The British Society of Criminology (BSC) has a number of Honorary Members who through their careers have demonstrated exceptional distinction and service in the field of criminology. The BSC grant the status of Honorary Membership in specific circumstances largely intended to reward persons who have an overarching role in defining and developing criminology at a national (and often international) level.
The status of Honorary Member confers lifetime membership of the Society. Honorary members can take advantage of all BSC benefits and attend conferences for a preferential fee. They don’t have to pay an annual subscription (although some choose to continue to do so).
The current list of Honorary Members include those people who have made contributions to the BSC in particular and/or to the discipline in general. Our Honorary Members include former Presidents of the Society, holders of the Outstanding Achievement Award, and others pivotal to criminology in the UK. The Society’s executive committee determine who should receive the award.
Honorary members
Philip Bean
Anthony Bottoms
John Braithwaite
Maureen Cain
Pat Carlen
Paul Cook
Adam Crawford
John Croft
David Farrington
Nigel Fielding
Loraine Gelsthorpe
Chris Hale
Frances Heidensohn
Dick Hobbs
Peter Hodgkinson
Roger Hood
Mike Hough
Matthias Kelly
John Lea
Michael Levi
Patricia Mayhew
John Muncie
Tim Newburn
Robert Reiner
Joanna Shapland
Ursula Smartt
Peter Squires
Sandra Walklate
Professor Philip BeanMy first formal involvement with the BSC, other than as an ordinary Member, was as Chairman of the Midlands Branch, later followed as BSC Secretary (to Robert Reiner`s Presidency) 1993-1996. I was elected President and served the 3 years from 1996-1999, and was the first President to be so formally elected by a ballot of all the Members. A number of constitutional changes were made during that period, namely changing the BSC`s legal status from an Association to a Company Limited by Guarantee (i.e. with no share capital) and making it a Charity. The aim also was to build on the success of earlier Presidents such as developing the Branch structure and continuing with the progress made with the BSC Conferences. From 1999 until my full retirement in 2006 I worked closely with the Midland Branch.
From 1999 until I retired in 2004, (working part time until 2006) I continued as Professor of Criminology and Director of The Midlands Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Loughborough. I continued to publish, mainly in the field of Drugs and Crime and Mental Disorder and Crime, as well as editing and jointly editing books on Informers, and Drug Treatment. On retirement I have continued to publish, including the 4th edition of `Drugs and Crime`, a book entitled `Legalising Drugs` and editing volumes on `Criminology`(2014) `Madness and Crime,` (2016) and `Human Trafficking` and `Hate Crimes,` the latter due out 2017.
From 2000-2006 I was an Associate of the General Medical Council sitting on the conduct, and health committees. In 2006 was made an Emeritus Professor, and in 2013 a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge.
Professor John Braithwaite
I believe I attended my first BSC meeting at the end of the 80s or early 90s and I have attended a few since, always enjoying the opportunity to catch up with my many British criminology friends. The British Journal of Criminology is my favourite journal to read and I think it has published more of what I would consider as my best publications than any journal, with the possible exception of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology.
Substantively, I concentrated on corporate crime from the beginning of my career until now. Since 2004 my empirical work has emphasised peacebuilding, including the relationship between crime, the criminalisation of the state, and war. Perhaps I am best known for my theoretical contributions on responsive regulation and restorative justice. There are few domains of criminology in which I have not enjoyed publishing at some stage. ‘Crime in a Convict Republic’ in the Modern Law Review is the article I most enjoyed writing.
Professor Pat Carlen
My main involvement with the British Society of Criminology has been as an Opening plenary speaker at annual conference, a presenter at the Postgraduate Conference and a regular Annual Conference attendee during the years 2006 -2013 when I was Editor-in Chief of the British Journal of Criminology. In my view the British Society of Criminology’s main value is as the guardian of professional ethics and academic values within criminology.
My recent work is varied and reflected in publications 2014 – 2016:
‘Homelessness and Crime’, in Roland Atkinson (ed.) (2014) Shades of Deviance: A Primer on Crime, Deviance and Social Harm. Routledge.
‘Just Criminology: The Legacy of Jock Young’, in Crime, Media, Culture, 2014, 10 (3): 191-202.
‘Ethics, Politics and the Limits to Knowledge’, in M. Adorjan, E. Chui and R. Ricciardelli (eds.) Engaging with Ethics and Method in Criminological Research. London: Routledge, forthcoming 2016.
‘Doing Imaginative Criminology’, in M. Haviid-Jacobsen and S. Walklate (eds.) Liquid Criminology: Doing Imaginative Criminological Research. London: Routledge, forthcoming 2016.
‘Alternative Criminologies’, in L. Ayres Franca and P. Carlen (eds.) Alternative Criminologies. Brazil: IEA EDITORA, forthcoming 2016.
