Journal of
Sociology
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The Institutional Foundations of Contemporary Australian
Criminology
Kit Carson and Pat O'Malley
Journal of Sociology 1989 25: 333
DOI: 10.1177/144078338902500301
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333
The Institutional Foundations of
Contemporary Australian Criminology
Kit Carson
Department of Legal Studies
La Trobe
University
Pat
O’Malley
Department of Legal
La Trobe University
Studies
ABSTRACT
The foundations of modern Australian criminology were
formed in a conservative social milieu in which a
professionalising project for the discipline was pursued by
allying it with academic lawyers and state criminal justice and
correctional officials. Nevertheless, the fact that criminology is
’tainted’ by the inclusion of disreputable social sciences (i.e.
sociology), has meant that its protagonists have succeeded only
in creating a quasi-profession, formally autonomous as a
knowledge, but in practice policed by state officials and
members of the legal profession. Despite various ’police
actions’ and organisational constructions designed to constrain
the critical potential of the discipline, and despite the belated
development of sociology as an academic discipline in this
country, Australian criminology has begun to generate a
genuinely critical discourse during the 1980s.
INTRODUCTION
In the past few years, Australian criminology has at last begun to take
some definite steps towards joining the modem mainstream of critical,
radical and more theoretical criminology research. A solid body of critical work on white-collar and corporate crime has been built up, feminist
criminology has begun to make its mark, and informed radical stances
have been adopted by some criminologists on such issues as a national
drug policy and prison reform. Two new journals with the potential to
provide a forum for radical and theoretical debate have appeared on the
scene, while the longer establishedAustralian and New Zealand Journal of
Criminology (ANZjC) has also started to present less orthodox and conservative work.2 A serious start has also been made on the business of
theorising the Australian legal order and criminal justice system.33
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These are but a few of the developments which attest to the fact that
the face of Australian criminology, long set firmly towards unreflective
correctionalism, unexplicated positivism and unswerving conservatism,
is finally beginning to change. While work in the newer criminological
vein is not supported by an institutional framework such as a radical
criminology conference, it is no longer treated as some kind of intellectual pariah by the established national institutional structures of Australian criminology. This growing tolerance, if not wholehearted acceptance, was signalled quite clearly in 1987, by the Assistant Director of the
Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC):
While it is true that, as in Australian criminology generally, the Institute
engages in criminological research within the positivistic paradigm, both at
the theoretical and empirical level other perspectives have been developed.
This development has quickly accelerated in a number of universities where
increasingly, deviancy theorists and those using a marxist or neo-marxist
framework are engaged in both theoretical development and empirical
research in criminological and criminal justice matters. These developments
are a sign of vitality and, I believe, maturity in the development of Australian
criminology (Wilson and Dalton, 1987, vi).
Welcome as these changes certainly are, their impact and extent should
not be exaggerated. Elsewhere, for example, Pat O’Malley (1984) has
pointed out that the development of a left-reformist tradition in Australian sociology of law and crime has not necessarily fostered a movement towards ’theoretically propelled’ research. Similarly, in looking at
the auguries for Australian criminology in the 1980s Duncan Chappell
showed that it ’continues to reflect its original domination by law and
lawyers and its strong alignment with the positive school.’ (Chappell,
1983, 25). In the same year that the Assistant Director of the AIC, Paul
Wilson, was voicing his optimism about the discipline’s capacity to
accommodate newer and more radical approaches, Ken Polk was
lamenting the relative dearth of attention to theoretical concerns in the
papers given at the Institute’s annual seminar on research projects in
the field (Polk, 1987,112). Depressingly, the only comfort Polk could extract from them in this respect was that they seemed to indicate that
there is still some potency in perspectives such as labelling theory! In a
refreshingly honest appraisal of where Australian criminology is currently going, John Braithwaite comments that ’critical or Marxist currents have never gained a prominent place, becoming more prominent
in the 1970s, but perhaps even declining in influence in the 1980s’.44
Overall, his impression of Australian criminological endeavour is less
than flattering:
the intellectual contribution of Australian criminology has been shallow, and
we must all share in the blame for that. However one sets one’s standards
-
by rigorous quantitative methodology, rigorous qualitative methodology,
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335
philosophical rigour in jurisprudence or theoretical rigour, we don’t measure
up too well.
Nor should the more hopeful, if piecemeal signs of change that have
emerged in the past few years be allowed to obscure their own belatedness. Conventional, correctional and conservative criminology has
enjoyed a very protracted period of intellectual and academic hegemony
in Australia, a longevity which can be highlighted by using developments in the United Kingdom, where more radical debate and theorisation have been fairly commonplace for some time, as convenient
benchmarks. Thus by the end of 1977, almost a decade after the
National Deviancy Conference had been established in England and
nearly five years after the New Criminology had made its appearance in
the same country, only one article oriented towards radical deviancy
theory had been published in the ANZJC. Summarising the first ten
years of the journal’s contents, O’Connor was forced to conclude that
’American and British developments, e.g. labelling, conflict theory and
radical deviancy theory which occurred prior to and during this decade
of publishing (1968-77) were ignored’ (O’Connor, 1980, 16).
In this paper we wish to begin the task of excavating the institutional
and ideological bases of the hegemony of conservative criminology in
Australia. This exercise will be extended in later research which will
examine the criminological role of government appointed commissions
of inquiry, law reform commissions and the like, and which will outline
the sources and forms of critical criminological developments.
FORMING THE STRUCTURE OF HEGEMONIC CONTROL
1950-1960
By almost all accounts the growth of Australian criminology has been
crucially tied, particularly in its formative years, to the legal profession
and to the administration of the criminal justice system. ’A weak offshoot of law’ is how one of our correspondents on the subject has
described it, while another has suggested that ’Australian criminology
than in North America and
has always been more lawyer-dominated
perhaps Europe as well’. Nor is there any dearth of historical evidence to
support such assertions. The first steps in the development of the field
the establishment of the subject at the University of Melbourne in 19511
were taken on the initiative of, among others, Sir John Barry, at that
time a judge of the Victorian Supreme Court, Dr Norval Morris of the
university’s Faculty of Law, George Paton, Vice-Chancellor and himself
a lawyer, and the State government’s Attorney-General.
