Joc Young A Cultural Criminologist

558756
research-article2014
CMC0010.1177/1741659014558756Crime, Media, CultureFerrell and Hayward
Special Issue Article
Crime Media Culture

2014, Vol. 10(3) 179190
Never boring: Jock Young as The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
cultural criminologist sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1741659014558756
cmc.sagepub.com
Jeff Ferrell
Texas Christian University, USA; University of Kent, UK
Keith J. Hayward
University of Kent, UK
Abstract
Jock Young (19422013) was one of the worlds foremost criminologists. This paper traces his
academic career in sociology and criminology and its culmination in the theoretical, methodological,
and interventionist approach known as cultural criminology. Drawing on a 2008 interview with
Professor Young and the authors longstandingrelationship with him, this paper in addition explores
the convergence of Youngs intellectual trajectory with the emerging contours of cultural criminology.
Keywords
critical criminology, cultural criminology, Jock Young
An Unlikely Convergence?
Its 10pm on Saturday 10 May 2003, and an impromptu party is under way. In the basement of an
Italian restaurant in Bloomsbury, London, a large group of conference delegates from the First
International Cultural Criminology Conference has moved on from the days papers, given by the
likes of Jack Katz, Stephen Lyng, Stephanie Kane and Phil Cohen, and is now in equal parts debat-
ing, drinking, and dancing. Some are even singing, as an acoustic guitar is being passed around
among the many criminologist-musicians in attendance. Slowly, very slowly, Jock Young descends
a treacherous spiral staircase into the basement. Casually commandeering a glass of his favourite
Pinot Grigio, he quickly inserts himself into the epicentre of the social events. Its been a long two
days of conferencing, and Jock especially has been at the intellectual heart of things, giving a key-
note paper, contributing to a roundtable on the Iraq War, and leading the questions from the floor.
But there is no flicker of fatigue on his face this night, only a look of delight as he relishes the
atmosphere, the sense of something taking form. An hour or so later, Jock joins us at a quieter
table. I hope you dont mind me parachuting in? he says with that familiar glint in hiseye.
Corresponding author:
Professor Keith J. Hayward, School of Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research, University of Kent, Canterbury,
Kent, CT2 7NF, UK.
Email: K.J.Hayward@kent.ac.uk
Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DE CHILE on February 11, 2015
180 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 10(3)
To those conversant with the previous decade of criminological discourse, this moment of
happy convergence must have seemed unlikely at best. During the 1980s and 1990s, Jock Young
had been one of the primary intellectual architects of left realist criminology (Young 1987; Young
and Matthews 1992). An understandable, perhaps even necessary, response to rising crime rates
in Margaret Thatchers Britain, left realist criminology disavowed what some saw as the romantic,
idealist tendencies of radical criminology in favour of a more accountable, on-the-ground engage-
ment with both perpetrators and victims of crime. In particular, it questioned the valorization of
transgression for its allegedly progressive possibilities, and instead attempted to account for more
practical issues of community harm, personal victimization and state policy. Yet during these same
years, and as part of the early conceptualization of cultural criminology, there had also developed
an approach that seemed to embody all that the left realists disavowed an approach that Mark
Hamm (1993: 206) called the return of anarchist criminology.1 As resurrected by Jeff Ferrell
(1993/1996), this anarchist approach was as culturally disruptive as left realism was sternly seri-
ous, and dismissive of state policy as a matter of moral principle. Worse, it emerged from Ferrells
long-term ethnography of urban graffiti writers, and so was rooted in the very sorts of back-alley
cultures and street-level transgressions that left realists now questioned. Nor did this tension go
unnoticed. Moving from a discussion of Ferrell and other anarchist criminologists to a discussion
of Young and associated left realists, Werner Einstadter and Stuart Henrys excellent mid-1990s
book on criminological theory noted that in a direction polar opposite to the idealism of anarchist
criminology, a new critical perspective has recently developed known as left realism.
(Einstadter and Henry 1995: 2323).
Dinner, drinks, dancing? Shouted disparagements would have seemed more likely. So what
was Jock Young doing at that dinner, and why were the cultural criminologists there so glad to
see him?
