C: Criminal Careers to Critical Criminology

Core idea

The four entries here trace concentric circles around the offender. Criminal careers is the closest in — the trajectory of an individual's offending, understood either objectively (what they did and when) or subjectively (what they became in their own eyes and others'). Criminal justice system is the institutional apparatus that processes that trajectory. Criminal psychology is the explanation that locates the source of offending inside the offender's head. And critical criminology is the sociological refusal of all three of those, on the grounds that what counts as a "criminal career" and what counts as a "psychological problem" are themselves products of political and economic arrangements that the offender did not choose.

The topic is best read as a debate. The first three entries describe the dominant individual-focused tradition; the fourth is the long-running counter-argument from the National Deviancy Conference, the new criminology, and the left-realist and left-idealist successors. Anyone working in criminology lives somewhere on this argument.

Why it matters

If you do not understand the difference between primary deviance (the act) and secondary deviance (the labelled identity), you will misread half of what's interesting about contemporary criminal justice — including why a stop-and-search can do more damage than the offence it was meant to detect. If you do not understand the basic structure of the criminal-justice system, you will mistake police-and-prison for "the system" when they are only two of six agencies. And if you do not know what critical criminology is for, you will struggle to see why criminologists fight as bitterly as they do over what the discipline is supposed to be doing.

Mental model

Lemert's distinction between primary and secondary deviance is the conceptual hinge of the topic, so it gets its own diagram. The flow shows how an initial act becomes — or fails to become — a career.

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Criminal careers

Introduced by the Gluecks and Clifford Shaw around 1930, the criminal career concept has always existed in two senses. The objectivist sense (the Gluecks, later the Blumstein-Cohen statistical-cohort tradition) treats career as a label for the patterns of onset, frequency, escalation, and desistance you can extract from data. The subjectivist sense (Hughes 1937, then Lemert, Goffman, and Becker) treats career as the offender's evolving sense of self under the pressure of social reaction.

Recent developmental and life-course criminology has tried to reunite the two registers — quantitative tracking of life-course transitions (leaving school, marriage, conviction) paired with qualitative attention to the meaning the offender attaches to those transitions. Julie Liebrich's (1993) study of offenders attempting to desist is the model: desistance is not an event but a difficult, reversible process — what she calls "going straight" as distinct from "being straight".

Criminal justice system

In England and Wales the CJS is six agencies: the police (detection and order maintenance), the criminal courts (trial and sentence), the Crown Prosecution Service (deciding whether to prosecute), the prison service (detention and constructive regime), the probation service (community supervision), and the Youth Justice System (offenders under eighteen). Each is administered by a different department of government — the courts under the Ministry of Justice, the police under the Home Office, the CPS under the Attorney General, and so on.

The fragmentation is not accidental. It is the institutional expression of the principle that no single branch of government should hold the policing, prosecution, trial, and offender-management functions. The downside is that the agencies' targets do not always align — a probation service judged on reoffending rates has different incentives from a police service judged on detection rates — and "the criminal-justice system" therefore behaves less like a system than like a federation of partly co-operating fiefdoms.

Criminal psychology

A broad church covering psychoanalytic, personality-typing, biological, and developmental approaches. The shared feature is that the cause of offending is located inside the offender — in early-life psychic conflicts (psychoanalysis), in stable personality dispositions (the psychopath / sociopath tradition, Eysenck), in neurological or hormonal abnormality (biological criminology), or in cognitive deficits.

The discipline's standing critique is that all of these traditions extract the offender from their social context and reduce a meaningful act to an inner determinant. A more telling critique is that many of the categories the psychology mobilises (most famously homosexuality before its declassification in 1973-74) are themselves culturally variable. What looks like a stable scientific description of mental abnormality is often a coded record of the prejudices of the era.

Critical criminology

The fourth entry is the longest and most polemically loaded. Critical criminology dates itself to the establishment of the National Deviancy Conference in July 1968 — the so-called "York group" of sociologists, criminologists, and activists who set out to write a new criminology that would treat deviance as a social and political product rather than as an inner pathology.

Author's argument: the central proposition of critical criminology is that what counts as crime, and which crimes get prosecuted, are functions of the historical, political, cultural, and economic conditions of the society at a given moment. There is no necessary link between crime and social response to it — street crime dominates political agendas and fraud does not, even though fraud causes greater losses, because the political economy of attention selects in one direction.

The original Marxist framing — that crime can be understood as a "reaction to positions held in an antagonistic social structure" — ran into serious internal difficulties almost immediately. Crime is not equally distributed across the groups oppressed by capitalism: men offend much more than women, even though women are more likely to be poor; some ethnic groups appear more in the official statistics than others, in ways that are partly real and partly an artefact of differential policing. And the empirical fact that most predatory crime is poor-on-poor — that the "reaction to an antagonistic structure" is the victimisation of other victims of that structure — was hard to square with the original framing.

The result was a split. Left realism (John Lea, Jock Young) argued that critical criminologists had to take victims seriously, especially in poor neighbourhoods where the victimisation was concentrated, and that the discipline needed mid-range theories about the offender–victim–public–state interaction rather than grand structural theories. Left idealism kept the structural critique, arguing that criminalisation is itself a political logic that mobilises popular consent for the state's management of "problem populations".

The recurring criticism of critical criminology is that, in being "resolutely sociological", it threatens to dissolve criminology into sociology — at which point "crime" becomes a lens for studying other things rather than a topic in its own right. The defence is that criminology is a "rendezvous discipline" anyway, and that the rendezvous is more productive when one of the participants is asking sharp political-economic questions.

Practical application

The topic's four concepts equip the reader to interrogate any policy proposal:

Example

A 15-year-old is caught shoplifting a £4 chocolate bar. Run the case through each lens.

The criminal-psychology reading asks whether the act reflects a deficit in self-control, an emerging conduct disorder, or a normal one-off act of adolescent risk-taking. It prescribes a behavioural intervention if it finds the first two.

The labelling / criminal-career reading observes that the act is primary deviance. Whether it becomes a career depends on what happens in the next six months. A stern but private warning from the shop-keeper and the child's parent: probably no career. A formal police caution that the child must declare on every job application for ten years, school counsellor flagged, peer group altered, social-media reputation marked: now you are watching secondary deviance form in real time.

The criminal-justice-system reading notes that the same act will produce wildly different outcomes depending on which of the six agencies engages first — a CPS prosecutorial discretion (no public interest in prosecuting) is a very different path from a Youth Offending Team referral, even though both are nominally the same system.

The critical-criminology reading asks why we treat the £4 chocolate bar as the case that matters when the same supermarket's parent company is the subject of a multi-year investigation into wage theft from store workers that costs each worker more than that chocolate bar every shift. The criminal-justice machinery activates instantly for the child and barely activates for the corporation, and that asymmetry is the political logic the topic wants you to be able to name.

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