This sample Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Incarceration Research Paper is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need help writing your assignment, please use our research paper writing service and buy a paper on any topic at affordable price. Also check our tips on how to write a research paper, see the lists of criminal justice research paper topics, and browse research paper examples.

The US incarceration rate is exceptional in a number of respects. First, the USA has the highest number of people imprisoned (over two million) and the highest imprisonment rate in the world (730 per 100,000 national population) as of 2010. The number of people imprisoned in the USA is almost double that of China, which is ranked second on this measure, and more than ten times that of most Western countries. Other countries ranked highest in the number of people incarcerated include Russia, Brazil, India, and Iran (International Centre for Prison Statistics 2013). There is certainly something paradoxical about the USA, a democratic country that is a global hallmark of freedom and civil liberties, imprisoning more citizens than authoritarian regimes that are often criticized for human rights abuses.

This US exceptionalism has received a great deal of attention in the criminal justice literature as researchers have tried to explain mass incarceration in the USA in terms of political, economic, and cultural conditions specific to the USA (Christie 2000; Garland 2001; Tonry 2011). However, much less research attention has been given to comparative analyses of imprisonment that can situate the US experience within a broader global context. Such analyses bring greater attention to macrolevel historical, cultural, and institutional factors that are often overlooked in case studies.

One criminological axiom is that punishment trends are a reflection of structural forces and not simply a function of crime rates (Christie 2000; Garland 2001; Tonry 2011). Despite the research supporting this claim, the misperception persists that incarceration is driven by crime levels. This does not suggest that crime is completely unrelated to incarceration, but rather that there are several steps between crime commission and incarceration at the microlevel and numerous macrolevel factors that influence incarceration levels. For example, if you compare homicide rates internationally, which is often argued to be the most reliable indicator of cross-national crime differences, the US homicide rate is much lower than many other countries that have lower imprisonment rates (United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime 2011). This is because punishment is shaped by historically embedded preferences, values, and norms that are durable, yet malleable. Comparative research offers unique insights into the historical, structural, and cultural contexts of punishment. This research paper illustrates how historical and comparative research on incarceration can shed light not only on US exceptionalism but more broadly on understanding why countries differ in their types and levels of punishment.

The Historical Context Of Incarceration As Punishment

Formal punishment serves multiple purposes, including the direct punishment of an individual (i.e., inflicting pain), as well as the indirect demonstration of public definitions of acceptable social behavior. For much of human history, rulers relied on overt forms of brutal physical punishment to control populations, including whipping, ear cropping, branding, and other excruciating practices, as well as execution. Punishing the body left a physical mark (e.g., cut ear, missing finger, brand) so that others could easily identify and stigmatize the criminal. Additionally, physical punishments took place in public to send a message to other potential law violators that they too would receive a similar torture.

The brutality, corruption, and arbitrariness of early modern punishment fueled an egalitarian backlash demanding fairer treatment of individuals. Changes to the labor market also contributed to shifts in social control mechanisms. Specifically, brutal physical punishment no longer met emerging nineteenth-century economic demands for a large, able-bodied workforce that was needed to fill the factories emerging throughout the Western world (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1968). This new economic reality fostered the development of houses of corrections that were responsible for more than just punishing inmates. They were designed to correct and shape modern citizens through a reflective incapacitation process.

The USA was an early adopter of imprisonment, and the first prisons of the nineteenth century in New York and Pennsylvania emphasized this reflective incapacitation approach. Silence, separation, and introspection were seen as tools to teach pro-social values and compensate for the poor upbringings and lack of discipline that were believed to be the causes of criminal behavior. However, structural changes in the late twentieth century brought about another shift in penal strategies. Many Western countries experienced changes in economic, social, and cultural frameworks that served as the cultural preconditions necessary for the development of a “culture of control” characterized by a growing reliance on criminal justice responses to more behaviors and longer prison sentences. These preconditions were accompanied by increasing crime rates that fostered a new perception of crime as a common occurrence that residents need to take proactive steps to prevent. The state was seen as incapable of protecting citizens from everyday predations because crime was now an embedded feature of the late modern social fabric. In the face of deindustrialization, growing unemployment rates, and inflation, the once flourishing central business districts of many cities experienced capital and human flight. These departures left only the most disadvantaged and marginalized groups behind. Instead of strengthening the social safety net, the US criminal justice system stepped in to regulate the resulting social disorganization and poverty (Garland 2001).

This historical context explains how incarceration became the primary means of punishment and social control in the USA, and it illustrates how social structural and cultural forces shape policy decisions regarding punishment. However, it does not explain how the USA became such an extreme outlier in the implementation of this form of punishment. How did the USA come to punish more people for longer periods of time? Comparative scholars began to recognize that there are unique legal institutional differences that shape different penal outcomes. Whitman (2003) provided an erudite historical analysis of punishment in France, Germany, and the USA to explain why three democratic, egalitarian, and capitalist nations sharing numerous cultural values could produce such different types of punishment. Interestingly, Whitman (2003) was not concerned with explaining the differences in the amount of punishment; rather, he focused on the differences in the types of punishment. The USA had distinctively harsh forms of punishment with many jurisdictions now using chain gangs, military-style boot camps, and double-bunking inmates, not to mention the forms of civil and social exclusion related to a criminal status. US inmates, for the most part, face felony voting restrictions, employment bans, and limited educational opportunities, such as being ineligible to receive financial aid to pursue a college degree. Whitman (2003) contrasts these exclusions with the Continental experience in which inmates maintain their privacy and dignity as they are housed in single-occupancy cells where guards must knock on doors before entering.

