Mannheim Matters Newsletter - March 2012 Edition

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Mannheim Matters - December 2013 Edition

News and Notes

Welcome to the December 2013 edition of Mannheim Matters.

There is yet more sad news to announce with the death of Jock Young. An appreciation of Jock has been written by Kevin Stenson and is included in this edition.

If you have any news items or features you wish to include please email Jennifer Brown: J.Brown5@lse.ac.uk

Wishing everyone all the best for the festive season and the New Year

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Meet ... Mike Redmayne

I have been in the Law Department at LSE since 1999, my previous posts being at Brunel and Manchester Universities. Having written a little on criminal justice (a textbook with Martin Wasik and Tom Gibbons), I became a member of the Mannheim Centre when I arrived here, though I must say I often feel a bit of a fraud as it is something of a stretch to describe me as a criminologist! That said, criminology is a broad church, so perhaps I can be squeezed into it somewhere, and I certainly deal with mainstream criminology in parts of my work. I also used to teach a bit of criminology when I was at Manchester.

Today my main research interests are in criminal evidence and criminal procedure, and involve questions about how criminal cases are brought to court and tried. Evidence law has a reputation for being lawyer’s law, full of arcane technical distinctions about what evidence is admissible and what is not. Try the definition of hearsay: statements are presumptively inadmissible as evidence of matters stated; statements are defined as representations of fact or opinion, and matters are stated in a statement if it was the speaker’s purpose to cause another person to believe the matter or to act on the basis that it is true. So when X asks Y, ‘can I buy some more drugs please’, is the fact that X has bought drugs from Y before a matter stated in the statement (if this is a statement)? While I get a certain lawyerly pleasure from trying to work out the answer to questions such as this, what really keeps me interested in evidence law is that it covers such a broad range of issues and disciplines. This morning I’ve been reading about the psychology of eyewitness identification. Last week, when teaching confession evidence, the seminar group had a discussion about the possible impact of legal aid reforms on access to legal advice in the police station, while the week before that when the topic was entrapment our focus was on questions of political morality: can it be legitimate for the state to encourage someone to commit a crime in order to prosecute them for it?

I rather drifted into evidence law – it wasn’t a subject I had studied as an undergraduate law student. But when I graduated and expressed an interest in doing a PhD on something connected with criminal justice, expert evidence emerged as a good topic because of the role forensic science had paid in some of the miscarriage of justice cases of the 1990s – the Birmingham Six and others. This gave me a rich set of questions to think about: how should courts judge what is good and bad science? In what ways is scientific evidence objective? But with the emergence of DNA evidence I ended up becoming fascinated with a slightly more obscure set of questions about the role of probability and statistics in forensic science, and in connection with this, the role that probability plays in evidence law. It turned out that Bayesian probability theory was becoming influential among forensic scientists as a way of analysing scientific evidence and that this had implications for the way their evidence was presented and interpreted in court. Most recently this got me involved in writing a paper with another lawyer, a statistician and a forensic scientist about whether the Court of Appeal was right to say that shoe-print experts should not use probability theory in the absence of hard statistics. My work in this area has also landed me a place on the Royal Statistical Society’s Working Group on Law and Statistics: quite something for a lawyer who still considers himself to be basically innumerate!

Currently my main research project is on the use of character evidence – typically previous convictions or their absence – in criminal trials. As well as reading lots of cases to try to work out what the courts are doing, this is keeping me interested in criminology, as issues about recidivism play a role in this area. I also still write about some more general issues in criminal justice, having written two editions of The Criminal Process with Andrew Ashworth. For that I need to keep up with the research on issues such as stop and search and the PACE detention regime.

So I have a pretty broad range of interests, and being at LSE has been a brilliant way of helping me to juggle them all. Working alongside not only lawyers but also criminologists and philosophers with an interest in scientific evidence has been a great way of keeping me alert to the way my subjects relate to other disciplines. It’s also helped me keep a sense of perspective when worrying about whether or not a request to buy drugs is hearsay evidence if used to prove that the addressee is a drug dealer. It turns out that there are more important issue in criminal justice that deserve to be worried about as well.

Independent Police Commission

The Commission chaired by Lord Stevens, formerly Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, launched its report on 25th November after two years of deliberations. Professor Jennifer Brown, Co-director of Mannheim was the Commission's deputy chair.

