Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? Introduction

Punishment and Society (P&S) is an interdisciplinary field of social science inquiry into punishment as a social institution. P&S scholars seek to understand where punishment comes from (why it is the way it is) and what its consequences are for society. We draw primarily from criminology, history, sociology, and political science, but also other disciplines like anthropology, geography, and psychology (very little econ it seems). Many of us also identify as Law and Society scholars, itself an interdisciplinary field.

As a group of interdisciplinary scholars, working in other interdisciplinary communities of scholars, we still live and work in a largely disciplinary world. For most of us, our primary academic appointments are in a single, traditional discipline. Consequently, we are expected to publish (at least some of the time) in disciplinary venues, and ideally the top journals in those fields (Criminology, AJS, ASR, etc.). Likewise, we often attend conferences and do service work in those disciplines---not just LSA (L&S), but also ASC (Crim) and ASA (Soc), for example. Finally, when we or our students go on the job market, we often seek jobs in disciplines, using the disciplines' professional association job banks. 

P&S's identity of interdisciplinary scholar situated within a disciplinary context sometimes breeds tensions in our identity--how we see ourselves, how we try to position ourselves (for resources, jobs, publications, etc.), and how others see us. Sometimes these tensions work in our favor---our ability to "pretend" to be X or Y at various times can open up more job (or publishing) opportunities. Sometimes, they work against us as when gate keepers (search committees, reviewers, editors) view us narrowly and as an other and therefore exclude us. 

Over the years, I've experienced this tension in a number of ways many times and have been somewhat fascinated by it. Coming through UC Berkeley's Jurisprudence and Social Policy PhD Program, I was trained to be particularly aware of it. Few people outside of the Law and Society world know what "JSP" is, or what jurisprudence means, so our faculty advisors---aware of the difficulties we could face on the ever-looming job market---drilled it into us that we essentially had to perform our disciplinary credentials. This means showing up to the conferences in our discipline and publishing in journals that have our discipline's name in the title (i.e., not just "subfield journals"). It means listing your research interests in your CV in terms familiar to your intended audience---the "sociology of punishment," not "punishment and society." Go to job talks in that other department (or departments) and see how job candidates present their research and the types of questions they get. Frankly, this is good advice for everyone to follow for going on the market, but our faculty were particularly attentive to making sure we got it---and since then I've definitely heard from folks in other programs that didn't get similar training. 

This training was especially helpful for me because it contextualized the negative side of being an interdisciplinary scholar. I've had it happen several times when I submitted an article to a top sociology journal and even to law and society journals where one or more reviewers write back, "This article belongs in a criminology journal." It's worth noting that in each case, I'm pretty sure that at least the topic fit since there were similar studies published in these journals and I'd done my best to frame it appropriately---although since then I've gotten much blunter about framing my work for a broader audience so that doesn't happen anymore. I've also had it happen when I've been on the job market that I've been rejected (at one stage or another), I later found out, either because I was a criminologist, I was not a criminologist, or I was a law and society scholar---in each case because that wasn't what the department (mostly soc departments, but some crim) was looking for. (This has been true even when I was coming from a sociology department.) Getting rejected in the same cycle because I was and was not a criminologist seemed somewhat comical, but it also illustrates the liberties people take in identifying us in various ways. 

I do think as punishment scholars, we face added benefits and disadvantages beyond the standard challenges and rewards of being interdisciplinary. On the one hand, punishment is pretty popular right now---it's always on the news, on The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight, and there is frequent political and legislative activity about punishment. On the other hand, the tendency for scholars studying unsavory, dirty, or stigmatized topics seems alive and well. When I was in grad school, seeking out an external dissertation committee in sociology, I went to one professor's office hours. This professor seemed like a friendly enough person (they were good participants in the seminar series) and their interests were different but similar to mine, so they seemed potentially useful. When I explained my research interests and intended dissertation topic, this professor waved their hands and made a face, exclaiming, "Prisons! I don't even like prison movies!" Well, I don't either, truth be told, but that seems neither here nor there. I really would have thought their interests in Foucault would have been enough to indicate why prisons could be important, so I tried that tact---and failed. Ultimately, they declined serving on my committee.

