In 2013, I found myself teaching in the Department of Criminal Justice at California State University, Long Beach, which was an odd post for me because my Ph.D. is in English. What happened is that the chair of the department, when he first arrived to campus, went around to the criminal justice employers in the area and asked them, “What do you need from our graduates?” They responded, univocally, that they needed their workers to be better writers. Somewhat surprised by this response, the chair took a look at the campus-wide writing course that all first-year students are required to take, which is administered by the English Department, and decided that it wasn’t doing a good enough job. To his credit, he created a discipline-specific course, “Criminal Justice Researching, Writing, and Reasoning,” and also added writing components to other courses in the department.
In the “Criminal Justice Researching, Writing, and Reasoning” course, we spent much of our time talking about comma placement, subject-verb agreement, and APA-Style citations, and we wrote police reports, case briefs, and research papers. But, in the process of designing and teaching this course, it also became clear that it provided students with their first real opportunity to think creatively and independently about complex problems of crime and justice.
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Departments of Criminal Justice face a uniquely difficult educational challenge: young men and women of action as they are, students drawn to this field of study are usually less rigorously thoughtful, critical, and indeed skeptical about themselves and their cultures than students drawn to other disciplines, yet those same students need to graduate with degrees in Criminal Justice being considerably more thoughtful, critical, and skeptical of themselves, their cultures, and their professions than students in other disciplines are. This deep self-consciousness is required on account of the powers and responsibilities society bestows upon those who hold the careers that stem from a degree in Criminal Justice, as well as the challenges and traps traditionally presented in those careers.
All too often, students entering the Criminal Justice major see it as an administrative hoop to jump through on the way to getting a badge and gun and performing the work of heroism. Students often have no idea that a large part, if not the majority, of their jobs will consist of holding meetings and filling out paperwork, relentlessly mundane activities in contrast to the picture of criminal justice in popular culture: dusting for prints, cracking the case, breaking down doors, nabbing the bad guys, playing good-cop/bad-cop, securing a confession, arguing a case in court, serving as an expert witness, or throwing the book at a criminal.
Most students come to the Criminal Justice major because they want to do good in and for the world: nobly, they want to use their time, energy, and talents to make the world a better place. The challenge of Criminal Justice education is that there is a great divide between having the desire and having the ability to do good. This gap is made all the greater by the fact that popular culture offers such a simplified image of the work of doing good that the desire to do good is often counterbalanced and sometimes negated by a misconception of how it is actually done.
In this sense, the purpose of Criminal Justice education is disillusionment: a disabusing of the misconception that “the good” is widely agreed upon and easily ascertained, and that law enforcement is an easy implementation of “the good.” Indeed, it is because “the good” is not agreed upon, and not easily ascertained, that law enforcement can never be an easy application of “the good.”
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As my invocation of the idea of “the good” may indicate, I think Criminal Justice education needs to be a far more philosophical endeavor than it usually is.
Often, Criminal Justice education is conducted as though its sole purpose is to inform students of the structure of the justice system and facts about and theories of crime and justice in the United States. Such knowledge is necessary for a career in Criminal Justice, but it is not sufficient (or, rather, it currently is sufficient, but it shouldn’t be). It is not sufficient because it does nothing to ensure that the practitioners of justice in our society will have the capacity to question in responsible ways whether or not “crime” and “justice” as they are defined and dealt with in the U.S. justice system are actually the best ways to define and deal with “crime” and “justice.”
How can we ensure that Criminal Justice students have the ability to measure what is called “justice” against the multiple and competing traditions of “the good”? In order to do so, Criminal Justice students must be exposed to the formal methods and traditions of philosophical skepticism. This is my working thesis: to prepare students for careers in Criminal Justice, teach them skepticism.
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As everyone knows, the purpose of the academic discipline of Criminal Justice is to prepare students for careers in various forms of policing, corrections, investigations, and adjudications. Everyone agrees on the purpose of Criminal Justice education, but there is considerably less of a consensus on how best to achieve that purpose; that is, on how best to prepare students for the aforementioned careers.
Departments of Criminal Justice are not trade schools: for the most part, they do not teach the technical skills required to perform a certain job. There are, for example, police academies or law schools or certificate programs designed to train workers in the skills peculiar to specific careers. What, then, do Departments of Criminal Justice do? By and large, Departments of Criminal Justice are gatekeepers for the justice system; these departments are designed to cultivate the kind of people we as a society want to entrust with the administration of justice.