The ten key changes the Commission calls for are:

Establishing a chartered police officer
Merger or nationalisation of current 43 forces
Creation of a new organisation - Independent Police Standards Commission
Replacement of PCCs
Local policing commitment enshrined in Law
New deal for staff based on principles of procedural justice
Third party partnerships
Greater gender and ethnic minority representation
Necessary conditions for private sector involvement
Ethical code, including working relationships with the media

A full copy of the report can be downloaded through the Mannheim web site.

People

Professor Jock Young

An appreciation by Kevin Stenson

Superlatives are devalued by trivial use but in our field Jock Young, who died recently in New York, was one of the most creative and influential intellectuals of recent times. This is a sad blow, coming so close on the heels of the death of his old friend and colleague Stan Cohen. His impact has been felt and he is mourned in many countries throughout the world. Though based in recent years at John Jay College, City University of New York, he retained a small position at the University of Kent and returned periodically to teach and further with Keith Hayward and others the development of his latest interest, cultural criminology. His close friends and colleagues there, Roger Matthews and Keith Hayward, wrote an excellent obituary in the Guardian ( http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/04/jock-young) and John Jay College has a touching tribute to their much valued and loved colleague.

(http://www.jjay.cuny.edu/7146.php ).

Jock’s story was one of upward mobility in the post-war welfare state. Born in Scotland, the son of a lorry driver, he focused on science at A-level at grammar school in Aldershot, but decided to shift to social science at the LSE, which provided the crucible of his intellectual formation. He went through from undergraduate studies to PhD here during the 1960’s. Working with David Downes and others, he furthered in Britain exciting new US theory and research in labelling and subcultural theories, for example in his doctoral study of subculture within which people used illegal drugs. I was a student of Jock’s, and of Stan Cohen and John Lea at the Enfield College of Technology, which morphed into the very different Middlesex University. The College became a sort of LSE satellite and was a place of extraordinary radical intellectual ferment, with some affinity with Vincennes University in Paris at that time. We students were the lucky beneficiaries of Jock’s mesmerising, charismatic teaching, as have subsequent generations of students here and in the US. While never afraid to tell truth to power, he was always unstuffy, un-pompous, positive, ironic, very funny and encouraging to younger scholars. Many of his students went on to become leading criminologists in their own right and they all carry a piece of Jock in their hearts. I find it very hard to accept that he is gone.

It is a familiar trope of critics to emphasise Jock’s multiple reinventions, yet I agree with his view that the continuities are more significant. He remained consistently sceptical about criminological `scientism`, the attempts to apply natural science methods to the study of deviance, crime and control. His final book, `The Criminological Imagination` includes biting, witty, and I think indispensable, critiques of what were for him bogus, wasteful and damaging attempts at such `science`, usually funded by the public purse, and which usually involved the misapplication of sophisticate mathematical models to understand and explain essentially fragile qualitative data. He retained an allegiance to interpretive approaches to data and analysis rooted in Weber’s verstehen sociology and American symbolic interactionist perspectives. These focused on the agency and rationality of social actors and the meanings they attribute to their circumstances, even if they do not choose to live in those settings. As is usual in sociology, one of Jock’s abiding concerns was with how to marry his interpretive accounts with some kind of structural narrative to describe and explain the wider contexts of action and interaction and much of his creative imagination was devoted to trying to do this, especially by deconstructing the inequalities and tensions of modern capitalist economies. I am sure there will be dissertations written about his ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with Marxism over the years.

For him, it is important that criminology does not simply serve the state and its functionaries but also gives a voice to offenders and victims and tries to discover how working class and poor people perceive crime, policing and criminal justice and feed their concerns into public policy making. This was part of the attempt to update the knowledge base of social democracy and maybe make the Labour Party and cognate parties abroad more electable This was the great strength of Jock’s Left Realist phase in the 1980’s and 1990’s with John Lea, Roger Matthews and other colleagues. This illustrates another of the continuities in Jock’s work, which culminated in his final trilogy, The Exclusive Society, The vertigo of Late Modernity and The Criminological Imagination: his continuing belief that social and criminal justice are closely intertwined. The possibility of social order and solidarity and the control of crime and deviant behaviour will always be in doubt while deep inequalities and insecurity remain the fate for those at the bottom of the barrel.

Postgraduate update

Congratulation to Daniel Bear on the successful defence of his doctoral thesis

Adapting, Acting Out, or Standing Firm: Understanding The Place of Drugs in The Policing of a London Borough.

