CRIMINOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES: A METHODOLOGICAL PRIMER by John Hagan, A. R. Gillis, & David Brownfield. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. 202 pages.
ISBN 0-8133-1084-9.
Reviewed by Dennis J. Palumbo, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State
University.
This book is clearly written and contains some very interesting insights about crime and its causes--insights that are somewhat surprising and not all that well known among criminologists. The six chapters (and therefore six controversies) are divided equally among the three authors. The main purpose of the book is to show what the application of social scientific techniques, especially quantitative analysis, can contribute to the study of crime and delinquency. How well the authors do this will be addressed later. First, I will describe and evaluate their substantive contributions.
Hagan wrote the first two chapters. The first chapter deals with the question of whether adverse class conditions cause crime, and particularly whether or not there is an "underclass" that accounts for most crime. Hagan says that most research regarding this question mixes together descriptions of poverty and crime in a tautological fashion rather than articulating the processes that actually connect class to crime. These processes, Hagan says, connect community settings and individual lives wherein "young people follow a life course that leads from delinquency to crime to unemployment and related problems." Hagan’s conclusions about class and crime are not altogether clear; he says that macro-level community unemployment can create micro-level conditions for individuals in which juvenile delinquency is likely to lead to adult unemployment and associated crime. This seems to say that social class (being poor and unemployed) causes crime. However, this conclusion ignores the reasons why macro-level community unemployment exists in the first place and the role of the war on drugs in producing "criminals."
In the second chapter Hagan takes on the question of gender and crime by testing power-control theory that suggests fathers use the power they derive from authority positions in work outside the home to assign mothers primary responsibility for child care. This helps reproduce the gender roles of the patriarchal family in which girls are controlled more than boys. As a result, boys are more likely to be risk takers and get more involved in crime, particularly violent and assaultive behavior. But can patriarchy as a variable account for the fact that over 90% of the people convicted of crime are male?
A. R. Gillis wrote chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3, Gillis considers whether urbanization causes crime, especially since much American criminology seems to conclude that it does. Gillis’ interesting conclusion is that this is time bound and perhaps unique to 20th century United States. Using longitudinal research (most American research is cross-sectional) of 19th century urbanization in France shows that urbanization is not always connected with crime (although it certainly was in Charles Dickens’ England). Gillis’ next chapter asks whether adding more police actually INCREASES rather than deters crime. Longitudinal research again shows that, in the short run, there is an increase in crime as more charges are investigated, but when distributed time lags are used, adding police does decrease crime. Gillis’ conclusion is that, consistent with deterrence arguments, the "growth of the urban police force may have been a substantial contributor to the decline in rates of major property crime in nineteenth-century France." The problem with this conclusion is that official measures of crime (even though Gillis says that 19th century French official record keeping was good) are really measures of police activity, not measures of crime.
Brownfield wrote the final two chapters. In the first he argues that subcultural theories of crime deserve further attention because, at the lower end of the income spectrum, families that are characterized by unemployment and welfare dependency have a greater tendency to endorse values that encourage crime, while at the opposite end of the class spectrum, white collar crime "may be fostered by values that promote deceptive business practices and an instrumental ethic." It is nice to see that Brownfield focuses on more that just the poor and crime although the cliche’ is still true that "the rich get richer and the poor get prison."
In the final chapter Brownfield finds that drugs and crime are not causally connected as is commonly believed (i.e. addicts commit crimes to get money to buy drugs). Instead, using the technique of "latent class" analysis, he concludes that both are measures of a latent variable he calls "deviant behavior." Thus, researchers should stop trying to determine if drugs cause crime or the reverse.
Along the way the three authors take the reader through a number of statistical and methodological techniques, some of which are quite advanced; a "primer" this book is not, regardless of the title. A major plus of the book is each author begins with a discussion of the issue, a review of the literature, and then an analysis of data related to the issue. The main purpose is not to establish the validity of the theory but to document ways in which propositional theory can be explored and tested. Thus, the authors show that quantitative analysis can shed light on crime issues. The book can be used in methods courses, although not with out regular texts, particularly statistics texts, because their explanations of the techniques are not clear and detailed enough for most graduate students.
Finally, the authors admit that, similar to qualitative methods, quantitative research rarely gives the final word on an issue. The authors also are quite daring to defend and support positivist methods in this age of post-modernism. However, they overlook a major ontological aspect of post-modernist philosophy, which is they take their dependent variable "crime" as a unidimensional given rather than a multifaceted social construct. Thus they ignore the possibility that the criminal justice system itself has been a major contributor to social break down and crime in the inner cities and that it is possible that instead of fighting "crime," the "war on drugs" is really a war on African Americans; thus, more than 50% of the 1 ½ million "criminals" in the nation’s prisons and jails are African Americans and many of them are there for drug crimes. As Jerome Miller (1996) has noted, quantitative research has failed to detect this and in fact has concluded that racial bias does not exist. The point of these remarks is that although Hagan, Gillis and Brownfield disagree with THE NEW CRIMINOLOGY and assert that crime can be measured, similar to a physicist measuring subatomic particles, they forget that even in physics, subatomic particles change in the process of measuring them (the Heisenberg principle). Crime also is not a given, static thing but defined by those who have the power to do so and who benefit from their definition. Thus, it seems to me to be a futile exercise to look for CAUSES of this illusive and multi-faceted phenomena.
Jerome G. Miller, 1996. SEARCH AND DESTROY. AFRICAN-AMERICAN MALES IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM. Cambridge University Press.