executive Board published a statement on “The Trump Administration’s Policies Relevant to
Crime and Justice” that
critiqued the “incongruity” between Trump’s Executive Orders and “well-established
science about the causes and consequences of crime.” The ASC letter further
implored the Trump administration to use criminological science to “promote
justice.”
We agree
wholeheartedly with much of the two ASC letters. Agencies like the National
Institute of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics are vitally
important, and they ought to be helmed by criminological experts. And much of
Trump’s criminal justice rhetoric has dismissed or manipulated basic social
science findings like the effect of immigration on crime and trends in violent
crime rates. So too do we agree that the criminal justice system ought to be
oriented toward justice for all.
To agree
with the letters is not, however, to overlook another truism: criminological
research in the U.S. (and, we suspect, across the world) has always been entangled in politics. (As Johann Kohler quipped, it is not as though “CJ knowledge was political” and then
“Science fixed it.”) At the risk of being overly dramatic, we cannot think of a
time or place in American history during which criminology was not political. Politicians, together
with bureaucrats, academics, journalists, prisoners, and everyday citizens have
continually fought over who to
punish, and how to do it. These
struggles are always about both the logistics of punishment (e.g., Can prisons
rehabilitate or reform the people locked inside their walls and, if so, how?)
and the nature of those who commit crime (e.g., Are those who commit crime
fallen souls who can be redeemed, or are they incorrigible monsters?).
There is
no clearer example of this than Robert Martinson’s famous “nothing works”
article published in 1974 in The Public
Interest. In the version of events re-told by many criminologists, Martinson’s
(now infamous) article over-simplified the research he conducted during the
early 1970s with Douglas Lipton and Judith Wilks. In particular, Martinson is
remembered for concluding that in-prison treatment programs almost never work
to reduce recidivism. Although this conclusion was unwarranted given existing
evidence, pundits and scholars insisted that Martinson’s article had an
immediate and massive effect. As legend has it, this article swept the legs out
from under the rehabilitative enterprise.
But this
version of events, as documented in our book Breaking
the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (and as explored by other scholars, including
Michelle Brown in The
Culture of Punishment), gets
almost everything about Martinson and his article wrong. The research was
shoddy and the article wasn’t all that interesting—at least to criminologists. And
Martinson surely wasn’t the first to point out the failures of correctional
treatment programs. To understand the article’s fanatical reception, we need to
situate it within a larger struggle over punishment raging in the first half of
the 1970s. Whether using it to justify new sentencing regimes, or to explain a
shift from education to reentry in prison programs, or as a rallying cry for
doing research on “what works,” Martinson’s article became very influential
because powerful actors made it so: the nature and impact of Martinson’s
article cannot and should not be understood outside its political and
historical context.
Similarly,
the push to reform criminal justice policies in the 2010s was propelled by
political actors deploying criminological knowledge on the harms of mass penal
control. This research, steadily built in the 1990s and 2000s, produced a
number of important findings, including that some kinds of targeted intervention could reduce
recidivism rates, states could change parole policies to minimize technical
violations, mass incarceration harms children and communities, imprisonment
rates (especially for the drug war) have profoundly disproportionate effects on
black families, and more. This body of scholarship became politically
influential as it became increasingly voluminous and as actors began to employ it as a part of a symbolic struggle
to undercut mass incarceration and related processes.
In the
same way, John Hagan’s Who Are the Criminals? The
Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan shows how criminological research on “career
criminals” undergirded the turn toward incapacitation as a dominant penal goal
(see also Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, on this history). Or Tony Platt’s
lecture on the brief flourishing (and, shortly thereafter, institutional
crippling) of radical criminologists in the 1970s.
To
return to the ASC letters, criminological data and findings are inherently
political—because political actors use research/data to support or oppose
current arrangements and future developments. But, as the second ASC letter
highlights, this is exactly the point. Democratic governance means political
debate—debates, we would agree, that should be based in data and deep empirical
research. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves in thinking that the side with the
best data, best models, and best arguments will always win. Politics isn’t a
game of equals; powerful actors can (and often do) support claims with bad
science or misuse good science to support harmful policies. In short, the
political uses of criminological knowledge depends in large part on the shape
of struggle—that is, the distribution of power among actors involved in battles
over crime policy.
By
writing the second letter, the ASC directly entered this fray as an agonist,
struggling to impose their vision of the state of the world. We can see this
symbolic struggle, for example, in the framing of the recent uptick in
homicides in 2015. The national uptick was driven by substantial increases in a
small number of large cities. The ASC letter frames this as a “non-existent
crime wave”—a framing contested even among some criminologists (see, for
example, this twitter thread by Thomas Abt). Similarly, despite the letter’s emphasis on “evidence-based”
policy, the agenda outlined by ASC includes tactics that have faced relatively
little academic scrutiny (such as federal consent decrees for embattled police
departments). Thus, despite their framing of “just the facts, ma’am,” the
letter represents a very specific vision of justice.
In
short, we argue that the production of criminological science will always be a
politically charged endeavor. It is not enough to publish sound
findings—political actors must also champion those ideas in their attempts to
reshape who and how we punish. Groups such as the ASC taking on these explicitly
political roles will not automatically win the debate by entering as the “expert”
in the room, but they do change the shape of the struggle. Whether this will
help or hinder the reform effort remains an empirical question.