His examiners were Professor Robert Reiner and Professor Alex Stevens from the University of Kent. Of his viva Daniel said " having Robert's encyclopaedic knowledge and years of experience in police research alongside Alex's expertise and critical insights into drugs policy made the viva a wonderful learning experience as well as an object lesson in constructive feedback and encouragement for the new academic kid on the block". Daniel is now a professor of public safety at Sheridan College, Toronto.

Johannes Rieken just back from Columbia, via California writes "When I came to LSE over five years ago I only intended to do an MSc. However, a year later I found myself writing a PhD on micro police (inter)actions using video based methods. I started a postdoc in the International Development Department right after my viva last June. In this new environment I am doing more comparative research particularly looking at police professionalization and training. For this purpose I also started to work with the Norwegian Policing College in Oslo and the Police Academy in Bogota. For me this journey shows that LSE and particularly the Mannheim Centre is a great place to become immersed in a topic. There are so many brilliant people that help you to explore and find ever new but interconnected angles on whatever your criminological interest may be".

Recent Events

From moral panics to states of denial; a celebration of the life and work of Stan Cohen

10th December

Organised by the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, Professor David Downes contributed to this celebration of our colleague Stan Cohen. David, with the late Terry Morris, had supervised Stan's doctoral thesis on vandalism. Stan Cohen was instrumental in founding the National Deviancy Conference as well as the Masters on Crime, Deviance and Control. David described a favoured Adorno quotation of Stan's "one must belong to a tradition to hate it properly" in explaining Stan's demolition and reshaping of criminology. His PhD was transformed into Folk Devils and Moral Panics which was a seminal text in reaction to the excessively punitive and melodramatic reaction to the behaviours of 'mods' and 'rockers.' Stan's central idea of moral panics when there are perceived threats to certain societal values, have been widely applied to areas such as drug use, child abuse, immigrants, asylum seekers and indeed the media itself.

David described Stan's sceptical view about offending and his independent and powerful advocacy in looking beyond the individual and seeking contributory causation in factors such as class, race and gender. Stan Cohen's work with Laurie Taylor with lifers in the Durham Maximum Security Unit produced 'Psychological Survival' as a further major contribution to criminology in what David called the 'annus mirabilis', 1972. This book created consternation in the Home Office with its implication of a rights based reform of prison than that control through privileges and discipline.

The third great contribution David drew our attention to was Stan's work on the analysis of social control. Here David reminded us of Stan's fishing metaphors, net widening and mesh thinning.

Professor Stan Cohen was an original thinker, generous colleague and inspiring teacher. The evening was an affectionate tribute to a humorous and humane man.

The podcast of this event can be downloaded at:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2159

What if..Evidence was used to redesign the gateway to criminal justice?

4th December

The latest What if was propounded by Peter Neyroud who was a former chief constable and chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency. The session was chaired by Frances Crook and the two discussants were Professor Gloria Laycock and Professor Paul Ekblom. We have a podcast of this event which will shortly be put up on the Mannheim web site.

Hillsborough: Resisting justice, recovering truth

27th November

The Mannheim Centre together with the Institute of Race Relations hosted a seminar given by Professor Phil Scraton from Queen's University , Belfast in which he described his work on the Hillsborough Independent Panel and his nearly 25 years of research into recovering the truth of what happened on 15th April 1989 when 96 Liverpool fans died in the Football stadium at Hillsborough. Phil presented a shocking catalogue of lies and cover up. As a consequence of a reanalysis and reassessment of the evidence, the following has been achieved:

Prime Minister - apology for the ‘double injustice’

IPPC review - police misconduct (2000 officers)

Criminal Investigation – potential criminal prosecutions (individuals or corporate bodies)

Attorney General/ High Court - inquest verdicts quashed, new inquests to be held

Chief Medical Officer - Royal College of Pathologists review

NHS Chief Executive - emergency services/ health authorities review

Public acknowledgement - including media response

Mannheim/BSC Wednesday Seminars

We have had a cracking programme of seminars.

9th October Anthony Amatrudo kicked off with a talk entitled: Unheimlichkeit, alienated and integrated identities and criminal existences.

