Editor's Blog
New criminology students: the awful but exciting truth!
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- Category: Editor's blog
- Last Updated: Wednesday, 03 June 2026 17:45
- Published: Monday, 14 September 2020 12:07
- Written by Colin Sumner
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As criminology students around the world return to study at their universities, in new and strange circumstances, I want them to realize that they have a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to see the core truths of the legal and social world we live in. It's like a type of eclipse you can only see in your own backyard every 50 years.
Rarely can you see so many governments breaking the law or refusing to protect their citizens or blatantly lying or brutally attacking their civil servants, judges, media and, of course, oppositions. These are truly exceptional times, and if you do not recognize what I am talking about I suggest you start reading current affairs as a matter of some urgency. You will need to do this yourself, because some of your teachers, for a variety of reasons, will simply teach you what they have always taught.
This article in Today's Guardian touches on many of the issues in the UK today with its serious collapse of democratic governance during a pandemic: "For the Tories, breaking the law is just a sign of strength" by Nesrine Malik. The Tory government has repeatedly challenged the rule of law over the last few years and, like Hitler's emergent fascists of the 1930's, every time they get away with it they grow stronger and move on to their next seizure of somebody else's power. Of course, during this time, they have been embarassed into many u-turns and have neglected their duty to protect the UK from a lethal pandemic, to protect the poorer North of England from economic disaster, and to protect the interests of the other nations within the UK, notably the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. Their multiple 'failures' have been accompanied by a growing authoritarianism in Westminster, strong direction from an unelected special adviser, the vilification or suppression of most opposition, and non-engagement with critical media. This also involves government blaming everyone else for the problems they themselves have created! Brexiters blame the EU for making them want to leave the EU! The science of blaming has a laboratory and you have a perfect view!
In the USA, Belarus, Australia, China, Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel and many other countries, the situation is similar or worse. Presidents and governments expand their power at the expense of democratic procedures and restrictions, and yet blame everyone else for their problems. Their actions have been extreme: bombing their own citizens, not protecting their people from a deadly pandemic, poisoning key opposition critics, bombing critical movements in neighbouring countries, refusing to give up power when faced with overwhelming opposition and derision, imprisoning large numbers of their opposition, killing questioning journalists, refusing to accept the value of immigration and inhumanly rejecting people who try to escape from brutal oppression to supposedly safer havens, not policing human trafficking tightly, not protecting ethnic groups to the point of leaving them exposed to environmental and medical disasters, and perhaps above all failing to prevent the ongoing, massive environmental damage and climate change caused by human attacks on bio-diversity.
Criminology must now redefine its agenda fundamentally in the light of these major and revelatory social changes....if it is to escape from the clutches of corrupt states and their compliant universities and speak truly to the huge numbers of people who are fascinated by what it can reveal about the world.
Your lecturers should explain right from the outset in Year 1 what I am talking about, if you are not already aware. They should explain the implications for criminological analysis for what has been revealed over this last decade, as welfarism gives way to 'austerity', as democracy gives way to a kind of fascism, as news gives way to propaganda. These are not minor matters. What you should seek from your course in its first year, and I am sure you students of 2020 do really care about the truth and not just getting good grades for non-existent jobs or jobs in a corrupted state, is this:
1 An explanation of the implications of state crime for the very definition of crime. Is crime simply what state-made law says it is? In corrupted or failed states, don't we need a concept of crimes against humanity or a renewed universalistic moral order, however limited?
2 A thorough exploration of the distinction between criminal and civil law, and of the links between this distinction and social class. Does criminal law simply deal with what threatens the state? Is failure to prevent the deaths of thousands of citizens caused by, say negligent building practices (Grenfell Towers), or poor crowd control (Hillsborough) or privatising the NHS and micro-manging healthcare very badly (CV-19) not criminal? Isn't the moral outrage behind crime linked to a strong sense of its social harm? In today's global culture don't we very much want the category of crime to be filled with our list of social harms?
3 A clinical dissection of the components of 'crime' and 'criminal behaviour'. Is any behaviour inherently criminal or is it criminal because the state and its agents say so? Or is crime a censure that contains or combines both legal category with the targets it is applied to, and is therefore highly cultural and deeply political?
4 Some history of criminology's close association with the state, as a kind of reform research agency, and why over the last 50 years have 'radical', 'Marxist', feminist and 'critical' criminologies developed as powerful intellectual forces?
These are core and basic issues in any independent, scientific criminology, unrestricted or trapped by state influence, funding and power, and what stop it becoming the mere product of state research bureaux, whatever they might call themselves.
For a taste of what we have seen and a clue on what will follow:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45427838
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/25/trumps-terrible-week-stunning-news-and-whispers-of-impeachment
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/11/poland-holds-ghost-election-with-0-turnout
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/12/top-lawyers-slam-suella-braverman-for-wrecking-uks-reputation
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040194
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/trumps-lies-about-coronavirus/608647/