There is also a unique challenge we face as punishment scholars who seek disciplinary appointments when criminology exists as---what is often perceived, rightly or wrongly---as a separate discipline from its related fields like sociology. This is part of what is going on when I got the rejections from journals because my article belonged in a crim journal or when I got those rejections on the job market because I was or was not a criminologist. There is this sense that we belong somewhere else. And yet there is sometimes a perception (again, perhaps right or wrong) that you must choose. When I was a graduate student going on the job market and trying to decide what jobs to pursue, I was told by various sources that if I ever wanted a sociology job, I needed to start off in a sociology department; if I started off in a criminology job, I was "stuck" on that track (this was sometimes intended in the pejorative way it sounds). At least for me, this did not seem to be the case--I was able to interview for several sociology and criminology jobs after my first job in criminology at Florida State University and ultimately landed in sociology at the University of Toronto. Going back to my grad school experiences, I also received advice from a very nice leading criminologist that once you publish in a disciplinary journal, that also kind of locks you in (at the time, I'd only published in interdisciplinary journals (P&S and LSR). They'd said once you publish in a soc journal, you would not be attractive to crim departments, and vice/versa. Having been part of several searches in crim and soc, I don't think that is universally true, but it is interesting advice nonetheless. It's also possible that in the last several years, things have changed. I've certainly noticed a lot (relatively speaking) of sociology jobs looking for hires in their "criminology" subfield during the last few job markets. 

So these have been some of my experiences. But I've never had a very good sense about how representative my experiences have been. Not only did I come from an explicitly interdisciplinary program (with training explicitly in soc, poli sci, econ, philosophy, and history), but I also very much identify as an interdisciplinary scholar. I variously masquerade as an historian, a criminologist, and a sociologist. I mostly see myself as a law and society scholar, although, admittedly, I often feel on the margins of that field---it seems like we need to take extra steps to remind mainstream L&Sers why punishment matters as much as lawyers, courts, and disputing or legal mobilization, for example. Most of the time, I'm not entirely sure how to present myself, and I've definitely changed how I self-identify over time---and I sometimes strategically identify differently for different groups. Likewise, people label me in a variety of different ways, some of which I get really excited by (like when people call me an historian, because there I feel the least confident in my ability to make such a claim). 

Living in Canada has also put a new spin on this for me. Moving to Canada, and also having a stronger connection with British academics, very quickly helped me realize something that should have been obvious but for my #AmericanPrivilege, which is that sociology, criminology, law and society, and other fields look different in different countries. Not only are reigning methodologies and theories somewhat (and sometimes very) different, but they also have different identities. For example, some people in Canada see law and society as a subfield of criminology---something that I think most US scholars, whether criminologists, law and society scholars (esp. those studying the civil realm), and others would have a hard time agreeing with. 

Moving here also made these questions more urgent for me because I was officially hired within a sociology department as a criminologist slated to teach "Criminology, Law and Society" undergraduates. As part of my "portfolio," I was asked to teach criminological theory (i.e., causes of crime). Of course, I've never studied the theories of crime (my comp exam was actually in "criminal justice," the only crim option in my program and still something I had to fight for---or rather my advisors helped me fight for). I definitely felt like the wrong person to teach this class, but I was heartened by the fact that my colleagues who also taught the class weren't folks whose research really came from this area---they were, like me, punishment and society scholars, although they did have more training in criminology proper. I usually feel like a fraud teaching that class, but not for the whole time. Because I'm in Canada, and criminology is a bit different here, for about half the class we depart from what might be seen as mainstream US criminology and move more into critical criminology and punishment and society, both of which are essentially mainstream in Canadian criminology. 

So, given this variability---not just across disciplines but also across international norms about disciplines---I think I might be on the far side of the spectrum of interdisciplinarity and unsettled identity. To what extent does that shape my perceptions---and my advice to students and colleagues about framing themselves and their research? 

These questions have been forefront in my mind over the last year or so, and I finally decided rather than simply thinking about my own experiences, I should ask other people, in a somewhat systematic manner, what their experiences have been. So I did.