Mutual Attractions
The answer might be described in terms of a number of mutual criminological attractions. As
distant as left realism may have been in the 1980s and 1990s from the more anarchic threads of
early North American cultural criminology in the same two decades, a longer view reveals a host
of convergences between Jocks criminological career and the project that was to become cultural
criminology.2 Many of these Jock himself discussed in a 2008 interview, from which subsequent
quotations are drawn.3
Interestingly, the first of these was anarchism itself or, more precisely, the sense of excite-
ment provoked by the anti-establishment sensibilities that animated the political and cultural
revolts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Recalling the London School of Economics during this
time, Jock emphasized that it was appallingly boringIt wasnt militant. There wasnt anything
interesting going on at all Even conventional classes on Marxism seemed, as Jock joked, more
like a CIA plot to turn people off Marxism. Then things changed; then 1968 happened, and the
whole world seemed to be turning upside down. Within British criminology, Jock and the other
founders of the 1968 National Deviancy Conference (NDC) turned the discipline thoroughly
upside down, rejecting establishment structures of legal and political authority, and reframing
criminology around issues of social control and social critique. By seeking to invert the social order
itself, one can see the NDC as a criminological manifestation of the type of anti-authoritarianism
Ferrell and Hayward 181
that was such a prominent feature of late-1960s student life, something evoked vividly by Jock in
the following extract:
A tremendously influential person [on the NDC] was Phil Cohen, who wasnt in any institution
whatsoever. He was Dr. John of the London Street Commune and was running an anarchist
occupation in 144 Piccadilly, reading Levi-Strauss in the British Museum, and inventing subcul-
tural theory about bricolaging and all these sorts of things. Trotskyite ideas were tremen-
dously influential; anarchist ideas also. You have to remember that quite a lot of the original
NDC people had written in Anarchy David Downes, Stan Cohen, Ian Taylor, myself And the
little journal Anarchy had a quite a wide circulation, and in general the NDC tended to be
anarchist rather than formal Marxist At that time we were very, very anarchistic.
Looking back now on the extent to which Jocks formative years were shaped by this heady
period of anti-establishment politics, its perhaps not surprising that later in his career he found
himself attracted by certain elements of early cultural criminology. By the end of the 1990s it was
clear that New Labour had failed to deliver the left realist project, and after more than a decade
spent undertaking the many empirical, practical tasks associated with realist criminology, not to
mention the strain of all the political conflicts that had surrounded left realism, the chance to
reconnect with his roots via cultural criminology would no doubt have been appealing. If his goal
was to expand his vision and reconnect with a more academic-oriented project then cultural crimi-
nology provided the perfect vehicle. Moreover, with its general sense of creative energy it also
afforded Jock the chance to revisit his iconoclastic, anti-criminological and, dare we say it, more
innocent earlier self.
This argument is supported by another early influence that Jock pointed to when recalling his
time as a student in London in the late 1960s. The 1968 revolts in Paris and elsewhere were driven
forward by the Situationists, with their understandings of late capitalisms totalizing effects on daily
life, their sense of modern society as cultural spectacle, and their call for a creative revolution of
everyday life. As Jock recalled, Situationists and Trotskyites quickly took over the London School
of Economics as part of the late 1960s upheavals, and Situationist influences also became a part of
the NDC. Now, by the time of the First International Cultural Criminology Conference in 2003,
some cultural criminologists were invoking the Situationists again, and using the Situationist analy-
sis of organized drudgery to explain both crime and mainstream criminology (Ferrell 2001, 2004,
2005). They were also recalling two infamous Situationist slogans once painted on the walls of
Paris, and suggesting that these slogans continued to explain much about contemporary society.
Looking back, they seem to explain much about Jock Young as well, and his gravitation toward
cultural criminology. The first of these: The society that abolishes every adventure makes its own
abolition the only possible adventure. The second: Boredom is always counter-revolutionary.
Certainly not boring was the scene in Notting Hill, the London neighbourhood where Jock lived
in the late 1960s. As Jock recalled, the neighbourhood was alive with music, film and politics, and
was the focal point of the art school crowd a group with which Jock spent more time than he did
with LSE students. Given this, its not surprising that Notting Hill was also a subcultural scene of
drug dealing and drug use a scene that Jock documented in his first book, The Drugtakers (1971).