‘Imaginary Penalities’, in Ayres Franca and Carlen op.cit.
‘Alternative Criminologies, Academic Markets and Corporatism in Universities’ (with Jo Phoenix), in Ayres Franca and Carlen op.cit.
Paul Cook B.A (Law) MSc (Econ)
I have been a member of the British Society of Criminology since the late 1980’s and am a practitioner rather than an academic. A former Chief Superintendent with the Greater Manchester Police and I now work as a consultant on policing, crime and drug related issues.
During my police service I had experience in a wide variety of activities from operational detective roles to command positions at both strategic and tactical levels. As a Superintendent in the inner city area of Moss Side, Manchester I had the opportunity to implement new initiatives and strategies towards perennial policing issues in the community.
From 1992 until my retirement in 1997 I was responsible for the restructuring and fundamental re-alignment of Community Policing. During this period major initiatives in respect of Crime Prevention; Police involvement in schools programmes; Crimes against vulnerable members of the community were undertaken. I developed the first Police Drug Misuse Strategy in the UK, both in respect of enforcement and demand reduction activities. In 1996/7 I co-ordinated a major drugs supply/demand reduction programme in the Greater Manchester area known as ‘Operation Jigsaw’ and which involved a number of other agencies.
Until my retirement from the police I was the UK police delegate to the EU Drugs and Organised Crime Working Group and a member of the National Drugs Committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers. As an independent consultant I have worked on behalf of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, UNDP and as an adviser to a number of national governments including Czech Republic, Belgium and Finland. In 1999 I was commissioned by the Phare Multi-beneficiary Drugs Programme of the European Commission to assess the overall capacity of the 13 Phare partner countries’ law enforcement services in respect of combatting drugs; and to develop a strategic tool for the assessment of the process of adoption and implementation of the EU acquis in the field of drugs.
Since that time I have had the privilege of working in and managing projects in over 50 countries including Africa; the Middle East; Central Asia; South America; Eastern Europe and the European Union in places such as Colombia, Turkmenistan, Libya, Estonia and Albania.
I am currently the Chair of the Management Board of the Southern Caucasus Office for Drugs and Crime (SCODC based in Tbilisi, Georgia). Now in a second phase of retirement I spend my time as a regular speaker on cruise ships and on the Speaker’s circuit in the UK.
Professor Adam CrawfordProfessor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, and Director of the Leeds Social Sciences Institute, University of Leeds
I have been a member of the British Society of Criminology since the early 1990s. With an intellectual background in Law and Sociology (from Warwick), I have always been interested in, and keen to support, interdisciplinary research which draws on the strength of the existing disciplines that make up criminology as rendez-vous discipline, but also works across these boundaries. After cutting my teeth in the late 1980s working on the second Islington Crime Survey with the late Jock Young and colleagues at Middlesex Polytechnic (as it then was), I worked for nearly five years at the University of Hertfordshire. Since 1993, I have worked at the University of Leeds, becoming the Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies throughout 2005-11. In 2005, together with colleagues, we hosted the BSC annual conference at the University of Leeds.
Between 2010 and 2015, I was Editor-in-Chief of the BSC’s official journal Criminology and Criminal Justice. As a nominated member of the Law sub-panel for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), working closely with Loraine Gelsthorpe (the then BSC President and sub-panel member for Social Work and Social Policy) and others, we sought to ensure that criminological research was well represented in the REF assessment processes. To this end, we sought to ensure cross-panel working between the three main sub-panels that explicitly welcomed criminological work: namely Law (UoA 20); Social Work and Social Policy (UoA 22) and Sociology (UoA 23). In its reviews of the exercise, HEFCE recognised criminology as providing valuable lessons for how such multi-disciplinary research might best be accommodated within the process. In 2015, I became the Director of the Leeds Social Sciences Institute which serves to support and enhance cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaborations within and beyond the social sciences at the University of Leeds. It also fosters capacity and skills training through the ESRC funded White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership together with the universities of Sheffield and York.
My publications and research interests broadly revolve around: the governance of safety and security; policing; youth justice and restorative justice. Recently, I have published articles on: ‘Temporality in Restorative Justice’ in Theoretical Criminology; ‘Everyday Security’ (with Steven Hutchinson) in the British Journal of Criminology and ‘The role of procedural justice in the implementation of Anti-Social Behaviour interventions with young people’ (with Sam Lewis and Peter Traynor) in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research. I am currently working on an AHRC funded study of the past, present and future of public parks (with Anna Barker, Nathan Booth and David Churchill) and Principal Investigator for an ESRC seminar series on ‘markets in policing’.