The crux of Whitman’s argument is that French and German punishment mechanism consciously – yet slowly – moved away from stigmatizing responses. Criminal justice officials recognized the need to reduce the emotionally laden approach to crime control. Although there is much rhetoric among US policy makers of adopting evidence-based models of punishment, there are structural differences that make such attempts difficult. French and German prosecutors and judges are civil servants; they are experts that possess knowledge of human behavior and principles of behavior change. They have extensive and specialized training specifically related to their position, and the judiciary must act within a tightly bound system of accountability checks to ensure that punishments prepare inmates for normal life, not strip them of humanity. In contrast, prosecutors and judges in the USA have broad discretionary power regarding whom to charge, what to charge these individuals with, and what sentences to apply. The US plea bargaining system is relatively unthinkable in other countries due to the amount of prosecutorial discretion that it involves. Further, the US adversarial system is one that provides the judiciary with few boundaries during the sentencing phase of a trial; no doubt, sentencing guidelines do exist but these are presumptive. These distinctions were summarized by Weber (1967) as differences between types of legal thinking in which the Continental law relied on formal rational mechanisms and the common law relied on substantive rational mechanisms. To summarize these differences briefly, formal rational law attempts to eliminate individual discretion and subjectivity, whereas substantive rational law encourages legal actors to inject morality and ethics in legal decisions.

Tensions Between Modern Capitalism And Incarceration

The shift to an industrialized, capitalist economy not only changed labor market demands but also increased inequality and poverty, creating a marginalized class that could be potentially disruptive to social order. Governments have used a variety of tools to maintain order under such conditions. According to Bourdieu (1999), the left hand of the state controls the citizenry through less overt forms of coercion (e.g., education, welfare, and public healthcare), and the right hand of the state delivers direct control through police, courts, and prisons. At least since the end of World War II, Western nations have developed welfare programs to protect citizens from the inherent negative effects of capitalist production and have simultaneously bolstered criminal justice apparatuses to control the poor.

Beckett and Western (2001) argued that within the USA “penal and social welfare institutions comprise a single policy regime aimed at the problems associated with deviance and marginality” (Beckett and Western 2001, p. 44). The tremendous growth in US incarceration necessitates pondering who is occupying these prisons. Western (2006) provides an illuminating empirical analysis that shows how incarceration is driven by poor, uneducated, African-American males. This punishment trend is situated within a context of deindustrialization, stigmatizing subsistence-oriented welfare mechanisms and limited opportunities for the growing underclass left behind. Changing structural realities were embedded within a criminal justice culture lacking any real institutional blocks to increasing punishment. That is, US criminal justice actors did not push for rational and proportional sentences; rather, austere measures were the typical response because crime and criminals were seen as social pariahs, misfits, and incorrigible individuals. This is contrasted with Continental and Nordic perceptions of punishment in which criminals are a part and product of their social landscape – not disembodied from it. Criminality and crime control mechanisms fit within an inclusive context that provides a safety net from inequality as well as placing institutional barriers on criminal justice actors that prevent the reliance on overly emotional sorts of punishment. This is not to say that punishment lacks an emotive element. Rather, punishment takes a scientific, rational, and bureaucratic form. This form differs from the US response by recognizing that unpleasant features of social disorganization cannot be eliminated with incarceration nor can the rare, sensational, and highly publicized criminal events be prevented with new policies or longer sentences.

Comparative researchers demonstrate that the context in which governments, employers, and workers negotiate is consequential for incarceration rates. In particular, the ways in which governments set wages and determine labor arrangements to buffer the negative effects of capitalism – deindustrialization, unemployment, and underemployment – affect incarceration rates. Comparative research has shown that countries with corporatist bargaining, strong unions, and powerful left-oriented political parties have significantly lower incarceration rates than countries lacking these policies, such as the USA (Cavadino and Dignan 2006; Jacobs and Kleban 2003; Sutton 2000, 2004). Sutton (2000, 2004) concluded that across the advanced capitalist world criminal justice and welfare policies are historically intertwined as subthemes within a larger policy discourse about the management of social marginality. Furthermore, countries with a collectivist orientation have political-economic institutions in place that keep popular punitivism in check. Decentralized governmental structures increase the likelihood that the public’s emotional desires for more punishment will creep into legal actor decision making (Whitman 2003).

Strong centralized efforts to protect labor interests keep incarceration rates down in at least two ways. First, the presence of collective bargaining and other political-economic frameworks that protect the working class from unemployment, underemployment, and universalizing welfare demonstrates interclass solidarity. Countries with such characteristics have a smaller gap between classes, an emphasis on full employment, and a social philosophy focused on diminishing inequality. Second, political-economic frameworks that protect the working class from economic uncertainty provide actual monetary benefits that prevent the development of the durable underclass that many have shown are driving the US mass incarceration movement.