The department was set up as small, but formally independent, with
its own Board of Governors. As would be expected, this was dominated
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336
by lawyers (although two psychologists also found a place on the board)
and was primarily thought of as contributing to legal education.’ As
Norval Morris summed up its position in 1952:
If the
Department of Criminology can assist to raise a generation of lawyers
of the complexities of the many problems of the punishment of
crime, its establishment will be well justified (Morris, 1952, 14).
more aware
by lawyers was marked, it was the department’s strongly correctionalist character which was its most pronounced
feature. Early teaching and related initiatives included a strong emphasis on ’regular clinical contact with the delinquents’. Service courses
were developed for probation officers, those working in penal institutions and for ’other field workers’. And to further liaison with correctional state services, the Government Medical Officer and four senior
civil servants who administered the police, the prisons and ’the institutions for neglected and delinquent children’ were coopted as regular
and active advisors to the Board (Morris, 1952, 13).
However, while domination
Developments at the University of Sydney followed a similar pattern.
The original idea for the establishment of an Institute of Criminology at
that university appears to have emanated from the Attorney-General
and Minister of Justice for New South Wales who, in 1953, approached
Professor K. Shatwell, Dean of the Faculty of Law. In a later memorandum outlining subsequent events, Professor Shatwell recalled how
discussions spanning a number of years involved not only Morris and
Barry from Melbourne, but also the NSW State Attorney-General and
the Solicitor General, and Mr. Justice McClemens of the Supreme Court
of New South Wales (Shatwell, 1972). Moreover, both the Comptroller
General of Prisons and the New South Wales Commissioner of Police
were heavily involved with the lawyers in the discussions
leading up to
the Institute’s establishment. Interestingly, Shatwell even travelled to
England in 1959, and visited Professor Leon Radzinowicz at the University of Cambridge in order to discuss the formation of the Institute.
Radzinowicz was just about to become Wolfson Professor of Criminology and Director of the newly established Cambridge Institute of
Criminology, and the first head of agreement between himself and
Shatwell was that ’the proper location for studies in criminology was in a
Faculty of Law’ (1972, 6). What is not mentioned in the Shatwell memorandum was that the location of the British institute at Cambridge has
been opposed on the grounds that, among other things, such a step ’was
likely to continue too closely the close links with criminal law’ (Butler,
1974, 4).
Back in Sydney, however, such qualms do not seem to have been
voiced. Rather, the Attorney-General, described as playing a crucial role
in the relevant discussions, had an ’interest (which) rested on his view
that instruction in Criminal Law as it had previously been conducted for
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Law
the Sydney
School
was
many years in
University
totally inadequate
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in light of the important role of criminal law in the social and economic
life of the community ...’ (Shatwell, 1972, 5). When the Institute was
formally created in 1959, (although formally it had no staff until the
appointment of Gordon Hawkins in 1961) the Dean of Law was its first
Director, and the list of members appointed to its Advisory Committee
incorporated what amounted almost to a Who’s Who of the New South
Wales judicial system. The courses developed, as in Melbourne, took on
a strongly correctionalist character. Indeed, as Duncan
Chappell has
pointed out, the provision of a diploma course for members of the police
force, or other sections of the public service involved in criminal justice
’seems to have been one of the unofficial quid pro quos demanded by the
NSW government in recognition of its financial and allied support for
the establishment of the Institute of Criminology’. Normal university
entrance requirements could be waived for suitably experienced applicants ’actively involved in various aspects of criminal law enforcement,
whether as police, magistrates (present or future), prison officers or child
welfare officers’ (Chappell, 1983, 18).
In both Melbourne and Sydney, then, law and lawyers clearly played
leading role in shaping early criminological development, which took
on a strongly correctionalist form and was closely articulated with the
ideas and perceptions of the administrators of state criminal justice
systems. In part, the intention seems to have been to broaden legal education by providing a kind of technocratic familiarisation program for
law students, although Norval Morris entertained doubts about the
immediate value of the discipline’s sociological side in this respect
(Morris and Turner, 1958, 168). But there was also a broader project in
a
mind, namely, the development of criminology
as a
quasi-professional
knowledge base and as service training for practitioners in the fields of
criminal justice and corrections. A ’modernisation process’ for child welfare, the correctional system and the police was how one interviewee
recalled this side of the Melbourne experiment, part of a broader university response to the perceived ’social need’ for more trained professional staff in state government departments.
However, this process
was not without hiccups. After the first fe N
the
Melbourne
years,
department gained a measure of autonomy, as the
day to day workings of an academic department drew it away from the
direct supervision of the Board. By the mid 1950s Norval Morris had
moved from being secretary to the ’Board to become first head of the
department, holding an associate professorship in criminology in
tandem with a senior lectureship in law. Upon his departure to a distinguished career elsewhere the headship passed to another lawyer, Dr
Stanley Johnston. But the immediate domination of criminology by the
administrators of the correctional and criminal justice systems and by
academic lawyers had nevertheless been weakened further by the
Morris with his influential professional and political assocideparture ofDownloaded
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PURGING THE INFANT CRIMINOLOGY
the Departachieved a
had
thus
University
Criminology
measure of autonomy. One of the effects of this process was the development of factional politics within the Department - and as often
happens in such contexts this followed the overlapping divisions of
right/left political affiliations and the law/social science divide. Factional struggles led the Department of Criminology to be singled out for
particular attention during the late fifties and early sixties during a
McCarthyist purge against the social sciences at Melbourne University.
Given the infant and retarded development of the discipline at that time,
the episode probably was of long-term significance and deserves atten-
Despite
ment
its conservative
origins
and its relative
obscurity,
at Melbourne
of
tion.