But as Jock also documented in The Drugtakers, Notting Hill was equally the scene of ongoing
conflict; drug dealing and other subcultural transgressions brought regular clashes with the police,
and abiding antagonism between police and young neighbourhood residents. Subcultures, art,
transgression, urban spatial politics, the role of law and policing in criminalizing alternative pursuits
many of the themes that would emerge from the ethnographies of cultural criminologists dec-
ades later were here in Jocks initial ethnographic work, and in his day-to-day existence. And there
was another parallel as well. Critics sometimes point out that the ethnographies written by cultural
criminologists inappropriately mix attentive reporting with cultural and political advocacy (e.g.
OBrien 2005). But for Jock, this was precisely the point. It was history from below transferred
to youth cultures, he said of The Drugtakers. So its parallel was in the socialist history of E.P.
Thompson, Sheila Rowbotham and Raymond Williams. So our job was an advocacy job.4
A more obvious and more clearly articulated mutual influence was mid-twentieth century American
sociology of deviance (Hayward and Young 2004: 2601; Ferrell et al. 2008/2015, ch.2). During his
time at the LSE, Jock was influenced by the junior faculty far more than by the more esteemed figures
such as Karl Popper or Tom Bottomore. He recalled how these young criminologists were fantasti-
cally open to American ideas, with David Downes importing subcultural analysis, Paul Rock symbolic
interactionism and Terry Morris Jocks doctoral supervisor the American tradition of prison culture
studies. Inevitably perhaps, Youngs passion for American sociology of deviance found an outlet in
both his PhD research on student drug use, and later with the publication of The Drugtakers. Most
obviously this work, with its understanding of the authorities as amplifiers of deviance, can be seen
as an extension of the American labelling tradition as established by the likes of Frank Tannenbaum
and Edwin Lemert. However, Young was keen to augment this early work, and along with Stan
Cohen developed the concept of moral panic. Later Young described this development as a synthe-
sis the British synthesis of American labelling and subcultural theories:
This synthesis was facilitated by the logic of their two foci: labelling theory focused on con-
structions downwards (the reaction against deviance) and subcultural theory on constructions
upwards (deviant actions and responses). Moreover, the sometimes wooden tone of American
subcultural theory was given a zest, a feeling of cultural creativity; top-down reactions to devi-
ance were also invested with this sensibility. Transgressive and deviant acts were in turn given
a more positive valuation. Rightly or wrongly, deviance was a sign of resistance, an effort at
overcoming, a creative flourish; it was not predominantly a site of failure or grudging adapta-
tion. The American sociology of deviance became a British sociology of transgression. (Young
writing about British criminology in Ferrell et al. 2008: 44)
Youngs love of American sociology of deviance would remain a constant throughout his career.
(One could argue, for example, that The Criminological Imagination [2011] was something of a
hymn to this tradition.) Even when he moved away from the labelling perspective during his more
Marxist period while working with Ian Taylor and Paul Walton (Taylor et al. 1973, 1975), intel-
lectually he never strayed far from what he called the extraordinary decade from 1955 to 65 of
American deviancy theory, everything from Al Cohen to Howard Becker. For example, although
the goal of 1973s The New Criminology was to approach the subject of deviance from a more
holistic and structurally informed position, Young confirmed that the American ideas were taken
tremendously seriously by us Brits and that we were more versed in American than British sociol-
ogy. Early on, Jock and his associates embodied the intellectual interplay of American and British
criminologies that would define cultural criminology in coming decades.
The New Criminology foreshadowed another aspect of Jocks work that would also reach its
acme in cultural criminology: his critique of sociological and criminological positivism. However,
while The New Criminology strongly condemned early forms of biological and psychologically
positivistic criminology, it was only later, while undertaking more practical research associated
with left realism during the 1980s and 1990s, that Jock extended his position to include a more
developed critique of abstracted empiricism and numerical fetishism within criminology. This frus-
tration with a statistical, technological criminology stemmed from two sources. First, after spend-
ing a considerable time in the thick of quantitative research (Young 2004: 17) including over
15 large-scale crime and victimization studies organized by the Centre for Criminology, Middlesex
University he became disillusioned with the survey format (see Young 1988a), and what he
would later call (following Richard Lowontin) the problem of representativeness (Young 2004).