This research clearly demonstrates that incarceration is not simply a response to crime. Instead, incarceration must be situated within a broader fabric of social control. This fabric is complex and varied and sometimes merges contradictory elements. Governments have varying preferences regarding diminishing gaps in inequality with wage bargaining and worker solidarity situated within left-political power, producing serious reductions in the reliance on incarceration as a social control mechanism in some countries. The USA, conversely, is a context in which policy makers, the public, and the media interact in a cyclical process of defining crime as something committed by the underclass, and criminals are in need of the state’s “iron fist” through crime control policies centered on longer sentences, harsh treatment, and civic exclusions upon release. This approach fosters a path-dependent process creating policy inertia that makes it difficult to change course to more rational crime control responses that actually might reduce social inequality.

The Influence Of Legal Traditions On The Use Of Incarceration

The emphasis on state-labor relations in the comparative incarceration literature needs to be situated within historical legal traditions. The three legal families of the Western world – common law, Roman law, and Nordic law – codify and define enforcement strategies in different ways that reflect social preferences about state intervention that affect variations in the use of incarceration. Common law is a legal system that emphasizes common knowledge of facts brought to the court by private individuals. The contemporary adversarial system emerged from a private form of law that excluded defense attorneys from trials, lacked a public prosecutor, and did not allow judges to decide on guilt or innocence (Langbein 2005). The Roman legal system dates back to the Roman Emperor Justinian during the fifth century in which he commissioned legal scholars to devise a “gapless legal system” (Weber 1967). This system was institutionalized as an inquisitorial, code-based approach to eliminate legal actor discretion and lay influence in legal matters. The Nordic law combines elements of substantive (i.e., common law) and formal (i.e., Roman law) types of legal thinking with a cultural imperative focused on social solidarity and limited inequality. The shared histories and unique development of each legal family delineate legal theories, philosophies, and varying levels of discretion to legal decision makers.

Countries fitting into a specific legal family will adopt similar institutions to define and enforce state authority. This is not to suggest that all common, Roman, or Nordic law countries will be identical to one another; rather, these countries will have a high degree of interfamily similarity and high degree of intra-family variation. Simply, the USA and Australia, as common law countries, have similar legal practices that differ from their Roman law counterparts, say France and Germany, or from Sweden and Norway as Nordic law countries. It may seem out of place to discuss legal family or legal origin when explaining contemporary punishment outcomes, but this approach builds upon comparative economic research that shows how macroeconomic outcomes vary across countries according to their type of legal family (Hayek 1960).

Legal families define legal actor roles and structure financial markets in the form of rules of corporate ownership, stockholder protection, and private property rights that influence contemporary economic outcomes (Glaeser and Shleifer 2002, p. 1193). Legal institutions vary by legal family to reflect a country’s use of law to protect property owners, enforce private contracts, and regulate the relationship between employers and employees. For example, Roman legal families use institutions that diminish legal actor discretion, rely on codified law, and prefer government intervention in financial markets. The common law approach, alternatively, uses institutions that favor judicial flexibility, case-based law, limited regulation, and private market solutions (Glaeser and Shleifer 2002). Comparative economic researchers find that the judicial flexibility of common law situates corporate actors within a context in which laws can be changed quickly according to social and economic preferences. This, essentially, shapes individual’s willingness to rely on legal mechanisms of conflict resolution as there is a high expectation that legal decision makers will rule on the side of corporate interests.

This macroeconomic research is discussed because it – along with ample sociological literature (e.g., Weber 1967) – suggests that the rules defining and providing meaning to legal actor roles are consequential for punishment outcomes. Recently, (DeMichele & Janoski 2010) argued that similar legal institutions important for macroeconomics are consequential for criminal justice policies as well. Analyzing data from 1960 to 2002, he found that the common law countries had the highest amount of incarceration with average rates hovering between 125 and 150 per 100,000 in the population. The Roman law countries, composed of Continental European nations, had average incarceration rates between 80 and 100 per 100,000 in the population. And the Nordic law countries had the least incarceration with average rates ranging between 40 and 70 per 100,000 in the population. The unique blend of legal actor discretion, lay participation in the legal system, sentencing rules, and alternatives to incarceration coalesced to produce varying levels of incarceration. This research concluded that just as there are three types of capitalist welfare systems (EspingAnderson 1990), there are also three types of Western punishment. Different legal systems produce environments that make possible the adoption of specific legal practices that reflect dominant definitions of the relationship between the state and individuals.

What Does Historical And Comparative Incarceration Research Tell Us About US Exceptionalism?

