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Meet ... Michael
Shiner |
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 I have been part of the Mannheim
Centre for slightly more than a decade, initially as a contract
researcher and PhD student then as a member of the teaching faculty
in the Department of Social Policy. Being involved in the Centre has
been one of the highlights of my time at LSE, bringing me into
contact with some of the giants of British criminology and exposing
me to an academic environment that has been simultaneously inspiring
and daunting. I remember sparking a disagreement between Robert
Reiner and Stan Cohen during one of the legendry Tuesday afternoon
PhD seminars some years ago, which was a surreal moment. I agreed
with both of them naturally! Kindness and generosity are also words
I associate with the Centre, which seems to thrive on a quiet
egalitarianism.
Like several of my predecessors who
have written in this slot, my route into criminology has been a
pretty circuitous one. Having gained a degree in history from the
University of Leicester I completed an MSc in Social Research
Methods at the University of Surrey. As well as providing an
excellent methodological training, this course sparked my interest
in criminology and I applied to do a PhD on policing with Nigel
Fielding, but funding was not forthcoming. After a brief and
ignominious period as a researcher at St Bartholomew’s Medical
College
(they ‘let me go’ six months into a
12 month contract) I was lucky enough to land a job at the Policy Studies
Institute, which was a perfect environment for me to complete my
apprenticeship, providing ample opportunities to put my recently
acquired research skills into practice. I was initially appointed to
the Information Policy Group, but crime seemed more interesting than
libraries so I enrolled on a criminology course at Birkbeck College
and pestered David Smith, head of the Social Justice Group, into
giving me some work. My break came on a small evaluation of a
drugs-focussed peer education project in Canning Town, East London,
which led to other studies of peer education and an enduring
interest in drugs. My other main project while at PSI I was a
large-scale longitudinal study of entry into the legal professions.
From PSI I moved to Goldsmiths
College, working at the Public Policy Research Unit with Tim Newburn
for five years or so, during which time I worked on studies of drug
education, the delivery of drug services to black and minority
ethnic groups and community responses to drug issues. I also
registered for a PhD, which I completed after I moved to LSE and was
published as Drug Use and Social Change: The Distortion of History (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
The transition from full-time
researcher to a member of the teaching faculty has bought big
changes in my day-to-day activities. Teaching has its own rewards
and the departmental reception for new graduates and their families
remains one of my favourite days of the academic calendar – the
sense of joy, achievement and anticipation are palpable and it’s
rewarding to feel part of that. I’m starting a half module on
Illegal Drugs and their Control next years as part of the MSc
Criminal Justice Policy, which is an exciting prospect and is a
course that has been 20 years in the making!
In terms of research, the drugs field
is not thriving as it was when I started out, but remains a key area
of interest. I recently published an article in the Journal of
Social Policy linking British drug policy to the development of
criminal justice and state interventionism more broadly and am
currently working on the Global Drugs Survey with Adam Winstock as
well as a study charting the disproportionate impact of drugs
policing on black and minority ethnic communities with Release, the
drug law reform charity.
 New or developing areas of interest
include suicide (Understanding Suicide: A Sociological Autopsy by
Ben Fincham, Susanne Langer, Jonathan Scourfield and Michael Shiner,
2011, Palgrave Macmillan) and the police use of stop and search. I
am in the process of putting together an edited collection on stop
and search with Rebekah Delsol and am actively involved in
Stopwatch, a coalition that campaigns for fair and accountable
policing. I think of this as an exercise in public criminology,
which has involved writing blogs for various outlets including
Comment is Free, two blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances on
Sunday Morning Live and Newsnight, and producing a play, Stop
Search, at the Broadway Theatre, Catford (Time Out and The South
London Press awarded us three and four stars respectively!). As an
extension of my work on stop and search, I am also working on a
soon-to-be-completed evaluation of a pilot programme introducing structured communication into a handful of prisons.
Away
from my desk I de-stress by playing football, practicing yoga and
boxing. I recently took up the noble art (that’s boxing not yoga)
following the exhortations of a former student and am due to have my
first fight anytime now (I’m trying to come up with a suitable
ring-name so please feel free to send me any suggestions). Call it a
mid-life crisis, but 'Big' George Foreman won a world title at
the age of 45!