By the end of the 1950s the Department was still very small, only a
handful of staff headed by a senior lecturer. Yet in the early 1950s it had
a lecturer (Geoff Sharp) with an interest in sociology, who
became active in left politics on the campus, and who was part of a
growing number of left wing thinkers in the social sciences (principally
in the Department of Psychology, Political Science, Social Studies and
Criminology). Altogether, it is unlikely that this network of party members and ’fellow travellers’ amounted to more than a score of relatively
junior staff members in peripheral departments of a large and conservative institution. But the late 1950s was a period of considerable political
paranoia in Australia, and it was unlikely that such developments would
go unnoticed. ~ Although the first rumbles of reaction became clear in
acquired
1958, these were not especially focused on any one department. 8 Rather,
what was at issue was the quite extraordinary perception that the ’Communist Party was the paramount influence on the university’ and
moreover that Melbourne University as a whole was ’effectively dominated by the Communist Party through party members and fellow
travellers on the teching staff’ (Knopfelmacher, 1963, 196, 198).~
clear-cut nature of the threat claimed by anticommunist
not until 1961 that a
instance of communist ’con-
Despite the
forces, it was
specific
trol’ could be located, and that only in what was described as ’two small
departments’. In that year, the influential, conservative national weekly
The Bulletin became the vehicle for a prolonged attack on elements in the
Department of Social Studies and the Department of Criminology. What
the journal called ’the Sharp Case’, after the principal target of its attack,
involved it in a series of articles on ’Melbourne University Communists’
together with the publication of editorial comments and some fifty letters over much pf the year. Retrospectively it is probably impossible to
sort out the precise dimensions of the issue, although it certainly
involved questions of the kind of research being conducted. In view of
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the
importance of establishing the credentials of criminology as a prag-
matic, service discipline, the
nature of this
aspect of the fracas is
es-
pecially significant. The commissioned research focused on treatment
and control of patients in a large Melbourne institution, who were diagnosed as suffering from epilepsy. But as The Bulletin (19 April 1961, 12)
reported, instead of the anticipated pragmatic research:
The final research report was quite unrelated to what those who commissioned it wanted to know. It attempted to prove that the class of people under
investigation was the victim of prejudice engendered by our social system,
and that
had to suffer from inhuman employers and corrupt public
they
institutions. 1
central to the concerns of the university appear to have been
of the control over research and administration exercised by
heads of department. By and large, in this respect it appears as a squabble in a very small (three members of staff!) department. But in the pages
of The Bulletin this was blown up to become ’a small communist-led
faction controlling a department’s staff policy and research and seizing it
in the name of &dquo;the staff&dquo; or &dquo;the research team&dquo; by the tactics perfected
outside the universities’ (The Bulletin 3 May 1961, 7).11
Equally
matters
The short term effect of this attack was the establishment of an internal university Good Offices Committee to investigate the matter; the
longer term effect was to ensure that research, staffing and teaching in
criminology henceforth would be more carefully monitored.l2
QUASI-PROFESSIONALISM
AND PRAGMATIC
CRIMINOLOGY
the late 1960s, the institutional foundation of criminology in Australia remained miniscule, so much so that two senior members of the
Sydney University Institute still found it a necessity to write a paper
pointing out ’The need for criminology in Australia’ (Hawkins and
Chappell, 1967). Whatever the strategic significance of this paper it
serves to indicate very clearly the extent to which criminological thinking had remained firmly embedded in the Cambridge mould. The
authors emphasised what they saw as a need for ’applied criminology’ in
Australia, and in doing so explicitly saw themselves as
By
aligning ourselves
Cambridge school.
with the pragmatic approach of Radzinowicz and the
This approach is one which distrusts philosophizing and
calls for facts, which treats ’each problem as it arises and in its particular
context instead of approaching it in terms of some general principle’
(Hawkins and Chappel 1967, 309).13
This hostility to theoretical work was matched, as would be expected, by
close focus on the perception of criminology as a service discipline for
a
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justice system. In attempting to establish these ’needs’ for
criminology, the authors could provide only two: the first was a need for
the criminal
uniform crime statistics; the second a need for ’treatment research’, both
of which are established in their paper in terms of facilitating crime
control and correctional policy. Criminology was further cemented into
its role as a service discipline by the nature of the processes which the
authors envisioned for the dissemination of research findings. Two such
avenues were discussed. First, it was proposed that criminologists could
compile a handbook for sentencers sponsored by State and Federal
Attorneys-General. Second, criminology could be brought to bear on
policy through the medium of judicial conferences in which ’judges,
members of the bar, penal administrators, criminologists, psychiatrists’
and others could participate. The autonomy of criminology to lead,
rather than be led, was thus minimal, for as the authors note, ’the initiative for convening such conferences must rest with the judiciary’ (1967,
-
-
314).
This subordination of criminology to the criminal justice system fitted
well with important developments in the professionalisation of the discipline. Addressing lawyers and the judiciary in their principal professional publication, The Australian Law journal, in terms which constructed criminology as a service discipline rather than an alternative
knowledge base, and identifying ’needs’ which were currently espoused
by influential members of the professions (notably Sir John Barry) the
paper may be seen as part of a professionalising offensive being
mounted by institutional criminology at this time. That same year (1967)
saw the foundation of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (President, Sir John Barry) and, soon after, the foundation of its
official publication, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, under the editorship of Alan Bartholemew (a prison psychiatrist). A correctionalist and pragmatic criminology, having secured a
place in the two conservative bastions of Australian academia, now was
seeking the imprimatur of its own professional status.
Yet there was (and still remains) a major flaw in this professionalising
project. At face value, criminologists were pursuing professionalism by
the orthodox strategies of many of the nineteenth-century occupations
which had embarked on that course. As Friedson (1986, 33, 64-5) and
others (Johnson, 1975; Sarfatti Larson, 1977) have suggested, professionalisation may be seen as a project in which occupations aim to
achieve increased power and autonomy by increasing the occupation’s
prestige and legitimacy, and by attempting various strategies of market
closure
optimally by means of a state-guaranteed monopolisation of
the occupational field. In the most successful professionalising projects,
this is coupled with a high degree of autonomy from direct state control
ie occupational self-regulation (Friedson, 1986, 66-7). Despite historical variations, in general this process involves gaining occupational
-
-
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and status legitimacy in the eyes of state officials. In its turn, this process
involves the construction of the occupation as bearing a particular ideological relation to state and employers. In contrast to trade unionism as a
mode of occupational organisation, professionalism embodies an attempt to establish the employment relation as being outside the capitallabour relation, with its implications of class conflict. Furthermore,
while it is not necessary to go as far as Johnson (1975) in arguing that
professions all provide some control function for the state which is
enhanced by the granting of autonomy, it may be agreed that an important strategy in professionalisation does appear to have been the establishment of a case in which state officials recognise benefits flowing from
the granting of autonomy. The clearest example of such a situation, of
course, is the role of rule of law ideologies in forming and maintaining
legal professional autonomy. 14
The
professionalising project of Australian criminology follows in a
orthodox
fashion along such lines. First had come the establishfairly
ment of the occupation as one which provided services for the state. As
seen, the early advocates of criminology had made great effort to ally its
cause with influential officials within the criminal justice and correctional systems, and with the relevant state ministerial figures. In this
process it was promoted as a service discipline which functioned to enhance the effectiveness of state agencies entrusted with the key practices
of coercive control. Its occupational legitimacy and integrity were next
established through the development of university training in the discipline, the construction of a formal-abstract and university based
knowledge being always a major component of professionalising strategies (see Friedson, 1986). Finally came the formation of the professional organisation, with its restricted criteria of membership, embellished with a professional journal.