Criminal Justice is one of the very few academic disciplines that requires its students to be virtuous. One does not need to be a good man or woman to be a good historian: one only needs to know facts and dates and to be able to make sense of and narrate them effectively. One does not need to be a good man or woman to be a good engineer: one only needs to know how to build a bridge. In order to be a coherent participant in the administration of justice, however, one needs to be, at least in theory, a virtuous individual. To be sure, there are some unsavory folks who make it through the educational system and into Criminal Justice careers, but when this happens it happens because the educational system has failed, which sadly happens too often.
Most academic disciplines teach technical skills: how to clone a stem cell, for example, or how to invest money wisely. These skills are then put to use in careers that have ethical and legal safeguards against the abuse of those skills: don’t clone humans, for example, or don’t defraud investors. Because the careers predicated on a degree in Criminal Justice are those responsible for making and enforcing the laws that everyone else must follow, the enterprise of Criminal Justice must be its own watchdog. It must be skeptical of everything, including itself.
My wording in the last sentence betrays me: an “it” cannot be skeptical. Skepticism is a quality exercised by human beings, men and women, not institutions. To say, as I did, that the enterprise of Criminal Justice must be skeptical of itself is as absurd as saying that it has brown hair. In other words, it is individuals, not institutions, that must be the focus of the academic discipline of Criminal Justice.
If departments of Criminal Justice are supposed to ensure that the students they train are sufficiently self-policing, then those departments need to operate on the principle that it is their duty is to conduct the moral education of individual men and women.
The single greatest charge of Criminal Justice departments – what we mean when we say their purpose is to prepare students for the various careers we list – is to teach students how to be successfully skeptical of themselves and their own cultures, including the cultures of Criminal Justice.
Insofar as Criminal Justice serves a gatekeeping function, it must be sufficiently rigorous and indeed difficult. It must approximate the complexities and challenges of the work of criminal justice, but in a safe setting in which failure will not result in disaster. If someone is going to fail – that is, to have a moment of intellectual or ethical compromise – it is better for him or her to fail with a pencil and paper than with a gun and badge.
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Academic departments of Criminal Justice are sometimes seen as the greatest apologists for the professions of law enforcement, and sometimes conducted as if they were. In fact, the opposite is, or should be, true. Academic departments of Criminal Justice are, or should be, the greatest critics of law enforcement as it is currently practiced. The purpose of the academic discipline of Criminal Justice is to critique, not to defend, the enterprise of Criminal Justice as it is practiced by the professions. The academic discipline of Criminal Justice is the ombudsman of law enforcement, the skeptical critic who observes and when necessary disturbs the actions of those who are conceptualizing and implementing policies.
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As crystalized in the compound nature of the term, “criminal justice” is an inevitably interdisciplinary field. It is a study of the “criminal,” which raises biological, psychological, and sociological questions, in the context of a study of “justice,” which considers legal, political, and philosophical issues.
In terms of its academic branch, the discipline of Criminal Justice is usually thought of as a social science, a branch of knowledge founded upon the idea that we can study society as we study nature, through rigidly controlled experiments, carefully collected data, and deliberately reasoned theories. Quantifying culture, and theorizing about those numbers, is certainly important to do, but given the diverse biological, psychological, sociological, legal, political, and philosophical questions considered in the name of Criminal Justice, perhaps it might be worthwhile to consider the concerns of Criminal Justice from the vantage of the Humanities. The Humanities are grounded in a simple concern with what, how, and why we humans create: what things we create, how we create particular things, and why we create those things in those ways. Not everything was or is created by humans, and not everything is available to the Humanities for interpretation: humans did not create the rocks and the stars, so the Humanities have nothing to say about such things, though the Humanities certainly do have something to say about the interpretations and discourses we humans create in response to those naturally occurring objects.
Insofar as humans create both crime and justice, the discipline of criminal justice is available to a humanistic perspective, one that can generate otherwise unavailable knowledge about the production of crime and justice. A humanistic approach to criminal justice would ask, “What crimes do we humans create? How do we create specific crimes? Why do we create those crimes in those ways?”; and, “What kinds of justice do we humans create (and what kinds don’t we create)? How do we create (and fail to create) justice? Why do we create justice (or fail to) in the ways that we do?” The values and perspectives of a healthy humanism can counterbalance the quantities and calculations that emerge from too scientific a Criminology.