I am the Director of the N8 Policing Research Partnership (N8 PRP), a research and knowledge exchange collaboration between eight universities (that comprise the N8 Research Partnership) and eleven police forces and Police and Crime Commissioners in the north of England. Supported by a HEFCE Catalyst Grant (2015-20), the N8 PRP is seeking to transform the ways in which policing organisations value and utilise research as well as the ways in which academics engage with external partners and maximise the impact of their research findings.
I started my academic career writing about policing and community safety partnerships and now find myself leading one. All the challenges of partnership working that I wrote about in my first book, The Local Governance of Crime (Oxford, 1997), now are my everyday reality!
John Croft CBE MA (Oxon and London) PGCE
I strongly support the principle of a British Society of Criminology. My interest goes back to the forerunner of the BSC – The Scientific Group for the Discussion of Delinquency Problems – established around 1953. My membership of the BSC dates roughly from 1961.
I became head of the Home Office Research Unit in 1972. The output of the Research Unit was published in an official Home Office series and some of the more significant outputs included the launch of the British Crime Survey. I recently had an article published on the website of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/resources/research-policy ) which dealt with the problematic relationship between research and policy. In this I argue that a clearing house in the form of an independent Institute of Justice would be the ideal but probably unaffordable.
I have published some 50 articles on criminal justice issues.
Professor Nigel Fielding
Criminology is sometimes described as a ‘rendezvous discipline’. Through its conferences, journals, and networking activities, the British Society of Criminology has long promoted work across disciplinary borders. This is something I have greatly valued. At the Society’s meetings one witnesses a genuine enthusiasm for coming at issues of crime, deviance and social control from a variety of perspectives, and without divisions into ‘camps’ like those sometimes found elsewhere. This does not mean that debate has not been at times passionate and committed. But there is always the feeling of a shared fascination with how society plays out the high dramas of what is right and what is wrong.
I have been a member of the BSC for the whole of my professional career. As editor (with Les Wilkins) of the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice from 1985 to 1998 it was sensible to maintain a good dialogue with my opposite numbers at the British Journal of Criminology and we co-participated in editors sessions at some of the annual conferences. British criminology is lucky in having both a ‘broad church’ organization representing criminology – the BSC – and a campaigning organization focused on applying research to policy reform – the Howard League. I haven’t held office in the BSC but I have benefited enormously from the activities of its regional branch network and the annual conferences. I know no better way of keeping up with the intellectual trends and the back stories behind the policy initiatives of the day.
My interests in criminology are largely in policing. That includes research on police selection, training, and resignation factors; police socialization and occupational culture; community policing; police ethics and integrity; police community engagement; police intelligence-gathering and criminal investigation. My recent work has also included studies of the judiciary and the experience of lay people at court. I am currently conducting a systematic review as part of the ESRC/College of Policing ‘What Works Centre for Crime Reduction’. I am also involved in Home Office/HEFCE work on analytics for Open Source Communications, reflecting the current police interest in using social media as a community tensions indicator and medium for community engagement. I am also leading a charity-funded study of the needs of police officers and their families when officers, auxiliaries or staff are injured or killed in the line of duty. The study covers both physical and psychological injury, and uses a mixed method research design. Researching in criminology has given very good opportunities over the years to apply my interests in methodological innovation – around new technologies for social research, mixed methods, and qualitative software.
Professor Frances Heidensohn
I came to criminology in the 1960s after reading sociology at the LSE. I was fortunate to be taught by the older generation of scholars – Mannheim, Terry Morris , while my fellow students included Paul Rock, David Downes and Stan Cohen. These were exciting times intellectually, but only later did I find ways to analyse the topics and issues which really concerned me, and which thereafter led to the development of feminist criminology.
While in the 1960s there were a few token nods to the puzzles of low recorded levels of female crime in the literature, many of them were based on sexist assumptions and also inadequate data; an issue was why few scholars had explored these matters. In those earlier days, my research was quite a lonely project and I was met with incomprehension from colleagues. Even when I approached the Home Office for permission to interview women and girls in prison & Borstal, staff whose task it was to manage and to care for them regarded mine as a perplexing project.
Gradually, however, the landscape changed: second wave feminism arrived from the United States, a few fellow scholars (notably Carol Smart) joined the endeavour. I continued to work on women and crime, and later on the role of women in law enforcement, on gender and justice, and on comparative studies in criminology.
The most significant conference of my career and of many who attended it was held at Mt Gabriel, Quebec in July 1991. This was the first international feminist criminology conference, and it provided the forum for many key discussions forging lasting links.