In the short space of fifteen years, much had been achieved; but as the
Sharp episode so clearly indicated, criminology was a tainted knowledge. The strong alliance with the legal profession had been fostered
inter alia in order to downplay, and even nullify, the associations of the
discipline with the more disreputable social sciences. But these associations were never far from the surface, and the rise (albeit gradual) of
sociology as a critical discipline during the 1960s and 1970s made the
sense of taint stronger rather than weaker. Clearly, however useful pragmatic criminology could be to the legal system, and whatever fantasies
Foucault may have about its place in a disciplinary society, it was too
much of a Jekyll and Hyde to be granted significant power and autonomy by state officials
especially in an area as politically sensitive as
the labelling and processing of criminals. Back in 1961, this point had
not been lost on The Bulletin, which noted the dangers of communism in
the criminology department, a department
-
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with access to Police Department records. (Access to the files and confidential
documents of the ’punitive organs of the Capitalist State’ is a standard objective of Communist parties everywhere; their value for sabotage and blackmail
is obvious; and Communist party work among the inmates of jails is well
known) (3 May 1961, 7).
Like such other emergent
1979), criminology
was
’tutelary complexes’ as social work (Donzelot,
be granted a form of quasi-professionalism:
to
formal professional autonomy with respect to training, entrance and and
standards (but, significantly, entirely unenforced by state legislation)
coupled with an overwhelmingly advisory and service based subordinate
relation to the state. Practitioners are subjected to direct control by state
administrative officials. Criminologists may become senior administrative officials in the criminal justice system and the correctional institutional complex, but not in their professional capacity as criminologists. 15
These characteristics of criminology’s quasi-professionalism
together
with the pragmatic focus which is the other side of this quasi-profeswere soon to be inscribed in its institutional embodiment:
sional coin
the Australian Institute of Criminology.
-
-
RELATIVE AUTONOMY, PRAGMATISM AND THE AIC
Over the next few years, the pragmatist themes outlined in Chappell and
Wilson’s (1967) paper formed the core of political proposals which were
to culminate in the establishment of a national institute for the study of
crime. Between 30 January and 23 February 1968, a major seminar was
organised by the then Commonwealth Attorney-General (Nigel Bowen
QC) dealing with the issue of ’The control of deviant behaviour in Australia.’ Participation at this seminar was restricted to government officials working in appropriate areas throughout Australia and New
Zealand, and in the view of Sir John Barry at the time:
The importance of this seminar cannot be overemphasised. It is a manifestation of the same perturbation which led to the appointment in U.S.A. (sic)
by President Johnson of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement
and Administration of Justice. (Barry 1968, 5).
This ’perturbation’ of course, arose from the recognition that trends in
Australian crime rates were following the upward course of those in
Britain and the United States, and that this was associated with a dramatic increase in the economic costs of crime (Loof, 1979, 10). It was this
identification of the growth of the ’crime problem’ in Australia which led
the seminar to recommend that there should be increased research into
crime, which the seminar members saw ’as being achieved in a central
body, such as a joint government venture’ (Bowen, Australia, House of
Representatives 1969, Debates, 63, 2458).16 In May 1969 these proposals
were given formal governmental
approval in a Ministerial Statement by
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343
the Liberal
Attorney-General (supported by
the Labor opposition),
the decision to form the Institute and the Criminology
Research Council (Australia, House of Representatives 1969, Debates,
63, 2457, 2460).1~ The background to these events provides crucial
insights into the ways in which the contradictory character of criminology was explicitly recognised and gave form to the further institutionalisation of the discipline.
announcing
In the late 1970s, Peter Loof of the Commonwealth AttorneyGeneral’s Department compiled an invaluable account of the negotiations which had culminated during 1971 in the establishment of the
Australian Institute of Criminology (Loof, 1979). From this record, it is
apparent that the relevant discussions were permeated by an almost
obsessional concern for control on the part of government. Thus, Loof
recalled:
proposals recognised that a governmental institute was needed to repregovernmental interests and enable control of research to be exercised to
ensure that priorities in research were observed which would be most likely
the
sent
bring practical results in areas of greatest need ... the cooperation of State
Governments would be of great importance to ensure that governmental
control was maintained over source material made available by State and
Commonwealth Departments and that the research results were not made
public without the consent of the governments concerned. (Loof, 1979, 4,
to
13).
As for the role of universities or indeed of other independent research
bodies, it was clear that bureaucratic self-preservation was to take precedence. Hence one ’important factor’ was agreed to be that a lot of
research material was contained in State departments and that, as a
consequence, those departments
would be more willing to permit access to this material to official researchers
than to individuals from a university or independent institute, who might
publish material without due sympathy for departmental problems. (Loof,
1979, 12).
Universities, it
was
exist of a local
suggested
moreover,
might
be
subject
to ’ties that
nature’, while a national institute ’established
on a
might
would
be
more
’to
the
confidence
of
basis’,
governmental
likely
enjoy
State Departments’ than an independent body such as a university. In an
equally engaging and ingenuous passage, Loof sums up the outcome of
the discussion on the need for governmental control as follows:
Consideration was given to whether arrangements for research and training
should be dealt with by universities, whose traditional role had been to
undertake academic training and academic research. Consideration was also
given to whether these problems should be dealt with by an independent
body, on the assumption that research would flourish more successfully free
from governmental interference. The conclusion was reached that neither a
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344
university or an independent body could satisfactorily fulfill (sic) all the needs
that had been adverted to. It was thought that, although there were many
aspects of research that might be carried out by existing resources in universities, there was a need for a governmental body and for governmental sponsorship
of and control over research activity in this field. (Loof, 1979, 11; emphasis
added).
Despite such forthright statements, however, it would be unfair to
conclude that there was to be no role at all for independent academics.