In late December and early January, I sent emails to several dozen scholars asking them to engage with this question: "Are you a criminologist or a sociologist?" (I explain my methodology in more detail below.) I started off with people who could easily be seen as both a criminologist and a sociologist. I wanted to focus on these two disciplines because criminology is very much (or at least is seen to be) an offshoot of sociology, even though it is an increasingly interdisciplinary discipline (see the UPenn crim department, for example). The soc v. crim distinction seems to be the strongest and most troubled, whereas I get the sense that the same is not true for historians or political scientists, although they have their own identity challenges. 

Many of the folks I contacted are self-identified Punishment and Society scholars, some would also or instead identify as Law and Society scholars, and plenty of the folks I contacted would identify with neither of those categories. I wanted a range of responses, not just limited to what will be typical for P&Sers. I also tried for various kinds of diversity in terms of research as well as demographics and national location. While I tried to balance my initial list, I also asked people I contacted to recommend others they thought I should contact, to ensure that I did not just replicate my own network.

I was really curious to see variation in responses: What did people think of the question? Did they take it seriously or think it odd? (Would some dismiss it as insipid naval gazing?) Did they seem enthusiastic? How did they respond substantively? While my response rate was not 100% (it was about 50%), I was heartened that a lot of people eagerly accepted my request to reflect on this question, as is clear from the number of responses following this introductory post. What is more: a lot of people (certainly not everyone) reported enjoying the process and/or finding it useful to think about. Indeed, a number pointed out that this was an important question (in general or for people in our subfield), echoing my own thoughts and motivations for assembling this post. Certainly, some also pointed out that the issues around labelling or thinking about your disciplinary identity is overdone and that the debates about who someone is or is not is somewhat silly; some have also been able to stay above the fray. 

Initially, my plan was to post a single blogpost with the responses embedded as extended quotations. However, because so many people were kind enough to contribute, and a lot of them took me up on my invitation to send in several pages, I've decided to present these responses as a part of a series of blog posts. Below, I list the contributors and hyperlink their names to their posts. (If you wish to read this in one sitting, I recommend right clicking on each link to open it in a series of tabs, or you can just go to the homepage for the blog and scroll down---the posts are not in a substantive order.) I anticipate receiving some more responses in the coming weeks, as some people were busy with the start of the semester, and I will update this list as they come in.

Before closing this post, I want to express my appreciation to everyone who took the time to write down their thoughts on this question. I am so grateful for the enthusiasm and generosity they showed. I believe this conversation will be a fruitful one, not only for P&S scholars to think about as a field, but also for scholars in other fields who face challenges relating to their interdisciplinarity. I also think it will be an important conversation for junior scholars---graduate students and early career researchers---to witness and take part of, since these tensions are not always made explicit and sometimes you learn the hard way. Finally, although I've mostly framed this discussion as a one of challenges and tensions, I hope this conversation also gives us all the chance to reflect on the benefits of and creativity enabled by interdisciplinary research---basically, it's worth it.

Contributors (with links to their posts)

• Anon
• Anon
• Anon
• Michelle Brown
• Megan Comfort
• Ben Crewe
• Susila Gurusami
• David Garland
• Phil Goodman
• Erin Kerrison
• Chrysanthi Leon
• Josh Page
• Laura Piacentini
• Michelle Phelps
• Danielle Rudes
• Joachim Savelsberg
• Chris Smith
• Sara Wakefield
• Michael Walker
• Rob Werth

Methodology

I initially asked 27 people. My goal was to try to balance gender as much as possible, but also get some international variation; variation in which departments people work in (mostly soc and crim, but also other types of departments); variation in PhD discipline (incl. those without a soc PhD who are working in soc departments); some variation in people who study just crime, just punishment, or both; and variation in career stage, starting with people in grad school who have jobs lined up all the way through to super well-established Big Name people. Then, at my request, these folks also recommended others for me to email (and sometimes I asked that group for recommendations, but between the repetition of names but also the growing number of respondents, I stopped asking for more recommendations). In total, I reached out to 40 people, and I received substantive responses from 20. (In terms of what type of selection bias we might see from this, I had a worse response rate from non-Punishment and Society folks, especially sociologically trained folks who are more squarely located in mainstream U.S. criminology. Interestingly, that has happened before; see Bosworth and Hoyle's Introduction to What is Criminology.)