For example, the phrase in my last paragraph, “the production of crime and justice,” is an invitation to consider Criminal Justice through an analytical vocabulary availed by the theatre, to attend to both the criminal event and the administration of justice as dramatic productions, complete with casts and crews, actors and audiences, characters and conventions, props and costumes, and entrances and exits. The language of the theatre allows us to conceive of crime as drama and justice as theatre.
The problem with too scientific an approach to Criminal Justice is that no student of this discipline will ever meet and shake hands with a statistic or a theory; they will deal with human beings all the time. Moreover, there will come a time in the career of every Criminal Justice professional when the only thing that prevents injustice is his or her ability to recognize inhumane ideas and immoral actions, and his or her knowledge of how to halt such things.
At the end of the day, from the perspective of the Humanities, there is a Criminal Justice system, but it is humans who run the system, and since humans are prone to error and inadequacy, the system will never run perfectly, which means that justice is an ideal that, as a rule, cannot be attained. Men and women, base and creaturely things, will always fail to achieve justice but must try nonetheless because any other option is tantamount to chaos. All that we can hope for – and this is where the Humanities can be a valuable counterbalance to the leaky scientism of much Criminology – is that the individual men and women collected under the pursuit of this ideal, destined as they are to failure, will be decent enough human beings with the mental capacity to evaluate information in all its rampant particularity and the moral diligence to prevent routine mistakes from becoming systematic oppression that we might abate, however slightly, the swell of pain and suffering that seems to return to us like the tide, twice daily.
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In other words, it is possible to think of crime and justice as texts, and the same interpretive strategies literary critics use to read literary texts – attending to issues such as setting, plot, and character, as well as features like imagery, genre, and theme – can be used to read ideas and instances of crime and justice as texts. To be clear, I am not proposing that students of Criminal Justice study literature instead of society, though of course the interpretation of literature is always practice for the interpretation of life. I am suggesting that they study society as literature is studied, not as molecules are studied.
Being trained in Criminal Justice means being trained to read crime and justice as texts, as narratives in which some events are known, others not; some motives expressed, others not; and the task thus falls to the analyst to fill in the gaps and make sense of the competing accounts, possibilities, and probabilities that lurk behind known facts. In other words, the charge of the criminologist is equal to the accomplishment of the literary writer: to give narrative form – a beginning, middle, and end – to complex social events that usually swirl far beyond the reach of comprehension. To analyze crimes, and to theorize about kinds of crime, is to craft a narrative, one complete with intrigue and plot twists, showing the sometimes surprising conceptual origins of criminal action and its various consequences.
That is, crime and justice can be seen as rhetoric, as expressions that follow certain patterns and employ certain strategies in order to achieve certain goals. Broadly defined, “rhetoric” is speech aimed at accomplishing a given purpose, and “rhetorical analysis” is interpretation of the structure and intent of such speech: of the structure that holds the various parts of a text together, which an author usually develops in and against a certain tradition of structuring similar texts; and of the intent behind structuring a text in the way that it is structured, behind using certain tactics to achieve certain goals or a certain set of goals.
Rhetorical analysis gives an account of the goals someone has when he or she speaks, the tactics he or she employs in order to achieve those goals, the structure of the text that results from employing those tactics, and the effect of that text on others who experience it. To treat crime as a text, and to offer a rhetorical analysis of it, is to give an account of the goals someone has when he or she commits a crime, the tactics he or she employs in order to achieve those goals, the structure of the crime that results from employing those tactics, and the effect of that crime on others who experience it. By the same token, to treat justice as a text, and to offer a rhetorical analysis of it, is to give an account of the goals someone has when he or she administers justice, the tactics he or she employs to achieve those goals, the structure of justice that results from employing those tactics, and the effect of that version of justice on those who experience it.
In the end, Cultural Studies, not the Social Sciences, provides the best vocabulary for Criminal Justice. As the foundation of Culture Studies, Rhetoric is the inter-discipline Criminal Justice needs to address crime and justice as cultural constructions available for deconstruction; that is, as things created by humans that are therefore available to interpretive accounts of how and why they were created. Since this term, “deconstruction,” and the post-modern philosophy toward which it gestures, are often met with suspicion in Criminology, I should say that deconstruction, not to be confused with destruction, is not about tearing down or subverting social institutions. It is about giving an account of their constructedness. Deconstruction is not political but intellectual, and that is precisely what Criminal Justice needs: less politics, more intelligence.
