1 Situating Criminology On the Production and Consumption of Knowledge about Crime and J ustice Ian Loader and Richard Sparks Introduction: More footprints in the sandThe development of social scientific theory and knowledge takes place not simply within the heads of individuals, but within particular institutional domains. These domains are, in turn, shaped by their surroundings: how academic institutions are organized, how disciplines are divided and sub-divided, how disputes emerge, how research is funded and how findings are published and used. In criminology, an understanding of these institutional domains is especially important for knowledge is situated not just, or even primarily, in the pure academic world, but in the applied domain of the states crime control apparatus. (Cohen 1988: 67) Three decades ago, in 1981, Stanley Cohen published a report on the current state of criminology and the sociology of deviance in Britain.1The paper, entitled Footprints in the Sand, outlined the visions and divisions of the field of social scientific research and teaching on crime as Cohen observed them at the time.Cohen described the institutional locations, disciplinary affiliations and guiding preoccupations of what he termed mainstream British criminology, and charted some of the key changes that occurred during the 1970s.He also mapped the formation and fractious development of the National Deviancy Conference and set out the ideas that were challenging, and seeking to transcend, the parochialism of conventional criminology.His conclusion was that while at the edges of the academic field new ideas were being absorbed and accommodations made, little was happening to dent the collective self-confidence of the mainstream.At the centre of the criminological enterprise, Cohen remarked, it is business as usual (Cohen 1988: 84).

1Thereportwaspublishedasoneofsetofreadingsproducedforathird-levelOpenUniversitycourseon Issues in Crimeand Society (Fitzgerald etal. 1981). Itwas later re-printed in a collection ofCohens essays (Cohen 1988). All citations are from the re-print. 2 Business was not to remain as usual for much longer.Revisiting Cohens analysis today one is struck by two things.It is clear, first of all, that Cohen was writing on the cusp of significant change inside criminology and in the social institutions and practices within which it is enmeshed and that it strives to understand and explain.In 1981 academic criminology in Britain remained a smallish cottage industry, albeit one that had recently been given impetus by the expansion of higher education in the 1960s.It comprised a few dozen active researchers.There was no annual criminology conference.Criminological education was limited to five masters programmes (at Cambridge, Edinburgh, Hull, Keele and Sheffield) and a smattering of final year options on law and sociology degrees.The idea that one could teach entire criminology degrees to undergraduates had yet to capture the imagination of any would-be course director or entrepreneurial vice-chancellor.The field had two dedicated journals The British Journal of Criminology and The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and each year generated a relatively small, and manageable, number of books, articles and reports.It was possible to read everything that was produced.In the intervening period criminology has boomed, in Britain and in several other jurisdictions around the world (Kerner 1998).There has, as we shall see, been a dramatic increase in the number of researchers, teachers, courses, students, conferences, books and journals.As a result, criminology has somewhat to the dismay of Cohen and many of his contemporaries taken on the institutional paraphernalia of an autonomous discipline (Garland 2011).The publication and contents of this weighty Handbook (first published in 1994, and now in its fifth edition) are testament to this transformed state of affairs!2 This expansion has occurred in part because the objects of criminological enquiry - crime, policing, justice, punishment, fear, victims, control, order, security have since the 1980s come to occupy a much more prominent and disputed place in the lives and consciousness of citizens and the talk and actions of governing authorities, in Britain and in many other western democracies (Garland 2001; Simon 2007).At the time of Cohens essay the early sightings of this heating up of the crime question were already discernable, and indeed had been astutely dissected by Cohen (1980).Rising crime rates, panics and mobilisations around youth subcultures and the black mugger, and police clashes with protestors and

2 For a review of the first edition situating the Handbook in terms of what is says about, and what it might do to, the expanding field of criminology, see Loader and Worrall (1995). 3 strikers had made the 1979 general election the first in which law and order figured loudly and swayed voters (Downes and Morgan 1994) even if the institutions and settled assumptions of liberal elitism and penal welfarism remained largely in place (Loader 2006).But in the intervening three decades the landscapes of crime, order and control shifted decisively (Loader and Sparks 2007).The growth of mass imprisonment, private security, and surveillance technology; the rise of penal populism and the victims movement; the globalization of crime and development of transnational crime control networks; 9/11 and 7/7; and the advent of the internet, wall-to-wall news and new social media - all this attests to the prominent and emotive place that crime and crime control have come to assume in contemporary social relations and political culture.This prominence is plainly and intimately connected to the expansion of criminology.In our view, these altered contexts also call for fresh thinking about the fields boundaries, focus and ambition. The second striking and still valuable - thing about Cohens essay is that it has a spirit and orientation that can assist us in this task.Footprints in the Sand is an early exemplar of an activity that has since become more common across the social sciences namely, the attempt to think sociologically about the production and consumption of knowledge, in this case criminological knowledge.To think about and hence situate criminology in this manner is to ask where this activity is located, what its boundaries are, and what relations exist between criminology and the institutions which support it.It means attending, not only to the questions, approaches and knowledge claims that constitute the activity, but also to the conditions of possibility for different kinds of knowledge production, and to the circulation and effects of the knowledge produced.It is to study criminology not as a discipline (we do not, as will become clear, think that this is the most helpful way of thinking about it) but as a field, not just in its commonplace sense but also in Pierre Bourdieus more particular application of this term.This orients enquiry towards where and how criminology is constituted, to its lines of vision and division, and to its relations to other fields academic, legal, political, bureaucratic, journalistic, and so forth (Bourdieu 2004). To suggest that this approach has become more common in the years since Cohens essay was written is to point to a thriving if rarely uncontroversial body of work in science and technology studies which has examined, inter alia, the laboratory practices of scientists, the 4 politics of scientific claims-making, and the role and power of science in democratic societies (e.g., Latour 1987; Collins and Pinch 1998; Irwin and Michael 2003).To date, little of this work and its questions and concepts - has been turned back on the social sciences themselves; there is nothing like a social science studies of equivalent empirical depth and theoretical sophistication.3 Such an orientation has thus only sporadically found expression in studies of criminology.There are, to be sure, several important historical accounts of the origins and development of the science of the criminal which emphasize that criminology was constituted in prisons and reformatories before establishing itself as an academic subject inside universities (e.g., Garland 1988, 2002; Rafter 2009).The work of the late Richard Ericson returned time and again to the question of how criminological knowledge is produced and communicated within circuits of power (Ericson 2003).Other writers have investigated the often tense relations that exist between criminological researchers and the sponsors and users of their knowledge (Zedner 2003; Walters 2003), and one can point to a notable recent collection of reflections on the condition, borders and futures of the field (Bosworth and Hoyle 2011).The question of criminological engagement with politics and public life has also been the subject of our own recent work (Loader and Sparks 2010).Yet research and writing about criminology as a field of enquiry remains a sporadic and unsystematic activity, lacking much historical depth. It is, moreover, often dismissed as navel-gazing. Even Cohen ended his report on criminology with a warning about the dangers of obsessive self-reflection (Cohen 1988: 89). There are some obvious reasons for this impatient and sometimes dismissive attitude towards reflection on criminology.They have to do with the social and political import, and the sociological interest, of criminologys organizing questions. Cohen says that there are just three: Why are laws made?, Why are they broken? and What do we do or what should we do about this? (Cohen 1988: 9; see also Sutherland et al. 1992: 3).How one answers these questions has major practical and policy implications.They are also intimately entangled with individual subjectivity and well-being; the texture of collective life, and the scope, power, legitimacy and accountability of the state and other governing authorities.These are questions that lie close to the heart of social sciences abiding concern with the problem of

3 There are, it should be said, somenotable exceptions (e.g., Abbott 2001; Haney 2008;Lamont 2009; Savage 2010). 5 order and are inseparable from political contests regarding the nature of the good society.Given this, the sceptic asks, why would anyone trouble themselves with something as trivial as the study of criminology or as tedious as the activities and self-understandings of criminologists?We have some sympathy with this view and well understand, indeed share, an impatience to get back to more substantive questions.Yet it is precisely because of the close proximity of criminologys subject-matter to the lives and preoccupations of citizens, and the powers and interests of governing authorities, that those who produce and consume knowledge about crime and justice ought to cultivate and sustain a reflexive awareness about the conditions under which such knowledge is (or is not) produced and the contexts in which it is used, abused, championed, derided, or ignored.Reflexivity in this sense is not a distraction from the real business of trying to answer any one of Cohens three questions. It is a vital constituent of good social science research in respect of each of them. These, at any rate, are the thoughts that animate our attempt in this chapter to provide a sketch and it can only really be a sketch of the contours of contemporary criminology.4