One observation I had in the process of coming up with folks to contact was how many people I came up with as potentially useful respondents. I came up with a lot---even just limiting my focus to people at the boundaries of criminology and sociology. Meaning, I think this question of disciplinary labelling can be a broad issue that many folks in P&S, and beyond, face. (And then, of course, people came up with other names of folks they thought would also have interesting identity issues!) 

What did I actually ask people? In my email asking for participation in the form of contributing text for me to reproduce as part of this post, I explained: 

"The motivation for the piece is to explore the tensions surrounding how a person is labeled, particularly for those of us who could equally well be characterized as a criminologist, a sociologist, or a criminologist and a sociologist. For example, sometimes people are included or excluded on the basis of which label they use or others impose on them, whether this happens in the context of the job market, publication, or other opportunities like speaker series or field-level service. I'm interested in understanding what other people make of these tensions and how they navigate them. I think this post will resonate with a lot of punishment and society folks and seeing how other (especially successful) folks navigate these tensions should be potentially useful as people (especially junior people) seek to navigate these tensions on their own... I am intending for these questions (what you make of these tensions and how you navigate them) to be broad so you can take it in whatever direction makes sense to you, but I’m happy to elaborate if that would be helpful."

In terms of length, I gave people free range: a few sentences, a few paragraphs, a few pages---whatever they felt appropriate and felt like doing.

Finally, I gave folks the option to include their name or not---most said I could use their name, and only a few wished to keep it anonymous, so I include their responses as "Anonymous" with no other identifying information beyond what they provided in their response.

All responses are posted in their entirety and unchanged from their original submission (except sometimes some formatting things to fit with the blog page layout). 

How do you explain punishment and society to your non-punishment colleagues?

Yesterday, a colleague asked me what exactly was punishment and society. I stopped for a moment to think because, while that's something I had a pat answer for in years past, I'm not sure that answer still holds today as the field as grown, matured, and diversified, as David Garland has recently described.

I used to say we look at why a given society or set of societies punishes in the way(s) it does. We might further add that our credo is examining the social, political, and economic factors---that is, things other than crime rates---that influence punishment. The other definition I can give is more vague and doesn't really say much about the field: we study punishment as a social institution or we study punishment from social science and humanistic perspectives. I also gave this definition to my colleague, but they did not find it useful, and I would agree---it says what we study, and some basic information about how we study it, but not really why we study it, what we're after.

Three caveats before moving on: I say crime rates, not perceptions of crime rates, because we know perceptions of crime rates are really important and that perceptions often have little to do with the actual rate of crime (e.g., Beckett 1997).

The second caveat is, at least as I (and a lot of other folks, but maybe not everyone) see it, punishment should be broadly construed. It doesn't have to be state authorized punishments---it can be things that in years past people called social control (but that has become unpopular recently for reasons I'm not yet aware of). In fact, there has been an explosion over the last ten or so years, really going back to about 2010, of people exploring non-punishment punishments---that is, things that many wouldn't call punishment because they are not formally/officially punishment but they sure feel like punishment to the people experiencing them (e.g., Beckett and Herbert 2010, Lynch and Hannah-Moffat 2011, Zedner 2015, Super 2017).

The final caveat is I'm defining the field intuitively rather than based on what's published in what journal. Probably most people who self-identify as P&S scholars publish in P&S, but not everyone who publishes in P&S self-identifies as a P&S scholar. Likewise, self-identified P&S scholars publish in a variety of other journals, including various disciplinary journals (e.g., ASR/AJS, ANNALs, Criminology, BJC, ANZJOC, TC) and interdisciplinary journals (LSR, LSI), among many others.

But in thinking about this intuitively, I'm also prioritizing my unique training, sets of preferences, and network. People in other countries, or in the same country but trained in a different department, or with different research interests may have different takes. Interestingly, there are a lot of people I would label as P&S scholars who don't seem to self-identify that way. (It's an interesting question to think about---how might you empirically define a field. L&S scholars writing review articles trying to identify the L&S "canon" have sometimes used surveys, syllabi, LSR articles, the most-cited articles. Others have suggested we should look at conference presentations. Still others have pointed out that most of these methods are pretty American-centric approaches. Methodologically and theoretically, it's a really interesting question, I think anyway.)