Historical research has put current incarceration patterns and trends in a larger context to understand how a confluence of economic, political, and cultural factors encouraged the use of incarceration as an important form of punishment and social control. Additionally, comparative research has shown how modern capitalism changed labor relations and exacerbated poverty and inequality in ways that also favored incarceration as a tool of social control. But why was this tool used more extensively in the USA relative to other advanced capitalist societies in the West? Criminologists have searched for institutional variation that differentiates the USA from other common law countries to point to the peculiarity of using popular elections to appoint many criminal justice and legal actors. That judges, prosecutors, and others are elected by the public may seem to be an inconsequential fact. However, it is well-known that during election cycles prosecutors and judges are found to implement longer sentences. Therefore, the common law relies on substantive practices that are more susceptible to public punitivism, and in the USA legal decision makers lack the bureaucratic protection found in other countries from these public desires for punishment. For example, consider the emotional reactions to sensational cases and how laws are created in the name of victims to gain public support. These institutional arrangements are situated within a US political-economic culture that favors individual responses to inequality, rightoriented politics, limited union strength, and decentralized wage bargaining – features known to correlate with increased incarceration. Mass incarceration, essentially, resulted from a social landscape that relies on formal punishment as the primary response to inequality embedded within a type of legal thinking predicated on the insertion of individual subjectivity and public emotionalism.

Future Directions

Although the literature explaining cross-national differences in the use of incarceration has not been extensive, it has certainly provided some important insights to explain US exceptionalism and also to delineate macrolevel forces that shape decisions regarding the tools of social control. Nonetheless, several questions regarding crossnational variations in incarceration rates remain unanswered. In particular, the prevailing focus on the use of incarceration in Western European countries provides a fairly narrow view of the question of why countries vary in their use of incarceration as punishment. The focus on the West is a common pattern in cross-national crime and justice research (Stamatel 2006) that has been exacerbated in the punishment literature because of the extreme US exceptionalism with respect to incarceration.

While Western European nations are natural points of comparison for the USA due to similarities in political and economic development, other countries outside of this region could provide interesting points of comparison for other reasons. For example, consider the fact that many countries with the highest incarceration rates per 100,000 population are former colonies, particularly British colonies, such as St. Kitts and Nevis, Anguilla, the Virgin Islands, or Bermuda (International Centre for Prison Statistics 2013). Are there commonalities in the colonization experiences of the countries, and the USA, that would explain similarly high usage of incarceration as punishment? Are their historical trajectories with respect to social control and punishment different from other formerly colonized countries with lower incarceration rates?

Another factor that is noticeably missing from the historical and comparative research on incarceration is religion. Tonry (2011) argues that Protestant fundamentalism is key to understanding harsh punishments in general in the USA.

To what extent is this a common feature among other countries with high imprisonment rates? Is the type of dominant religion important for explaining cross-national differences in punishment or is fundamentalism the relevant explanatory factor regardless of type of religious foundation? The moral dimension of punishment that was so central in research on nineteenth-century practices seems to have been put on the back burner in the twenty-first century.

Lastly, the lack of diversity in comparative incarceration samples means that some types of legal systems have not been considered, most notably the socialist legal system that still has a strong influence on many Eastern European countries despite the fall of communism in that region or the hybrid legal systems that encompass much of the world, particularly countries with a history of colonization. These countries are interesting comparatively for two reasons. First, several countries with a socialist legacy have high incarceration rates, such as Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Second, most socialist and hybrid systems, particularly in Eastern Europe and South America, have been undergoing significant changes in their legal systems (Newman 2010), raising questions about whether these changes will bring about more or less punitiveness.

Historical and comparative research is uniquely equipped to answer these types of questions. By contextualizing the historical, structural, and cultural contexts of punishment, we can identify and explain the macrolevel forces that affect punishment decisions and ultimately create cross-national differences in incarceration rates. Existing research has already shown how macroeconomic changes in labor markets, the creation of a permanent underclass, political configurations regulating state-labor relations, historical legal traditions shaping degrees of state intervention, and accompanying cultural perspectives regarding state strength, social control, and emotional gratification have contributed to different levels of incarceration across countries. This line of inquiry is still fairly new and many questions remain unanswered. Future research in this area has the potential not only to further explain US exceptionalism with respect to incarceration but also to situate the primacy of incarceration as punishment in a global context. This knowledge would be beneficial to other areas in criminology and criminal justice as it speaks to a number of important issues in the discipline, including social control, state control, cultural values, and the interrelationships among the criminal justice system and other social institutions.

Bibliography:

Beckett K, Western B (2001) Governing social marginality: welfare, incarceration, and the transformation of state policy. Punishm Soc 3(1):43–59
Bourdieu P (1999) Rethinking the state: genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field. In: Steinmetz G (ed) State culture: state formation after the cultural turn. Cornell University Press, Ithaca
Cavadino M, Dignan J (2006) Penal systems: a comparative approach. Sage, London
Christie N (2000) Crime control as industry. Routledge Press, London
DeMichele M, Janoski T (2010) A theory of cross-national incarceration rate variation: three worlds of western punishment, 1960–2002. American Society of Criminology, San Francisco, California
Esping-Anderson G (1990) The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Garland D (2001) The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary society. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Glaeser EL, Shleifer A (2002) Legal origins. Q J Econ 117:1193–1229
Hayek F (1960) The constitution of liberty. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
International Centre for Prison Statistics (2013) World prison brief. http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/ worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poprate. Accessed 17 May 2013
Jacobs D, Kleban R (2003) Political institutions, minorities, and punishment: a pooled cross national analysis of imprisonment rates. Soc Forces 82:725–755
Langbein J (2005) Origins of the adversary criminal trial. Oxford University Press, New York
Newman GR (2010) Introduction. In: Newman GR (ed) Crime and punishment around the world, vol 4. ABCCLIO, Santa Barbara
Rusche G, Kirchheimer O (1968) Punishment and social structure. Columbia University Press, New York
Stamatel JP (2006) Incorporating socio-historical context and temporal variation into quantitative cross-national criminology. Int J Comp Appl Crim Justice 30(2):177–208
Sutton J (2000) Imprisonment and social classification in five common law democracies, 1955-1985. Am J Sociol 106(2):350–386
Sutton J (2004) The political economy of imprisonment in affluent western democracies, 1960-1990. Am Sociol Rev 69(2):170–189
Tonry M (2011) Punishing race: a continuing American dilemma. Oxford University Press, New York
United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (2011) 2011 global study on homicide: trends, contexts, data. http:// www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/Homicide/Globa_study_on_homicide_2011_web. pdf. Accessed 17 May 2013
Weber M (1967) Max Weber on law in economy and society. Edited and annotated by Max Rheinstein. Simon and Schuster, New York
Western B (2006) Punishment and inequality in America. Russell Sage, New York
Whitman J (2003) Harsh justice: criminal punishment and the widening divide between American and Europe. Oxford University Press, New York

Historical Criminology

Overview

Historical criminology brings methods and concepts from history to the study of crime and criminal justice. This research paper covers the differences between criminologists and historians, leading theoretical frameworks in historical criminology, methods of historical research, and the role of time in criminology theory and research.

Key Issues/Controversies

Criminologists And Historians

There are well-established areas of research that overlap history and criminology. Manuel Eisner (2003) and Hans van Hofer (2011) analyze levels of crime over time. The study of crime trends makes intuitive sense to criminologists, particularly when these trends are examined from the Second World War. Trends in crime and imprisonment during the late twentieth century are readily interpreted using criminological models, so readily that criminologists do not regard this as “history.” Criminologists are also interested in the history of criminology. This research examines the founding assumptions, theoretical traditions, and methods of criminological inquiry. Mary Gibson and Nicole Rafter have led the examination of Cesare Lombroso and biological criminology. They have explored the emergence of biological positivism in nineteenth-century Italy (Gibson 2002) and the popularity of criminal anthropology in the United States (Rafter 1992). Their work has advanced our understanding of Lombroso as more (and less) than the originator of the “born criminal” concept and raised new questions about criminology as a science of the human condition.

Nevertheless, there are real differences between criminologists and historians. For criminologists, historical research must do more than reveal the past. To be of use, history must be relevant to the present, meaning, there must be a clear statement about a present concern. In a sense, there is a commitment to “futurism.” Criminologists try to build models that are good enough at explaining the present to anticipate what is likely to happen, and this provides a basis for advising crime policy (Lawrence 2012, p. 8). Historians are reluctant to comment on the present. They are more concerned with understanding the significance of past events against wider currents of human experience. They are happy to correct misrepresentations of the past (by politicians or others), but do not feel the need to offer policy recommendations.

Criminologists are committed to theory-driven research. They are particularly troubled by “empty empiricism,” an assemblage of facts presented outside a clear conceptual framework (Loader and Sparks 2005, p. 14). While there is ample room for theory construction, and new theories of crime are always welcome, leading journals appreciate research developed within a theoretical tradition of criminology. Mathieu Deflem’s (2002) investigation of international police cooperation deals with history, except that as a sociological criminologist, he constructs his book different than an historian would. He declares from the beginning that his work draws on the framework of Max Weber and that he will explore several propositions. Historians rely on theories to organize their facts, but do not specify them in the same way. Theories are not stated in the tradition of scientific research, but are rather weaved into the fabric of the narrative. Historians refer to concepts in the course of presenting their research material. They engage the arguments of other historians along the way: sharpening arguments, questioning evidence, and weighing interpretations.

Because the research training criminologists receive does not include historical research, most criminologists are not in a position to provide historical background into their topic of interest. The curriculum may include an option concerning the history of crime, but methods’ requirements, even at advanced levels, do not include the craft of historical research and writing. Further, as social scientists, criminologists are suspicious of anecdotal data and wonder whether a few historical events can be stretched far enough to become social processes. In contrast, historians can choose crime as a topic of study rather more easily, and in fact, many have turned to crime in recent years. In Britain, there has been an “explosion” of scholarship concerning the history of crime (Godfrey et al. 2010, p. 18). The British Crime Historians have met every 2 years since 2008. Further, the American Social Science History Association and the European Social Science History Association operate networks for historians engaged in the study of criminal justice and legal history. Historians of crime, who are familiar with the aims and techniques of social history, are receptive to social science concepts.

And then there is the matter of style. Criminologists question the value of description. Historical material makes sense provided it is organized around criminologists concepts. The sequence of events is secondary to the explanation of concepts and their connection to the criminological literature. Historians are more comfortable with narrative. Not all historians rely on chronology to organize their work, but they adhere to the belief that the sequence of events matters. Historians would not frame a research question as a “test of a hypothesis,” so their writing does not follow the familiar sequence of literature review, research questions, data analysis, findings, and discussion. The technique of historical argument can be compared to constructing a dry stone wall. The builder fits all the available stones into a shape that holds together. In the same way, the historian must fit all the known evidence into a coherent pattern.

