Deviant Knowledge: Criminology, Politics and Policy.

Vol. 14 No.11 (November 2004), pp.893-895

DEVIANT KNOWLEDGE: CRIMINOLOGY, POLITICS AND POLICY, by Reece Walters. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2003. 256pp. Paperback. £18.99 / US $29.50. ISBN 1-84392-029-8. Hardback. £40.00 / US $59.95. ISBN 1-84392-030-1.

Reviewed by Lisa L. Miller, Department of Political Science. Rutgers University, miller@polisci.rutgers.edu

The main purpose of DEVIANT KNOWLEDGE, by Reece Walters, is to offer a critique of government sponsorship of criminological research and to note that the privatization and commodification of knowledge, along with the increasing salience of “risk management” in Britain, Australia and the U.S., affect the production of knowledge about crime and criminal justice. Walters’ primary point is that government funding sources (the Home Office in Britain, for example) dictate the direction of criminological research and that research strategies that are critical of the government or that analyze the disciplining nature of criminal justice institutions are systematically undermined either by bureaucrats themselves or by academic institutions seeking to maintain reputation and legitimacy. While this is an interesting premise, the book fails to deliver a meaningful discussion on the subject for several reasons.

First, while the author interviewed 36 criminologists in Britain, Australia and the U.S. and had “numerous informal discussions” with many others, the book not is a systematic, empirical work. The interviewees, listed in the appendix, can hardly be said to be representative of the range of criminologists in the three countries (indeed, only three of the formal interviews were conducted with academics from the U.S.). But even if they were representative, there is no systematic analysis of the interviews. Rather, respondents’ comments are inserted to support Walters’ claim that academics critical of the status quo are marginalized by funding agencies. There are virtually no data on how much criminological research is funded by these agencies or whether criminologists find funding elsewhere. Nor is government sponsored research compared to funding from other sources. The author’s relentless claim that the work of criminologists critical of governmental processes is virtually unfundable leads one to wonder how so many of them remain gainfully employed.

Second, Walters’ use of the passive voice is frustrating, to say the least, and makes many of his key arguments unpersuasive. Apparently, in the U.S., “academic criminologists are turning to National Institute of Justice [NIJ] funding to conduct research” (p.63) as other sources of funding become more competitive and “there is a growing dependence on government organizations” (p.51). But we have no analysis of how many criminologists get NIJ funding now or at any time in the past or whether NIJ is, in fact, increasingly central to criminological research. Similarly, the alleged suppression of critical research is apparently an “increasing” problem [*894] (p.75), though the book presents no analysis over time, so it is hard to know what to make of such claims.

In fact, the book is full of assertions with no supporting evidence. Who are the agents of power here? Government bureaucrats? Elected officials? One has the sense that the entire British, American and Australian systems of government are aiding and abetting this conspiracy to keep scholarship that is critical of the government from coming to light. I cannot speak for the U.K. and Australia, but I am pretty sure Walters is incorrect when he claims that the administrative head of the National Institute of Justice in the U.S. plays “an influential role in establishing the criminological research priorities within both government and academia” (p.61, my emphasis). I think it is probably true that many criminologists in the U.S. shape particular research projects around what funding priorities exist. But most scholars get funding from a variety of sources and academics tend to do what they want and then look for a funding window of opportunity. Perhaps Walters is right, but we cannot know by simply talking to a handful of scholars. A much more systematic analysis of funded research, research priorities and the full array of funding sources would be necessary.

More troubling is the book’s thinly veiled contempt for standard social science empirical models. Walters decries the politics of “evidence-based research” (p.57). But what other kind of research is there? While I am advocate of critiquing standard statistical tools and prioritizing philosophy of science questions, I am genuinely unnerved by the assertion that research about social and political phenomenon can be something other than evidence-based. What is the alternative? The ill-defined narratives of selective interviewing? After reading the anecdote of the scholar who thought he had to get drunk with the police at the local watering hole in order to conduct his research (and then wondered whether he should nurse his hangover or write up his experiences), I had a new appreciation for human subjects review boards in U.S. institutions (p.103). Such folly does not qualify as systematic research under any standard with which I am familiar. There are the obvious questions about how objective the “data” are when people have to be drunk in order to provide them, but there is also a serious breach of ethics to represent oneself to respondents as a drinking buddy when the real agenda is to get them to say something damning. I will take social science empiricism with all of its epistemological and methodological flaws over a science-free “research” project any day. While Walters worries that government-sponsored research may be ideologically driven, he overlooks the possibility that some of the criminologists whose work is not getting funded may have their own ideological axes to grind.

This bring us to the third and most disappointing problem of the book, which is that it never defines the precise alternative criminologies that are being quashed by government research institutes and private funding sources. What would a non state-centric criminology look like? What would the parameters of a criminological scholarship be if it were free from government funding sources, free from state-centered policy analysis, free from [*895] popular constructions of deviance? I think that is an important question, and I am genuinely interested in the answer. Like Walters, I am somewhat uncomfortable by the degree to which criminologists in the U.S. seem to study the same typical crimes over and over and have little to offer by way of theoretical or empirical contributions to the assessment of harm more generally—i.e., state deviance as well as individual deviance or deviance that is not labeled as such. But Walters’ critique seems to be a wholesale condemnation of the entire criminal code, and he never confronts the fact that at least a portion of the behaviors deemed criminal by the state (i.e., violent behaviors) produce objective harm. Is violence merely a government-constructed category aimed at keeping critics of the status quo from complaining? Much criminological research in the U.S. is aimed at understanding the causes of violence, and while it is easy for academics (who most likely fall into low-risk victimization categories, by the way) to denounce such research as merely contributing to the state’s hegemony, for people living with violence on a daily basis, understanding the causes and consequences of such actions have profound significance for social and political life.

In my view, the arena of criminology in which Walters situates himself suffers from over-theorizing and a dearth of empiricism. As a result, there is little mid-range theory that would be amenable to empirical study and what theorizing exists is unchecked by empirical reality. Walters might argue that the lack of empiricism results because the Home Office will not fund it. Maybe. But it seems equally likely that the research proposals suffer from some serious flaws, such as under-specified research designs.

Critical approaches to criminological study have a lot to offer, particularly in a time when security concerns are so prominent in the public consciousness, and “I’ll keep you safe” seems to be a sufficient claim to win the presidency in the U.S. An analysis of how some types of behavior are more likely to be criminalized than others and how criminological research might reify those categories is a worthwhile project. Such research might consider, for example, how the Mann Act (prohibiting “white slavery”) co-existed with inattention to white lynch mobs and the degree to which academic work at the time contributed to public outcries about the former and not the latter. An engaging analysis of the ways in which governments use fear and violence to benefit particular interests and pursue particular social policies – and the degree to which criminologists contribute to that agenda – would be quite valuable. Perhaps Walters’ next effort will offer us one.

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