This was a tour taking in the concepts of angst, anomie and alienation. The idea of 'unheimlichkeit is uncomfortableness, strangeness and a sense of being unsettled and is drawn from the work of Heidegger. In his presentation, Professor Amatrudo located these ideas to the condition of life that exist within models of capitalist social relations. He argued that much in Durkheim is concerned with the integration of individuals through social regulation, but where this is absent alienation or anomie follows. Essentially some people find it particularly difficult to make sense of and locate themselves in the capitalist world. This analysis nicely set the scene for our second lecture by Daniel Briggs.

13th November Daniel Briggs talked about his work on 'Deviance and Risk on Holiday: An Ethnography of British Tourists in Ibiza'

Professor Briggs described his study into behaviour of tourism in Ibiza, written up in his book, "Deviance and risk on holiday." He opened with a complaint that journals were unsympathetic to his study, in part because of the explicit language and nature of the behaviour he was reporting. His analysis was one in which he argued that people were purchasing experiences and attempting to live an (impossible) dream of a life three degrees of separation from the celebrities they admire. These people, he argued, were "pied pipered into excessively conspicuous consumption. He, briefly, discussed some of the ethical dilemmas attached to his ethnographic method and described, non stop drinking and sex probably more sybarite than hedonism. Two groups he identified, and did not talk much about, were the young women tourists and also the fortysomething returnees. An observation offered to Professor Briggs was that many UK city centres would see similar excesses, on Friday or Saturday nights.

11th December George Mair presented his analysis of the Probation Service or Paradise Lost?

Professor Mair provided his assessment of the state of the Probation Service. He acknowledged the Service is in difficulty but took a more pragmatic view than the 'romanticised nostalgic sentimentalism' of Paul Senior's "death knell of a much cherished service". His analysis concluded that the Probation Service as we currently know it will have disappeared over the next few years. He suggested that the Service has been unable to respond to an expansion in size and responsibilities and different ways of delivering interventions. In part this is due to the three key Probation Service organisations, the Central Committee, ACOP and NAPO and an insistence on localism which inhibits speaking with an authoritative national voice, inconsistent and sometimes badly run services; a lack of critical research; and a wilful resistance to various Government innovations. Other problems identified by Professor Mair are the uncoupling of Probation from its social work professional qualifications and the range of other agencies and private sector providers of services. The current atmosphere of increasing punitiveness (and Probation has a legacy of being a soft option) payment by results, de-skilling and a loosening of national standards, accounts for Professor Mair's pessimism.

Hermann Mannheim quote of the month

In 1940 Hermann Mannheim published “Social Aspects of Crime in England and Wales ” He writes (page147)

“The only conclusion which can safely be drawn from our statistical material is that unemployment as a causative factor of crime seems to play a widely varying role in different districts. Whilst in some cases there is to be found an almost complete harmony between the fluctuations of unemployment and crime, in others not even the slightest analogy exists."

Mannheim looked for psychological explanations.

"It is generally taken for granted that unemployment particularly when it lasts a long time cannot fail to affect the moral powers of resistance against evil influences. There is a rough progression from optimism to pessimism, from pessimism to fatalism, accompanied by that dreadful feeling of insecurity, of complete economic helplessness and failure".

From The Archives

On the 6th April 2000 Nelson Mandela visited LSE on the occasion of his lecture 'Africa and Its Position in the World.' held at the Peacock Theatre. He described his early years in a world of rampant disease, without clean water or electricity and one in which life was "brutish and short". He asked that the assessment of Africa's achievements take into account its oppressed past and that he would follow other African leaders in stepping down to make way for the younger generation.

The speech can be downloaded at:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2149

Forthcoming Events
2013-2014 British Society of Criminology Southern Branch & the Mannheim Centre for Criminology Seminar Series 15 January 2014 - Marian Fitzgerald (University of Kent)NAB 1.09 12 February 2014 - Kate Fitz-Gibbon (Deakin University - Victoria , Australia) NAB 1.09 12 March 2014 - David Downes, Tim Newburn & Paul Rock (LSE)NAB 1.09 14 May 2014 - Meredith Rossner (LSE/UWS)TBC 11 June 2014 - Coretta Phillips (LSE) and Deborah Drake (The Open University) TBC All of the seminars will be held at the LSE and will start at 6.30pm, with wine from 6.15pm. We recommend arriving early to be sure of a seat. We hope you will also be able to stay for drinks with the speaker after the talk.
To Happy New Year London

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