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In this last statement, I am suggesting that the push for “policy implications” is, in fact, a hindrance to successful Criminology. Public policies should, of course, be responsive to the knowledge produced by Criminology, but Criminology is and must remain the purely academic arm of the discipline of Criminal Justice.
Criminology is, or should be, about basic research in contrast to applied research. Basic research is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; it is, in short, the search for truth. Applied research is about utilizing basic research in order to make the world a better place. Criminology is not about making the world a better place; it is about understanding the world.
It is certainly possible for someone to conduct both basic and applied research, but in practice it is very difficult. Human beings, fragile creatures that we are, have very limited time and energy, and when someone tries to do everything, he or she often succeeds in accomplishing nothing at all. When those who are trying to understand the world start trying to fix it, those attempts to fix the world often inhibit by taking the place of their attempts to understand it.
In your Criminology, aim to be analytical, not moralistic. That is, you should aim to understand the crimes you address, not to fix them, keeping in mind that to understand is not to excuse. You can make a bad situation much worse when you try to fix something you don’t understand. By the same token, when you fully and accurately understand a problem, the solution will usually be obvious. As tempting as it might be, you should not aim, at least not primarily, to propose policies for the betterment of society. Doing so will only lead you down a path of banal moralization, the sort of hollow polemic readily available on cable news channels, whereas a careful and deliberate analysis of an issue will take you in the direction of specialized criminological knowledge that actually matters. Thus, don’t try to fix; try to understand, and answers will freely follow understanding. To understand a crime is to recognize that there are multiple factors contributing to the criminal event, that it is not simply the product of a bad person’s bad choice, that crimes are sometimes the unintended and unfortunate outcome of the best laid plans of well-intentioned people, or of too many people competing for too few resources. At the same time, crimes are also destructive and costly. It is your duty, as the criminological theorist, to negotiate the complex and sometimes ambivalent judgment of criminal acts, and this is perhaps the greatest responsibility of the criminologist: to be able to see the criminal act as both the cause and the effect of great pain and suffering.
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From this perspective, the pinnacle of the academic discipline of Criminology, and its reason for existing, is not theory but pedagogy. I have yet to be convinced that there exists a general theory of crime that accounts for all crimes in all places at all times. I am more sympathetic to the idea that there are coherent theoretical explanations for specific kinds of crimes (for example, mass murder, gang violence, or white-collar crime). I am even more compelled by the notion that a criminological theory need not be “true” to be useful.
In other words, the ideas of criminology do not need to be demonstrably sound explanations of the phenomena they claim to explain in order to serve as helpful roadmaps for thinking about the individual instances of those phenomena. Criminological theory is, always has been, and always will be a heuristic, a useful fiction. That is, the conceptual schemes we develop in criminological theory are most useful, not as explanatory mechanisms, but as maps to the possible interpretations of specific criminal events, as ideas that may not necessarily be theoretically sound but can still be used (and, as needed, not used) to provide fully formed lines of thought for making sense of criminal and legal events as they unfold, especially when those lines of thought are not immediately obvious. As such, the duty of the criminologist is not to explain crime but to teach others the vast array of explanations of crime that will serve as equiptment for criminological work.
To restate the point, the greatest charge of the criminologist is pedagogy, not theory; or, the criminologist only does theory in the service of pedagogy.
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In sum, the academic discipline of Criminal Justice encounters two main obstacles, one from popular culture and one from the professions. In popular culture, Criminal Justice is seen as a science as opposed to an art; that is, as a branch of knowledge in which questions are clear and answers are absolute, which are the misconceptions that give rise to the romanticized image of justice in which the good battles and conquers the evil. As a corrective, the Humanities can offer a vocabulary capable of dealing with crime and justice as human inventions, as opposed to naturally occurring phenomena, which is what they are from a scientific perspective. In the professions, Criminal Justice is said to be about action, not thought, even to the point that intelligence is sometimes treated as a weakness and liability. On this front, the Humanities offer Criminal Justice the rich tradition of rhetorical theory, which strengthens by scrutinizing acts of interpretation.
The Humanities can be a valuable pedagogical resource for Criminal Justice; the Humanities can aid Criminal Justice students in an intellectual transition that is fundamental to their professionalization, namely the transition from a dogmatic to a skeptical model of Criminal Justice.