The second source was something much more general: the political mood of the 1980s and
1990s. Famously for Young, this was the period when the new administrative criminology
emerged as the major paradigm in establishment approaches to crime (Young 1986, 1988b), a
period which saw the left realist dream of a progressive, socialist criminology lose out to new
forms of governmental criminology predicated on cost-effective situational crime prevention and
rational choice theories of criminal behaviour. As Jock recalled:
It looked like positivist criminology was on the ropes in this country that was the general feel-
ing, you know, that progressive ideas were in the ascendant. Then criminology expanded on
this vast level, and the crime rate went up, and the criminal justice system expanded, as did the
State. And, of course, what happened was an extraordinary expansion of rational choice the-
ory, positivism, and all these sorts of things. What we thought were vanquished ideas, resur-
faced with a vengeance on a most extraordinary level. And then some of our own [left realist]
ideas became metamorphosised in these sorts of ways and were regurgitated back at us.
As Jock has made clear elsewhere (Hayward 2010: 264265), by the end of the 1990s not only
was the New Labour government in the UK abandoning the type of progressive, practical crime
policies associated with left realism, but worse still, Blairs policy wonks had started taking realist
ideas about social exclusion and hanging them on to the work of Charles Murray and other right-
wing conservative thinkers.
It was political changes such as these, along with a self-conscious reaction to very rationalistic
notions of crime control and crime, that saw Jock gravitate away from left realism and toward
more social theoretical analyses of society and its exclusionary dynamics. Jock described his feel-
ings at this point:
Academically as well as politically, criminology was beginning to become an awfully boring,

unbearable subject. It became a subject which we were rather ashamed to be in I was also
getting a bit worried about it [left realism] becoming too specific, too particular to parts of
London. I felt the need to get back to a wider sense of sociology, to get a wider perspective.
And this he did with his 1999 monograph The Exclusive Society, a sweeping text that charted
the transition from an inclusive society (characterized by the social stability, cultural homogeneity
and high modernity of the post-war period up to the 1960s) to a late modern exclusive society
(characterized by hyper-pluralism, casino capitalism and the unravelling of consensual politics and
of community, family and stable employment). These themes in and of themselves would have
attracted the attention of cultural criminologists. But Jock went a step further, outlining how
these tendencies played out at the levels of psychodynamics and cultural dynamics, exacerbating
anxiety and feelings of ontological insecurity. With cultural criminologists exploring similar social
theoretical themes in relation to certain forms of experiential criminality (Fenwick and Hayward
2000; Hayward 2001, 2002; Presdee 2000), a mutual attraction between Jock Young and cultural
criminology was indeed building.
Jock and Cultural Criminology

It was at this point, in that Bloomsbury basement and beyond, that Jock Young and cultural crimi-
nology converged. Jocks longstanding intellectual passions the anarchic critique of authority,
the social and cultural politics of crime, the dynamics of subcultures and of everyday interaction,
the salvaging of the criminological imagination from the abstractions of administrative positivism
found a home in an emerging approach animated by many of the same scholarly passions. It
might even be said that Jocks deep, longstanding intellectual history came to full fruition with
cultural criminology not as some predictable end point, of course, but rather as part of an open-
ended cultural criminological project that, as it turned out, both recalled and reinvented his accu-
mulated insights. Yet despite the uncanny convergences between Jocks intellectual history and
contemporary cultural criminology, the two were not a perfect fit, and rightly so. When Jock
parachuted in, the landing was not entirely soft; he brought to cultural criminology new perspec-
tives, and cultural criminologists offered Jock some alternative ways of thinking as well. In this
section we recall those new perspectives and alternatives, and some of the divergences and ten-
sions between them aswell.
