Biographical criminological inquiry

BIOGRAPHICAL CRIMINOLOGICAL INQUIRY

The use of biography within criminological inquiry remains a paradox to researchers. On the one hand, biographies humanize offenders and redirect their lives away from social margins and place them front and centre an authoritative experience. But, as Goodey (2000) has noted, the use of biographical methods within criminology has been treated with scepticism. ‘Criminology, as a social science discipline’, Goodey (2000: 474) writes, ‘has never embraced the idea of research that is based on the study of the individual’. In particular, criminology’s scepticism over biography is due to the empha- sis these narratives place on the personal aspects of a ‘criminal life’ which foreground notions of ‘criminal’ character and ignore the importance of placing such lives within their social and historical contexts. As Stanley (1993) notes of Merton’s (1988) appeal for a ‘truly sociological autobiography’ that explores the interactional connections between social and cultural locales and structural conditions, so too does Goodey (2000: 474) urge scholars to ‘synthesize the individual with the social’. Practical exam- ples of how biography can be practised in these ways as a criminological and victimological research method can be found in contributions from Goodey (2000), Holloway and Jefferson (2000), McGarry and Walklate (2015) and McGarry (2016) for example. For the purposes of our current discussion however, we instead look to digi- tally produced historical data as a means of constructing biographical information.

Biographies of criminal ‘others’

Criminal biographies have a long history. From dramatic adaptations of the notori- ous early eighteenth-century thief and gaol-breaker Jack Sheppard, to the sensationalist twentieth-century accounts of ‘The Krays’, criminal biographies have always generated cultural interest. But it is essential to remember that these popular

narratives work to mythologize criminal individuals and events (Rogers, 2016). From the ‘Ordinary of Newgate’ to dramatic retellings of the Confessions of the Condemned (see Box 16. 1), these sensationalist accounts were repackaged for an audience eager to glance at the lives of the criminal ‘other’, and written with the purpose of instructing its readership on how to avoid lives of moral depravity. These accounts then hold more value to researchers as examples of morally didactic reform literature than as authentic retellings of life stories.

Often developed for the popular market, such accounts sensationalize aspects of individual biographies rather than focus on their broader social contexts, including, for example, structural inequalities such as poverty, institutionalized discrimination such as and police bias that inevitably played a part in offending trajectories (Godfrey, 2016).

Biography and life-course criminology

Biographies differ from life-course approaches in myriad ways, but two reasons are especially significant: first, biographies and autobiographies are subjective accounts of the individual. By contrast, life-course approaches view the individual’s life trajec- tory through a series of interconnected lenses: context, linked lives, agency and timing. Thus, scholars of life-course inquiries present individuals’ lives as a product of shifting and interlocking social, economic and political values, structures and con- texts (Barnwell, 2017). Popular criminal biographies often emphasize, if not glamorize, criminal activity. Works which divorce an individual’s ‘criminal career’

from the context/s in which such lives were lived, should be treated with scepticism by social science researchers. ‘Criminal’ biographies, however, can hold merit when treated in critically sensitive ways. As Goodey (2000) argues, if deployed within criminology it allows us to place individuals central to our analysis and permits a reassessment of their social, structural, cultural and political situations by examining ‘turning points’ in their lives. Goodey (2000) focuses on Denzin’s (1989: 70) ‘epiphany’ moments, arguing that ‘turning points’ in one’s life can be a useful framework for interpreting an individual’s relationship to crime within a broader social context. Such notions that life events – schooling, marriage, employment, and so on – are related to crime and desistance, have been the foundation of life-course criminology since the 1930s.

Defined as ‘the study of life-course events, transitions and trajectories and their relation to stability and change in crime involvement’ (McLaughlin and Muncie, 2013: 254), ‘life course’ studies have a long trajectory within criminology (Farrington and Ttofi, 2015; Farrington et al., 2006, 2013; Glueck and Glueck, 1930, 1934,

1950, 1968; Sampson and Laub, 1993, 1997, 2003, 2006. See also J. Sarnecki and

C. Carlsson in this volume). Life-course criminologists (see, for example, Benson, 2013) collate individual biographies of offenders and explore the relationships between crime pathways and life-course transitions (i. e. marriage, employment, fam- ily formation, other life events) as a means of understanding change at both the personal and the collective level. Placing individual lives and their transitional moments (i. e. entry into school, marriage, family formation, experience of the criminal justice system) – within their social, political, economic and cultural con- texts invites criminologists to examine how these transitions contribute to crime and desistance (see Goodey, 2000, for example). Furthermore, by adding each individual life history into a database of several hundred or more lives enables a deeper under- standing of the pathways into, and out of, offending. This type of criminological research is driven by two broad – but key – questions: first, are there social factors which make some people more prone to criminality? Second, what social factors make offenders more likely to either persist in or desist from offending? An early and highly influential example of life-course research emerged in America during the 1930s through Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck’s infamous study of young offenders (see Box 16. 2 and Box 13. 4 on page 308).