By a dogmatic model of Criminal Justice, I mean the kind that is codified in popular American culture, the kind with roots in the rationalism of a Beccaria and the scientism of a Lombroso, and represented by the facile and formulaic genre of detective fiction, as epitomized by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the investigator who always gets his man through an extraordinary display of individual intelligence, strength, and virtue. Among its other limitations, this image of the heroic law enforcement agent makes him or her completely distinct from and opposed to the criminal, an opposition grounded on some fairly simplistic assumptions: the law is good, and crime is committed by bad men and women making bad choices. By the same token, the law enforcement agent is a good man or woman who makes good decisions, usually grounded in logic and science, especially statistics, turning crime into something abstract and absolute. As an almost allegorical battle between the evil represented by the criminal and the good represented by the law enforcement agent, who always wins, detective fiction is a comforting genre, one that props up the idea of justice as the strong and stable guardian of civil society.
If the dogmatic model of Criminal Justice points forward to our popular, modern attitudes about crime and justice – attitudes, I have suggested, that are not very good attitudes – a skeptical model of Criminal Justice points backward to some ancient questions, to some important and arguably timeless problems of human society. Where the dogmatic model is scientific, the skeptical model is humanistic: crime is particular and situational, evidence is not statistical but anecdotal, and analysis is not quantitative but qualitative. In the skeptical model, concepts are always more complex than their dogmatic counterparts: crime is a result of both individual and cultural forces; a criminal can be both a villain and a victim; and justice is an imperfect mixture of revenge and forgiveness. Here there are not “good guys” and “bad guys”; there are good actions and bad actions, and any given person is capable of either. As such, the law enforcement agent is not necessarily impervious to criminality, and indeed the police are often beset by ineptitude, recklessness, and error. In contrast to the simplified picture of crime in the dogmatic model, the skeptical model treats crime as a complex web of competing assumptions, motives, and commitments; as the unfortunate outcome of too many people competing for too few resources; as the material result of cultural mistakes like giving badges to fools; and – most importantly – as both the cause and the effect of great pain and suffering. In other words, justice is not heroic but tragic, not stable but fragile, not comforting but troubling.
In the dogmatic model the word “criminal” refers to an identity – a criminal is a kind of person, one who is always guilty, always caught, and always punished – but in the skeptical model “criminal” is an action, not an identity. Thoughts, words, and deeds can be “criminal,” but not people. Just consider how shaky the notion of “criminal” as an identity is. Is a “criminal” simply someone who has committed a crime, has broken a law? In that case, aren’t we all criminals, which renders the term “criminal” useless as a descriptor. Or is a “criminal” someone who has been convicted of a crime? In this case, what about the wrongfully accused, those convicted of crimes they did not commit? The idea of the “criminal” as an identity is the result of sloppy, lazy, or hasty thinking, of the creation of a category in which to place people who do not always fit.
The effect of this categorical thinking is that those who have been branded as “criminal” acquire in the eyes of others, and sometimes in their own eyes, all the negative attributes and hardships associated with criminality. This stigma can be avoided by thinking of actions, not people, as “criminal,” but to do so requires extraordinary time and effort because each individual must be addressed as an individual, not as a canned character type. The justice system, by nature of it being a system, is constitutionally incapable of the particularity required to treat individuals as individuals. The system creates categories and organizes society according to those categories, making movement among those categories something that we do all the time in life but something that is difficult to achieve from the vantage of the system.
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Most “criminal” behavior is not an inversion of “normal” or “healthy” behavior but an extension or exaggeration of it. For example, date rape is not the opposite of normal sexual courtship but an exaggeration of (usually) the tradition of the male who displays his power and devotion to the female who resists his supplications in an attempt to preserve her honor.
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Any rational choice theory of crime falls apart for the simple reason that crime is not rational. Except in some special circumstances, crime is always an irrational choice. From this perspective, criminology should be concerned with giving accounts of how a human mind came to make the irrational choice of crime, this in contrast to the rational choice criminology that claims crime is committed by men and women who weigh the risks and benefits of crime and make the rational choice that the benefits are worth the risks. There are certainly case where such formulae apply, such as the woman who steals a loaf of bread so that her children don’t starve, but much more common are the cases in which circumstance and desire make a clearly poor decision seem to be attractive. Consider the enterprising youth who commits a violent crime to earn his membership in a gang: there is no meaningful sense in which that is a rational mind at work. It is an irrational mind that commits most crime, and it is the criminologist’s duty to explain why reason is not the operative principle at work in the mind in question.
As a rule, crime is committed due to confusion, not malice.