My first experiences of the BSC were of the seminars held at Mary Ward House in Bloomsbury, where I gave a presentation myself, jointly with Susan Edwards in the early 1980s. The first annual BSC conference I attended was at the then Bristol Polytechnic in 1989, and I have been to many of the following ones. It is worth reflecting on how comparatively recently these annual events became established, and a key part of the criminological calendar after the early 1980s. As other Honorary Members have noted, the growth of the BSC has been part of the broader consolidation of criminology in the UK. The BSC Southern Branch seminars are now held jointly with the Mannheim centre at LSE, and are excellent and well- attended. A significant development in the recent history of the BSC is the success of the Women, Crime and Criminal Justice network which younger generations of feminist criminologists have nurtured. It was a privilege of mine to take part in the first national conference, partially funded by the BSC, at City University in 2018, and to see the marvellous younger scholars presenting their work.
Professor Dick Hobbs
Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of Essex and Professor of Sociology Western Sydney University.
I came to academic work in my 30s and lurched into ethnography via the Chicago School, the sociologies of education, work, deviance, and policing along with historians of working class London such as Henry Mayhew, Jerry White, Bill Fishman and Raphael Samuel. Were I not innumerate my career in criminology would be non-existent.
Professor Roger HoodProfessor Roger Hood, CBE, QC (Hon), FBA, Professor Emeritus of Criminology, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford.
President of the British Society of Criminology 1987-1989
In 1958, when research assistant to Dr Hermann Mannheim at the LSE, I first attended meetings of the BSC’s precursor: the ‘Scientific Group for the Study of Delinquency Problems’ set up in 1953 by the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD). Present were such distinguished criminologists of the day as Max Grünhut, Trevor Gibbens, Peter Scott, and Leslie Wilkins, as well as progressive members of the judiciary, prison and probation services.
By 1961, when I returned from Cambridge to the LSE, the Group was on the verge of becoming the independent British Society of Criminology. The discussions were still at a high level: I recall the erudite presentation made by Gordon Trasler when he revealed his Explanation of Delinquency. How anxious I was when asked to speak on my doctoral research on Homeless Borstal Boys. In 1987 I became President. By this time the meetings, held at the Mary Ward Settlement in Bloomsbury, were attended by fewer of the leading academics of the day. I believed strongly that the BSC needed to transform itself into a recognised Learned Society. A new Constitution was drawn up which introduced the present qualifications for different classes of membership, the first being those who had a good claim to be regarded as teachers and researchers in criminology.
When Sheffield University organized a national conference in 1987, I was delighted when my motion that future conferences should be held under the auspices of the ‘reformed’ BSC was accepted by a large majority.
I am now in my 80th year. Since retirement in 2003 I have tried to keep myself engaged in criminology. After being Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong I taught ‘short-course’ seminars between 2008 and 2011 at the University of Virginia Law School and at City University of Hong Kong. Regarding research, I have concentrated on universal abolition of the death penalty. Until 2005 I remained responsible for preparing the UN Secretary-general’s quinquennial reports on capital punishment. The 4th and 5th editions of The Death Penalty: a Worldwide Perspective (1st ed. 1989) were published jointly with Professor Carolyn Hoyle in 2008 and 2015. Working with The Death Penalty Project, I published (with Florence Seemungal) between 2006 and 2011 three empirical studies of the mandatory death penalty in Trinidad, including a survey of public opinion: and in 2013 a report on public opinion on the mandatory death penalty in Malaysia. Following this I was appointed consultant to Malaysia’s Attorney-general. I have travelled widely to lecture on the human rights case for global abolition, including China (many times), India, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Uganda and Pakistan, as well as at conferences including a BSc Plenary at Portsmouth in 2012. I was honoured by the award of the Cesare Beccaria Medal in 2011 by the International Society of Social Defence; in 2012 by the ESC European Criminology Award ‘for a lifetime contribution as a European criminologist’; and honorary Ll.D degrees by the Birmingham (2008) and Edinburgh Napier (2011) Universities.
Professor Mike Hough
Professor of Criminal Policy and Associate Director of the Institute for Criminal Policy Research (ICPR) Birkbeck, University of London
I have been a member of the British Society of Criminology since 1985 and served as its president from 2008 to 2011. I have a distant background in government research at the Home Office, and in the mid-1990s established an academic research centre, now called the Institute for Criminal Policy Research. ICPR was based at King’s College London when I became BSC president, and is now at Birkbeck, University of London. I took on the presidency as I thought that there might be some scope for narrowing the gap between academic criminology and criminal policy that had been growing for many years. I felt that most academic criminologists understood too little about the role of research within government, and that government researchers and policy officials were becoming over-doctrinaire about the primacy of experimental research. I think that I made some progress in improving links between government and academia, and in convincing officials that there was more to research evidence than randomised controlled trials, and that theoretical sophistication – or perspective – was often what policy lacked, and what good academic research could provide. At the end of my stint, ‘administrative criminologist’ was probably still a term of abuse amongst the majority of my academic colleagues, though I am optimistic that the increasing emphasis by HEFCE and the research councils on the need for academics to demonstrate impact and social utility will eventually rehabilitate policy research in our field.