Getting back to these definitions.... Although my preferred definition (abbreviated as "what social factors cause punishment") sounds very macro, there is a greater variety in it than may at first appear. While some of the earliest studies were pitched at the macro level (Durkheim, Marxists, Foucault, Garland), there has been a lot of work at the micro level that still falls under this definition. For example, people who study the behavior of contemporary courts (Van Cleve, Koehler-Haussman) or policing behavior (Stuart) are looking at the micro-level, situational, and interactional factors, embedded in larger frameworks of politics, racial and gender hierarchies, and poverty, that shape penal policies and the experience of punishment---that is, the causes of punishment (and punishment-like experiences, even if they aren't formally punishment).

What gets left out?

But despite its flexibility, I'm not sure my definition (or perhaps characterization) holds anymore. A lot of P&S scholars study other things that are sometimes termed critical criminology and prison sociology. For example, the lineage that begins with Clemmer and Sykes and continues on to a number of scholars today doing prison ethnographies to understand the prison experience, mostly within a sociological tradition (or some would say criminological) tradition. It certainly seems like an affiliated subject and there is a lot of crossover (many of us do both P&S and prison sociology, if we're to refer to them separately, which perhaps we shouldn't). But particularly when looking at prison ethnographies as prisoners' reactions to their confinement (how I usually describe my work, for example) this seems a step removed from the question of what causes punishment. However, if we look at prisoners themselves as one of the causes of punishment (which takes more careful wording than I can muster without implying that prisoners are somehow responsible for their situation--not what I want to imply), along with their organizational setting and the role of the criminal justice actors and policies, then it would still fit. It's not so much about explaining formal policies of punishment and more about explaining the experience of punishment.

There might be even greater overlap with critical criminology in terms of the overall project of understanding penal trends and developments, if sometimes from a different epistemic or philosophical bent. However, despite the overlap, there seem to be a number of folks who identify as P&S scholars who would not self-identify as critical criminologists, and vice versa.

One area that is very likely (and problematically) excluded from this definition is one subset of what might be called the sociology of punishment. In this category, I'm thinking about the many scholars studying the consequences of punishment. (Of course, "sociology of punishment" is also too narrow as there are several notable political scientist studying the political ramifications of our penal trends for democracy generally and voting specifically. However, I've not heard anyone refer to the political science of punishment, while the politics of punishment seems to transcend the soc/poli sci boundary.) This area became really popular in the early 2000s with scholars looking at the consequences of mass incarceration and its associated policies on exacerbating inequality, particularly racial stratification, along class, education, income, employment, health, voting, and other basic facets of life (e.g., Pager 2003, Pettit and Western 2004, Wakefield and Uggen 2010). While you could argue this work has downstream consequences that increase people's chances of getting scooped up in the CJS net, the primary focus is on the consequences of punishment rather than the causes. I find this research super interesting, and don't want to exclude it, but it's an example of one of the limitations of my preferred definition or characterization of the field.

Finally, I want to mention a set of research that predates the rise of P&S as a recognizable area, which I do date back to the founding of P&S in 1999. That's the work by Stan Cohen in 1979 and 1985 on net widening and mesh thinning and the failure of progressive penal reform generally. This strikes me very much as a P&S project, but most folks working in this tradition (at least in the US) were in criminology departments. This is also around the same time as some early prison histories---Rothman (1971 and 1980), Ignatieff (1978), Foucault (1965 and 1977), Melossi and Pavarini (1981)---that were also pretty skeptical about reform. Interestingly, I'd put all of this in the P&S category---it's all about what causes punishment---in this case what causes penal reforms to fail, how penal reforms play out in practice, why punishment turns punitive despite apparent efforts to the contrary, all more specific versions of why a society punishes as it does. But these works all came out before we had something called "punishment and society."