Theoretical History

Historical criminology could not have developed without the contribution of several theoretical frameworks which have built bridges between history and criminology. In the 1970s, the work of several British historians crossed over to criminology. The British Marxist historians, as they became known, pursued a “history from the bottom up” or “history from below,” that is, the experiences of working class and ordinary people. Primitive Rebels (1959) and Bandits (1969) by Eric Hobsbawm, Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975) by Douglas Hay and others, and Whigs and Hunters (1977) by EP Thompson examined the response to crime in the context of class structure and the emergence of industrial capitalism. Because these works engaged a conceptual vocabulary drawn from Marxist social theory, they found a ready reception among criminologists pursuing “radical” and “critical” approaches. Criminologists brought historical arguments about the rule of law and maintenance of social order to the contemporary critique of criminal justice policies. The British Marxist historians had excavated deep into the foundations of Anglo-American legal heritage. They offered insights into the administration of English criminal law in the eighteenth century that could apply to the policing of street crime in American cities of the late twentieth century.

About this same time, another influential book appeared: the English version of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977). It was, ostensibly, a book about how Europe had come to rely on imprisonment. It inspired a great academic discussion about the “birth of the prison.” But it was also more than this. In this book, and other work that followed, Foucault wielded an arsenal of images that captured the imagination of criminologists. Criminologists retold his examples (the execution of Damiens, Bentham’s panopticon) and added his words (“discourse,” “surveillance,” and many more) to the lexicon of criminological terms. Historical studies framed as a: “history of the present” or “genealogical account” began to appear in criminology books and journals. Foucault made “appalling” mistakes about what happened, when, and where. But none of this mattered to criminologists who, particularly when it comes to history, prefer an entre´e of ideas with only a small serving of historical details, perhaps as the ape´ritif. Foucault did not write a history of criminal justice; he turned criminal justice history into a worthy intellectual project.

Foucault even inspired further research by what he did not say. Foucault did not address the confinement of women, nor, for that that matter, did other widely-read historians of the prison. Nicole Rafter (1985) pointed out that it was a mistake to regard the history of women’s imprisonment as an extension of the history for men. She presented the women’s reformatory movement, the rise of custodial prisons for women, the legal and social characteristics of imprisoned women, and the effects of “race” and class on treatment of women (Rafter 1992). Work by Zedner (1998), and others, confirmed that gender could not be explained away as a lighter or softer version of men’s experience. Historical research into institutions for women opened the doors to a parallel world operating according to its own logic, moving at its own pace, and leading to its own consequences.

David Garland took the “history of the present” to another level. In a series of influential books and articles, Garland produced an intricate history of changes in crime policy from the late nineteenth century. He examined institutional practices within wider social and cultural contexts with a particular eye for “moments of transition.” In Punishment and Welfare (1985), he examined how science entered legal culture before the First World War, and in The Culture of Control (2001), he analyzed the displacement of rehabilitation by security as the characteristic response of governments in the late twentieth century. Garland’s research opened up new issues for analysis: changes in prison practice, the origins of criminology, the role of the state, and convergence of welfare policy and penal policy. He generated a new conceptual vocabulary for historical study in criminology, such as “penal welf-arism,” “mass imprisonment,” “the crime complex,” and “the culture of control,” and in the process, opened up new tracts of real estate for development by historical criminology.

The social theory of Norbert Elias has also been influential. In The Civilizing Process (1939), Elias recovered the transformation of European society from barbarism to civilization. Drawing on an interesting set of archival documents, commentary about manners, he charted the emergence of polite society. Through a process of cultural change so gradual as to seem invisible, control of violence shifted from external force to internal restraint. Elias’s theory of social change, sometimes called “process sociology” has been especially important in studies of penal policy and practices. Pieter Spierenburg (1984) and John Pratt (2000), two of Elias’s leading interpreters, have brought the civilizing process to punishment practices in the Netherlands and New Zealand. Mucchielli (2010) points to recent crime trends in France as evidence of an overall decline in violence. Crime figures in recent decades suggest Elias’s concept of the “civilizing process” at work, a fall in violent crime owing to the stigmatization or delegitimization of violence.

Archival Methods

Historical criminology borrows the methods historical research. Research in historical criminology relies on primary sources, documents, and materials that originate in the time period of interest, such as prison registers, police reports, and court records. Digitization has made significant material accessible for the historical study of crime such as the Old Bailey online project. The proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, are available via the internet for 1674– 1913. Internet access has also made available an increasing number of books and periodicals, government documents, and newspapers from the nineteenth century and earlier. The vast majority of archival material, however, remains accessible only through traditional search strategies.