As the director of a policy research centre that has to earn its living through grant income, my research interests have tended to be promiscuous, ranging from illicit drug use and drug-related crime to sentencing, the rehabilitation of offenders, desistance theory and restorative justice. I am especially proud of the programme of work which ICPR has mounted in collaboration with the Prison Reform Trust, on the growth of imprisonment, on sentencing and sentencing guidelines, on children in custody and on the unfairness of the indeterminate sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection. However, interest in policing has been a constant throughout my career and over the last ten years my work has increasingly focussed on procedural justice theory. With colleagues at LSE and Oxford, and in a number of mainly European countries, I have developed a variant of procedural justice theory, testing this using the European Social Survey.
Matthias Kelly QC SCI was treasurer in the early days of the BSC.
I am a Recorder of the Crown Court and have been since 2002. I am also an Attorney (New York State and US Federal Bars) and I am a Former Chairman of the Bar Council of England and Wales (2003). I have been a Bencher of Gray’s Inn, London, since 2001. I am a QC in practise in London and Dublin. I specialize in Health Care Law, Regulatory work, Human Rights and personal Injury work. I live in London.
Professor John LeaI have attended British Society of Criminology Annual Conferences from time to time since the early 1990s and have occasionally given papers. I still have fond memories of the last conference of the twentieth century at the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool in 1999 and very much enjoyed the Plymouth Conference in 2015. I have also attended meetings of the South East Branch at the Mannheim Centre at LSE. I have spoken there and at the South West branch in Plymouth and have contributed to the Newsletter. I am also an occasional book reviewer for the British Journal of Criminology. I see criminology as a healthily eclectic discipline drawing together people from a variety of academic disciplines and practitioner backgrounds. The British Society of Criminology is important for maintaining a common set of values and professional identity.
Most of my academic career was at Middlesex University where, during the decade from the mid 1980s, I worked with Jock Young on the development of Left Realist criminology. Our 1984 book ‘What Is To Be Done About Law and Order?‘ was written during that period. I was Professor of Criminology at Middlesex from 1995 until my retirement from full time teaching in 2005. Since then I have held a number of honorary visiting professorships, at Brighton, Leicester and Roehampton Universities.
My recent work covers a number of fields. I continued work on left realism in Crime and Modernity (Sage 2002) and ‘Left Realism, Community and State Building’ Crime, Law and Social Change (2010) 54: 141-158 and ‘Jock Young and the Development of Left Realist Criminology’. Critical Criminology (2015), 23(2), 165–177. My interest in Marxism and state theory is reflected in ‘Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ in de Keseredy, W and Dragiewicz, M. eds. (2014) Critical Criminology, Volume 1. New York: Routledge and (with Simon Hallsworth) ‘Reconstructing Leviathan: Emerging contours of the security state’ Theoretical Criminology (2010) 15(2): 141-157
More recent interests in the interface between crime and warfare are reflected in ‘From the Criminalisation of War to the Militarisation of Crime Control’ in Sandra Walklate & Ross McGarry eds. Criminology and War: Transgressing the Borders. London: Routledge and in ‘War, Criminal Justice and the Rebirth of Privatisation’ in Sandra Walklate & Ross McGarry eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and War (forthcoming 2016).
My recent work on the private sector and the role of non-state actors ranges from (with Kevin Stenson) ‘Security, Sovereignty and Non-State Governance From Below’ Canadian Journal of Law and Society (2007) 22(2): 9-277 to (with Wendy Fitzgibbon) in ‘Defending probation: Beyond privatisation and security’ (2014) European Journal of Probation 6(1): 24–41.
In recent years I have also written on the history of English riots, racism and policing, and on money laundering legislation. I seem to show no signs of slowing down.
Michael LeviProfessor of Criminology, Cardiff University
Beginning with my PhD in 1972 on the organisation and control of long firm (bankruptcy) fraud, my principal contribution to criminology has been to the understanding of the linkages and differences between white-collar and organised crime and their formal and informal crime control, from elite corporations and individuals to payment card and bankruptcy fraudsters. My mapping out of the local and transnational tensions in the globalisation of financial crimes and their control has been an enduring research theme.
I’ve played a prominent role since the 1970s in assisting the development of public policy and practice, including conducting for the Royal Commission of Criminal Justice a review of the Investigation, Prosecution and Trial of Serious Fraud (1992-3). From 1988, I embarked on a series of pathfinding studies of money laundering and the evolution of its national and transnational control in the UK and later for the Council of Europe, the EC, the IMF and most recently for the Law Commission. I created the corporate fraud survey in 1985 and developed a grounded understanding of the costs of frauds, money laundering and cybercrimes. I am a supporter of mixed methods in criminology, especially in the area in which I work, believing that using data without understanding their construction is foolish. I have also promoted the incorporation of regulatory and civil mechanisms into criminal justice in making sense of corporate and organised crime controls and their effects on offenders and society.