To secure their services, for example, it would be necessary to devise
acceptable processes for the publication of results. Nor could the bid to
capture control of what would arguably turn out to be the most important development in postwar Australian criminology just be a crude
power-play. The Australians had learned their lessons from their British
mentors too well for that. In the U.K., when an Institute of Criminology
was being established at Cambridge in the early 1960s the authorities
had deemed it prudent to avoid a direct grant from the Home Office, so
that ’the institute should be seen to be entirely separate’ (Butler,1974, 7);
and this despite the fact that the Cambridge Institute, and in particular
its research agenda, was destined to remain much more tightly controlled by the Home Office than any of the developments within Australian universities. Likewise, the Australian authorities were adroit at
obfuscating if not entirely concealing their own aspirations to control.
Hence, the Criminology Research Council was formed, consisting of
representatives from the Commonwealth Government and the six (later
seven) State governments. The Council was designated as the means of
according some degree of relative autonomy to the Institute:
The conclusion was reached that, if close relationships were developed
between the Council and the Institute and if some degree of control of the
Institute was given to the Council, the establishment of formal Commonwealth-State control of the Institute would not be necessary. (Loof 1979,
14).
The Institute, as Chappell points out, was subsequently established in
the light of these governmental concerns about control:
These general considerations, which were aimed at maintaining governmental influence over the operation of the institute, particularly its research
activities, were subsequently adopted ... To alleviate state government fears
that the new institute would be no more than a component of the federal
government, the AIC was established not as a unit within a federal government department but as an independent government instrumentality
(Chappell 1983, 20).
Just how effective this indirect mode of control over the Institute’s
affairs turned out to be is of course difficult to say. Certainly, however,
the necessary infrastructure was soon in place, with a board of management comprising six members, three (including the Chairman) nomDownloaded from jos.sagepub.com at The University of Melbourne Libraries on September 9,
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345
inated by the Commonwealth and three (later increased to four)
nominated by the Criminology Research Council to represent the states.
In addition, while Duncan Chappell argues that individual members of
the Institute staff have been able to pursue their own research interests
’without having to follow any comprehensive research goals and objectives set down for them by either the board of management or the
director of the research division’, he also had to concede that, nonetheless, all research projects by staff members were subject to the approval
of the board of management (Chappell 1983, 21, 34). As late as 1987,
moreover, the board was still laying down fairly stringent criteria as to
what would be acceptable, with a primary focus on ’the reduction of
costs associated with crime, or with the operation of the criminal justice
system; or the evaluation or improvement of the efficiency of the criminal justice system’ (AIC, 1987, 6).
In these circumstances it is hard to believe that it could be with anything but difficulty that Institute researchers could have broken out of
the conventional criminological mould of ’Home Office’ style research,
reflecting the organisation and orientation of the UK body to which
particular attention had been paid during one of the crucial seminars
leading up to the establishment of the Institute (Loof, 1979, 12). The
pragmatism which had informed the quasi-professional project in the
1950s and 1960s was built into the mandate of the new Institute. Loof’s
account of the negotiations and discussion which went on during the
1960s leaves no doubt on this matter with respect to the Institute’s original raison d’etre. He recalled that from the outset:
emphasis was placed on the need for applied research the need for practical solutions to practical problems and the need to develop priorities for
research designed to bring practical results in areas of greatest need. (Loof,
-
1979, 2).
Similarly, the original proposal which had first been put forward in 1960
by the ubiquitous Sir John Barry, and revived in 1965, had the primary functions of such an Institute as being ’firstly, the training and
-
instruction of senior law enforcement
officials, social workers and correctional officers ... and secondly, research into problems of youthful
delinquency and of adult criminal or aberrant conduct, with a view to
the prevention or diminution of crime’ (Barry 1965, 8). By 1968 the
thinking of the joint Australian/New Zealand seminar, convened to
discuss the functions of the proposed Institute, ’was pervaded by the
recognition of the need for practical research’ (Loof 1979, 9). Ten years
later and some six years into the Institute’s life, a paper on possible
approaches to evaluation pointed out that it would not be sufficient to
show that the Institute had been conducting research. Rather, it would
be necessary to show that the research was ’relevant, meaningful and
likely to be of value, not only in elucidating the crime problem, but in
helping to deal with it.’ (AIC, 1981, 4).
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That some researchers at the Institute, particularly in the recent past,
have managed to resist these pressures is immensely to their credit and
greatly to the benefit of Australian criminology. Clearly, some room for
manoeuvre - a relative degree of autonomy - does exist. As has been
seen, a totally state controlled body was never proposed, for it would
have jarred with the quasi-professionalism of the criminologists. Moreover, the state officials who brought it into being saw that a purely
governmental body would carry little weight in this area. The result,
therefore, has not been a stifling of non-pragmatist research, but rather,
its restriction and containment. Just a few years before his own appointment as Director, Duncan Chappell remarked upon the fact that the
academic approach ’has not found favour with some criminal justice
agency personnel who believe that the institute has failed to meet its
original mandate to provide an applied research resource for people
working in the field ...’ (Chappell, 1983, 21). At least one of his predecessors also experienced ’tensions and conflicts which occur as one
tries both to be useful to one’s paymasters and yet to avoid producing
what is simply administrative criminology’. The present Assistant Director (Research & Statistics) Paul Wilson, has also cryptically alluded to
’occasional pressures from outside to conduct the research process or
present results in a particular manner’, while at the same time stressing
that Institute staff do ’work very hard at maintaining intellectual integrity and independence’ (1987, vi). That such work should be required is
testimony to the way in which the institutional structuring of Australian
criminology on the national plane has fostered hegemonic control by the
criminal justice and correctionalist systems. The dilemma faced by the
researchers is both familiar and cruel:
those who work in such settings are constantly faced with the possibility that
may be tom between the competing demands placed upon them as a
consequence of their dual allegiance. As researchers, their criteria or relevance, appropriate methodology and success will be derived from their
discipline; as civil servants, they must also take account of pragmatic politics
in these matters and may well find it difficult to renounce, when necessary,
the criteria which are operating within their parent institution. (Wiles, 1976,
they
6).
CONSERVATIVE WELFARISM, LIBERAL REFORMISM AND
SOCIOLOGICAL SILENCE
One of the keys to the direction taken by early developments in Australian criminology undoubtedly lies in the profoundly conservative
political and ideological character of the postwar Australia in which they
took place: an era described by Jill Roe (1976) as one of welfare conservatism. Spanning the years from 1949 through to the beginning of the
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347
1970s, conservative administrations had adopted an essentially ad hoc
approach to social policy (Roe, 1976, 313). The prevailing sense was that
social policy was to be downplayed, and the ministry dealing with this
area become the preserve of the junior partner in the coalition Federal
Government. Basically there was a profound faith in the existing institutions, and in the capacity of the postwar boom economy to deliver
benefits to all. The approach of successive conservative administrations
thus was to subsidise existing providers and voluntary agencies rather
than extend government intervention and responsibility. As the 1960s
drew to a close, pressures for reform began to build up, but at first these
almost inevitably reflected their conservative milieu (Roe, 1976, 313).
Thus while people like Paton and Barry, for example, were indeed reformist in their intentions, they were also supremely confident in their
attachment to the established values to be promoted through such
endeavours. This essential conservatism is apparent in a particularly
telling passage which Barry included in his speech to revive the idea of
an Australian Institute of Criminology:
As economic development and technological progress steadily advance there
tends to follow in its wake manifestations of much that is anti-social in the
form of juvenile delinquency and adult crime, prostitution and vice, alcoholism and drug adc’ction, vagrancy and vandalism. It has been the experience
oE many countries that unless methods and programmes of social defence and
_ ~ ~cial welfare keep abreast of advancement in economic and material fields,
the benefits of such progress become dissipated. For, of what use, if may be
asked, are material progress and high standards of living, if the fundamental
ties of home and hearth, of family and community, of society and nation, are
to be slowly but surely disintegrated from within by the canker of vice and
crime. (1965, 4).
Given such commitments, the establishment of an institutional structure
for criminology was but a means to an unquestionable objective, a
means which, as one witness to events in Melbourne recalled, ’would
allow you to realistically go about implementing the values which you
knew were the correct ones’. ’All one needed really’, he reported them as
thinking, ’was good intentions, the wish to reform things, and then you
needed specialists to give you technical skills to go about achieving
those objectives’. The problems, in other words, were practical ones of
how to harness relevant scientific knowledge to the pragmatic task of
dealing with crime, whether through training or research. Thus, that
pragmatism so characteristic of criminological positivism in general, was
from the outset well integrated in a general ethos among reformists in a
conservative milieu.
The
unique
predominance
to
of this kind of
criminology
was
not of course
postwar Australia. In both the United States and Britain, for
example, positivist, correctionalist criminology remained in the ascendant for many years during this same period. In both of those countries,
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however, its hegemony was challenged and at least to some extent
broken by scholars operating from the disciplinary base of sociology in
the 1960s and 1970s. But these developments did not have very much
effect in Australia in which a criminology oriented primarily to the pragmatic concerns of the criminal justice and correctional systems remained
dominant up to and even beyond the end of the latter decade. Hence,
consideration of the protracted hegemony of relatively conventional
and conservative criminology in Australia cannot be separated from the
history of sociology as a discipline in its own right and as a component of
the criminological enterprise.
On the broader of these two fronts, the first factor to be borne in mind
is that sociology has only recently emerged as a discipline of any scale
and consequence in Australia. The major Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Western Australia, claiming for themselves the
dubious distinction of being Antipodean successors to Oxbridge, have
long refused to countenance the establishment of sociology departments. During the 1960s, six departments were established at other
locations, but at the close of the decade there were still only 55 full-time
and fewer than 35 part-time sociology teachers in Australian universities (Zubrzycki, 1971, 8, 9,17).18 Moreover, it had been necessary to staff
the new departments largely from overseas sources, and this had the
consequence that the bulk of academic sociologists took several years, at
least, to familiarise themselves with their new milieu and to establish a
basis for research in the Australian context.l9
This slow growth of sociology was undoubtedly underpinned by
ambivalence and even antipathy towards it as a discipline in its own
right. In the University of Melbourne, for example, even the piecemeal
development of the subject under the auspices of other and differently
named departments seems to have become caught up in the right/left
conflict of the late 1960s reflecting the common conservative conception
of sociology as being so dangerously radical in substance and intent that
it should only be taught at graduate level. For present purposes,
however, the germane point to be emphasised is that no small measure
of the same ambivalence and antipathy was also reflected in the attitude
towards and the role allocated to sociology within the fledgling discipline of criminology in the universities. The final catalyst which provoked the Sydney Law School to establish its Institute was a fear of
sociology capturing the field. No lesser authority than the NSW Minister
for Justice and Attorney-General (Downing) put pressure on the University to set up the Institute
light of the fact that the University of New South Wales was actively contemplating the establishment of serious studies in criminology within the
department of sociology and Mr Downing was strongly of the opinion that
such studies should be developed within the ambit of a Law School on lines
in
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which made
provision for the participation of some persons trained in other
disciplines, (Shatwell, 1972, 6).
so eager was the Attomey-General to pre-empt sociological
criminology, that he took it upon himself to arrange for the provision of a
special government grant to Sydney University for the purpose.
That such vigorous pressures should have been exercised in Sydney is
not altogether surprising, given the experience of the Cambridge Institute in England upon which it was largely modelling its own Institute.
There, one of the objections raised against locating criminology at
Cambridge had been precisely the lack of a well developed Department
of Sociology, while traces of the rancour caused by failure to choose the
other contender
London, where the development would have been
based on sociology
were still apparent as late as 1974 (Butler 1974, 4,
9).
All of this is not to say, that there was no place whatsoever envisaged
for sociology in the development of Australian criminology in the university context. But the role anticipated for it was a very circumscribed
Indeed,
-
-
and subservient one. In Melbourne,
we were
told, while there was some
sociological input, particularly on the survey side, ’the idea of looking at
crime or even welfare for that matter in a broad perspective of social
processes’ was not what was wanted. In Sydney, as Dean Shatwell
noted, the intention was to make room for ’some persons’ from other
disciplines, but squarely under the control of the law school. A similar
role for disciplines like sociology was also envisaged by the Deputy
Comptroller of Prisons, while nonetheless believing that ’solutions to
problems of punishment and treatment ... (are) in a primary sense legal
problems’ (Shatwell, 1972, 6). The desirability of such an accommodation, with law firmly in the driving seat but other specialists called in
to help, must have been confirmed at the Dean’s 1959 meeting in
Cambridge. Having identified a Faculty of Law as the proper location for
criminology, he and Professor Radzinowicz further agreed:
that studies in the criminal process in the Faculty of Law required the active
and close participation of persons with high academic qualifications in
sociology, philosophy, or some similar non-legal university discipline which
includes within its province some serious intellectual interest in criminological problems (Shatwell, 1972, 6).
...
The consequences of
sociology’s relatively slow development as an
discipline within the universities and of its failure to
become the lead discipline within emergent criminology were profound.
Thus, for example, the lack of rapid expansion in either respect up to the
beginning of the 1970s meant a relative lack of the favourable labour
market forces which, in the United Kingdom, allowed a younger generation of sociologists and sociological criminologists to challenge estabautonomous
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lished or establishment orthodoxy with relative impunity. Sociology
remained caught up in its passion for description and measurement, and
was itself still extensively empiricist and policy related.’O Like criminology, it was heavily invested with pragmatism (O’Malley, 1984, 93).
Consequently, the theoretical debates between traditional, interactionist
and Marxist sociologies which so galvanised criminology in the United
States and Britain during this period were relegated to marginal and
belated significance. As a result, Australian criminology was reinforced
in its pragmatism, and also substantially missed out on a critical period
of maturation enjoyed by the two criminologies upon which it has traditionally been most dependent. Speaking of our relative immaturity in
this respect, Ken Polk (1987) has put the point succinctly:
obviously criminology has not matured here as it has in either North America
or the U.K.... Personally, this would seem to me to be a consequence of
the difficulty experienced here in establishing a solid base for the discipline of
sociology. Without that base, there is no sub-structure of methodological or
theoretical thought from which paradigmatic developments can flow.
...
Perhaps more than anything else, however, the slow development of
sociology and its effective marginalisation within criminology in the
period prior to the 1970s meant that two subsequent developments of
potentially critical criminological significance took place to the accompaniment of a fairly deafening sociological silence. First, when the era of
left-liberal reform of the legal order finally dawned, with the advent of
the Whitlam Labor Government in 1972, the ensuing rush of research
relevant to the concerns of criminology emerged relatively uninformed
by the sociological/theoretical debates taking place elsewhere. Instead,
as O’Malley (1984, 94), has pointed out in another context, ’by initiating
a major research tradition geared to a more reformist problematic, the
Whitlamite and derivative initiatives displaced any nascent tendencies
toward the type of theoretically propelled research which characterised
the field in Britain at this time’. Paradoxically perhaps, the Whitlam era
amplified the tradition of empircist, atheoretical policy research already
established during the 1960s, and the hegemony of law in the criminological field was further enhanced by being engaged on its own
terrain rather than on ground of sociological choosing.
The second occurrence which took place to the reverberating echoes
of sociological silence was of course the conjoint establishment of the
Criminology Research Council and the Australian Institute of Criminology in 1971. Once again, the background noise is of atheoretical,
practical and policy oriented concern, not even the faintest whisper of
the mounting northern hemisphere sociological debates about crime
and criminology breaking through into the dense ether of pragmatic
zeal. Even though it was written nearly a decade after the event, Peter
Loof’s account for example, of how both bodies came to be set up reveals
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trace of anything significant being afoot elsewhere at the time, much
less of later developments which might have warranted retrospective
comment. While the subsequent work of the Criminology Research
Council must inevitably have come to reflect the funding requests made,
it is significant that right up into the 1980s very few projects that could
be described as having a bearing on radical, theoretical, sociological
debate about crime received support. Although the work of the Institute,
has been described as taking a more academic than applied line, its work
throughout the 1970s and early 1980s with one or two notable exceptions such as the program in the field of corporate crime, fell in the
mould of conventional positivistic criminology.
no
CONCLUSIONS
In this analysis, the attempt has been made to outline the conditions
which formed a conservative and pragmatic criminology in the Australian context. At bottom, the essence of this account is that, paradoxically, it has been the critical and theoretical potentials within criminology which have created a conservative hegemony. More precisely, it
should be said that recognition of the critical potential of criminology
was a key factor in generating a
professionalising project which bonded
and subordinated the discipline to the legal profession. Under this tutelage criminology was nurtured as a university based service discipline
for state agencies, providing correctionalist technicians and knowledge.
Within these confines, its proponents managed to generate the trappings
of quasi-professional status, the characteristics of which - formal academic autonomy but occupational subordination and close control
have become inscribed in its institutional structures: notably the Australian Institute of Criminology. In practice, the critical potential of its
sociological component was rarely to create problems, partly because
the underdevelopment of theoretical sociology in Australia was associated with a markedly empiricist and pragmatic sociology. Nevertheless,
this potential is built into the nature of criminology, and the institutionalisation of controls is never likely to be totally restrictive. Even within
the AIC, these controls have become decreasingly effective, and in later
years the Institute itself has become the subject of external pressures to
bring its errant research practices back into line.
-
From such analysis begins to emerge an account which makes historical sense of the relatively underdeveloped state of Australian criminology. Yet it must be admitted that a paper such as this has only begun
the task of analysing the institutionalisation of conservative criminology
in Australia. This is not so much because there is much more to be revealed about the formation of academic and professional criminology
per se- although this also is the case. Rather it is because perhaps the
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most influential exercises in criminological work
these contexts at all, but by the vast array of Royal
of
Inquiry,
are
carried out not in
Commissions, Boards
Law Reform Commissions and the like which produce a
of interpretive analysis of crime. Moreover, while pro-
constant stream
fessional
criminologists (conservative
or
otherwise)
must
struggle
to
make their voices heard, the practitioners of the ’criminological comhave at their
the Costigans, Muirheads and Stewarts
missions’
command considerable material and ideological resources. It is to these
practitioners that prime ministers and police commissioners attend, it is
their theorisations and assumptions of crime which are widely disseminated, and it is their work which results in the formation of new
legislation, new policing agencies and new sanctions. Here, perhaps, is
the site of the real character of Australian criminology. But its excavations must await future research.
-
-
NOTES
1
2.
3.
4.
For examples of this work in the period up to 1983, see O’Malley (1984). Representative
samples of more recent critical Australian criminology may be seen in Findlay and Hogg
(1988) and Chappell and Wilson (1987).
The new journals being Law in Context and The Australian Journal of Law and Society.
Signs of the developments in the ANZJC appeared when there was a change of editorship
in 1980, and although its contents have remained largely in the mould of orthodox
empiricist and positivist criminologies, some feminist, Marxist and other critical work has
secured a fairly regular place in its pages (See O’Malley 1984, 97).
See in particular Wickham (1987); Zdenkowski and Brown (1983); O’Malley (1983) and
papers by Allen, Hogg, Garton and Cunneen in Findlay and Hogg (1988).
In addition to analysis of the usual documentary sources, the data presented in this
research were also gathered through a series of personal interviews and through correspondence with many criminologists and others who have been involved in the
development of the discipline in Australia. Unfortunately, the list of such people is too
long to include in this paper. But we would like to take this opportunity to thank all those
who contributed, and especially to thank those (who wish to remain anonymous) who
provided first-hand accounts of some of the less savoury incidents in the history of crimi-
nology.
6.
The Board’s composition was as follows. The legal profession was represented by the
Chairman, Mr Justice Barry, Professor Zelman Cowan (Dean of Law), Professor George
Paton (Vice-Chancellor) and Dr Norval Morris. Psychologists were represented by Professor Oeser (Head of the Psychology Department) and Miss Ruth Hoban (Head of the
Department of Social Studies, a psychopathologist).
The complete list of 33 members is too long to provide here, but included the former and
the current Chief Justices of NSW respectively, (Chair and Deputy Chair); seven other
judges; the Chair and Deputy Chair of the NSW Stipendiary Magistrates, and the immediate past-chairman; the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General of NSW, and the
NSW Minister for Justice; the chief probation officer, the Commissioner for Corrective
Services for the State, and a former NSW Police Commissioner (Shatwell, 1972, 3-
7.
The
5.
4).
major manifestation of this was a major split within the Australian Labor Party
(ALP), one of the two principal parliamentary political parties. A large faction within the
party, closely allied with the Roman Catholic church and rabidly anticommunist, formed
the breakaway Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The split was claimed to have occurred as
reaction against communist domination within the ALP — although restrospectively
the ALP appears to have been a rather conservative social democratic force. This split was
to keep the ALP out of federal office for almost two decades. The DLP gradually faded
from the political scene and was formally disbanded in the early 1980s.
a
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353
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
See Knopfelmacher’s (1963) account of his interventions in the student politics of this
period, and his (1958) contribution to the conservative journal Quadrant in which he
directed attention to the social sciences as ’susceptible to ideological bias’ in which academic credentials notoriously founded upon shifting sands. From this, possibly defensible, position, Knopfelmacher moved on to argue less plausibly that in Melbourne
University ’many academic reputations are still being fabricated and destroyed by cliques
which move within the orbit of the (Communist) Party’ (1958, 24). Knopfelmacher was
closely associated with leading members of the DLP (see note 7).
The ’struggle’ for academic freedom thus became one ’against an academic junta whose
members have been corroded by totalitarianism and against their psychologically disturbed and delinquent progeny.’ (Knopfelmacher, 1963, 207).
Significantly, the superintendent of the institution had, upon discovery of this, turned the
researchers out, notified the university, and refused permission for publication of any of
the data.
To the outsider, all the evidence appears to point to very familiar problems created by
junior staff seeking democratisation by clumsy and unsubtle means, and by heads of
departments resentful at being reduced to ’a sort of secretary, recording the policy directives of the "staff"’ (
The Bulletin, 19 April 1961). While this kind of struggle became
almost the norm over the next decade in Australian universities (and of course, in most
universities in the West), no doubt this instance attracted so much attention because it
was historically precocious, situated in an era a rabid anticommunist reaction, and
involved what The Bulletin referred to as a ’notorious communist’.
The Good Offices committee eventually took no action against any of the parties concemed and found no evidence of a communist conspiracy
although soon after, a senior
The Bulletin 19
appointment was made — apparently to shore up discipline in the area (
April 1961, 12). Nearly thirty years later, the bitterness of the episode was still evident in
interviews conducted for this paper.
Strangely, and apparently without intentional irony, the authors immediately follow this
comment with the ’philosophical’ that ’a rising crime rate is an almost inevitable price of
social and economic progress’ (1967, 309).
Its active utilisation by the legal profession in Australia was most visible in the struggles
over legal aid in the 1970s (O’Malley, 1983).
This is in marked contrast, say, to the legal profession in Australia. Departments of the
Attorney-General at state and federal level represent the capacity of that profession to
carry its autonomy into the very structures of the state. These departments are invariably
headed by senior members of the profession, and by and large succeeded in grouping
under its umbrella lawyers working as lawyers within the network of state agencies
—
13.
14.
15.
(O’Malley, 1983).
16.
17.
18.
19.
The rising crime rate was also well to the fore in the Parliamentary debates over the
establishment of the Institute and the Criminology Research Council. (See especially
Australia, House of Representatives 1971, Debates, 1005-1041). The need for criminological research and training was well illustrated by the poor standard of these debates,
the highpoint of which came when one Member suggested that ’Only about 10 per cent of
New Australians (i.e. non-angolphone immigrants) are inmates in New South Wales
prisons.’ (James, in Australia, House of Representatives, 1971, Debates, 1020).
There had been one previous effort in this direction, shortly after the foundation of the
Sydney University Institute. In 1963 Gough Whitlam had made a proposal for establishing a national institute, but the Attorney-General at that time (Sir Garfield Barwick) had
replied ’that he would not feel in a position to sponsor a move for the establishment of a
national research organisation into the treatment or rehabilitation of offenders’, (Australia, House of Representatives 1963, Debates, 2460).
The departments established in this period were at the University of New South Wales
(1959), the Australian National University (1961), Monash University (1964), the University of Queensland (1966) and La Trobe University (1969). The department at Flinders
University was formally established in 1970, although it was only some years later that
this was translated into reality.
A good many never made the adjustment, still focusing on the analysis of their country of
origin, and often returning thence at the completion of a three-year contract. (Many
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354
Australian universities, right through to the mid 1970s, attracted overseas staff by offering to subsidise costs of returning to the country of origin at the end of the three-year
20.
period).
Writing in 1974, Baldock and Lally (1974, 271, 277) were forced to remark that ’general
theoretical works of any kind were a rarity in Australian and New Zealand sociology’ and
that ’research in these areas has been mainly descriptive and devoid of theoretical
insights’.
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