My decade or so at LSE has been
marked by a series of high profile departures, with David Downes,
Stan Cohen, Paul Rock and Robert Reiner all heading into retirement
and Stan sadly passing away. I’m tempted to say that theirs are
impossibly large shoes to fill, but I prefer the metaphor about
standing on the shoulders of giants. Either way, the Mannheim Centre
has a vital legacy, bridging our collective past, present, and
future.
See
Michael's recent piece on stop and search
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/06/police-stop-search-ethnic-minorities |
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Staffordshire University Policing and Criminal
Investigation Department
By Dr Mark Roycroft
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The Policing and
Criminal Investigation department is a part of the Forensic and
Science Faculty within Staffordshire University. This is a small
unit comprising three former Senior Investigating Officers, an ex
Detective Sergeant and an ex Forensic Manager. We offer an
undergraduate course with modules in major crime investigation:
criminology; and the criminal justice system. Specific topics
include crime and dishonesty, the criminal Justice system, Case File
to Court, Drugs of abuse, Major Crime Investigations, the use of
Police intelligence( including the national Intelligence Model). We
take on about 90 students a year.
We have recently
introduced some new modules which focus on terrorism and its causes
and the significance of Community Policing and Hi-Tech crime. All the
modules place emphasis on relevant legislation and current
investigative techniques. The Hi-Tech crime lectures uses well
known cases and are strengthen by our personal experiences in major
investigations.
Our students undertake mock court
practicals and searching techniques within a Crime Scene. This
is done in a
 detached
house, complete with CCTV and an observation room. The house has a
large garden and off-road parking and contains seven rooms that
have been furnished to resemble a typical domestic home. The main
purpose is to create simulated crime scenes in a realistic setting
such as clandestine
burials or crimes
involving vehicles.
The students process
the forensic evidence, working in small teams, using the appropriate
equipment and procedures to prevent contamination or loss, and to
ensure continuity of evidence. We even provide a Crime Scene Tent,
which can be placed over the crime scene in an attempt to protect
the evidence.
There is a strong
connection with the local police force and many of the students are
local Special Constables who receive a shorter training programme
than normal.
Some recent
dissertations include:
· The impact of PCSOs on
volume crime in six different police forces over the last 10 years;
· The De Menezes shooting
and its impact on the command structure in the MPS and the
lessons learnt. It also examined the arguments for arming the a
police;
· The history of Terrorism
legislation in the UK and its impact on different populations;
· Disability Hate
Crime from police and social services perspectives and how
reporting could be improved;
Students also look
at case
studies in various miscarriages of justice.
We take approximately 90
students a year and we hope to offer a Masters course in Policing in
2014.
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NPeople |
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Geoff Pearson
An appreciation by Professor Dick Hobbs
Amongst the cacophony of
cant and ignorance masquerading as social commentary that followed
Britain’s 2011 riots, there were few credible voices of
understanding, let alone attempts to place the youthful violence,
nihilism, and looting within anything approaching a historical
perspective. Yet as the usual clichés were rolled out about the
riots being without precedent, and a sure sign of a radical and
dangerous departure from the subservience of the past, the carefully
modulated tones of Geoffrey Pearson, who has died aged 70, came
once again to the fore.
 Geoff Pearson was born
in Manchester, the only son of a Co-op worker and a local Labour
Party activist. He was educated at Accrington Grammar School and Peterhouse
College Cambridge, where he studied Moral Sciences (philosophy and
psychology). On leaving Cambridge, he carried out postgraduate
studies before working with people with disabilities in Sheffield,
and later trained as a psychiatric social worker at the London
School of Economics before returning to Sheffield to practice. .
Much of Geoff Pearson’s early academic career was in social work
education and training, first as a Lecturer at Sheffield
Polytechnic, then for five years at University College, Cardiff.
While at Cardiff Geoff published his first major work, “The Deviant
Imagination” (1974), a study of the complex multi-disciplinary
debates that thrived under the banner of the National Deviancy
Conference. The Deviant Imagination explored the background
assumptions and ideological foundations of a wide range of theories
of deviance, and was openly critical of the burgeoning subjective
politics of identity that was a direct threat to the traditional
socialism that had nurtured his boyhood and youth. Most importantly
in terms of Pearson’s subsequent career, the book established
historical precedents for many contemporary policies and social
attitudes, particularly those relating to youthful hedonism.