I have been at Cardiff University since I was appointed lecturer in criminology in 1975. It has been my pleasure to serve the British and European criminology ‘community’ in a range of ways during my career. 1992-2005, I was Council & Executive Member of the BSC, and chaired it when we first held the BCC in Cardiff in 1993. From 1998-2005, I was Chair, Wales & West of England Branch as well, and from 2013 have been co-chair of the Welsh branch. I edited Criminology & Criminal Justice. As a keen internationalist, I was a founder member of the ESC in 2001, and have been twice a member of its board, and Cardiff hosted the ESC conference in 2017. I have also been vice-President and then President of the US National White-Collar Crime Research Consortium 2010-13 and contributed to the creation of the White-Collar and Corporate Crime Division within the ASC. See http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/38041-levi-michael.
I am a keen believer in ‘public criminology’ (though unsure what it means!), and have contributed to a range of public policy bodies in the UK and Europe dealing with corruption, fraud, and organised crime, which does not mean agreeing with everything they do. Normatively, I make no claims to be right in my personal values, but I see it as my task to critique evidence and promote its wise consideration in policy. As the son of a concentration camp survivor and a polio-afflicted mother, the struggle to reduce prejudice and promote justice is important – but not always easy to identify.
Professor Tim Newburn
Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science
I joined the BSC around 1986/87. I was working in the Home Office’s Research Unit at the time and for the first time was doing work that might have been considered ‘criminological’. There were monthly meetings, held in those days at the National Institute for Social Work on Tavistock Place, attended by a wide variety of professionals as well as academics. I held various posts over the next 10 years or so, first as Branch Secretary, then Southern Branch Chair, helping to organise the London meetings, and also becoming the Book Reviews Editor for the Society’s newsletter. I joined the Council in the late 1980s and remained for the best part of a decade. I became President Elect in 2004, serving as President from 2005-2008. In those three years the Society changed quite markedly. In addition to growing membership, and a considerably expanded administrative operation, the thing that stands out for me is the acquisition of the journal Criminology and Criminal Justice. The agreement reached with Sage was both very positive intellectually and financially for the Society, offering a new income stream as well as ensuring, as any Professional Society ought, that the BSC had its own academic journal. Being a member of the BSC has been a pleasure and I’m enjoying seeing it go from strength to strength.
My work has always been quite varied or wide-ranging. As things currently stand I’m pursuing interests in at least four areas. By far my largest project/responsibility, is as one of three ‘Official Historians’ (David Downes and Paul Rock being the others) writing the an Official History of post-war criminal justice. As it sounds, this is a mammoth task, taking in the bulk of the criminal justice system, from policing to prisons, as well as a range of areas of criminal justice policy. I’m not a trained historian, so being buried in the archives has been a real eye-opener. I also continue to work on the general territory of urban violence, having spent a year working with journalists from the Guardian on a study of the 2011 England riots. I still anticipate a book may yet emerge. In recent times, I’ve also returned to the study of policy transfer – a long-standing interest – though the arrival of social geographers on the scene appears to mean this topic tends now to be referred to as policy mobilities. The time feels right for further research in this field, one still rather under-exploited in criminology. Finally, I’m also working on a book about everyday social order, and how this has been changing in the last half century or so. A book, tentatively called Orderly: How we solve our everyday problems, should appear some time in 2017.
Professor John Muncie
During my Open University career, from 1976 to 2011, I chaired or produced teaching materials for over 20 undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the fields of criminology, social policy, popular culture and youth studies. I was a founding member and Director of The Open University’s International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR) from 2003 to 2011.
My core research involves establishing the parameters of a comprehensive youth criminology capable of moving beyond narrow discipline boundaries by drawing on cultural studies, media studies, social history, the sociology of education, labour-market studies, the sociology of youth and social policy as well as criminological knowledge. A summation of this work can be found in Youth and Crime published by Sage (1st edition 1999, 2nd edition 2004, 3rd edition 2009, 4th edition 2015).
From 2006 to 2016 I was co-editor of the journal Youth Justice: An International Journal. Other key projects have been the compilation, authoring and editing of the first Dictionary of Criminology to be published in the UK (Sage Publications, 1st edition 2001, 2nd edition 2006, 3rd edition 2013) and the editing of classic and contemporary criminological texts to construct Criminological Perspectives: Essential Readings (Sage Publications, 1st edition 1996, 2nd edition 2002, 3rd edition 2013).
