This is an extract from a chapter in the Book Decolonising the Criminal Question due to be published in June 2023. The full chapter will be open access and I will add a link as soon as it is available.
There is a secret veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments. They had their origins, as the beginnings of all such things have had, in some matters that had as good be covered by obscurity
Edmund Burke, Speech in House of Commons, 1788
Whilst crime and punishment had been the subject of European intellectual discourse since Antiquity, the emergency of criminology as a discipline in the modern sense occurred as part of a broader movement to reorganise knowledge. A range of disciplines (for example geography, phrenology/psychology, anthropology, sociology, statistics) appeared, broadly simultaneously, in the early part of the nineteenth century. These initially took the form of the establishment of learned societies and their journals, before, often much later, the disciplines embedded themselves in the academy. Whatever their institutional incarnations were, what was significant was that they represented a new way of organising and producing knowledge. It was no coincidence that this reorganisation of intellectual thought across such a wide range of social subjects occurred at roughly the same time. The dramatic changes in social structure being imposed in both the metropole and its colonies were generating an extensive range of social problems requiring a response from liberal thought. It was necessary to create bodies of knowledge that took at their ‘object man as an empirical entity’ (Foucault 2002: 375).
The philosophical glue that held together these disciplines of the individual was liberalism (Losurdo, 2011). Whilst the word liberal is routinely used promiscuously to refer to a range of ideas and attitudes (Bellamy, 1992) my deployment of the term ‘liberal’ refers to those mainstream liberal philosophers – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Bentham, Hegel and JS Mill – whose work provided the intellectual underpinning of, and justification for, the capitalist and colonial projects of modernity. Alongside those other disciplines we now call the social or human sciences, criminology emerged to provide strategies of liberal governance. Indeed, as Michel Foucault (2002: 376) has pointed out ‘the historical emergence of each one … was occasioned by a problem, a requirement, an obstacle of a theoretical or practical order’. This function, in respect to criminology, Foucault was later to identify as ‘entirely utilitarian’ after he asked:
Have you read any criminological texts? They are staggering … I fail to comprehend how the discourse of criminology has been able to go on at this level. One has the impression that it is of such utility, is needed so urgently and rendered so vital for the working of the system, that it does not even need to seek a theoretical justification for itself, or even simply a coherent framework.
Foucault (1980: 47)
This ‘entirely utilitarian’ character of criminology may, at least in part, be a direct result of it being unique among disciplines in having its subject matter – crime – determined by the state.
The institutional history of British criminology is complex and still awaits its historian. Activity until the second half of the twentieth century was a mix of national and international conferences organised through governments; networks of individuals working inside policing and penal institutions; and scholars working in other disciplines. What all these had in common was an acceptance of the necessity and naturalism of criminal justice; a commitment to a liberal individualistic approach and a willingness to operate within agendas set by the state. This connection between criminology and the state is so intimate that it is often unrecognised by criminologists. As Mark Neocleous (2021: 47) has observed criminology as a discipline has ‘ambled along without any real concept of the state, let alone a theory of it.’ The oppressive and violent nature of the state, so obvious in the colonial context, tends to escape criminological discourse unnoticed. Most criminology has an, implicit rather than explicit, understanding of the state as a natural and necessary collection of institutions working for the general social good. Parts may be performing poorly or in problematic ways, but these issues are correctable through a reform agenda. Such a consensus perspective is fundamentally ahistorical. Radical, critical and Marxist criminology do, on occasions engage with the problematic nature of the state from a class perspective, however, there is little or no recognition of how the modern state – in the metropole, settler colonies and the postcolonial independent states – has been shaped by the requirements of colonial governance. All these states have an interlinked history and have developed to impose and maintain unjust social orders. What is crime – criminology’s subject matter – is determined by the state. Indeed, what is prosecuted and sanctioned as crime is also determined by state institutions – the courts, the police, prosecutors, probation services and prisons. But it is not only that criminology’s subject matter is determined by the state that is problematic. It is also that as a discipline criminology, throughout its history, has consistently sought to serve the state. It has consistently sought to assist the state by identifying criminals and developing proposals for reforming the institutions of penal law. From its birth criminology has been ‘a selective science’ that endorsed a focus on the criminalisation of a narrow selection of harms, an emphasis that legitimised the targeting of the most vulnerable and powerless whilst simultaneously largely ignoring the far greater harms caused by the powerful. Criminology’s adaption to the Nazi party’s rise in twentieth-century Germany demonstrates its ability to accommodate the needs of the state.
Trincomalee walks 