The ‘turn to biography’in Sociology and criminology

From our contextual discussion above, the latter study mentioned was Clifford Shaw’s (1930) The Jack Roller. This particular work from Shaw (1930) is highly regarded and popularly known within criminological research. In brief, this study sees the Chicagoan sociologist Clifford Shaw following the experiences of ‘Stanley’, a delinquent young boy from a deprived background who experienced destitution and imprisonment in his early life. Shaw is said to have met Stanley during his sen- tencing in the Chicago House of Correction before taking him under his guidance in a bid to understand the circumstances which eventually found him as a ‘delinquent’, and (less explicitly) rehabilitate him from criminality (Gelsthorpe, 2007). The influ- ences of this principal biographical study have been profound for criminology. As Gelsthorpe (2007: 516) articulates:

Shaw’s sociological and methodological contribution is widely considered to have been hugely significant. Among other things, life history ‘illuminated urban institutions and other aspects of behaviour’ (Bennett, 1981: 221), it provided a clear depiction of urban pathology, and, critically, it contributed to an understanding of the development of delinquency.

Despite these influential origins, an engagement with biographical research as a com- mon method within criminology has been inconsistent and variously interpreted. Without the time or space to unpack the past 100 years’ influence of Chicagoan research in this area, this is perhaps most notable from how biography (and life his- tory) have been addressed in criminological research methods books. For example, within Jupp’s (1989: 65) Methods of Criminological Research uses of ‘life histories’ are cited as a means of informal interviews as part of the ‘discovery-based ethno- graphic tradition’. True to its influence on the discipline of criminology, Jupp (1989: 64) informs us that:

A typical example of a life history from the Chicago School is Shaw’s The Jack Roller … The data took six years to collect and included a number of stages: first, details about

Stanley’s arrests were presented to him as signposts around which he could relate his story; second, the verbatim record of this story was presented to Stanley who was asked to expand on it by including greater detail.

Jupp (1989) continues by informing us that ‘discovery-based’ approaches, which are contingent on long-term interaction with the life (or life story) of another, are instru- mental in building theory (such as Shaw’s (1930) The Jack Roller and Sutherland’s (1937) The Professional Thief). Maguire (2008) also makes brief comment on the uses of life history as a means of documenting ‘criminal lifestyles’ in another edited text (see King and Wincup, 2008). Following further acknowledgment of the influ- ences of Shaw (1930) and Sutherland (1937), Maguire (2008: 279) offers some thoughts on the practical pitfalls of ‘life history’ when applied to the realities of research in the ‘field’, such as it being contingent on the skills base of the researcher, and finding the ‘right person’ who is articulate enough to engage with the process as a participant, recall details coherently and not be a ‘plausible liar’. Other crimino- logical methods books, however, have had much less to say about biography. For example, in the previous edition of Doing Criminological Research (the methods book you are currently reading) some mention of life history was made by Jewkes (2011) in her study of prisoners’ preferences for media as a means of discovering more about their identities and feelings of power and powerlessness, while Hudson (2011) had also briefly mentioned life history as a method of interview for critical criminological research. Others, such as Noakes and Wincup’s (2004: 116) Criminological Research, also acknowledge the influence of Shaw’s (1930) work and advocate the use of ‘personal accounts of interactions’ to illuminate the workings of the criminal justice process. Although they offer no further instruction on how this can be achieved, Wincup’s (2017) later edition of this text provided some further insight and encouragement into the uses of autobiography (discussed below) as a way to ‘think creatively’ when using existing qualitative data. Within Withrow’s (2014) Research Methods in Crime and Justice, The Jack Roller is mentioned passingly as the explanatory material connecting ‘case study’ and ‘ethnography’ with no mention of biography or life history. Other texts, such as Crow and Semmens’ (2008) Researching Criminology, make no reference to the use of life history or biography whatsoever.

All of this is not to castigate the work within these selected texts, each of which

has comprehensively covered a myriad of other methodologies and methods. What this observation instead serves to reflect is Goodey’s (2000) remark that biographical methods have long been held with some scepticism as a rigorous mode of social inquiry within criminology. This may well be, as Jock Young (2011) noted, due to the ‘nomothetic impulse’ of what Jupp (1989) had earlier described as the ‘criminologi- cal enterprise’. In brief, this refers to mainstream criminology’s default to quantitative methodologies and preference for survey data as valid sources of generalizable knowledge. The resulting intermittent use of biography as a method within crimino- logical research, and its recent resurgence (evident by its more established presence within this book), has been referred to as the ‘narrative turn’ (qua Goodey, 2000).

Similar shifts and developments are known as the ‘biographical turn’ within sociol- ogy (see Chamberlayne et al., 2000). The ascendancy of humanistic methods within sociology leading to these eventual ‘turns’ is highlighted by Plummer (1983: 8; 2001) as a move towards ‘the rise of the personal tale’ (i. e. the use of textual artefacts, images, film, oral history, life story and autobiography as important sociological sources of ‘data’). And as Jupp (1989) further noted, life histories do not necessarily have to pertain to the living; social history has also been employed within criminol- ogy to bring attention to the present by using historical documents to resurrect, rebuild and critically reflect on the past. Within the following sections, we aim to demonstrate the use of such approaches to method to help critically explore one particular example of biography concerned with the narrative history of a ‘criminal’, and the more peripheral autobiography of the ‘victim’.