We begin by focusing on the conditions and settings of criminological production.We describe the ways in which criminology has expanded in the years since Footprints in the Sand appeared and analyse the institutional arrangements and relations that condition the production of knowledge about crime and justice today.Our concern here is in thinking through some of the benefits and dangers of criminologys emergence as an autonomous discipline.We turn next to the object(s) of criminology.We outline some of the lines of vision and division that shape the field in respect of competing accounts of what it means to produce knowledge of the social world. The range of issues that are selected for criminological scrutiny today is very wide; and the new modes and topics of enquiry that are attracting attention in todays globalized and insecure world extend from genetics to genocide.We then examine the consumption of criminological knowledge.Our concern here is with the audiences, forms of engagement and visions of governance that are

4MuchofthefocusofthisinstitutionalanalysiswillbeoncriminologyinBritainthoughwewillmake comparison with other jurisdictions when it seems valuable to do so.Having said this, we are aware that one of the criticisms made of earlier editions of the Oxford Handbook is that they were about criminology and criminal justiceinBritain,orevensomethingcalledBritishcriminology.Wehopetomakeitclearthat,under conditionsinwhichjusticeideasandprogrammesflowbackandforthacrossborders,itmakeslittlesenseto speak of British or any other national criminology, as if they were discrete entities. There is no methodological nationalismhere(WimmerandGlickSchiller2002).Neverthelessthecriminologiespractisedindifferent placesaroundtheworldaresignificantlyshapedbydistinctsetsofinstitutionallocationsanddisciplinary traditions, as also needs to be acknowledged. 6 postulated by producers of criminological research as they go about their work.We note some of the ways in which criminology is received in the wider circuits of culture and politics, and the contests that occur between criminology and other claims to know about crime and justice, and the demands for action which flow from them.In conclusion, we suggest that this inescapably raises the question of how criminological projects are entangled with competing conceptions of the good society and hence with politics.We argue that certain visions of politics lie buried within different conceptions of criminology and that there is merit in making these more explicit, before setting out the case for a research agenda that takes as its object of enquiry the relationship between crime, punishment and democratic politics. The field of criminologyKnowledge about crime and justice doesnt just happen.Nor is it located solely in the heads and activities of the individuals who produce it.The question of what comes to be known, from what theoretical perspectives, by what methods, about what crimes and ways of responding to crime, in what forms, and with what effects is conditioned by a whole range of institutions.These institutions employ researchers (permanently or temporarily); fund (or do not fund) research projects and programmes; permit (or refuse) access to data, research subjects and sites; offer outlets for publication; and use, abuse, champion or ignore the products of that research.Each of these institutions universities, research councils, charities, think-tanks, consultancy firms, publishing houses, newspapers, broadcasters and new social media, campaign groups and lobbyists, political parties, prisons, police forces, government departments and so on are themselves situated in economic, social and political contexts that shape how each of them think and can act.To study criminology as a field is to explore how power relations and struggles between actors in these different institutional sites structure the knowledge that is (and is not) produced. 5

5 In a recent extension of Bourdieus field theory to the sociology of punishment, Page usefully defines field as a semi-autonomous, relatively bounded sphere of action in which people, groups and organizations struggle with and against each other (Page 2012: ???). 7 One great virtue of Stanley Cohens essay is that it sought, back in 1981, to map the field of criminology with these issues very much in mind.Cohen noted the importance to criminology in Britain since 1945 of a small number of key academic institutions, notably the Cambridge Institute of Criminology (founded with government backing in 1960 Butler 1974; Radzinowicz 1988), but also the London School of Economics and small clusters of criminological activity in Edinburgh, Oxford and Sheffield.He also registered the size and significance of criminological research conducted within or funded by government most importantly by the Home Office Research and Planning Unit (established in 1959 Lodge 1974) but also in research branches of the prisons department and the Metropolitan Police. Cohen further signalled the role played by quasi-academic bodies (1988: 83) with reformist ambitions and close links to criminal justice and psychiatric practitioners.The Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, which founded and owned the British Journal of Criminology, was foremost among these, though mention should also be made of the Howard League for Penal Reform, a pressure group which housed the fields other key journal, the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice.Cohens point was that this institutional assemblage structured the main contours of post-war British criminology.First, its pragmatic frame of reference (1988: 69) and distaste for theory its selfunderstanding as realistic, empirical and moderate (Radzinowicz 1999).Second; the shape of its inter-disciplinary eclectism - Sir Leon Radzinowicz, founding Director of the Cambridge Institute and the towering figure of mid-twentieth century British criminology, viewed inter-disciplinary criminology in the following terms: A psychiatrist, a social psychologist, a penologist, a lawyer, a statistician joining together on a combined research operation (1961: 177).Third, criminologys orientation to the task of producing what it saw as an effective and humane in short, a civilized - justice system.Finally, its remote and mutually suspicious relation to sociology. Cohen also set out, however, to describe the intellectual and political challenges that were beginning to emerge to this conception of criminology and its relation to the world.A new generation of sociologists, embarking on academic careers in the the new universities of the 1960s, and embroiled in the political and cultural tumult of that decade, brought new objects of enquiry to the fore: deviance, social control, political conflict and state violence, police power, ideology and the manufacture of news, not to mention the reflexive and intentionally subversive re-examination of the claims and effects of criminology itself which were so much at issue in Cohens essay and in other writing of the period. New theoretical perspectives and 8 concepts were imported (from the US and from elsewhere in the social sciences) and put to use: appreciation, labelling, moral panics, symbolic interactionism, anti-psychiatry, Marxism and feminism.New institutions were assembled to provide a platform for these perspectives and to build alliances with radical social workers and lawyers, anti-psychiatrists, students, prisoners organizations and campaigns against state violence.Foremost among them were the aforementioned National Deviancy Conference (1968-1979) and the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control (founded in 1973 and still in existence).The then smallish social world of British criminology had become one of conflict and schism.6 What though has happened in the years since Cohens essay was written?What does the field of criminology look like today if we try to understand it in Cohens terms? The big theme is one of expansion across a number of dimensions.The platform for growth has been the embedding of criminology within mass higher education.The first undergraduate programme in criminology in Britain was launched at Keele University in 1991.Twenty years on 87 UK universities teach criminology and criminal justice in single and joint degrees that number well into the hundreds. Sixty-three British universities run postgraduate programmes.This development sparked a two decade long explosion of academic posts in the field.This has in turn in part under pressure of a governmental research assessment regime led to a burgeoning number of textbooks, handbooks, monographs, edited volumes and journal articles.We ourselves, and all our peers of whatever political and theoretical orientation, have been beneficiaries of and participants in the resulting boom.In Britain, much of the increasing flow of books was brought into existence by criminologys own specialist academic publisher Willan.7 New journals proliferated and now include (mentioning only the most prominent): Policing and Society (founded in 1990), Theoretical Criminology (1997), Global Crime (1999), Punishment and Society (1999), Criminology and Criminal Justice (2001), Youth Justice (2001), Crime, Media, Culture (2005), and Feminist Criminology (2006).The rejuvenated British Society of Criminology has over 700 members, awards numerous prizes, and runs an annual conference that reliably attracts around 500 participants.Specialist conferences are an almost weekly occurrence.However one measures it, this is a tale of rapid and remarkable growth in what was once a small and