In 1976 Pearson joined
the University of Bradford where he published the study for which he
was best known, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1980).
Hooligan is concerned with the eternal recurrence of a form of
cultural pessimism that regards youth crime as a threatening
departure from the stable traditions of a “golden age” of peace and
tranquillity. Whether the triggers for youth deviance were regarded
as music hall, gangster movies, or rock and roll, Pearson identified
a connected vocabulary of respectable fears stretching back to
Victorian times and beyond. Hooligan will remain highly relevant for
as long as the default reaction to youth violence continues to
disinter the notion of a “golden age”. Yet his work does not deny
that youth and the communities that spawn them have undergone huge
changes in the last five decades. For as he noted in the wake of the
2011 disturbances, “although we need a bottom–up process of
re-integration, built around families, schools and communities…the
problem remains: how do you re-integrate people who were not
integrated in the first place ?”.
Geoff was always careful
not to glamorise deviance, and in “The New Heroin Users” (1987), he
gave a voice to users and addicts , and in doing so confounded many
stereotypes concerning this most demonised group, who were heavily
concentrated in areas already suffering unemployment, poor housing
and poverty. Pearson moved to London in 1985 as Professor of Social
Work at Middlesex Polytechnic during which time he was a member of
the Council for Education and Training in Social Work, and worked on
a number of projects including a critical study of multi-agency
policing, written in the wake of the Scarman Report.
His final career move was in 1989 to Goldsmiths College as Wates
Professor of Social Work, and later as Professor of Criminology. For
eight years he was Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of
Criminology, and while at Goldsmiths Geoff was a member of the
Runcimann Inquiry into Drugs and the Law, vice-chair of the
Institute for the Study of Drug Dependency, and vice-chair, of
DrugScope, He also carried out studies of drug use amongst young
people in care, of drug markets, and the policing of drugs,
confirming his status as a key figure both in the UK and
internationally in arguments that positioned chronic drug misuse in
the context of unemployment and social exclusion,
Although he retired in
2008, his inquisitiveness and natural affinity with blighted
communities led him to chair the Iindependent Commission on Social
Services in Wales that produced a highly critical report in 2010.
Geoff Pearson was married three times, and was dedicated to Marilyn
Lawrence, to whom he was married for 22 years, and together for 32
years, to his four children, Jonathan, Kate, Joe and Saul, to his
four grandchildren and one great grandchild. A talented jazz
pianist, and lifelong Manchester United fan, Geoff was the most
sociable of men who always had a story to tell, but who knew when to
listen. When nurturing and inspiring ethnographers of crime and
deviance such as Mark Gilman, Alice Sampson, Jenni Ward, Dan
Silverstone, Kate O’Brien, Dan Briggs and others, he encouraged them
to dig out stories of marginalised individuals and groups, and
whenever possible let them speak for themselves.
There was no trick or
sleight of hand with Geoff Pearson, no mystique to his craft as an
academic, to his qualities as a champion of the excluded and the
misunderstood, or indeed to the way that he led his all too short
life. He leaves behind a body of work that personifies his wit,
intellect and personal integrity.
Geoffrey Pearson:
academic and writer: born, Manchester 26/3/1943. Married Marilyn (4
children, 4 grandchildren, 1 great grandchild). Died, London
5/4/2013
Coretta Philips
As a media novice I was
rather daunted by the prospect of doing a live radio show, but it
was a very positive experience. Laurie Taylor was charming, as
expected, but also genuinely interested in my book, and I really
appreciated the effort gone to by the show’s Producer, Jayne Egerton,
to ensure that she and Laurie understood the complexities of the
book’s findings. Even the ‘peg’ (‘Terror police called in after
prison warder was held hostage by three Muslim inmates’ Daily Mail)
the day before the interview did not skew the questions asked too
much. And I got away without having to eat any jellied
eels!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01smpw6/Thinking_Allowed_Multicultural_Prison_Jellied_Eels/
Many Congratulations
to Coretta for winning the Criminology Book Prize 2013 for her
book ( along with Deb Drake for Prisons, Punishment
and the Pursuit of Security)
Michael Shiner
Michael's
latest involvement with Stopwatch and the Open
Society Justice Initiative resulted in a film
interviewing nine people from who have been
directly affected by stop and search. To contextualize
these stories, Michael and Ben Bradford analyzed
police data and large-scale
population surveys, connecting the interviews with the
experiences of different groups. The film was presented
to an open group for a discussion at the Public and
Commercial Union
building in Clapham 29th May.