Returning to the Field

Although I've not done a systematic review, it does seem like P&S the journal is becoming more big tent---this is a general trajectory of a lot of journals over time. For example, look at the diversity articles in LSR. This is not to say that either is as diverse as it could be---there are certain major gaps in theories, methods, topics, groups, and countries represented. But relative to their earlier days, it seems they are more diverse.

Consequently, again, it might be the case that the definition I used to give is too narrow to capture what might be better called the field of punishment studies---basically people studying punishment from various social science and humanistic perspectives. (To be more inclusive, I've started using this phrase, punishment studies, but it's still exclusive because of the focus on punishment, which people might interpret too literally as excluding, policing, legalization/criminalization, and social control more generally.) Of course, the (other) problem with this label and definition is it really doesn't get at what we do, what our goals are. It just says what we study, but not why. But perhaps in this larger, more developed field, there is no single, central research question---that might have been possible when it was a really small field, but maybe it's not any more, and perhaps a single underlying, broad research question is not desirable anyway.

Before ending, I do want to make clear that my goal here, in writing this post, is not to say who is in or who is out---my default reaction is we should always aim for a big tent. Instead, definitions are helpful; they are often imperfect and sound more objective than the blurry reality, but they are still informative, especially when used with a sense of caution.

So how do you describe punishment and society to your non-punishment colleagues? What's a broad definition or characterization that fits people who self-identify as punishment and society scholars? (And what's a better word than punishment that's more inclusive of people who study policing, regulations, non-punishment punishments, immigration, and other things that we do study and can learn from?) If your or your friends study punishment, but don't identify as a P&S scholar, why don't you/they?

What is Criminology? Who is a Criminologist?

Today marks the end of the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology. Even before this week, though, I've been thinking a lot about criminology, its meaning, and who/what it includes. As an interdisciplinary scholar, academic labels mean a lot to me. At JSP, it was drilled into us that we need to demonstrate our disciplinary identity: interdisciplinary scholars often have to "prove" they "are" a sociologist, political scientist, historian, etc. and sometimes get left in the margins when they fail to make this case, falling through the interstices of competing fields. Criminology is an interdisciplinary discipline---some programs more than others---but this issue of identity still matters.

Living in Canada has also made me question my understanding of criminology. For many reasons, the Canadian academe is much more internationally aware than the American academe: as members of the British Commonwealth, Canadians have more contact with British, Australian, and New Zealander thought and developments. As in many countries, Canadians are also more likely to read American journals *and* their own countries journals, whereas in the US, one might read a British journal regularly, but not much else beyond American journals. Consequently, there are different perspectives than one finds in American academic work alone and, as a further consequence, the same terms and fields have different meanings and theories. Notably, the definition---or at least understanding and content---of criminology is different in Canada: there is a much bigger emphasis on critical perspectives (critical criminology is huge in Canada), so there is a lot of feminist, colonial/post-colonial, critical race, Indigenous, and other perspectives not found in mainstream American criminology. With a stronger influence from the Continent and Great Britain, there is also a more (or different) theoretical orientation. Americans, I have learned, have a particular understanding of theory and methods that is different from the Continental approach, although I've not yet been able to articulate this difference. (For now, think how Foucault is different from, say, Rothman in their approaches to prison history. Both are great (and limited) in their own way, but the two men might have a very interesting discussion about what they mean by theory and how they use evidence or why they care about the prison as a social artifact.) From an American perspective, one might say the Canadian/British/Continental approach is less rigorous, but that would be unfair and American-centric; from a Canadian or British perspective, American ideas might be considered narrow, simplistic, and even naive.

Finally, as I start to accumulate experiences and a stronger understanding of myself, I've realized I'm rather curmudgeonly when it comes to the specificity of academic language, whether we are discussing the over-application of "resistance," the multiple definitions and uses of the "carceral state," or my annoyance at people who call Eastern State Penitentiary a supermax. So it might not be surprising that I've started to get frustrated with the term "criminology." It is probably inaccurate and unfair to say that criminology is a more heterogeneous field than, say, sociology, but it at least strikes me that way. Consequently, it seems problematic to have one catchall term for this diverse field. While some people welcome or rebuff the label for themselves, it would be useful to come up with more specific terms for diverse subfields within criminology---particularly so that those who get labeled criminologists can at least clarify what type of criminology they do. Indeed, we have already seen a distinction created with the branching off of Critical Criminology, which has its own section in the ASC.

