Thread by @DavidHayes4

‘Left-Wing Criminologists’: A Thread (Clickbaity subtitle: You’re Doing Public Criminology Wrong)

27 tweets follow, if my maths is correct. You might want to grab a cuppa.

1) Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of (unsurprising) critique on Twitter of Boris Johnson’s comments in the Mail on Sunday about opposition to his proposed criminal justice reforms from ‘left-wing criminologists’.

2) Broadly, responses I’ve seen have tended to boil down to “we’re not left-wing, we advocate evidence-based policies.” This is to miss the point of what Johnson is trying to do here, and to be honest, is also a little disingenuous.

3) That disingenuousness is part of why I’m so late to the party on this. In a sense, Johnson has my number. I *am*, after all, a left-wing criminologist. And I do oppose his govt’s proposals on deterrence and stop-and-search.

4) The problem, however, is more disciplinary. Criminology is, broadly speaking, a left-wing discourse – at least from where Johnson is standing. Virtually every criminologist I know, personally or professionally, is left-leaning.

5) I work across the disciplines of law and criminology, and crim is noticeably more leftist on the whole. I know only one criminologist who I even suspect of voting Leave, and don’t know any who I think would vote Conservative or BXP.

6) I think this is for two main reasons. Methodologically, criminology tends to be more empirically driven than law: it’s focussed on understanding people in context, hearing their side of the story, and exploring their experiences.

7) This is especially so since the qualitative turn in the 1980s, driven by feminist concerns with the right of the research participant to speak for themselves. By contrast, doctrinal legal scholarship focuses on abstracted rules of State action.

8) Secondly, theoretically, mainstream criminological research tends to emphasise context and the role of society, economics, culture and psychology in causing crime. Most criminology today rejects rational choice as a comprehensive theory.

9) Legal theory, by contrast, emphasises rights & responsibilities much more. That’s not to say legal scholarship is by any means right-wing. But it illustrates some ways in which criminology as a discipline tends towards a worldview that’s closer to the postulates of the left.

10) So I think we have to accept that criminology, as a discipline, does skew to the left. What’s important is that this doesn’t *automatically* mean that criminology is nothing but a warehouse for partisan shills of a phony leftist worldview.

11) Most criminologists I know are left-leaning *because* of their research, rather than having their criminology dictated by leftist bias. Researcher bias is a thing we should worry about, but my sense is that it’s not endemic.

12) Empirically, we know that randomised stop-and-search doesn’t stop knife crime. Empirically, we know that deterrence-based sentencing that “terrorises” criminals doesn’t significantly affect crime rates.

13) This is what most people mean when they talk about “evidence-based research”. The problem, though, is that making these claims is always a political act. It must be, because crime and criminal justice are inherently political concepts.

14) This has been widely accepted in criminology since the days of Stan Cohen, but the corollary hasn’t: if you are acting politically, you have to accept that you’re going to end up somewhere on a political spectrum.

15) By way of analogy: you can’t try to change public policy about the catastrophic effects of the climate crisis without getting a bit political, and if all the deniers are on one end of the spectrum, you’re bound to be on the other.

16) This example is shamelessly stolen from a video by leftist YouTuber HBomberGuy, incidentally: see (the rest of the video is good too – but not super relevant to this topic).

17) At this point, you might think I’m just arguing semantics: I agree that there’s a thing called ‘evidence-based policy’, so what’s the problem? In a word: framing. In three words: framing and strategy.

18) Johnson knows what he’s doing. ‘Left-wing criminologists’ is meant to mean partisanship, implicit bias, and so irrelevance of academic research. It supplements old-fashioned punitiveness with post-Brexit anti-expert populism.

19) While academic criminology skews to the left, it’s certainly not partisan. As a student in the New Labour years, I can attest to the discipline’s willingness to critique Labour policy just as much as Coalition or Tory policy.

20) Indeed, some of the most glowing comments by criminologists in recent memory have been of Tory Ministers of Justice – most recently, David Gauke’s proposals to end short-term imprisonment.

21) That’s part of the point: Johnson wants ‘left-wing’ to mean ‘Trotskyist’, but really it includes everyone outside of his hard-right position. But more to the point, by ‘left-wing criminologists’, Johnson just means ‘criminologists’.

22) I know of no criminological research that shows support for Johnson’s position. The only way he can defend his position is to discredit the discipline as a whole in the eyes of his voters. The trouble is, it’s an attractive line.

23) If our only response is “I’m not a political shill, I’m an expert, and here’s why”, we’ll convince no-one. This is the message from Brexit: politics is not just rational, and if you try to confront irrationality with facts, you’ll lose.

24) Incidentally, I don’t mean ‘irrational’ pejoratively. Humans are not just rational thinkers. Criminologists are quick to point this out in their theory of crime, but too often we forget it when trying to sell that theory to the public.

25) The ‘evidence-based policy’ line engages with the ‘left-wing’ part of Johnson’s argument, out of some misplaced desire to ensure scientific neutrality. But the results of our research are not, cannot be, politically neutral. Better to focus on the 'criminologists' part.

26) Better to ask where all the ‘right-wing criminologists’ are who endorse Johnson’s policy. Better to say, “Yes, my research places me at a point on the political spectrum, but here’s my reasoning, and here’s my scientific rigor.”

27) Better to engage with the public about why the arguments are all against Johnson, about why their irrational concerns are real and compelling, but not the whole of the story. That’s hard to do, of course. But that’s also democracy. Thread ends.