The discussion elicited
a strong evocation of the pain and anger by those who have been
stopped and searched and highlighted the need for something like a truth and
reconciliation process.
http://www.stop-watch.org/experiences/
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PPostgrduate
updated
Update |
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Policing minority ethnic
communities: A case study in London’s ‘Little India’
by Sara Trikha
Having recently passed
my PhD Viva I was invited to share the findings of my research and
also my reflections on the Viva process with fellow students about
to submit their thesis for final examination.
.JPG) My
PhD thesis, undertaken post Macpherson (1999), examined ongoing
tensions in the policing of minority ethnic communities through a
case study of policing in London’s ‘Little India’, or ‘Greenfield’
as I chose to call it. My thesis highlighted the continuing
influence of racism in policing, describing a world of policing
ethnically diverse communities that was more complex, variable and
contradictory than had yet been documented in the empirical policing
literature. I described how policing in Greenfield was a patchwork
of continuity and change, illustrating how, despite the advances the
police had made in eradicating overt racism from the organisation,
passive prejudice remained rife among officers. Most notably,
despite acknowledging Greenfield’s long resident Asian communities
as the ‘indigenous population’, officers still had little knowledge
about these communities, tending to classify them as ‘Asians’ in a
way that obscured, rather than illuminated their diversity.
Furthermore, while officers regarded ‘Asians’ as the established
communities of Greenfield, new ‘problem populations’ - most notably
Somalis, Muslims and travellers - emerged, with officers tending to
engage with these communities in antagonistic ways, echoing themes
from early studies of race and policing. Yet beneath this somewhat
depressing overarching picture of policing, I found that a more
complex, contradictory network of attitudes and practice emerged,
encompassing both officers who were overtly hostile to ethnic
diversity and also examples of inspirational officers committed to
reforming the policing of minority ethnic communities. Having
described policing in Greenfield, my thesis concluded with a
discussion of the wider ramifications for police legitimacy and
democracy in Britain, as I argued that until greater emphasis is
placed on ensuring that the police support the equitable principles
of democracy, the police in Greenfield and other areas would
continue to fail the marginalised people who most need their
services.
Having submitted my
thesis at the end of January, my Viva was held in early May during
the first week of the summer term. The best advice I can give fellow
students about the Viva is not to stress - it can actually be a very
positive experience! Having spent years working on your research the
Viva is your opportunity to explain and defend your work and,
perhaps even more importantly, to get potentially valuable feedback
from other academics. My Viva was a very useful, as well as
challenging, exercise precisely because I was able to get
reflections on my research from two academics whose work I have long
admired (Robert Reiner and Martin Innes). Although the discussion
was robust at times (the role of the examiners is to challenge after
all), it helped sharpened my arguments and identified some final,
minor amendments which, once completed, will improve my final
thesis. No piece of research is ever perfect and there are always
ways in your work could be improved, therefore as you approach
completion and begin considering examiners with your supervisor, you
may want to think about whose reflections you would most welcome on
your work and who could provide the most valuable challenge during
your Viva instead of being daunted by the process.
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Recent
Events |
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Mannheim/BSC Wednesday Seminar
15th May Mike Nash
(Portsmouth) talked about the problems in risk assessing sex
offenders
12th June David Wilson
discussed what can be learnt from serial killing in Britain
Speciality seminar
‘Why
are the Truly Disadvantaged American, when the UK is Bad Enough?:
Political economy, local autonomy and the path from education to
employment’ by Professor Niki Lacey and Professor David
Soskice in the Moot Court Room. Chaired by Professor David Downes. Professors Robert Reiner and Tim Newburn were discussants,
Abstract
In
terms of key criminal justice indices such as the rate of the most
serious violent crime and the imprisonment rate, the United States
not only performs worse than other advanced democracies, but does so
to a startling degree. Moreover these differences have become more
extreme over the last half century. For example, the imprisonment
rate, which was double that in England and Wales in 1970, is today
five times higher, notwithstanding the fact that the rate in England
and Wales has itself more than doubled during that period. And
while, at between 4 and 5 times the English level, the American
homicide rate is broadly comparable today with that in 1950 (when it
was nearly 6 times the English level) it reached ten times that
level in the late 1970s . These differences are widely recognised.