6 Key publications from the period include Cohen (1971), Taylor, Walton and Young (1973, 1975), Taylor and Taylor (1975), Pearson (1975), Smart (1977), Hall et al. (1978) and Downes and Rock (1979). 7 In 2010, Willan was sold to the Taylor and Francis Group.9 relatively obscure corner of the social sciences.One of the central ironies of this story of course is that in Britain at least it was precisely the radical, sceptical and critical versions of criminology, those most apt to question its disciplinary pretensions, that played a leading role in stimulating its growth and institutionalization within the teaching and research programmes of the expanded university system.In this regard the boundaries, though often invested with no little emotive importance from either flank, between mainstream and critical versions of criminology seem increasingly blurred and confused (cf. Carlen 2011: 98).Stanley Cohen himself had perhaps the sharpest eye for the resulting ironies: The more successful our attack on the old regime, the more we received PhDs, tenure, publishers contracts and research funds, appeared on booklists and examination questions, and even became directors of institutes of criminology (Cohen 1988: 8). The expansion of criminology in Britain has been especially striking.But it is by no means uniquely a British phenomenon.Rapid growth in criminology and criminal justice programmes has also occurred in the United States, especially in the form of professional criminal justice education at state universities and colleges sponsored by the Justice Departments Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (Akers 1995; Savelsberg et al. 2002).Criminology and criminal justice majors now far outstrip those enrolled on sociology programmes.The annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology and the more applied Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences regularly attract over 3,000 participants.The field comprises numerous dedicated journals.8 Across Europe, a more diverse picture can be found.In certain instances criminology has recently undergone rapid expansion, somewhat in the British manner (The Netherlands).Elsewhere, one encounters places where criminology has little autonomous institutional existence (Germany and Italy) and where its niche in respect of its parent disciplines principally law and sociology seems relatively precarious. Certain societies have small but active and influential criminological traditions (Finland, Norway and Sweden). In some places criminology remains a fledgling activity striving to establish itself whether in countries such as the Republic of Ireland and Spain, or in post-communist societies such as Estonia and Poland.Yet for all this unevenness, an

8 Including,Criminology andCriminology and Public Policy (run by ASC),JusticeQuarterly, (run by ACJS), Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Journal of ResearchinCrimeandDelinquency,JournalofQuantitativeCriminology,andtheJournalofInterpersonal Violence. 10 overall trend towards expansion can nonetheless be discerned.The European Society of Criminology (founded in 2000) has been a key organizational conduit for this: it currently has around 850 members from some 50 countries; hosts an annual conference attracting in the region of 700 participants, and publishes the European Journal of Criminology.9One should note, finally, that criminology departments and programmes have spread across Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and have begun to develop in India, China and throughout Asia (Braithwaite 2011; Smith et al. 2011: Part III). A second key theme has been that of growing autonomy: as criminology has assumed the institutional properties associated with scientific disciplines it has found a more established and discrete place inside the academic field (Garland 2011).Part of this story has to do with internal specialisation.As the field of criminology has expanded so too has the effort of handling the resulting diversity (in theoretical orientations, methods, questions posed, disciplines drawn upon, commitments expressed, audiences supposed) by institutionalizing the salient differences of focus and purpose. We have discussed these multiple divisions and differentiations elsewhere, and noted the dangers of so many contending criminologies frequently claiming to be much more than simple subject specialisms and instead casting doubt on one anothers intellectual or political credibility (Loader and Sparks 2010: ch. 1). But related risks also attach to the second aspect of criminologys growing autonomy its separation from fields of social enquiry that have historically nourished criminological theory and research.Throughout its history, many of its leading exponents have been careful to deny that criminology is a discipline they have indeed, like us, been attracted by its disciplinary impurity and recidivist transgression of boundaries (Braithwaite 2011: 133).For example, Savelsberg and Sampson (2002: 101) argue that criminology is a multi-disciplinary field that has a subject matter but no unique methodological commitment or paradigmatic theoretical framework.Moreover, they argue, there are no common assumptions or guiding insights.There is no intellectual idea that animates criminology. David Downes (1988) has, in a similar vein, famously described criminology as a rendezvous subject a field organized around a social problem which serves as a crossroads for exchange between researchers trained in more basic disciplines (sociology, psychology, law, philosophy,

9ThisbriefoverviewdrawsheavilyontheinvaluablecountrysurveysthattheEuropeanJournalof Criminology has routinely commissioned since its inception in 2004.

11 history, economics, political science), and is repeatedly animated and rejuvenated by ideas and concepts imported from outside. Yet, despite these protestations, criminologys expansion has seen it assume the organizational properties of a discipline separate departments, degrees, journals, conferences and prizes as well, over time, as hiring researchers whose entire higher education has been in criminology.In this context, it is worth recalling Andrew Abbotts (2001) analysis of the cultural functions of disciplines.Disciplines, Abbott argues, have what one might call existential and epistemic purposes.In the former case, Disciplines provide dreams and models both of reality and of learning.They give images of coherent discourse.They create modes of knowledge that seem, to the participants, uniquely real.Every academic knows the experience of reading work from outside of his or her discipline and knows the unsettling feeling it induces.Disciplines in fact provide the core of identity for the vast majority of intellectuals.In the latter case: A cultural function of disciplines is that of preventing knowledge from becoming too abstract or overwhelming.Disciplines legitimate our necessarily partial knowledge.They define what it is permissible not to know and thereby limit the body of books one must have read.They provide a specific tradition and lineage.They provide common sets of research practices that unify groups with diverse substantive interests.Often . . . these various limits are quite arbitrary. (Abbott 2001: 130-31) Abbotts point is that the organization of disciplines matters: it has material effects on knowledge production.Steve Fuller comments on these dynamics pointedly.Disciplinary boundaries, he suggests, are artificial barriers to the transaction of knowledge claims.Such boundaries are necessary evils that become more evil the more they are perceived as necessary (1993: 36).Viewed in this light, the risks of criminology morphing into an autonomous discipline are several. There is a risk that the field will lose connection with basic disciplines (Garland 2011: 300) in a manner that narrows intellectual horizons, insulates criminology from key ideas and debates in the social and political sciences, and generates work which lacks ambition and wider scholarly interest or indeed which simply mis-states its intellectual origins and resources and disclaims all interest in its own history (Rock 2005).12 This disconnection would leave criminology ill-equipped to respond to the challenges of living in globalizing, fretful and insecure times a point made a decade ago by Garland and Sparks (2000).There is a risk of criminological research and teaching programmes becoming more vulnerable to external influence and control in ways that orient the field towards policy-directed problem-solving and away from curiosity-driven problem-raising.10As Andrew Abbott reminds us: There is ample evidence that problem-oriented empirical work does not create enduring, self-producing communities like disciplines except in areas with stable and strongly institutionalized external clienteles like criminology (Abbott 2001: 134).There is a risk, finally, of criminology predominantly adopting a contractor-style relationship with the most powerful of these clienteles, while losing connection with fields of social and professional practice (some of which have played significant roles in its historical development social work, most obviously, but also public health) and with oppositional and counter-publics such as the womens movement, prisoners rights campaigns and civil liberties groups.Under such conditions the policy relevance of criminology may appear at least to be established (though we shall have more to say about this later), but its civic role and functions may become attenuated and obscure (see Hope 2011: 467). The existence of institutionalized external clienteles is, in fact, a key dimension of the tale we have just recounted about academic criminology.The expansion and expanded autonomy of criminology cannot be explained by internal reference to activities within the field, or even by taking account of the condition and incentive structures of universities.The dramatic rise of criminology has been coincident with and may be an effect of what we have elsewhere described as the heating up of the criminal question (Loader and Sparks 2010: ch. 3).For much of the twentieth century in Britain crime and punishment were not routinely issues of major public concern, nor did they figure prominently in contests for political office.The criminal question was for the most part managed off-stage by a network of senior government officials, strategic criminal justice practitioners, and concerned but respectable reform groups (Ryan 1978).These elites understood their responsibilities to be administering an effective and humane penal system (an activity in which the rehabilitative ideal played a crucial legitimating role); forging expert consensus on what were taken to be difficult even intractable social problems, and managing always potentially volatile public opinion