I was a regular delegate and speaker at BSC conferences during the 1990s and 2000s, most memorably (for those that can still remember!) the Liverpool conference held at the Adelphi Hotel in 1999. For 10 years I was a member of the Editorial Board for the British Journal of Criminology and part of the BSC Youth Justice Network Steering Group, established in 2007.
Research interests include critical criminology, comparative youth justice, children’s rights, globalisation, crime, harm and social policy.
I am now Emeritus Professor of Criminology, Department of Social Policy and Criminology, The Open University.
Professor Robert Reiner
Emeritus Professor of Criminology, London School of Economics
I became a BSC member in the 1980s, and regularly attended the seminars in Mary Ward House. I became a Committee Member and Treasurer, of the BSC in 1988. I Chaired the Southern Branch from 1989-93. For several years Tim Newburn and I organised the London seminars together in various capacities. I was hugely honoured to be the President of the BSC from 1993-6. My successor Professor Philip Bean made me a Lifetime Member, for which I am very grateful. In 2011 I was immensely privileged to receive the BSC Outstanding Achievement Award.
In the last ten years I have worked in three main areas: policing; media and popular culture; political economy of crime and criminal justice. I have written papers in all three areas, many of which are included in a collection ‘Policing, Popular Culture and Political Economy: Towards a Social Democratic Criminology’ (Ashgate, 2011) that also contains an Introduction setting out the rationale for my various writings in the context of the changing political, economic, social and cultural landscape they have addressed, as well as my more personal biography. My main recent contribution in the policing field has been the 4th edition of ‘The Politics of the Police’ (Oxford University Press 2010), and a number of articles in the area. I have written two recent books on the political economy of crime and criminal justice: ‘Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control’ (Polity, 2007); ‘Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept’ (Polity, 2016), and am working on a book on social democratic criminology for the Routledge Critical Criminology series. I have also published several papers on these themes in journals and edited volumes.
The BSC has always been a major element in my professional life. A long while ago, when a postdoctoral fellow at King’s College London, I found the monthly seminars at Mary Ward House in Bloomsbury a real lifeline and bonus to keep me up to date with new research and to inspire me, as well as an occasion to meet both academics and practitioners in London. Later, when I was Editor of the British Journal of Criminology, I was one of a small group of academics who decided to revive an annual conference for criminologists. The first of the new series of British Criminology Conferences was held at the University of Sheffield in 1987. We were worried at the time as to whether, given the theoretical splits in the 1980s, criminologists would want to come together, but were amazed and delighted at the response. We appealed to the University for more rooms and they gallantly found more space for us. I was Treasurer for the first three British Criminology Conferences, which definitely brought on the grey hairs, but which also cemented the need for criminologists to meet and to interact with practitioners and policy makers. More recently, I was on the Professional Affairs Committee – and that need to provide spaces and a forum for researchers, practitioners and policy makers to get together and explore what research can do is still vital, particularly in these times of austerity. Long may the BSC thrive!
I have always been slightly eclectic in pursuing a number of lines of research at the same time. The thread running through them has been how lay people interact with criminal justice, more recently comparatively in different countries. My long-term interest in victims of crime, the way they are treated and the role they should have in different legal systems continues and has diversified into a fascination with the processes of restorative justice and how they compare to more traditional criminal justice. I directed the national evaluation of restorative justice with colleagues at the University of Sheffield, focusing on adult offenders who had committed serious offences. At the same time I was working with Tony Bottoms on the Sheffield Desistance Study, which focused upon a group of mostly persistent young adult offenders initially aged 19-22, followed for around four years. This was looking at the early stages of desistance and, as scholars round the world are becoming interested in desistance, it will be very interesting to see whether the processes involved are similar in early and later desistance and depending upon the age at which people desist. Doing the two studies at the same time and more recently looking at good practice in probation one-to-one supervision has focused my attention on potential links between restorative justice and desistance. Both are also relevant to a new project, with Adam Crawford of the University of Leeds, on developing restorative policing so that it is attuned to victim needs.
Ursula Smartt JP MA MPhil PGDipLaw
I became a member of the British Society of Criminology in 1992 when I started my prison research and enrolled for the PHD in Social Policy and Criminology at Hull University. From 2002 to 2009 I was firstly Secretary of the London Branch for three years with regular meetings at the LSE and Dr Ben Bowling as Chairman of that branch, followed by being a member of the National Advisory Committee with the office of ‘Media and Public Relations’.
In 2001 I was awarded a Visiting Professorship at the Max Planck Institute, Freiburg, Germany where I undertook comparative research into EU stalking legislation (Germany; UK; Spain and France). I published a number of papers and book chapters jointly with Professor Helmut Kury on aspects of ‘fear of crime’, ‘attitudes to punishment’ and ‘domestic violence’. I have a long and esteemed research track record in international and comparative prison research and have acted as independent consultant to a number of ministries of justice, such as the HM Prison Service (England/ Wales), the Scottish Prison Service, a number of German ‘Länder’ prison administrations, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, France, Spain, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the USA, Canada, New South Wales. I also undertook prison inspections at HMP Grand Turk (Turks & Caicos), Tihar Jail (New Delhi, India) and Latvian Prisons. I advise on prisoner labour and prison industries including prisoner pay rates and the industrial manufacturing administration of prisons. ‘Grendon Tales: stories from a therapeutic prison community’ (Waterside Press) – remains a popular book, featuring my two-year research based at HMP Grendon Underwood where I interviewed some of the most dangerous prisoners in the prison system. I teach law at a number of universities as a visiting lecturer and publish the leading textbook in ‘Media and Entertainment Law’ (Routledge).
Professor Peter Squires
It was a conversation with Tim Newburn, at Belfast Airport, in the wake of the 1997 annual BSC conference that prompted me to become more involved in the work of the BSC. Long before the current imperatives around ‘impact’ or the ‘public criminology’ agenda, I’d always thought that criminologists should be contributing more to the debates about crime and criminalisation, bringing a little more light and evidence to debates too often driven by heat. In due course I was co-opted as ‘chair’ of the public relations committee, although I was never clear that it had very many other members. One of our first initiatives was to draw up a new BSC ‘experts’ database to allow us to respond more effectively to journalistic inquiries. Over the next few years I undertook a variety of executive committee roles and we even established a ‘break-away ‘Southern Coastal’ regional network. In 2015, I was nominated to stand as BSC president, prompting an election, the first for a fair few years in the society. The main themes arising over the four years of my presidency concerned: managing the consequences of the uneven expansion of criminology teaching and research; trying to address the ‘visibility’ and identity issues facing criminology arising from, first, the REF and, later, the TEF; and thirdly, trying to establish the ‘National Criminology Survey’ by which we might gain a clearer picture of the state of contemporary criminology: what criminology was being taught and researched, where, by whom, and under what conditions. We presented the first results from that initial survey at the 2019 BSC conference at Lincoln.
A longstanding interest in social control and specifically ‘criminalisation’ has continued to shape my academic work, although it was primarily framed within social and public policy rather than criminology, as such; my PhD was a study of the ‘policing’ of the benefits system and the criminalisation of poverty. As opportunities arose to move more towards teaching and researching in criminology, policing, youth crime, later anti-social behaviour, and surveillance became major topics of interest. Serendipity also played a major part, and it was only a chance decision, around 1994, to take a look at the rising incidence of gun crime in the UK, that led to the work programme that probably most defines my academic career. Consistent with my enthusiasm for a ‘public criminology’, I like to think of ‘my finest hour’ as a 60 minute live TV debate with NRA executive vice-president Wayne La Pierre. It went so well that the NRA never up-loaded the film to their website. Impacts can be had in various ways. I took voluntary severance from the University of Brighton in 2019 after 33 years of working there (long enough, I think) and I’m now looking forwards to a new career phase as a ‘freelance criminologist’ seeking interesting opportunities.
Professor Sandra WalklateI have been a member of the BSC since it was reconstituted in the late 1980s and have been involved in the activities of the society in various ways since then. I have been involved in organising its bi-annual then annual conference (York 1991 and Liverpool 2014), have contributed to the work of the North West branch in its various iterations, and worked on RAE 2008 and REF 2014 as a nominated member of the sociology panel for the society. I have also been involved in assessing submissions for the society’s teaching and learning award sponsored by Sage as well as its annual book prize. In 2014 I was honoured to receive the society’s award for outstanding achievement. Also in January 2014 I took up the role as Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Criminology one of the society’s flagship journals.
I am currently Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool and Adjunct Professor in the School of Justice, QUT, Brisbane. Having spent most of my time since the early 1980s working around criminal victimisation, the fear of crime, and gender and crime, over the last decade this work has extended into understanding the nature and effect of ‘new’ terrorism, connected policy responses, and presumptions around resilience. My recent publications include: The Contradictions of Terrorism (2015, Routledge with Gabe Mythen), Criminology and War: Transgressing the Borders (edited collection, Routledge, 2015, with Ross McGarry) and Victim, Trauma, Testimony, Justice (2015, Routledge with Ross McGarry. My first book dealing with victimology has recently been reissued as part of the Routledge Revival Series, entitled Victimology: The Victim and the Criminal Justice Process (1989-2012). I am currently engaged with colleagues at the University of Monash, Australia on foregrounding responses to violence against women as everyday terrorism and continuing to develop work with Ross McGarry on criminology and war and with Gabe Mythen on the legacy of Ulrich Beck. I am co-editing a book series with Kerry Carrington at QUT on ‘Victims, Culture and Society’ all to be published with Routledge.