What is less often recognised in comparative criminal justice
scholarship is that these differences in criminal justice variables
sit alongside stark differences in other key social indicators,
notably in inequality of educational outcomes and in residential
socio-economic and racial segregation, where the United States also
does worse than other liberal market countries with similar economic
and welfare systems. The comparison with other Liberal Market
Economies such as the UK and New Zealand is even more striking in
the light of their own poor performance on all these variables as
compared to the Co-ordinated Market Economies of Northern Europe and
Japan. In this paper, we present a thesis about what explains each
of these distinctive American outcomes, and about how they relate to
one another. Our core argument is that the decentralised American
political system, which accords a distinctive degree of autonomy to
localities, and which governs a distinctively wide range of
decisions about education, zoning and criminal justice through local
electoral politics, produces a polarising dynamic in which it is
impossible to garner stable political support for integrative, let
alone redistributive policies. The key ‘median’ voters in local
elections are, disproportionately, home-owners who vote for policies
which will maximise their own property values and the quality of
services and the environment in their immediate area, and who are
reluctant to vote for costly public goods whose benefits are not so
restricted. In this light, it is rational for local governments to
form policies based on zoning: whether of good schools, of community
policing, of public housing, or – the most extreme example – of
offender populations into the prison system. These dynamics,
moreover, have become particularly strong since the collapse of
Fordism and disappearance of many manual jobs which formerly
provided a bridge from education to employment for the low-skilled.
It follows from the dynamics of American democracy that it is
virtually impossible to construct political coalitions at the local
level in order to construct alternative bridges in a post-Fordist
world. Our argument leads to the sobering conclusion that, within
the American political system as currently structured, the
opportunities for reversing the trend towards ever greater
punitiveness, or combating continuing high levels of violence and
inequality, are limited. In particular, our argument implies that a
diagnosis of the ‘collapse of American criminal justice’ in terms of
the federalisation of criminal policy by an activist state is, at
best, a very partial one, while recent arguments in favour of a
revival of local democracy as a solution to the ills of American
criminal justice are seriously misconceived. Notwithstanding their
relatively poor performance in comparison with the co-ordinated
countries, the relatively strong framework for national policy
development and implementation in other Anglo-Saxon countries has
provided mechanisms countering some of the polarising and
inegalitarian dynamics of a Liberal Market system.
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Hermann Mannheim quote of the month |
In
1940 Hermann Mannheim published
“Social Aspects of Crime in England
between the Wars.” . He writes (page
153)
“It would at present be untrue to say
that the extent of pauperism shows no connection whatsoever with the
crime figures. On the contrary, the high rate of crime of Norwich,
for instance, for which the unemployment percentages could offer no
explanation, assumes quite a different complexion if related to its
sometimes exorbitant number of paupers.
Mannheim also distinguished between criminality caused by
unemployment and that due to striking in the following terms:
"Unemployment may come to be accepted as a permanent condition,
unchangeable and without any ultimate aims, often enough fiercely
resented as something humiliating, but nevertheless, promoting a
distinctly passive and fatalistic attitude of mind. There has been
comparatively little organisation among unemployed workers which
might have induced them to face their problems in a more energetic
and constructive way. Of corresponding character are the offences
committed by unemployed, consisting as they mainly do of
isolated acts of petty thieving, unemployment frauds and only
occasionally more serious crime like coining. The striker's position
is different. He is engaged in ..a lightening war which must be
conducted with a concentration of all available strength upon one
aim, against one enemy, and with the knowledge that the struggle
will be lost if it cannot speedily be brought to a victorious
end. This feeling...tends to produce a type of lawbreaking very
different from that connected with unemployment: crimes of violence,
committed by masses or at least groups of strikers, as assaults
against blacklegs, employers and the police; rioting; burning and
wilful damage.
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From The Archives |
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Forthcoming Events |
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To Do in London |
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