Editor's Blog
Politics, criminology and CrimeTalk
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- Parent Category: Editor
- Category: Editor's blog
- Last Updated: Wednesday, 03 June 2026 17:45
- Published: Wednesday, 01 July 2020 14:53
- Written by Colin Sumner
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In the coming months, CrimeTalk will be even more focussed than ever on the relationship between politics and crime. This is because of the period the world is going through, a time which involves an awakening to the fact that crime is a political issue and that today's politics seems to involve too many crimes. Politics today, or for this period, seems to be run by people who are criminal, or, at least, who would best be criminalized, or at an absolute minimum do not know the difference between right and wrong. Of course, since they are in charge, their crimes are not successfully stigmatised as crimes, even when they are according to the law. Moreover, critical criminology is better equipped to understand and explain this than any of the conventional criminologies or indeed other social sciences.
Things have changed; our thinking has progressed. It is more realistic. CrimeTalk will change too: to make more effort to connect to sections of the public interested in criminology intellectually. It will be pitched to the level I found amongst mature students in their first year at university doing a BA in Criminology. I created over a dozen criminology degrees in East London, Salford and Cork in Ireland. They were hugely successful, loved by the many students doing them and are still running strong. This is also a level I taught at in Cambridge to postgraduate students, so it is based on simplicity and deep understanding. Some of the students in Cambridge are now professors and some of them are on the new editorial and correspondents' team at CrimeTalk. CrimeTalk will now therefore be more connected to criminology in universities, but in a particular way, more like quality journalism and less engaged with self-referential and exclusive academic culture. Criminologists need to be talking to their public, and those who want to hear are their public - and the biggest group in that category is our students.
Editing CrimeTalk, I found that academics don't like to use 'Comment' boxes to challenge other academics' work nor do they like to do serious journalism-style writing. This aversion to public engagement is because staff are usually under pressure to write more for their profession's auditors than for the public, and secondly because the public is often happy with its myths and delusions about crime and shy about saying what it thinks, or voicing its experience, even when street-wise or critical. So I want to focus on the mature student who comes out of work into a university to study criminology. However it is also because university teachers do not, for many reasons, treat their students as members of the public, or citizens. That is going to change in coming years.
I have taught many older and more professional students, and in Cork our BA benefitted enormously from my policy of taking mature students as around 20-30% of our intake; an unusually high percentage for Ireland which is still getting its head round the whole idea of mature students and their funding. Most of those students were women; the Irish Constitution tells us the woman's place is in the home and only in the last two decades has taking up a university degree been accepted as a good choice for a mother. Today, our public is in the classroom, it is female, older, multi-national and increasingly interested in race and empire - and it wants higher education in a modern and convenient form. CrimeTalk aims to be that form for that audience.
I will continue to edit CrimeTalk to make it accessible to this audience. This will also mean creating pages in other languages. In Ireland, I happily got used to 30% of the criminology student body coming from the EU and not being first-language English. We will continue to use graphics and limit our use of jargon, footnotes and references, and I will start to introduce podcasts. However there will be sufficient academic references for students and staff to chase up.
On content, there has been a development in the relationship between crime and politics. This last four decades has seen us change the nature of criminology, and it now grasps the following relationships between the politics and crime:
1 Criminal law is made by politicians and political activists, with the aid of lawyers. It is designed to deal with a politically and ideologically defined problem. Moral evaluations are rarely apolitical or non-ideological. Legislation always reflects a political perspective, even if that only means a view on the limits of power. Politics can just be a partisan mindset or a set of assumed truths. Macro-politics has varying degrees of consciousness. It may be most dangerous when it has the best intentions but is rigid and certain of its 'correctness'. One of the preconditions of mass killing, we have discovered, is a narrow-minded certainty about the accuracy of the thinking and a moral absolutism about its value to the world: "there is no alternative" is always a suspicious phrase.
2 Criminal behaviour is often committed by people who are angry or critical of the way things are, either domestically, locally, nationally or even globally. In some cases it is 'baggage' and in others 'attitude'. That always involves some expression of power, however incoherent, and some level of awareness of the politics of the situation, however rudimentary. Criminal actions involve varying degrees of consciousness, and, like the Luddite attack on machines, some may have good reasons but mistaken targets. Others may have no reason just emotion, and an ideologically defined target. People with good cause often do the most abstract and brutal things, and others are just damaged and lashing out. Some are just rich, and expecting to get what they want.
3 Some crimes, such as corporate, environmental and state crimes, and their weak prosecution, reflect a lack of enthusiasm from legislators and a high level of difficulty for policing agencies. These crimes are often not even seen as crimes by their perpetrators, or even by the public, but as civil matters. Some perpetrators will see law and regulation as an administrative irritant in the way of business. These crimes, technically defined, are political in their neglect because the people with the power can best decide or indicate what is not really a criminal act and what is more of a civil matter, or just business as usual. Ignorance and indifference combine with craft, self-interest and guile to deliver the 'normal'.
4 Some crimes are instrumental in gaining funds for a revolutionary movement or protest, or in removing a human political obstacle to a government or programme. The motives and effects in such scenarios are totally political in terms of the national balance of power. These crimes have the ambiguous status of being 'political crimes'.
5 For the most part, over the last 144 years, since Lombroso published L'Uomo Delinquente (1876), criminology has taken as its 'domain assumption' (Gouldner's phrase) that crime, either as 'behaviour' or as the criminal law, is mostly not political. Consequently, its methods have been epidemiological, counting crime as a moral disease that is contagious through groups such as subcultures and lower classes, and treating its counting as fairly unproblematic, except for what it mysteriously called 'the dark figure of crime', no, not really a black guy but that great mass of crimes that go unrecorded, and of course treating policing as politically and ideologically neutral. Epidemiology therefore does not resolve the politics and crime issue, because it simply does not explore the politics of crime and criminalization. It just correlates factors linked to a badly counted and badly defined 'disease'. It then fails to do the research which would actually explain these faulty correlations. You might call it 'corona criminology', because it is vague, lacks conceptual precision or explanation, is profoundly methodologically flawed, and fails to prevent or reduce the problem, instead merely accentuating the existing correlations.
There will now follow a series of articles showing that the world is mad, justified by bullshit not science, viewed upside down and in reverse order through a camera obscura of ideology (see also Sumner 2017). We will start with an article by Mike Sutton debunking the idea that Darwin invented 'natural selection'.
References
Cesare Lombroso (1876) L'Uomo Delinquente. Milan: see British Library page.
Alvin Gouldner (1970) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books.