Many of us (readers of this blog, or at least those at whom this blog is aimed) do not identify as criminologists even if we attend the ASC or work in criminology departments. (I for one self-identify as a law and society scholar, but I also use/do history and sociology; because I study punishment, though, I am often seen as a criminologist, as are many others in our little subfield.) Whether we like it or not, much of our research is advertised by publishers as criminology titles. Our two main subfield journals are Punishment & Society and Theoretical Criminology. So it is difficult to escape the label---and it is not clear how strategic it is to fight the label.

Part of our unease with this labeling (to the extent it exists for others) may stem from the official definition of criminology as "the scientific study of crime and criminals" (according to Google). We do not study crime and criminals; we study society's response to, or treatment of, these socially constructed categories; said differently, many of us study the relationship between punishment and society. Thus, we have adopted Punishment and Society as a label to identify us as a group.

But Punishment & Society is also a problematic label, as it gives an unclear status to some scholars who very clearly fit inside our tent: for example, policing scholars, scholars of urban spaces, scholars looking at things that are not officially punishment but sure seem like punishment, scholars studying courts, scholars studying changes in criminal laws, etc. We could make the somewhat awkward explanation that these are all still "punishment scholars" because they are studying the processes that lead to or result from punishment. But punishment might not be their ultimate concern, so it is unfair of those of us who are more clearly concerned with "punishment proper" to centralize our interests in a collective label. (Punishment & Social Control might be more accurate, but others have raised problems with the "social control" portion of this label, so even if it makes it a bigger tent, it raises other demons.)

In this post, I would like to offer a preliminary attempt to impose some greater precision on what we mean by criminology to avoid conflating quite different normative and epistemic projects. Specifically, I propose that we begin using the terms techno-criminology, socio-criminology, and (adopting the existing term) critical criminology. (I'm avoiding other existing terms like "mainstream criminology" or, for reasons discussed above, "Punishment and Society.") Below, I lay out what I see as the essential differences between these subfields of criminology. I want to emphasize that these are something of ideal types and that there will be exceptions. It is also the case that scholars sometimes straddle these subfields or seamlessly move back and forth between them. Thus, while one person might be only a socio-criminologist, another might be a socio-criminologist at times and spend varying amounts of time as a techno- or critical criminologist. Finally, although I see myself in the socio-criminologist category, and obviously favor that approach, I do not mean to suggest any of the subfields are better or worse than the others---instead, each one pursues a different project with different assumptions, expectations, goals, etc. Socio-criminologists might analyze techno-criminologists, and critical criminologists might offer critiques of both other fields, and techno-criminologists might dismiss the two other fields as misguided or irrelevant. (Might!) But each has its own project and it is important to evaluate these subfields/projects on their own terms---if we wish to evaluate them at all (we might not---live and let live). For now, I simply want to impose conceptual clarity. Along the way, I hope not to mischaracterize any of these subfields---obviously, I know less about techno- and critical criminology, so I will be prone to misstatements for which I preemptively apologize.

Can Criminology be Neutral?

The following is a guest post by Michelle Phelps, Philip Goodman, and Joshua Page.

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.

The Angola Tour at LSA 2016 -- A Followup, Part III

In the last two posts, I offered a general description and an evaluation of our tour of Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) back in June. These posts drew on comments prepared by Johann Koehler and Keramet Reiter. Keramet in particular generously put together a brief essay or reflection of that trip that I promptly split up. Now, I want to post her comments in their entirety to maintain the integrity and coherence of her original words. 

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As a prison scholar, I have been inside prison and jail facilities across the United States and Europe. Sometimes I enter to conduct interviews with prisoners or staff, for research or advocacy; sometimes to assess a new facility or program; other times to take a group of students to educate them about conditions of confinement. I hesitate to use the word "tour" to describe how I enter prison facilities because the phrase has become charged in prison scholarship, where prison tourism is (rightly, I dare say) condemned as a potentially voyeuristic visit to an institution that is transformed into a human zoo by the tourist's gaze. In spite of this critique, I find that I learn something new with each prison I visit, and that the visits create unparalleled opportunities to talk concretely with students, colleagues, and the public about the utter inhumanity that pervades so many prisons, especially in the United States. To me, not every outsider's footfall across a prison threshold constitutes prison tourism.

