This is the second of a three-part series examining how criminologists can better engage what Jock Young has called ‘the criminological imagination’. The authors consider developments in the UK, USA and Canada and argue that criminology faces both external and internal challenges that constrain how crime is interpreted and how criminologists communicate their work in the public realm. In this piece, the authors consider internal challenges within criminology including careerism and citation counts, and the methodological fetishization associated with the quantitative turn in contemporary criminology. Perhaps most worrying is the lack of modesty about both knowledge and methods in leading publications.

This is the first in a three-part series examining the basis on which criminologists can better engage what Jock Young has called ‘the criminological imagination.’ We consider developments in the UK, USA and Canada and argue that criminology faces external challenges that constrain how crime is interpreted and how criminologists can communicate the results of an ever-growing, international evidence-base into the public realm. In our view, future efforts to re-define criminology as contentious, as in some cases, or conciliatory, as in others, require a new way to conceive of the intersections between crime, power, and society.

I am stunned that people are not more upset about this. You know, $8.7 billion of our money has gone missing in Iraq.   I didn’t even know they had a Goldman Sachs over there. (Jay Leno) ^[i]

In April of 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud complaint against Goldman Sachs and Company, and its employee, one Fabrice Tourre.^[ii]  In the words of one knowledgeable observer, this was the SEC’s “only major case against Wall Street since the crisis” (Sorkin 2010: 550). The complaint accused the defendants of making misleading and deceptive statements with respect to a debt instrument marketed by Goldman Sachs in 2007 that was based on subprime residential mortgage-backed securities.^[iii]  Undisclosed to investors was that a hedge fund called Paulson & Company was involved in the selection of assets which formed the basis for the new debt instrument, and paid Goldman Sachs a fee of $15 million to market the new instrument. Paulson thereupon took a short position against the very security it helped to market – a position which Goldman Sachs did not disclose to investors as required under the Security and Exchange Commission Acts of 1933 and 1934.

Science-fiction visions of dystopian societies, such as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron and Philip K Dick’s Minority Report, all three turned into successful films, are increasingly evoked in discussions of changes in society, individual freedoms and state control of criminal justice. These stories, in the eloquent words of Lucia Zedner, tap into our worst fears of:

"..a shift from a post- to a pre-crime society...in which the possibility of forestalling risks competes with and even takes precedence over responding to wrongs done. In consequence, the post-crime orientation of criminal justice is increasingly overshadowed by the pre-crime logic of security. [...] Pre-crime, by contrast, shifts the temporal perspective to anticipate and forestall that which has not yet occurred and may never do so." (2007: 262)

In Predicting Young Criminals, his recent article for CrimeTalk, Sean Creaney is therefore in good company in seeing parallels between Minority Report, with its pre-crime social exclusion of predicted murderers, and the pre-emptive turn in youth justice developments. He reflects on the role of practitioners required to assess the likelihood of young people becoming offenders, using fallible methods, and then to direct them onto youth offending programmes before they have offended.