One of the challenges is avoid a narrow administrative history. Making a historical portrait from documents left by prison managers, police authorities, and so on presents a particular view, that is, a managerial or institutional view. The “usual suspects” – the poor, immigrants, the crowd – did not produce their own written records. To interrogate the deeper purpose and wider impact of institutions and practices, it is necessary to get beyond official records. It is true that much of the institutional record is “limited for anything other than administrative history” (Bosworth 2001, p. 434). Diaries of prisoners, letters from the accused, and the like are rare. But the official view can also be reframed with reports of visitors, commissions of inquiry, courtroom testimony, newspaper accounts, and even novels.

Another challenge is moving beyond the nation state. Criminal justice is a national or local project, and not surprisingly, much of the historical record concerns the response of national governments and city authorities. For the history of human trafficking, terrorism, drug trafficking, and other cross-border crimes, the records and materials left by nongovernmental organizations are particularly useful. These include organizations such as the Jewish Association for the Protection of Women and Girls, founded in 1885 in response to concerns that women emigrating from the Pale of Settlement were vulnerable to the white slave traffic (Knepper 2009) Other intergovernmental organizations, such as the League of Nations, also provide valuable material. The League of Nations led major campaigns concerning human trafficking and drug trafficking in the early twentieth century. The archives in Geneva contain minutes of meetings, correspondence, field reports, photographs, and other materials (Knepper 2011).

Recent interest in “globalization” has invited new questions about the past, including an awareness of the legacy of empires. On paper, the British Empire represented one of the largest criminal justice systems in world history, with colonies, territories, and possessions extending from Australia to India, Ireland to Singapore. The Colonial Office attempted to coordinate police, prisons, and legal measures, and the influence was felt not only in the colonies but within Britain itself. Looking back yields insight into the diffusion of police and practices, and opens up new lines of inquiry, including the conditions for successful “policy transfer” and the influence of colonial practices on domestic institutions (Godfrey and Dunstall 2005).

Criminologists can gain a sense of history from published work by historians, but they cannot answer the questions they pose through secondary sources alone. Historians are interested in different questions, and the nature of historical research means that choices need to be made about sources and interpretation. Criminologists need to conduct historical research for themselves; they cannot proceed as if theory is all that really matters. Imposing a particular theory on the past yields a dull and pointless project, something like bringing one’s own food to eat while on a holiday tour of several countries. As in social science, there is an interaction between theory construction and empirical findings. The historical researcher needs a theory to judge the significance of documents; the documents lead to new evidence, leading in turn to revising theories (Knepper and Scicluna 2010).

The Criminology Of Time

Before Foucault, another French intellectual challenged social scientists to think about history. In the 1950s, Fernand Braudel encouraged social scientists to situate the objects of their inquiry in time. It was a mistake to believe that the significance of time could be gauged with a questionnaire or a few months of observation. Each social activity, he proposed, operates according to its own particular time, so that any historical moment is moving at multiple speeds.

In his history of the Mediterranean, Braudel presented three levels of historical time. He saw the natural environment, the mountains, deserts, and the sea, as the source of constraints on behavior that persist across generations. These behaviors produce the “almost immobile history” of geographical time. He described the “slowly rhythmic history.. .of groups and groupings,” shaped by long-term trends in trade, transport, empire, and forms of war. This he referred to as social time. And, he narrated “history of short, nervous, rapid oscillations” brought about by political and military leaders. The “history of events” unfolded in individual time; individual time “has the dimension of their anger, dreams and delusions.” (Braudel 1980, pp. 3–4) The fact that Braudel came up with his idea of multiple time while in prison during the Second World may suggest a particular relevance for criminology.

Criminologists have been interested in discontinuities, so much so that “paradigm shift” has become a cliche´. Continuity, as suggested by geographic time, may be more important than we have realized. Media and crime affords one example. Given the development of electronic media since the Second World War, and the internet, satellite communication and so on in recent decades, it is easy to believe that the media has a powerful effect public understanding of crime, leading to particular crime policies. The influence of media on policy making about crime has been described as part of the “challenge of our times” (Garland and Sparks 2000). But as Robert Shoemaker points out with a look back at the eighteenth century, crime was a recurring topic in every form of print. As print become more available, popular understandings of crime were shaped more by what people read than by what they knew from personal experience or reports from friends and relatives. Pamphlets from social reformers exaggerated the extent of crime to justify particular projects. Newspapers overemphasized crime both in the frequency of reports and tone of coverage. Printed reports of trial proceedings distorted understanding of crime and justice, as much by what we left out as what was said. Edited versions of trials portrayed English court procedures as more coherent than they actually were. Eighteenth-century readers approached this surfeit of information with a skeptical eye; they knew that crime problems were more complicated than reformers, journalists, and the authorities made it appear (Shoemaker 2009). So, aside from the technology, what has really changed?

Braudel was interested in trends or cycles that occur over several decades, or what he referred to as “conjunctures.” This is what LaFree had in mind when he urged criminologists to pursue historical analysis. There should be more emphasis on historical data and historical interpretation because theoretical insights cannot be obtained through cross-sectional designs that compare within a single moment of time. Crime events, such as the rise in crime during the 1960s and fall in the 1990s (in the United States), can be understood by recognizing that crime occurs within “distinct historical periods,” and one of the goals of criminology is to understand factors behind the transition from one era to another (LaFree 2007). A recent example can be seen in theory of “crime waves.” Periodization is a familiar idea to historians, and criminologists, who are accustomed to thinking about the importance of social context, are well-positioned to pursue it. Martin Killias (2006) examined fluctuations in crime rates across Europe with reference to “breaches,” the way in which social developments surrounding technological advances open up new opportunities for crime. He combined the historical idea of periodization with the criminological idea of opportunity structure.

