Author’s note: this continues to be all about me.
Damn braces: Bless relaxes.
– William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”
I was 44. I’d submitted my thesis but landed in “revise and resubmit” purgatory; on the plus side, I’d got my first academic job. It was a twelve-month research contract; my job was to put together a database of sources of statistical data on crime, with the ultimate aim of building a much larger database of sources of social science statistics. This in turn was intended to support a textbook, to be written by my manager and her colleague. I remember worrying, one dark December afternoon, about the state of the project. The database was taking much longer and proving much more complicated than I’d planned: there seemed to be more reports to keep track of, and more agencies producing them, than we had thought. I’d also borrowed a few days to write some stuff, because there were some ideas that wouldn’t let me alone – ideas about crime statistics, that is: about the difficulty in measuring, counting or even defining crime, or at least certain kinds of crime. This was all interesting stuff, but it meant taking time away from the database – time we wouldn’t get back on the contract – and I felt bad about that. I went to see my manager with a heavy heart, ready to confess all, convinced she was going to give me a mighty bollocking and tell me that this job clearly wasn’t for me. Then I’d go back to work – and work would just be work, like it was before: it would just be me sitting in an office doing things I didn’t really want to do, to be judged by standards I didn’t really believe in, like it always had been. (O the recalcitrant me-ness of me!)
That could have happened, but it didn’t. My manager told me that my work was fine, that they had no idea how long building the database would take, and that it could take as long as it needed to. She asked to see what I’d been writing; a couple of days later she and her colleague called me in again and asked if I’d like to contribute it to the proposed textbook, as third co-author. One of my strongest memories of that first meeting is just how relaxed I felt as I left it; closing the door, I sagged theatrically against the wall of the corridor, only to realise that my legs actually were giving way. I had arrived beyond all dreams of arriving – or, perhaps more to the point, I had arrived in my dreams of arriving. This was my world! (Or: I was good enough!) This was my world and I was, finally, perhaps, in it.
The textbook never got written, sadly. What did happen was that I was encouraged to think more deeply about the problems with the database and come up with a solution; this ultimately turned into a grant application, although (for obvious reasons) not one with my name on it. This in turn led to another eighteen months’ work, developing (successfully) a database of concepts used in statistical data sources, tracing relationships between concepts and changes over time. I also got a book contract, and eventually a book, out of my doctoral thesis. Quite soon my manager was encouraging me to take on teaching work, initially on uses of statistical data but later on a whole range of topics in criminology and criminal justice. Despite my rather untheorised interest in norms normative systems criminalisation as social control ect ect, I was coming to criminology pretty much cold. To begin with I had a fairly steep learning curve; in particular, I found the instrumental, “how can we make these people behave?” tone of some of the literature rather hard to handle. Fortunately a colleague recommended Howard Becker and David Matza, and after I’d read some of their work I felt that I knew where I was. As time went on my colleagues (I had colleagues!) positively threw work at me: I ran seminars and gave lectures at all undergraduate levels, on crime prevention, terrorism, drugs, victims of crime… After my research contracts had ended I even scored a teaching contract a couple of times – fixed-term (and short), but still.
That university was pretty good to me, all in all. I worked there for five and half years, including two and a half years on research contracts and another year on teaching contracts; the remainder was all hourly-paid lecturing (zero-hours contracts, as they weren’t then called). In my hourly-paid periods I spent a lot of time (unpaid) in meetings devising research applications, which would have employed me for a bit longer if they’d been successful. (I’m eternally grateful to everyone else who contributed their time and effort to this cause; sorry it didn’t work out.) More happily, I spent quite a bit of (unpaid) time as a participant in a fairly high-powered seminar series on regulation and criminal justice, to which I’d been invited as an afterthought. (My paper didn’t make it into the anthology which came out of the series, but I’m happy to say that I’m in the index.)
As for regulation, it turned out to be right up my street. Anti-social behaviour and ASBOs fascinated me, and had done right from that first piece about crime stats; this seemed to be a clear example of an evolving system of norms which had labelled new kinds of behaviour as out of bounds, with new and rather ill-defined mechanisms of social control following on behind. The relationship between these new mechanisms and the law – a relationship which seemed to be rather loose – began to interest me. The criminal law’s aspiration to systematicity, and its tendency to anchor general principles in the idiosyncrasies of individual cases, had also caught my attention; when I was teaching on counter-terrorism, I got an entire lecture out of the Terrorism Act 2000 and its roots, going back to the Public Order Act 1936 and beyond (e.g. Thomas v Sawkins (1935) and Duncan v Jones (1934)). Around this time my eye snagged on a casual reference to “traditional societies which have little or no law (in the sense of governmental social control)”. ‘Law’ meaning ‘governmental social control’ – could this possibly be right? More importantly, if (as I suspected) it wasn’t right, then what did ‘law’ mean?
So I’d raised my head a bit in theoretical terms and started to take an interest in normative systems as such – and, more specifically, in the law, considered as a framework for defining problematic behaviours and acceptable forms of behavioural regulation. My (still unpublished) paper from the seminar series critiqued John Braithwaite in particular and regulation in general, from a standpoint informed by the Bolshevik legal scholar Pashukanis. (I should probably get back to it some time.) Of course, I didn’t have any legal background – but I haven’t got a degree in criminology, either, and I’ve never studied Italian at all. How hard could it be?
In the mean time, though, I needed a proper job; zero-hours teaching would only stretch so far. A permanent half-time (0.5) teaching job came up at a different institution; I applied and got it. Five years later, I’ve taught students at all levels from Foundation year to MA, I’ve published in journals with the words ‘Criminology’ and ‘Law’ in their titles, and I’ve developed a unit that lets me talk about my Italian research and even mention the Situationists. Happy ending!
No, too easy.
¡Vivan las caenas! 