The questions you have asked me are about Criminology and Sociology. For most of my recent professional career I have worked in a Law School before transferring three years ago to a School of Social Work and Social Policy, still at the same University, which is closer to my background and which is essentially my ‘disciplinary home’. Prior to working in a Law School I worked for seven years in a Department of Sociology and Social Policy at another university. All this means that when I count the years up, I have worked ten years in social science departments and nearly ten years in a Law School. That’s about 50/50! I am not going to discuss being a Professor of Criminology in a Law school and instead focus on an issue much closer to my heart, but which remains an intriguing question that kind of eludes me, which is what do I make of being a Sociology-trained Criminologist.
The tensions about being labelled a Criminologist or Sociologist ‘of whatever one is researching in crime and punishment’, or both, do I believe exist. They are real, they are widespread and they are both invigorating and debilitating because they are institutionalised in our universities, at our conferences, in our publication outlets, in how we work with others, and in our professional organisations. Can being labelled a Criminologist or Sociologist working in the study of crime and punishment affect your desired career paths, your capacity to create, where you publish, your ability to grow, to attract PhD students, your wants and needs to connect and cohere with like others? You bet. And when you add that Criminology is taught in all kinds of departments, then that tension between feeling invigorated or debilitated takes on a significant institutional dimension that brings a whole host of other challenges around what is that thing we call our ‘disciplinary home’.
I have been trained in Sociology throughout my entire post-school education. My first degree was a Bachelor’s Honours Degree in Sociology followed by a Masters in Criminology, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Russian Language and a PhD in Sociology on the Russian prison system. Now that last degree there (the biggie) was where I first got to experience, up close and sadly on a personal level, tensions and resentment between whether I was/am a Sociologist or a Criminologist. It did not matter to me that my PhD graduation letter said ‘Laura Piacentini, Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology’. But it did matter to others - a lot. Just to add that none of these tensions were brought about by my own self-identification but how others in my subject, fellow student peers, staff senior, my Faculty and my university labelled me and my qualifications. No individuals are mentioned here as this is my personal story, but what I experienced was reflective of a culture shift in what can happen, and it did happen to me, when a new subject ‘Criminology’ was introduced into a Sociology department in a UK University in the mid-late 1990s.
On paper, the joys of working in a porous discipline such as Criminology include: one can hop around easily across subjects, create new lines of research inquiry, attend diverse conferences and free her/himself from what can be rigid boundaries of what their background is. Criminology is truly elastic, and in the very best sense it demands us to open our minds to a multitude of intellectual curiosities. Time matters in Criminology. I was fortunate to be of the pre CSI-TV-Crime Show era where many were agog, and perhaps arrogantly so, at why someone would ‘want to know why someone committed a crime and not what happens after’! ‘No psychology profiling here please’ (as someone once said to me during my Masters in 1994). What joy there is in moving far and wide, here and there and on a journey that takes one’s mind to new people, places, eras and periodization. Over the last twenty years, we have seen the slow drip of what we call multi-disciplinarity accelerate to a rapid rush of water. Criminology was in perfect position to lead the movement towards themes/issues/concerns/ and away from subjects/disciplines/silos. It was and still is great to be part of this embrace.
And what an embrace it has been. We are told that our governments that fund our universities, want us to open the subject up for our knowledge economy and our big research funders follow this and vice versa. The very best of ‘getting a bit of this and bit of that’ in Criminology means that we have choice and options on how we teach crime and punishment. But choice in the neo-liberal university means breadth of options, a market approach of pick and mix and not always depth of meaning. I think the social sciences have suffered badly from too much choice because our experience of ideas, knowledge, critical thinking, philosophy and theory becomes so short-lived so as to be suppressed by the cruel rhythm of market demand for choice. More Criminology does not equate to better, more rigorous and nuanced knowledge and that also goes for Sociology – or does it? A good Sociology degree from day one will furnish the student with a question that she will carry with her for the entire time of her degree: what are the burning sociological problems of our time? As Les Back has beautifully pointed out: “The action … is unfolding in those historical structural processes in these most every day, mundane, landscapes in which we live in social, intimate, up-close terms”[1]. The key point here, to paraphrase Back again, is Sociology is always a precious resource and a springboard from which to cultivate a vaster intellectual life. When Criminology stands against Sociology on these terms, I believe it is weaker. In other words, Criminology needs Sociology.