One of the criticisms of Braudel’s approach, and particularly his emphasis on “structural history” grounded in continuity, is the absence of human agency. The agency-structure problem is well known to social science, and in examining biographies, criminologists have provided an interesting solution. In what must be the “longest longitudinal study,” John Laub and Robert Sampson (2003) interviewed men some five decades after they had been selected for a study of delinquency. The interviews confirmed how individuals construct their own lives through the actions they take within the constraints of historical and social context. Criminal activities did not correspond with historical events, such as economic downturn, or social conditions, such as substandard schooling. Rather, in looking back over the course of their lives, the men saw the significance of choices they had made. Sampson and Laub (2005) encourage a view of time that balances structural constraints with human agency. Some historical events affect people very deeply. Others pass over, like a cloud across a quiet lake.

Concluding Thought

Criminologists have produced significant historical scholarship over the past few decades and, in recent years, have taken several steps toward incorporating historical criminology as a subfield of inquiry. Two presidents of the American Society of Criminology – John Laub in 2003 and Gary LaFree in 2006 – have used the annual presidential address to emphasize the value of historical perspectives (Laub 2004; LaFree 2007). In 2011, the Crime, Criminal Law and Criminology in History network was established with support from the Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology, and in 2012, the European Historical Criminology working group was established within the European Society of Criminology. It may be a step too far to suggest that historical criminology represents a recognized subfield. Criminologists and historians ask their own questions of the past, cultivate expertise in their own methods of inquiry, and organize their inquiries in different ways. But, from what has been done so far, one thing is clear enough: The most interesting criminology arises at the point that history and criminology meet.

Bibliography:

Bosworth M (2001) The past as a foreign country? Some methodological implications of doing historical criminology. Br J Criminol 41:431–442
Braudel F (1980) On history. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Deflem M (2002) Policing World Society: historical foundations of international police coperation. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Eisner M (2001) Modernization, self-control and lethal violence: the long-term dynamics of European homicide rates in theoretical perspective. Br J Criminol 41:618–638
Eisner M (2003) Long-term historical trends in violent crime. Crime Justice A Rev Res 30: 83–142
Garland D, Sparks R (2000) Criminology, social theory and the challenge of our times. Br J Criminol 40:189–204
Gibson M (2002) Born to crime: Cesare Lombroso and the origins of biosocial criminology. Praeger, Westport
Godfrey B, Dunstall G (2005) Crime and empire 1840-1940. Willan, Devon
Loader I, Sparks R (2005) For an historical sociology of crime policy in England and Wales since 1968. In: Matravers M (ed) Managing modernity: politics and the culture of control. Routledge, Oxford, pp 5–32
Mucchielli L (2010) Are we living in a more violent society? A socio-historical analysis of interpersonal violence in France, 1970s-present. Br J Criminol 50:808–829
Pratt J (2000) Civilization and punishment. Aust N Z J Criminol 33:183–201
Rafter N (1985) Gender, prison and prison history. Soc Sci Hist 9:233–247
Rafter N (1990) Partial justice: women, prisons and control. Transaction, New Brunswick
Rafter N (1992) Criminal anthropology in the United States. Criminology 30:525–546
Sampson R, Laub J (2005) A life-course view of the development of crime. Ann Am Acad Pol Soc Sci 602:12–45
Shoemaker R (2009) Print culture and the creation of public knowledge about crime in 18th century London. In: Knepper P, Doak J, Shapland J (eds) Urban crime prevention, surveillance and restorative justice: effects of social technologies. CRC Press, Boca Raton, pp 1–22
Spierenburg P (1984) The spectacle of suffering. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Von Hofer H (2011) Punishment and crime statistics in Scandinavia, 1750-2008. Crime Justice A Rev Res 40:33–108
Zedner L (1998) Women, crime and custody in Victorian England. Clarendon, Oxford
Godfrey B, Lawrence P, Williams C (2010) History and Sage, London
Killias M (2006) The opening and closing of breaches: a theory on crime waves, law creation and crime prevention. Eur J Criminol 3:11–31
Knepper P (2009) The invention of international crime: a global issue in the making, 1881-1914. Palgrave, London
Knepper P (2011) International crime in the twentieth century: the league of nations era, 1919-1939. Palgrave, London
Knepper P, Scicluna S (2010) Historical criminology and the imprisonment of women in nineteenth century Malta. Theor Criminol 14:407–424
LaFree G (2007) Expanding criminology’s domain: The American Society of Criminology 2006 presidential address. Criminology 45:1–31
Laub J (2004) The life course of criminology in the United States: The American Society of Criminology 2003 presidential address’. Criminology 42:1
Laub J, Sampson R (2003) Shared beginnings, divergent lives: delinquent boys to age 70. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Lawrence P (2012) History, criminology and the ‘use’ of the past. Theor Criminol 16(3):313–328