10InanimportantsociologicalstudyofUScriminology,Savelsbergandhiscolleagueshavedemonstrated empirically this very effect (Savelsberg et al. 2002, 2004; Savelsberg and Flood 2004). 13 (Loader 2006; see also Ryan 2003).The world of mainstream criminology described by Stanley Cohen in 1981 was closely aligned - ideologically and institutionally - with those circuits of elite liberal governance.As we have intimated, however, Cohen was writing on the cusp of the fall from grace of those elites and their preferred mode of governing crime. The last three decades have seen some far-reaching changes in the place that the criminal question occupies in everyday social relations and political cultures of Britain and many other western liberal democracies.The effort to make sense of these changes has given rise to some of the most important work and significant debate in contemporary criminology, whether in respect of the culture of control (Garland 2001), governing through crime (Simon 2007), or the penal effects of neo-liberalism (Reiner 2007; Wacquant 2009a).We do not have space to describe the relevant shifts in any detail.Nor can we analyse the vectors of disagreement, beyond noting that the developments these terms denote are unevenly encountered within and between states (Tonry 2007; Lacey 2008; Barker 2009); that one needs to emphasize continuities and contingency rather than epochs and catastrophes (Loader and Sparks 2004; OMalley 2000), and that aspects of them remain actively disputed (Matthews 2005).Nevertheless, this altered landscape of governance is of great pertinence to the question of situating criminology, as we shall see.A brief - and necessarily crude summary of key developments is therefore in order: Politicization of crime.Crime is no longer managed off-stage by experts but has become the subject of political dispute and contest.As crime becomes a token of political competition governmental reactions to it are heavily swayed by short-term calculation and expediency.In this climate, crime policy comes increasingly under the influence of mass media and public opinion and at the mercy of sometimes actively whipped-up popular emotion.Victims emerge as influential political actors and representatives of the public interest.The result is a policy environment that is hyperactive, volatile and unstable, one in which it becomes difficult to make reason and evidence the drivers of what is said and done.All this is underpinned, and to some extent driven, by a heightened crime consciousness among citizens, as anxieties about crime assume a more prominent place in shaping everyday routines and social institutions. 14 Re-centring of the penal state.In the face of rising insecurities and demands for order (generated by socio-economic precariousness and the partial retraction of social welfare) the criminal justice state becomes materially and symbolically central to the management of order and control of marginal populations.Prison returns as the modal institution of social regulation and is accompanied by an era of mass penal supervision.New powers and orders proliferate to control anti-social behaviour, violent and sex offenders, and terrorism.Policing becomes more visible and pivotal to efforts to manage conflicts and assuage social anxieties.This is accompanied by a public framing of the criminal question which privileges public protection against the criminal Other.A silent revolution in crime control.The reassertion of sovereign authority is accompanied by what David Garland (2001) calls adaptive strategies for managing crime risk.Situational crime prevention schemes manipulate the environment to reduce opportunities for offending.Local multi-agency partnerships proliferate, as does problem-solving policing.Government makes greater efforts through targets, inspection and audit to micro-manage criminal justice bureaucracies and shape outcomes.New techniques and discourses of risk management are used to predict future crime, target offenders and address the behaviour of those under penal supervision.This is often accompanied by systemic demands for new knowledge and a greater orientation to locating crime control in an evidence base.Pluralization of policing and security.The state has become but one of a number of actors engaged in the delivery of punishment and the governance of security.Responsibility for crime prevention spreads downwards to private citizens and to businesses, schools, hospitals, planners and so on.Involvement in crime control spreads outwards to the private sector whose personnel and hardware play a greater role in policing and protection and the building and management of prisons.Responsibility and capacity also spreads upwards to new international and transnational bodies, including the European Union (which assumes a vital new place in cross-border policing and the control of migration), the Council of Europe, and the International Criminal Court. Global flows of crime and crime policies.Under conditions of globalization, there is acceleration in the intensity and extensity in the flow of capital, ideas, people and 15 goods across borders.The world becomes one of networks and flows rather than places and borders, and the conditions exist for criminal activity to be organized and take place across frontiers.But the same holds for circulation and exchange between institutional actors and policy prescriptions.We inhabit an age of transnational policy elites, mobile entrepreneurs and global think-tanks which play key roles in the international circulation of such crime control innovations as zero-tolerance, community policing, three-strikes sentencing and penal privatisation.One needs now to attend to the travels of the criminal question (Melossi et al. 2011a).This means investigating not only the agents of diffusion, but also the forms and meanings that policies assume in different local contexts, and the reasons why some crime control techniques find it difficult, or even fail more or less completely, to travel. What though is the impact of these socio-political transformations on the production of knowledge about crime and justice and the shape of academic criminology?The most direct of these changes concern the relation between government and criminological knowledge production (Newburn 2011).There are of course institutional reasons why this relation is tense and prone to conflict as, indeed, it long has since been (Zedner 2003).But the altered climate of crime governance we have just described has tended to make governments more demanding, less loyal and, arguably, less pivotal sponsors of criminological knowledge.On the one hand, the politicized policy environment has intensified the long-standing tendency of government to directly and indirectly support research with short time horizons that answer pressing policy concerns, while also giving rise to micro-management of the research process and heightened wariness about potentially scandal-creating findings.Some who have been scarred by this new climate have used their experience to expose governments claim to be doing evidence-based policy as a fiction and to call for a boycott of official research conducted under these conditions (Hope and Walters 2008).Those on the other side of the commissioning fence routinely claim that criminology is today lacking in the required skills and appropriate disposition (Wiles 2001).On the other hand, government has increasingly resorted to other - less demanding and risky knowledge producers, such as consultancy firms, social research companies and a thriving public opinion industry, to supply the information it requires. 16 Some actors in this market are attractive to the users of research simply because they deliver the product on time, in a technically competent manner, with fewer overheads and less self-regard than university-based academics.Others can exercise appeal and suasive, even sometimes decisive, political influence precisely because they have a line, a known and readily communicated position, which, moreover, happens to align with the political preferences and prevailing rationality of governments, or aspirants to govern. The periods of ascendancy enjoyed by the inventors of certain well-known policy diagnoses (Murray 1984), recipes and interventions (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Kelling and Coles 1998), and techniques or methods (Bratton 1998) need to be understood in something like these terms (Jones and Newburn 2006; Wacquant 2009b). These innovators are no mere technicians, still less disinterested scholars.They become political players in their own right, entrepreneurs of packaged programmes and solutions, and the court philosophers to powerful policy actors.In this regard the more focal crime and punishment have become to the programmes of political parties and the decision-making of institutions (Simon 2007), and the more salient in the wider circuits of political discourse and popular culture, the more the production and exchange of knowledge about crime has seeped out from the universities and in-house government research units and become the stock-in-trade on one hand of consultants, analysts and various more or less technical experts, and on the other of think-tanks, lobbyists, campaigners, pundits and sales-persons. One outcome of this more contested and plural crime complex is that, even while the criminal question has become more politically charged, government or as we might say, sometimes contentiously, the state is arguably displaced from its once pre-eminent place as the primary sponsor and recipient of criminological research.In this altered climate, police and penal professionals, private security firms, NGOs and pressure groups also become producers, mediators and users of knowledge about crime and justice, as well as a source of new modes of engagement and collaboration.11There are dangers of capture at many points in these developments, and many instances of criminology making itself all-too-readily available as a docile and un-questioning producer of serviceable knowledge for rationalizing the operations of the already powerful. Or, as John Braithwaite more polemically puts it: For the moment, criminology is too comfortable with itself to see the potential to leave a great