Nonetheless, there are some prisons that are so famous, so integrated into prison lore, that I do simply want to tour them, to see the reality I have read about. Louisiana State Penitentiary, known colloquially as Angola, is one such prison -- so perpetually infamous that I simply wanted to see it for myself. I had visited other "plantation" prisons in Alabama and Georgia, but none with their own rodeo, cinematized death row, or substantial gift shop. In particular, I had imagined the Angola gift shop for years, because of a strange gift I was given in 2005.

I was working for Human Rights Watch when Hurricane Katrina hit. One of our researchers went to visit Angola, to document the human rights abuses taking place there as New Orleans flooded and prisoners, literally, disappeared. When the researcher returned to the Human Rights Watch offices in New York, she presented me with a gift: a plush little "beanie baby" dog, dressed in black-and-white prison stripes, stamped with the word "Angola." I have kept that odd memento for more than a decade, moving it from office to office, as a reminder of the many contradictions inherent in our prisons, especially the too easy commodification of suffering. As I entered Angola prison, through the gift shop, this summer, I was surprised to see shelves of those same, familiar little puffy prison dogs.

Later, on the tour, I was more surprised by another bunch of dogs. The only building in the entire, swampy facility, which both houses prisoners and has air conditioning, is the barn, bright white atop a sloping green hill at an edge of the property, where the prison's guard dogs are trained. Our tour guide told us that the most trusted prisoners in Angola earn the right to sleep in the air conditioned barn -- without guards -- and manage the dogs. I asked what exactly the dogs are trained to do. The tour guide said "guard the prison." When I had worked at Human Rights Watch, I had written about the use of dogs to attack prisoners and drag them out of their cells. I suspected the Angola dogs did more than "guard the prison." As our tour bus paused, the guide pointed out a single white cross marking a grave at the foot of the hill. A bill-board-style sign labeled the grave: "Ole Red used in music video by Blake Shelton." Here's where I sheepishly admit to loving Blake Shelton's country classic, "Ole Red," about a prisoner, sentenced to life for killing his wife and her lover, who earns the trust of the warden in prison and is given charge of the prison's guard dog. The prisoner trains the red-haired prison hound to sneak out of the prison on late night rendez-vous with a blue-tick hound beyond the prison gates. Next, the prisoner escapes, running "north" while Ole Red runs "south" to his blue-tick love. The refrain is cute: "Now there's red haired blue ticks all in the South. Love got me in here and love got me out." At Angola, Ole Red's grave, obviously in a place of honor, was a stark contrast to the sea of un-labeled white crosses a few hundred yards beyond, and across the road, marking the graves of the hundreds of prisoners who had died and been buried at Angola over decades of the prison's operation. I could barely make out the edge of the cemetery it was so vast. 

At Angola, I felt more like a prison tourist than I ever had before. Maybe it was the commodification of beanie baby dogs and country music videos. Maybe it was being on the school bus that shuttled 25-or-so-of-us around the prison grounds, past housing units and barns and stables and rows of corn. Still, the images of the visit, from prisoners talking with us in the law library, to the prisoners grooming the horses in the stables, to the museum of execution implements, to the white barn full of dogs up on the hill have mingled with snapshots from Dead Man Walking, the Ole Red music video, and the annual prison rodeo, layering a raw lived reality into a cinematic imagination. 

I, and busloads of other prison tourists, were lucky to cross the threshold of the prison in the morning, and ride out again in the afternoon. That vast cemetery insistently reminded us that most of the prison's inhabitants can never hope to be so lucky. I keep remembering the sticky, swampy heat that wore me out even as I sat still on the old school bus, and I keep imagining living an entire life in that heat with no hope of any relief, whether in the form of a fan, cool air, ice, or freedom. I'm still not sure whether joining the daily exodus of tourists from Angola raises awareness of the contradictions riddling the commodified, imagined reality of prison life, or just re-legitimizes the institution.