As an aside, but relevant to the question, many subjects are still taught as traditional disciplines in departments especially where is a professional accreditation such as in Education, Social Work, Law or Psychology. Maybe it’s a good thing, that where there is a professional accreditation required, that Criminology is offered as a stand-alone elective (sometimes alongside with others allied to the subject) and not a core subject. Remember what I said about a little bit of this and that? When you add the Research Excellence Framework in the UK to this mix, where we are submitted to Units of Assessment to measure research excellence, the debate over Criminology and Sociology becomes maddeningly frustrating because for Sociology trained Criminologists today, many could technically be submitted to three or four Units! Your university decides where you ‘fit’ and is, rightly, guided by the department or school you are in. Thankfully for the professional subjects just mentioned, the Unit is more straightforward, as I experienced when leading the REF in a Law School.
As I said, for me these tensions started nearly twenty five years ago when I was a 24 year old PhD student who started her PhD desperately curious about the sociology of prisons in modern Russia, but came to be quickly dragged into the Criminology vs Sociology debate. After I studied under some of Criminology’s leading luminaries at the University of Keele in the early 1990s, something became very apparent to me. So much great Criminology, that subject concerned with responses to questions about crime and punishment, can be better understood using the conceptual, analytical, empirical tools available in Sociology. I have never studied law, but I have studied some psychology. I never studied forensic science, but I had studied history, politics and economic. So using the tools given to me, I learned quickly that the light we shine on questions of crime and punishment is deeply implicated in where our scholarly roots lie, and where we settle as scholars shapes the contours of how we engage with our past education and the self. I am not saying that only Sociologists can do Criminology but my view and experience tells me that the subject is best understood and developed when links are made to a core, a root, a channel and a shape from where it can grow and specialise and be historicised in order to radiate into other criminological concerns. Maybe that’s why I don’t go for lots of tapas when I can have a big bowl of spaghetti with just a few key ingredients! And at the end of the day, crime and punishment are social problems that reflective of and implicated in social relations. That might not cut it for some but it does for me.
I have ended up as a Professor of Criminology. I teach and research with what I believe is a solid, theoretically informed, deeply critical and research methods heavy social science background. From that launch pad I go forth into the Criminological galaxy of multi-disciplinarity! Yes if only it were that easy! In my PhD time, I was told, in no uncertain terms and straight up from starting it, that there was a ‘problem between the crims and the sociologists’. Eh? Was my reply. I was then informed that I was not a ‘proper Sociologist’ because I was now ‘doing Criminology’. This followed me for my entire PhD. It emerged that at that time, the burgeoning and exciting growth in Criminology at my university was unsettling a fair few folk in Sociology because ‘crims nick students’. Sociology was in trouble in the 1980’s and 1990’s and by 1997 the fall out from that hit a generation of Criminology PhD researchers who had Sociology backgrounds. The irony that the ‘student nicking crims’ were, in fact, sociology-trained was not lost on me then, and is not lost on me now, as this tension has in various ways followed me all through my academic life and will resonate both with Sociologists and Criminologists.
I hate the trope that comes up time and again that Criminology is sexy, Criminology is theory light and Criminology is ‘just about policy’. And I also hate seeing how my beloved Sociology is subject to the vagaries of neo-liberal student consumers who might not find it ‘useful’ or ‘relevant’, which is obviously so not true, given how popular Sociology is and how much incredibly important and superlative sociological research there is out there. But someone is peddling these myths – or at least did in the late 1990’s and early noughties – and have since turned them into excel spreadsheets, units and targets.
To be saddled, burdened and pushed and pulled to take the side of one or other subject is a preposterous notion. No PhD student or staff member should be made to feel that this is one or the other, but never both. Luckily for me, I was and am able to navigate both sides quite well because no one had ever done a PhD on Russian prisons before so I was given respite and relief from the ‘discipline wars’. But it left a mark, hardened me to a prepare for a battle, and also gave me some time to think about not only where the subject (Criminology) belongs, but where I belong and I answered that question earlier when I commented that you work with the tools you have and the skills you have acquired both in the professional and personal sense. When people are curious with you, when people together are open to challenging themselves a little bit, and when people open up and out to new disciplinary and professional horizons to develop a subject, then everyone wins and Criminology and Sociology can be best friends.
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