Among Jocks most important contributions was a critical sense of disciplinary history and cul-
tural context. This had two valuable applications. First, Jock was a fine historian of criminology
and sociologist of sociology not some gossipy chronicler of disciplinary spats, mind you, but
rather an intellectual historian able to locate disciplinary developments in larger social and cultural
contexts (e.g. Young 1994). As already seen, Jock intimately knew the past fifty years of sociology
and criminology in Great Britain, the United States and beyond but he also knew that for those
fifty years and before, these disciplines had developed within and against the evolution of the
societies they studied. An understanding of moral panic theory, then, required also an under-
standing of post-war Britain; a full appreciation of labelling theory required a deep appreciation
of changing American culture in the 1960s. Disciplinary history was social history, refracted and
echoed through emerging modes of analysis. But if this were true, then so was a correlate: disci-
plinary theories and methods taken to be timeless or objective or somehow outside social influ-
ence were not, could not be, what they claimed. This critical, historical perspective on disciplinary
practices made Jock a ready and valuable co-conspirator with other cultural criminologists (e.g.
Ferrell 2009; Ferrell et al. 2008/2015; Hayward 2004; Morrison 2004) as they set about their own
critiques of social scientific positivism, tying it to particular historical configurations of power, and
imagining alternative approaches more consistent with contemporary society.
Jocks invaluable insights into historical period and historical context brought another sort of
perspective to cultural criminology as well. For Jock, much of the work being done in cultural
criminology could be seen as a series of engagements with the late modern condition; collectively,
this work appealed to him to the extent that it began to accumulate into an exploration of late
modernity itself. Put differently, Jock was particularly adept at situating the various theoretical
models emerging within cultural criminology in larger theoretical and historical context. His notions
of pervasive late modern identity politics and hyperindividualism helped contextualize and make
sense of the Katzian foreground of crime, with its elevated emotions and expressivity, and of the
edgework experiences described by cultural criminologists the sometimes desperate searches
for meaning and identity that proliferated amid the late modern predations of casualized labour
and organized boredom. Likewise, his understanding of late modernitys ontological fragility the
sense of personal and social uncertainty, the reality of structural inequality and cultural change,
that haunt both the included and the excluded was essential in explaining the heightened expres-
sivity, the pleasure and fear and vindictiveness, that fires much late modern crime, crime control,
and anti-crime ideology. Even without Jock, cultural criminology was positioning itself as a new,
alternative criminology tightly attuned to contemporary dynamics of mediated communication,
cultural dislocation and everyday experience. With him, cultural criminology became or at least
could plausibly claim to be the distinctive criminology of late modernity itself.
Jocks work was equally essential in understanding another of late modernitys traits: the globali-
zation of culture and economy and with it the flow of information, ideologies, identities and people
across boundaries of time and space. Here Jock, like Zygmunt Bauman, was suggesting that the form
of modernity which we now occupy is not only late but liquid a vertiginous affair where, for more
and more people, all that is solid does indeed melt into air (see Hayward and Young 2007 for a more
detailed account of Baumans relationship with cultural criminology). Jocks views on globalization
are perhaps best expressed in The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007), the second work of his trilogy.
The opening line of the book sets the tone This is a book about cultural borders, it is about borders
set up and borders crossed and with section titles like Crossing the border: to these wet and windy
shores and Globalisation and the generation of domestic and global discontent, its clear that his
particular interpretation of the world at that time was one tremendously influenced by the forces of
cultural globalization. This interpretation was also no doubt influenced by the fact that, in 2002,
after four decades of living in London, Jock moved to take up an academic position in New York City,
a place he claimed had always attracted mebecause its such a hyper-pluralist society.
Yet his insights on globalization and late modernity more generally, while essential to work in
and outside cultural criminology, are not without their tensions. To start with, on the subject of
globalization, questions have been posed about exactly whose lives are being described in The
Vertigo of Late Modernity and other works of this period. As Steve Hall and his colleagues (Hall et
al. 2008) have argued, these fluidities of culture and identity may primarily reflect certain sections
of the urban late modern world, and far less the experience of those consigned to the factory
floor, the housing project or the dying village. If this is true, then it may be that the thriving urban
neighbourhoods of Stoke Newington, London and Park Slope, New York that Jock called home
and loved so much, and in which he found daily miracles of multicultural interaction, predisposed
him to overestimate the liquidity of late modern life.5 If this was indeed the case then two ques-
tions emerge. First, did the idiom of cultural globalization resonate in particular with someone
who was living at the very epicentre of global trade, immigration and cultural bricolage? And
second, would we have been treated to a very different analysis of contemporary society if Jock
had chosen to relocate from London to Detroit or Darlington, rather than to New YorkCity?
