UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a historical sociology of how criminological expertise makes scientifically legitimate claims to inform criminal justice policy. I approach that analysis by posing three inter-related sub-questions: first, I ask how criminological knowledge cultivates scientific legitimacy by studying shifts in the shape and form that criminological knowledge takes, with particular attention to the types of knowledge that criminology produces. Second, I ask how criminological knowledge assigns scientific legitimacy to penal policies by studying how rules emerged for making a scientifically legitimate policy claim. Third, I ask how the pursuit of scientific legitimacy affects the knowledge that criminologists produce by studying how criminological knowledge has been deployed on the policy stage.

I use quantitative and qualitative tools to answer these questions. In the first, I make use of the most comprehensive dataset of criminological thought to date to study the co-citation structure of criminological knowledge. Social network analysis and unsupervised learning tools clarify the research communities to which criminology has given rise, expose variations over time in the extent of either ferment or insularity between research communities, and yield insight into criminology’s key epistemic continuities and discontinuities. The second analysis is a history of key moments of official criminological knowledge production, when the field ‘emitted’ a signal about a scientifically legitimate penal policy. Interviews with panelists who contributed to high-profile ‘Consensus Study Reports’ assembled by the National Academies of Sciences help trace the development of policy-informing criminological claims. The production of those reports provides a window into the questions to which criminological expertise could be put to use, and the strategies criminologists deployed to imbue their findings with policy value.

The dissertation contributes three principal findings. First, I observe that criminological knowledge acquired structure only as recently as the mid-1960s. Before this period, criminological knowledge cast around in search of an identifiable research agenda and set of contributions that it could make to criminal justice policy. Tensions between criminological research programs fractured, and the resultant disrepair cast a shadow over the next fifty years. Second, I find that criminologists reacted to the instability of the mid-1960s in two different but related ways. On one hand, criminologists successfully devised rules governing how to issue persuasive, policy informing claims. Those rules bore the trappings of an established scientific discipline even when other trappings were—and remain—absent. On the other hand, criminologists responded to the disenchantment of the preceding order by recasting crime as a problem they were singularly well equipped to solve. As a result, criminologists have positioned themselves as both disinterested observers and as strategic engineers in the public understanding of crime and criminal justice policy. Third, I observe that criminology’s capacity to identify successful crime control programs, emblematized most triumphantly in the ‘evidence-based’ movement, shapes the bounds of reasonable proposals for criminal justice policy. Although criminologists have little say in the adoption of any specific criminal justice policy, nonetheless policies that lack the support of an evidence base fall beyond the scope of reasonability. By implication, criminal justice reform should remain alert to how the evidence-based movement in criminology orders—and possibly narrows—the repertoire of available policy options.