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Chapter contents. Placing biography as a method within criminology
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CHAPTER CONTENTS
· Introduction 364
· Placing Biography as a Method within Criminology 364
· The ‘Turn to Biography’ in Sociology and Criminology 365
· Biographical Criminological Inquiry 367
¡ Biographies of criminal ‘others’ 367
¡ Biography and life-course criminology 368
¡ History, digitization and biography 370
· The Digital Panopticon: from ‘Stanley’ to ‘Scannell’ 371
¡ Life through a (biographical) lens 372
· Thinking Critically about Biographical Methods within Criminology 374
¡ Where is William? The presence and absence of the ‘victim’ 375
¡ A biographical ‘malestream view’ 376
· Summary and Review 378
· Study Questions and Activities for Students 378
· Suggestions for Further Reading 379
· References 379
GLOSSARY TERMS
biography autobiography life history interview
life-course study
USING BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN CRIMINOLOGICAL
( AND VICTIMOLOGICAL ) RESEARCH
Ross McGarry and Zoe Alker
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this chapter is to explore the theoretical and methodological uses of biography and autobiography as a means of critical social inquiry within criminol- ogy. First, this chapter explicates the influences of biography within criminological work as a way of emphasizing the juxtaposition between its usefulness and marginal practice. Second, the method of biography is demonstrated in one specific example of the life story of an individual ‘criminal’ drawn from historical documentary data to reconstruct the personal life of ‘others’. Third, within our discussion we reflect on the value of using this method as a mode of social inquiry (i. e. what can we learn from individual life stories? ) and offer some critical observations as to what remains absent within criminological work of this nature. We conclude by advocating for the continued use and development of biographical methods as valuable avenues of criminological and victimological inquiry.
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PLACING BIOGRAPHY AS A METHOD WITHIN CRIMINOLOGY
The Chicago School of Sociology was influential in the development of criminologi- cal research into crime and delinquency. In particular, it had a strong proclivity for conducting positivistic research concerned with studying the city of Chicago in rela- tion to social ecology and social disorganization (see Park et al., 1925; Shaw and McKay, 1942). Also developing out of the Chicago School was a strand of research concerned with ethnography and the individual personal lives of marginalized ‘oth- ers’. Following this influence, Plummer (1983, 2001) informs us that the use of biography (often in concert with ethnography) as a method of social inquiry derives most notably from Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918) study, The Polish Peasant in America and Europe. This study is said to have been the first (within Metropolitan social science at least; see Connell, 2007) to have synthesized the ‘objective’ factors of social life with ‘subjective’ interpretations of personal experiences (Plummer, 1983, 2001). The purpose of such an approach was to bring meaning to individual personalized accounts of everyday life as relatable to historical and social structures (Plummer, 1983, 2001). From this tradition came a tranche of further sociological studies ‘eliciting and analysing the spoken and written words of people who, earlier, had been seen as marginal to history making or to sociological explanation’ (Chamberlayne et al., 2000: 3; see also Wengraf et al., 2002). Notable examples include: Thrasher’s (1927) The Gang, Foote Whyte’s (1943) Street Corner Society, Anderson’s (1923) The Hobo, Sutherland’s (1937) The Professional Thief and Shaw’s (1930) The Jack Roller. Each of these studies has been influential in various ways for how we now study ‘crime’ as sociologically informed criminologists, with their main
methodological commonality focused on the individual lives of others as meaningful sites of sociological and criminological analysis. This brief preliminary discussion offers a situated sense of place for biography as a method within criminological research. However, to unpack this further we need to recognize that the use of biog- raphy within sociological research more broadly has had various changes in emphasis over the decades that have made its use and application less popular than this over- view might suggest.
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