11 Mention might bemade in this context of the proliferation of quasi-academic journals which aim to straddle the worlds of knowledge production and practice. These include, inter alia, Probation Journal, Policing, Police Practice and Research, Crime Prevention and Community Safety, and The Security Journal. 17 intellectual legacy. It is too much a creature of capitalism to turn around and bite it the way capitalism needs to be bitten (Braithwaite 2011: 142).But there may also be a possibility of liberation into less constrained, more democratically involved and accessible, creative and imaginative roles as we have tried to indicate elsewhere (Garland and Sparks 2000; Loader 2010; Loader and Sparks 2010).We take up these issues in more detail in the section on the consumption of criminology below. Let us take stock.What lessons can be taken from our brief overview of the field of criminology and its conditions of possibility?We think there are three.First, that only the most un-reflexive exponents of the criminological craft, and incurious among its students, will regard the growth and autonomy of criminology as a self-evident good.In our view, there are in fact sound reasons to pay careful attention to its potentially damaging effects, if only so one is better equipped to guard against them.Second, we have shown that the production of knowledge about crime and justice is structured by institutional contexts, not only inside the academic field, but also in terms of the relation of knowledge producers to political, bureaucratic and journalistic fields, and their preferred forms of capital and operative rules.Institutional arrangements matter.But this should not, thirdly, lead us to an analytical stance which reduces disposition to position, closes down the space for agency and detracts attention from debating the substantive claims of the criminology that is produced.People make their own knowledge about crime and justice.But, as Marx (1852: 15) reminds us: They do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.One needs to remain mindful of this as we turn to the stuff itself. The object(s) of criminology The doubts about criminology set in early.In a brilliantly premonitory article of 1933 entitled Some basic problems of criminology Jerome Hall looked across dubiously from the ostensibly higher ground of criminal law theory.In its current state of development, he said, social science looks like little more than social policy more or less disguised (1933: 119).Criminology, in particular, contains expressions of approbation or displeasure masquerading as objective judgements.It struck Hall as unlikely that criminology would advance beyond this condition any time soon for the primary reason that rather than taking a 18 discrete scientific object of investigation it moved in a world in which our frames of reference have been constructed for us (ibid).Hall could see no necessary relation between wise policy and the endless refinement of scientific precision (1933: 128).The prospects for criminology were limited in that it was composed of several fields that overlap and intersect at so many points that it is impossible to detect any common characteristics (1933: 132). Much has changed in the intervening almost eighty years but not everything.Some at least of Halls concerns have distinct contemporary echoes, even if he wrote before almost all that we now pass on to students as the canonical (if not indeed clichd) account of the succession of landmarks in criminological theory remained to be written.Two kinds of question resound down the decades.The first regards whether criminology ever can have or should aspire towards some form of paradigmatic unity or consensus.The second concerns the uncertain relationship between criminological knowledge and social and political action in the world. Since Hall wrote, most serious considerations of the question of paradigmatic unity in criminology have concluded that this is at best unlikely, if not indeed actually dangerous.In what we might now view as a companion piece to Cohens classic 1981 essay, appearing in the same volume, Jock Young precisely and formally set down a number of models of criminology.Those that concerned him then were: classicism, positivism, conservatism, strain theory, new deviancy theory and Marxism.Young compared and contrasted these positions in terms of their assumptions on a series of dichotomous dimensions human nature (voluntarism or determinism); social order (consensus or coercion); the definition of crime (legal or social); the extent and distribution of crime (limited or extensive); the causes of crime (the individual versus society) and policy (punishment or treatment). Others have subsequently undertaken similar mapping exercises see, for example, Einstadter and Henry (2006) for one of the more stimulating recent examples. Young was of course acutely aware that most of these models were not uniquely criminological theories; nor indeed were they theories of quite the same kind (Young 1981: 250).Classicism is the name given by criminologists to a certain version of social contract 19 theory as applied to crime and punishment.Positivism is in the first instance a position in the philosophy of (social) science.Conservatism is a body of political beliefs and sensibilities.Strain theory is a sociological hypothesis with a bearing on the explanation of crime in certain kinds of social structure.New deviancy theory is self-consciously a challenge to what it construes as conventional criminology.Marxism is a materialist theory of historical development via dynamic change in the means and social relations of production and exchange.As Young observes, it is not just criminologists who think seriously about crime.Moreover, part of the point is that these disparate and uneasy bedfellows both converge and, ultimately, diverge, in some cases irreconcilably.Their disagreement is permanent, but not entirely chaotic.There will be, Young correctly predicts, no uni-linear development, no single dominant theory (despite various takeover bids).There will also be, he argues even more acutely, a high degree of historical forgetfulness and nave rediscovery (1981: 306-7).This is finally because the study of crime is not a marginal concern to the citizen but plunges us immediately into fundamental questions of order and morality in society and to the examination of the very basis of the civilization we live in (1981: 307). Rather than attempt another typology or formal exposition of positions or paradigms, we intend to follow Youngs precept where we think it takes us.This means picking up the second strand of unresolved questioning echoing down the decades from Jerome Hall onwards and focussing upon the relationships between criminological theory and various forms of social action in respect of the changing world to which that theory responds.One source of guidance here is again provided by Young, writing a bit over a decade later in the first edition of this very Handbook.By this time, in 1994, the sample of theoretical positions that engage Youngs attention have changed.The criminologies of relevance in the 1980s and 1990s are for him all ways of addressing (or denying) the conjoined crises of aetiology and policy he terms these Left idealism/radical social constructionism; New administrative criminology; Right realism and Left realism.The substance of this particular bit of cartography is not our main concern here seen from other vantage points in the world the mapping would have been done on a different projection, just as things look different again another fifteen years on.Youngs points include that these positions are themselves mainly versions of the earlier ones, a reiteration made possible by historical amnesia and seeming rediscovery (cf. Rock 2005).He goes on to argue that disciplines have both an interior and an exterior history.The interior history involves many of the topics we have already 20 addressed above the nature of academic exchange, the institutional settings in which research is conducted, its funding, publishing and so on and hence its constitution as a viable field.The exterior history, meanwhile, involves the extent to which the interior dialogue is propelled by the exterior world; scholars of different conviction clash on a terrain determined by the specificity of their society (Young 1994: 71; see also Melossi 2008).Theory, for Young, emerges out of a certain social and political conjuncture and has different uses and applications in diverse contexts around the world.Generalizations are not altogether impossible, but they do not all travel as well as their producers sometimes imagine (see Melossi et al. 2011a). It is apparent nevertheless that the various criminologies, while not all by any means expressly affiliated to one or other political ideology, and by no means only conducted by overtly political people, involve distinct theories of action, depictions of institutions, assumptions regarding the feasibility of various forms of policy, visions of smaller or grander forms of moral invention (OMalley 1992), management and intervention.They claim certain kinds of social or political change small or large - as possible and desirable and dismiss or preclude others as either unattainable or unacceptable.They feature different notions of the viability of intervention through the institutions of the criminal justice system as conventionally understood, and distinct premises regarding the effectiveness or otherwise of various modes of punishment or other species of social regulation.They envisage different kinds of relationship between the role of states in coercive social control and their activities in educational, health or family policies and attribute different weights and significance to these.They project different and in some cases ultimately mutually exclusive images of the proper roles of government agencies and other loci of collective action, commercial or associational.They magnify some problems and dispute the relative significance of others.In other words, criminological theories may not all be political theories (they may be, and very frequently are, all too ignorant of the claims of political theory properly so-called - Loader and Sparks 2010: ch. 5), but they all, without exception, find their uses and applications in circumstances that are shaped and conditioned by the realm of politics and they carry implications from and for that world. 21 There are two primary kinds of challenge with which criminology has to come to terms today, and these are both acutely contemporary forms of the same challenges that Jerome Hall noted in 1933.The first, which is in some degree the leitmotif of this chapter, concerns the various ways in which criminology deals with its inherently trans-disciplinary character, at the same time as coping intelligently and productively with a range of contingent pressures and incentives towards disciplinary consolidation.The second has to do with the ways in which its practitioners estimate the relative urgency and importance of a range of substantive topics and questions, some more or less familiar but others entirely novel, and find compelling ways to speak to these before a variety of possible audiences.The latter point also by extension returns us to the vexed issue of how, by whom and with what effects, criminology is consumed and put to use, and the chances criminologists have of influencing those uses.We address these questions separately in the next section. Every now and again somebody comes up with a more or less prescriptive view on what criminology is or should be really all about.Really it is all about variations in self-control.Really it is all about criminal events, not criminal dispositions.Really it is all about psycho-social development.Really it is all about the appropriation by states of the power to criminalize human action.Conversely, every now and again someone states that really and truly criminology has failed, or indeed cannot exist.We have discussed a number of such moves and why we think they are all implausible, at some length elsewhere (Loader and Sparks 2010: 17-26) and do not intend to rehearse that argument again now.More commonly, criminologists tend to affirm (some would say pay lip-service to) the principle that criminology is indeed a multi- or inter- or trans-disciplinary enterprise.Sometimes these statements are themselves disguised attempts at closure really criminology is just a species of something else, be it psychology or sociology, to take only the most common. We ourselves are at times tempted to say that really criminology is a species of the genus Politics, but we know this would be reductive and over-simplify our own point and so, mostly, manage to refrain. Criminology, we suggest, not very originally, has strong reasons to acknowledge its hybrid and cross-disciplinary status and in various ways and degrees has long done so.Since it stands at the confluence between, and seeks to engage with, a series of fields and streams of 22 influence that constitute its subject-matter, and since these fields are of (at least) political, legal, philosophical, economic, cultural, institutional, policy, professional, practical and personal characters, it can scarcely do otherwise.While the particular configuration of streams that are arranged around the criminal question may be unique, the dilemmas of disciplinarity arise certainly across the social sciences and in all likelihood everywhere.For this reason the question of how disciplines are constituted how they come into being, develop, consolidate and disperse is itself the topic of increasing attention (Repko 2008).In the case of criminology certain terms crop up frequently.Sometimes criminology is thought of as a kind of scavenger or gleaner it raids other disciplines for what it can get out of them (e.g., Zedner 2007). Its relationship with them is somewhat opportunist, if not actually parasitic.On other occasions criminology is depicted more peaceably as having a bridging function between other more separate, but more fundamental, subjects (Garland 2011: 293).As Repko (2008: 22-4) points out, such metaphors arise frequently wherever disciplinary boundaries are placed in question, or a need is sensed to transcend or subvert them. What should we deduce from this little excursus?First, we have argued repeatedly that while criminologists continue to teach and to debate some version (but evolving and shifting versions) of a canon of known, classic positions we should also cultivate a conception of criminology as a field with open, porous borders, receptive to new inputs, perhaps from unexpected quarters (Loader and Sparks 2010: ch. 5). Second, criminological theories are evaluated just like others in terms of coherence and explanatory power, evidentiary weight, accountability, originality and so on, and not by any special or uniquely criminological characteristic.None of this means, however, that debate in or about criminology is either merely chaotic or unnecessary.Criminology shares its provisional and contingent quasi-disciplinary character with many other fields of study.For these reasons we think it makes most sense to think about criminology socially and institutionally, rather than deductively or prescriptively.Richard Jones has argued that we think of it as an aggregation of communities, or following Etienne Wenger, of communities of practice (Wenger 1998) with certain shared, disputed or brokered boundary objects.12

12 Jones made this point in oral presentation at the launch of Bosworth and HoylesWhat is Criminology?, All Souls College, Oxford, 3 February 2011.23 If we cannot seal the borders we cannot seal them a priori on any side, choosing to engage only with those forms of knowledge we find most congenial.Many students of criminology ourselves very much included continue to insist on seeing criminology as among the more social of the social sciences, to borrow a phrase Mary Douglas (1992: 12) once used in another context.That is, its disputatious and contested character is intrinsic, given that its objects of inquiry themselves belong in the domains of strife and disorder, and are characterized by conflicts over their meaning and interpretation, as much as over the practical measures undertaken towards them by way of control or redress.Crime, criminalization, sanctioning and social control have always been socially and politically constituted at their very core.As Garland points out (2011: 307), with reference to Kitsuse and Cicourel (1963) and Hindess (1973), students of crime and its control have known this for a very long time, implying that there are few excuses for behaving as if it were either not known, or was merely of tangential relevance.Yet this in no way precludes the pursuit of more primary, etiological and explanatory questions about how and why people come to act in violation of law.Those questions have always had a central place among the raisons detre of the field, and criminology cannot simply shrug off the legitimate expectation from various quarters that it has something to contribute to addressing them.To disclaim any such interest is to cede the relevant ground to others who may be, as Garland puts it in a slightly different context, innocent of all criminological theory (2011: 302).13The point, rather, is to insist that such explanatory projects meet the requirements imposed in studying such a complex object, in terms of definitional precision, awareness of cultural and jurisdictional variation and contingency, of coherent connections between relevant levels of explanation and so on.All of these considerations necessarily stand among the facts that a theory of crime has to fit. No doubt there are criminologists they may even be quite numerous who would sooner carry on doing the old work in the old way.Nevertheless it seems clear that some of those who are currently conducting the more creative and original explanatory work are well aware of these conceptual problems, and take pains to address them.Recent work by investigators such as Sampson and Laub (1993, 2003), Wikstrm (2010a and b) and others demonstrates

13Garlandrefersheretothegrowthofterrorismandsecuritystudies,largelyinignoranceofthepotential contribution of analogous themes and insights from criminology.24 an enhanced awareness of, inter alia, the dimensions of time and space in all human action, and of the knotty and inherently contingent connections between individuals, situations, settings, communities and actions (see generally Wikstrm and Sampson 2006).In this regard some of the more intriguing and potentially fruitful developments from within the heartlands of the field flow from the increasing availability of data from maturing longitudinal studies (inherently costly and demanding many years of investment and committed work). Moreover, the world we now inhabit is one that is being re-made at every moment by scientific and technical developments.Our relations with the world of things, our communicative capacities, our social relationships, our relations with our own very bodies and identities are all in change for these reasons. Indeed much of the most sophisticated current work in the social sciences is directed towards precisely this intersection (Barnes 2000; Yearley 2005).Now more than ever, it is fruitless to attempt to defend the social in social science merely by building defensive walls against the natural sciences on grounds of their imputed taint of positivism.We have little option but to address an environment in which knowledge drawn from genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and other such newer socio-technical fields will claim application to questions of crime and punishment.One foreseeable outcome of such developments is a new set of boundary disputes in which criminologists become drawn into a series of arguments over what Ericson (2003: 43) called their disciplinary jurisdiction.Another, perhaps more fruitful, response is to proceed not by reflex rejection but rather by participating in conversations that subject these developments to rigorous ethical, conceptual and indeed sociological inquiry, the better to estimate not just the validity of their substantive claims but also their ideological effects and their potentially far-reaching roles in reconstructing the governance of crime.As Garland points out, it is criminologys fate to have as its object of study a state-defined social problem and the set of state and non-state practices through which [it] is managed (2011: 305). If this makes criminology necessarily governmental it seems to follow that it is compelled to track, analyze, comprehend and critique the changing modes of knowledge and technique that bear upon the governance of crime. 25 One set of questions about such new scientific knowledges could be that several of them might be seen to have in common the tendency to direct attention onto the characteristics of individuals.In this respect, if not in all, they might appear to reproduce characteristics long associated with biological positivism, and social critiques thereof.One of the tasks fulfilled by the intellectual histories of those earlier movements (Melossi 2008; Rafter 2009) is to remind us, paraphrasing E. P. Thompsons celebrated expression, that the mind has walked these cliffs before, even as we struggle to accommodate to the new landscapes of knowledge that confront us now.It would indeed be regrettable if criminology were allowed to succumb to a new individualism when so many of the emergent problems and questions that currently confront the social sciences precisely demand attention to new configurations in economy, culture, technology and social organization that circulate globally and which pose distinct and testing questions about governance, policy, institutional design at multiple levels, including the supra-national.We noted above that the environment that current criminology addresses and which constitutes what Young termed its exterior history - changes continually and in dynamic ways.We identified new forms of politicization and the intensification in penal politics in many countries, the advent of new modes and techniques of management and ordering, the pluralization of policing and security, and the increasingly global flow of both crime and crime policies as prominent features of the terrain that criminology now confronts.Here we can only pick out a small number of what seem to us to be the most salient points, in terms of their implications for the production and circulation of criminological knowledge. We have argued previously (Loader and Sparks 2007) and continue to hold that, as Bauman (2001: 11) has it, the advent of global figuration is by far the most prominent and seminal feature of our times.Without rehearsing our own and others arguments in ways that space forbids, and which would in any case be redundant,14 we took a lead from David Held and his colleagues who conceptualize globalization in the following terms: A process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power (Held et al. 1999: 16).

14Therelevantpaperofours,originallyinthepreviouseditionofthisHandbook,isavailableat:[OUP resources URL] 26 As numerous analysts have noted, this poses problems for the examination of societies as distinct entities with clear boundaries and instead brings to the fore the issue of networks and flows movements of capital, goods, people, symbols and information across formerly separate national contexts (Castells 1996).We also took it to suggest that local social relations, and the fate of particular places, are being reconfigured in ways that contemporary social and criminological enquiry is only beginning to get to grips with, and that sovereign authority is no longer merely territorial, the sole prerogative of nation-states, but instead also inhabits new sites of power beyond the state.Such developments certainly affect and frequently intensify social cleavages, insecurities and inequalities (of affluence and destitution, access and exclusion, mobility and fixity).By extension we live in a time of contradictory political responses that globality has ushered forth- old fundamentalisms and violent protectionism on the one hand, new international social movements and cosmopolitan possibilities on the other. Certain of the effects of these altered mobilities and relationships in terms both of transnational organized crime and of transnational developments in policing and security are now becoming more fully registeredin a range of scholarly and policy literatures, even if the scale of what is at stake in these fields can baffle and deter.As Castells (1998: 166) has aptly suggested, these are new phenomena that profoundly affect international and national economies, politics, security, and, ultimately, societies at large.Certain key substantive issues thus posed notably that of trafficking in people for purposes of sexual and economic exploitation have latterly begun to receive more intense attention as topics of both research and intervention (e.g., Munro 2006; Lee 2007, 2011). Topics of this magnitude necessarily breach disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. They reach across national and international law and policy, development economics, gender relations and a variety of other bodies of work; and contributions to knowledge on them arises from groups and individuals ranging from local activists and NGOs, to journalists, to some of the most powerful governmental organizations in the world.A host of similar points might be made, inter alia, about debates on drugs, environmental harm, migration and the criminalization of mobile populations, and terrorism and security policies. Our point here is not to try to stipulate what criminologists or others must or should do: we have gone to some lengths elsewhere to dispute the value of such legislative utterances 27 (Loader and Sparks 2010: 20-22).Our claim is simply that while it has long been true that criminology inhabits a range of distinct sites and registers it is as Ericson (2003: 43) put it a multi-disciplinary, multi-professional, multi-institutional field the scope, reach and complexity of the problems that it might legitimately bear upon today is very great.This is not to presuppose, still less to try to impose, some kind of humanly unfeasible omni-competence on the part of criminologists. But it is to raise questions about their professional formation, the curricula they study and teach, their openness to multiple perspectives and the ways in which we debate and discuss the priority that we accord to different possible topics and objects of inquiry.What, properly speaking, might be said to be the criminological contribution to discussions of genocide and other crimes against humanity (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2009; Savelsberg 2011) - and does this question still make sense? At least three implications stand out as worthy of further brief mention.First, there is scope for criminologists to give renewed attention to the sense in which their subject is a legal as well as a policy field (Lacey and Zedner this volume; Zedner 2011).This concerns not just the obvious yet somehow all-too-often neglected point that criminology has an internal relationship to problems in the definition and application of criminal sanctions in short to criminalization and its alternatives (Simester and von Hirsch 2011).It also, in the context of the developments sketched above, suggests a need for more intense attention to a series of constitutional and jurisdictional questions, such as those raised in respect of questions of multi-level governance, international treaties and convention-compliance, and so on.This point has been well-made by Murphy and Whitty (2007) with specific regard to studies of contemporary prisons by criminologists and other social scientists, but it has wider application. They remark on what they see as the existence of a curious disciplinary divergence in which social scientists make scant reference (or none at all) to human rights, notwithstanding their increasing salience in the vocabulary of prison administration and their role in restructuring prison governance.This omission, they argue, results from some combination of disciplinary closure and over-dependence by researchers on officially-defined pragmatic and managerial considerations (ibid: 800). The irony here is that social scientists, in failing to engage with legal scholarship, miss key aspects of what is going on. These factors go some way towards explaining why [British] criminologists have not engaged in a sustained and informed way with human rights.That said, it remains hard to understand 28 why the 1990s criminological turn towards the rise in punishment did not prompt a companion interest in the growth of rightsbased legal constitutionalism in the United Kingdom or, more specifically, in the impact of the European Court of Human Rights on UK law in relation to matters such as prisoner release dates, disciplinary hearings or prisoner access to legal advice and the courts (cf. Lazarus 2004). Conversely, Murphy and Whitty suggest, while there has been some development in doctrinal and substantive discussion among lawyers of human rights, with respect to prisons as in other fields, there is still very little empirical literature within law on the impact of human rights [in the United Kingdom], in terms of both the initiation of rights claims and the implementation of rights norms (2007: 801).In similar vein, but on a broader European canvas, van Zyl Smit and Snacken (2009) advert in the sub-title of their book to a concern to connect Penology and Human Rights.They argue that the growing recognition of the human rights of prisoners in Europe, including the principle of the use of imprisonment as a last resort (2009: xvii) is in part attributable to empirical research on the characteristics of prisons as institutions, and the effects of imprisonment, as well as to wider reflections on theories of punishment and the aims of imprisonment. These seem strong arguments for mutual learning. Secondly, it no longer seems good enough for criminologists to focus the overwhelming bulk of their attention on the domestic concerns of a handful of the worlds wealthiest nations.For all that criminologists have a long and in many cases honourable record of concern for the effects of inequalities within those nations, the fields track-record of genuine curiosity in, or concern with, the majority of the worlds countries or people is limited at best.In light of the foregoing this is no longer sustainable.As Agozino (2010) sharply remarks Western modernist criminology has for too long buried its head in the snows of Europe and North America.This has resulted, notwithstanding the efforts of a number of pioneers (e.g., Sumner 1992; Cain 2000; Agozino 2005) in a selective ignorance concerning the effects that Western policy and intervention have had, and continue to have, around the world. It distracts from the sense in which the experiences of African or Latin-American societies might temper or correct the purportedly generalizing claims of Anglo-Saxon criminologies.In other words, the world ushered into being by the successive historical effects of colonialism and 29 latterly of capitalist globalization is as connected as it is unequal a multiplicity without unity, as Beck puts it (2000: 11).As one of us has noted elsewhere (Melossi et al. 2011b: 6) these concerns continue to pose as crucial the embeddedness and particularity of the criminal question in each national, historical configuration (the traditional domain, that is to say, of comparative criminology- Nelken this volume), at the same time as drawing attention to the ways in which various forms of savoir travel along lines of historical, economic, political and linguistic influence or affinity. One version of the latter argument has recently been canvassed eloquently and influentially by Loc Wacquant.In Wacquants view convergences between the language and practice of criminal justice systems round the world do not result simply from common responses to similar problems, nor yet from the pragmatic adoption or emulation of lessons or techniques. Rather, Wacquant detects the dominance of a certain set of models and slogans broken windows, zero tolerance, no-frills prisons and so on that are, in his view, integral to the ways in which hegemonic neo-liberalism (2009b: 5) superintends the insecurities and fears that it itself engenders. These developments, on this account, come as a package and are actively and energetically exported by think-tanks, consultants and other evangelists for neo-liberalism and for its penological and policing solutions. In these ways, Wacquant argues, the dissemination of zero tolerance partakes of a broader international traffic in policy formulae that binds together market rule, social retrenchment, and penal enlargement (Wacquant 2009b: 171). Melossi et al. (2011b: 9) suggest that some versions of a strong, diffusionist thesis need to pay greater attention to the ways in which translation and translocation raise obdurate and challenging conceptual issues. How are discourses and practices changed in the process of their movement between cultural contexts?As well as such questions of reception, however, there is an increasing requirement on Western criminologists to attend much more carefully to voices from the Global South as producers of criminological knowledge. The criminology of the post-colonial world (Cuneen 2011) necessarily concerns not just assimilating the often disturbing implications and effects of history but also why certain generic solutions fail to apply when lifted out of context, as well as why other more contextually appropriate ones may. In these respects the discoveries and implications of African, Asian and Latin-American 30 scholarship, as well as studies of indigenous peoples within Western countries, are likely to be among the leading and most provocative themes of the next few decades. Thirdly, and finally for now, we need to demonstrate awareness that the world of globalization is not flat. A concern with the implications of macro-level developments for criminological theory and research is not now (any more than at any other time) simply a licence for preferring the novel, the fashionable and the sweeping over the grounded, the empirical and the local, nor for disengaging from intricate and detailed problems of policy and politics wherever we happen to encounter them.In the midst of some potentially far-reaching transformations in the world we inhabit, there remains much to be said for research strategies that continue to attend to such things as experience, beliefs, values, sensibilities and feeling. There is, furthermore, much to be gained from seeking to grasp aspects of global social and political change microscopically through ethnography, and observation, and talking to people about the lived texture of their everyday lives. Those dimensions of social life denoted by the idea of culture continue, in short, to matter and ought properly to command criminological attention. They matter because macro-level social change of the kind we have been concerned with here filters into the lives, experiences and dispositions of individuals and social groups (become, as it were, features of mundane culture) in ways that are uneven and never entirely predictable, and which cannot simply be read off from the texts and tenets of social theory they stand, in other words, in need of patient empirical investigation. In part, this points to the renewed significance of that rich body of enquiry concerned with how crime, order, justice and punishment are represented through print and an increasingly bewildering and diverse array of electronic media; this being one of the principal routes through which the profane meanings of notions such as security, risk and danger and encoded and passed into cultural circulation. The criminological gaze might also fruitfully turn (further) here towards the ways in which crime and social order figure in the lived, and always in some part local, social relations of differently-situated persons in a wide, surprising and frequently vastly under-explored variety of places and circumstances.There remains a powerful need for what Daly, following Christie (1997), calls near data research (2011: 117-9), and for an ethnographic imagination that is committed to capturing the passion and particularity of the ways in which the criminal question is lived, transacted and fought out around the world. 31 The consumption of criminology Among the ways in which criminologies differ is their conception of their relation to audiences, impacts and influences for who and for what purposes are they written? What modes or models of influencing are envisaged by them and how successful are they in realizing these?As the field has expanded and diversified, in the ways we outline above, so the explicit or implied answers offered to these questions by different schools and practitioners have become more various and arguably more contested. Cohens implicit sociology of knowledge in Footprints in the Sand was sophisticated and appreciative, but the world it addressed seemed both smaller and in some respects less complex than the one that criminology confronts today.In its formative periods most versions of the map of possibilities of the ways in which criminology might be put to use in the world envisaged the criminologist as being on fairly intimate terms with their intended audiences. For those in the mainstream of whom, in Britain at least, Radzinowicz was the dominant and emblematic figure this meant civil servants and senior professionals. If criminology produced knowledge-for-policy it did so in a milieu whose locale was rather more the senior common room than the laboratory.Indeed at least one alert social critic of the period, Raymond Williams (1983), argued that the informality and casual amiability of these exchanges was a key aspect of the ways in which members of the dominant intellectual and political groups maintained their dominance and reproduced a shared picture of the world.In Britain, Radzinowicz was a serial member of Royal Commissions and other august bodies, such as the Advisory Council on the Penal System (Radzinowicz 1999). Nigel Walker, Radzinowiczs successor as Director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, was a civil servant before he was an academic.Some analyses of the lost world of elite liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s, from the vantage point of the harder and hotter 1990s (Windlesham 1997) are sometimes also in part expression of regret for the social worlds that sustained those postures, and the easy circuits of communication that were a feature of their mode of operation. 32 For the radicals and critics from the 1970s onwards there were also interlocutors and reference groups, but these were of different temper many of them previously un-represented and un-heard in academic discourse.They included prisoners, the families of people who had died in custody, and a number of less privileged practitioner groups such as youth workers.Aspirationally at least, and sometimes genuinely and effectively, the new oppositional accounts of criminology saw themselves as related to various fields of social struggle.Of these feminism has clearly been the most durable and the one that has fundamentally affected the field, as it has most fields of research across the humanities and social sciences.There has also however been a gradually increasing acknowledgement of intersectionality vis-a-vis race and class (Sokoloff and Burgess-Proctor 2011). In sum, the space of positions for policy and political engagement in the world that Cohen addressed in 1981 seemed somewhat simpler.There was mainstream criminology directed principally towards government; and there were the radical criminologies assembled within the NDC oriented to new social movements and radicalised professionals. This distinction is arguably of limited utility in a world in which criminology has expanded and diversified and in which the politics of the criminal question have heated up. To think about these matters today raises a number of questions. For example:Who are the postulated audiences for criminological research? If criminological knowledge today circulates in a more contested space, what other discourses and interests surround and intersect with it?How does criminological work engage with the worlds of politics, policy and the media? Are there beneficial by-products of the hotter climate, for example because things become more explicit and more clearly problematized? In the remainder of this section we take up these questions and the issues at stake in answering them. In so doing, we use the evidence-based policy movement (EBP) in criminology, and the claims, presuppositions and visions of politics and good governance mobilized by some key actors, as our case in point. In our earlier discussion of the various modes of engagement of criminologists with social action and policy debates (Loader and Sparks 2010) we note that students of crime and punishment of all sides, factions, schools and convictions have taken seriously the contributions of the knowledge that they produce to policy, to public discourse more broadly, to decision-making, and to professional practices of various kinds.As several thoughtful 33 commentators have observed something of this kind is more or less foundational for the field (Ericson 2003; Garland 2011), just as it is among the originating concerns of the social sciences more generally.The positions concerned vary in their epistemological self-confidence, and in their expectations of direct influence, but they are all versions of knowledge/policy or knowledge/practice relations. Most of the positions currently in play, in criminology as elsewhere, have an affinity with may even be seen as versions of - one or more classic attempts to resolve the problem of knowledge/policy relations that have been attempted at earlier points in the history of social science.For example, many of the current arguments of evidence-based and experimental criminology (Sherman 2009) are reminiscent of the view of the sciences of democracy associated with Harold Lasswell (1951) one which understands the policy analysts operational task as focusing the attention of all those involved in policymaking so as to bring about their maximum rationality (Hoppe 2005: 202).These views contrast somewhat with the no less celebrated accounts of Lindblom (1959) and Schn (1983).Lindbloms famous paper offers a modest vision of the capabilities of social science in an environment of incrementalism and polyarchic competition. Schn takes us further again in the direction of a sceptical and provisional understanding of the capabilities of knowledge to inform policy.In a famous statement he suggests that: There is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing 'messes' incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the large society, while in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern. Shall the practitioner stay on the high, hard ground where he can practice rigorously, as he understands rigor, but where he is constrained to deal with problems of relatively little social importance? Or shall he descend to the swamp where he can engage the most important and challenging problems if he is willing to forsake technical rigor? [...] There are those who choose the swampy lowland. They deliberately involve themselves in messy but crucially important problems and, when asked to describe their methods of inquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error, intuition, and muddling through. (Schn 1983: 42-3) 34 These utterances remind us of the need to acknowledge a spectrum of positions on the feasibility of scientific support for decisions.The most ebullient versions of this support envisage what Hoppe (2005: 202) calls the scientization of the knowledge system, characterized by the instrumental use or research as data, in direct support of decision-making.Most knowledge utilization, in crime policy or anywhere else, has not historically looked much like this, although advocates of EBP in criminal justice have in recent years come close to claiming that it should. In the UK a high water-mark of the latter view came in a speech by then Labour Cabinet Minister David Blunkett in 2000. Tell us what works and why, the Minister enjoined.For Blunkett it is self-evident that decisions on Government policy ought to be informed by sound evidence (Blunkett 2000, cited by Parsons 2002: 43).What policy-makers require is to be able to measure the size of the effect of A on B.This is genuine social science and reliable answers can only be reached if the best social scientists are willing to engage in this endeavour' (ibid).This is plainly a direct governmental demand for explicit, instrumentally applicable knowledge what one sceptical commentator called a view of evidence as things that can be added up, joined up and wired up (Parsons 2002: 48).Blunketts invitation certainly found a number of willing and conscientious takers. Nevertheless, many subsequent observations have been less sanguine than he might have hoped.There have been at least two very distinct lines of critical response to EBP in criminal justice in Britain. The first suggests that it never really happened; they were not serious, or at best they were intensely (and ideologically) selective. EBP is, on this view, more rhetoric than practice, a scientific cloak for a series of thinly disguised political preferences (Hope and Walters 2008). The second says: it did happen but its instrumentalism, and its association with the proliferation of governmental surveillance systems (audit trails, performance units, delivery metrics etc.) make EBP inherently tied to a command-and-control logic of knowledge production and use (Parsons 2002).Conversely, of course, there are social scientists for whom EBP is not a managerialist convenience, but an item of deeply held conviction and as-yet unrealized aspiration.On this view, the task of evidence-based or experimental criminology is to use the highest quality scientific research evidence available to encourage more efficacious and just public policy (Farrington and Welsh 2007: ix), and to make it a top priority of government to cast aside political rhetoric and the need to satisfy a mythical punitive 35 public in favour of research evidence (ibid.).This may, as Farrington