Such questions highlight another tension in Jocks work, this one around his use and interpre-
tation of late modernity itself. Jock consciously chose to describe the contemporary situation as
late modern rather than postmodern, seeing the shift from an inclusive to an exclusive society
as a transformation within modernity itself. This decision can be accounted for in two ways. First,
as Jock made clear in the interview, while he was drawn to some of the same debates about sub-
jectivity and the place of identity within contemporary society that so occupied postmodern theo-
rists, his take on the issue was more Durkheimian than Deleuzian:
Although I did like all those ideas of lots of vocabularies of motive coming together and all this
sort of thing, the idea of the self disappearing I found quite an odd idea. I felt the self was more
and more desperate to try and hold things togetherrather than a self which was quite hap-
pily divided into all little bits.
Second, and relatedly, Jocks conscious tendency was always to rely on and reconceptualize classic
modernist theorists like Robert K. Merton and C. Wright Mills (e.g. Young 2003, 2011) rather
than to engage with the more esoteric varieties of postmodern social theory. This decision was
stylistic as well as conceptual; Jock shared Mills distaste for the opaque structures and wordy
obfuscations of high theory and certainly many postmodern theorists stand guilty of just such
opacity and obfuscation. It would be interesting to do what Mills does to Parsons to some of the
high theorists of post modernity, Jock said, and say in a few words what they are trying to say.
So yeahthats why none of that appealed to me at all.
For a cultural criminology concerned with newly emerging media dynamics and cultural construc-
tions of crime and crime control, though, certain postmodern notions of media looping, hyper-
reality and epistemic ambiguity would seem essential and in fact have been utilized effectively.
Equally essential is a critical appraisal of late modernity versus postmodernity an appraisal that, to
be honest, cultural criminology has yet to fully undertake. And thus a tension emerges between
Jocks tendency to mine the past for theoretical and methodological inspiration, and a cultural crimi-
nology that sets itself out as a criminology of now, a criminology capable of dealing with the dis-
tinct complexities of contemporary society. In his final book, The Criminological Imagination (2011),
this tension becomes apparent in relation to methodology. Here many recent developments in the
field are neither discussed nor acknowledged; while much is made of ethnography, for example,
what is ultimately called for is a retreat into a rather formal ethnographic technique, albeit one
infused with a greater sense of reflexivity. No mention, then, of cultural criminologys emphasis on
liquid ethnography or instant ethnography, techniques designed specifically to tap into the imme-
diacy of the late modern mediascape. Similarly absent are other contemporary cultural criminologi-
cal methods: visual ethnography, documentary and auto-ethnographic photography, netnography,
narrative criminology, visual semiotics, video filmmaking, participatory digital cartography and
other forms of video-recorded social activism. Indeed, the books final sections seem to gaze back
to the classic works of the 1960s and 1970s, rather than forward to newer techniques and newer
fields of study such as cultural geography or social movement theory.
Then again, this tension between classic scholarship and emerging perspectives can also be
seen as a creative tension, an inevitable and important aspect of any collective intellectual project
like cultural criminology. Within such a collective enterprise, different scholars play different roles
yet with a shared commitment to critical conversation and thoughtful exchange in the interest
of pushing the project ahead. Here Jock excelled as well. As he reminded us many times, pat
agreement with a colleagues ideas is no compliment, and no way forward; intellectual insight
and intellectual respect emerge instead from the sharp interplay of people, ideas and traditions.
So, having shared our thoughts on Jock and cultural criminology, well leave it to Jock for a
response for his own thoughts on cultural criminology and his role in it. How did he see cultural
criminology, and the mutual attractions that weve suggested? His first answer addressed directly
the tension between old and new. