Against Administrative Criminology

Author(s): John F. Galliher

Source: Social Justice, Vol. 26, No. 2 (76), 25th Anniversary Commemoration (Summer 1999),
pp. 56-59
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options
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Against Administrative Criminology

John F. Galliher

Progressive Voices
OR APPROXIMATELY

in an Academic Wilderness

THREE DECADES

SOCIAL JUSTICE HAS PERSISTED

IN PUBLISHING

papers dealing with fairness in law, crime, and other cultural practices. The
vision of the journal has always been at odds with the dominant paradigms
JL.
found in academic criminology. Through most of this history, I have been a
member of the editorial board and have always been proud of this association.
The journal has not been alone in offering an alternative vision for the study
of crime and law. Troy Duster (1995) delivered a passionate and devastating
criticism of the racism inherent in thewar on drugs, including the significantly
more severe punishments for offenses involving crack as opposed to powder
cocaine. Such patterns resulted in a prison-building boom and an ever-increasing

proportion of arrest and incarceration of black males. Some criminology, noted

Travis Hirschi (1993), lacked a sense of intellectual history and showed a
consequent movement toward shopworn and outmoded biological explanations of
criminal behavior. This was often coupled with a theoretical vacuum and in?
creased federal funding. Hirschi called this type of research "administrative
criminology," consistent as itiswith the requirements of government bureaucrats.
For these reasons, and others, Stanley Cohen (1988) concluded thathe was
"against criminology." Cohen assumed thatthe scope of criminology consists of
addressing only three questions: "Why are laws made? Why are they broken?
What do we do or what should we do about this?" (Ibid.: 9). He laments the fact
that there is a "political timidity" (Ibid. : 52) whereby the firstquestion regarding
theorigins of laws is largely ignored in favor of behavioral research asking merely
why people break existing laws. "If 80% of students on a campus smoke
marihuana, thequestion should not be 'Why do theydo it?' but 'Why have those
inpower allowed such a law to remain?'" (Ibid.: 47). Thus, "the concept of crime
ismeaningful only in termsof certain acts being prohibited by the state... [and] drug
taking, homosexuality, and abortion would be very different if theywere not

'criminalized'" (Ibid.: 40). Mainline criminology thus "managed the astonishing

feat of separating the study of crime from the contemplation of the state" (Ibid.:
4). The question that remains is, how did American criminology get into these
straits?
John Galliher
Columbia, MO

is a professor in the Department of Sociology,

65211; (e-mail: galliherj@missouri.edu).

University

of Missouri-Columbia,

56 Social Justice Vol. 26, No. 2

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Against Administrative Criminology

57

A Short History of the Saddest Science

Cohen addresses this question by focusing on the institutional domains of
criminology, which in turn:
are shaped by their surroundings: how academic institutions are orga?
nized, how disciplines are divided and subdivided, how disputes emerge,
how research is funded, and how findings are published and used. In
criminology an understanding of these institutionaldomains is especially
important,forour knowledge is situated not just, or even primarily, in the
pure academic world, but in the applied domain of the state's crime
control apparatus (Ibid.: 67).
In the following paragraphs we will see how patterns of funding, both in and
outside of academe, have influenced the organization and division of academic
criminology.
Akers (1992) noted that until themid-1960s, all criminology was taught in
sociology departments and all criminology textswere written by sociologists.
Undoubtedly influenced by the urban riots of the 1960s, beginning in the early
1970s, thefederal government began to sponsor criminal justice programs through
the Law Enforcement Assistance Association LEAA (Cronin et al., 1981). At
colleges and universities, large and small, such programs quickly emerged to take
advantage of this newfound largess. Initially these programs had little research
impact, but were designed to trainpolice officers already on thejob (Ibid.). Soon,
applied training emerged for undergraduate majors interested in preparing for a
law enforcement career. Farrell and Koch (1995) have illustrated this applied
orientation, both in theirexperiences in teaching such programs and in a review
of criminal justice textbooks.
Akers (1992) traces the phenomenal growth of these programs. In themid
1960s, therewere only 39 bachelor's programs in criminal justice, 14master's
programs, and no doctoral programs. A decade later, therewere 376 bachelor's

programs, 121master's programs, and six doctoral programs in criminal justice.

By 1990, over 1,000 colleges or universities were offering degrees in criminal
justice, with 95 of themofferinggraduate programs and 13 offering thedoctorate.
It would be easy to exaggerate the impact of these patterns, because even
before this spate of government funding, regressive and repressive forceswere at
work in academic criminology, perhaps best reflected in deterrence research that
often sought information on themost effectivemeans of controlling the urban
underclass (DiChiara and Galliher, 1984). Although most of these criminal justice
programs and faculty are clearly applied in emphasis, representing administrative
criminology, some faculty and some programs have been more progressive.
As thewar on drugs took on steam and as theprison-building program moved
intohigh gear, thiswas not loston undergraduates at universities and colleges, who

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58

Galliher

flocked to such programs in hopes of securing some type of law enforcement

employment after graduation. Employment opportunities have abounded at the
local, state, and federal levels in policing and corrections. The interests of
undergraduates, and their tuitionmoney, were not lost on university administra?

tors; increasingly, universities have developed such programs and allowed them
to grow. Thus, these programs needed to recruit new faculty. To meet these
staffing demands, some criminal justice departments developed graduate pro?
grams. Research programs in these departments also have thrived with the
assistance of theNational Institute of Justice.
Some prominent sociology graduate trainingprograms shed the criminology
specialty, finding themselves out of stepwith academic changes. When I arrived
at Indiana University in 1962,many graduate students therehad been attracted to

the study of criminology and deviant behavior due to the legacy of the lateEdwin
Sutherland and a distinguished faculty thatincluded Alfred Lindesmith, who was
a prominent and persistent critic of federal drug control policies, and also Albert
Cohen, Austin Turk, JohnGagnon, and Charles Tittle. The Indiana graduate
student corps justifiably felt that the criminology program therewas among the
best in the nation, perhaps only taking a back seat to the one at theUniversity of
California, Berkeley. Yet, what a difference threedecades can make. Lindesmith
has passed away and the others have resigned. Indeed, the Indiana University
sociology department no longer teaches criminology, leaving it to the campus
Forensic Studies Program. It should be noted that sociology at Indiana and
elsewhere has been indifferent to losing criminology due to the vocational

emphasis in this specialty (Akers, 1992). To add insult to injury, theprogressive

and prestigious School of Criminology at theUniversity of California, Berkeley,
was closed in the 1970s by thenGovernor Ronald Reagan forbeing too far to the
left (Geis, 1995).
Without Social Justice, academic criminology would be leftwith few outlets
for progressive analysis of racist police, oppressive drug laws, and a prison
building program thatfinds theUnited States as the leader in theproportion of its
citizens who are imprisoned. JustasHirschi and Cohen have observed, it is an easy
choice to be "against criminology/' especially "administrative criminology."

REFERENCES
Akers, Ronald L.
1992
Cohen, Stanley
1988
Cronin, Thomas
1981

"Linking Sociology
Forces 71: 1-15.

and Its Specialties:

The Case

of Criminology."

Against Criminology. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.

E., Tania Z. Cronin, and Michael E. Milakovich
Indiana University Press.
U.S. v. Crime in the Streets. Bloomington:

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Social

Against Administrative Criminology 59

DiChiara, Albert and John F. Galliher
1984
'Thirty Years of Deterrence Research: Characteristics, Causes, and Conse?
quences." Contemporary Crises 8: 243-263.
Duster, Troy
1995
"The New Crisis of Legitimacy inControls, Prisons, and Legal Structures."
The American Sociologist 26: 20-29.
Farrell, Bill and Larry Koch
1995
"Criminal Justice, Sociology, and Academia."
The American Sociologist 26:
52-61.
Geis, Gilbert
1995
"The Limits of Academic Tolerance: The Discontinuance
of the School of
Criminology at Berkeley." Thomas G. Blomberg and Stanley Cohen (eds.),
Punishment and Social Control. New York: Aldine De Gruyter: 277-304.
Hirschi, Travis
1993
"Administrative Criminology." Contemporary Sociology 22: 348-350.

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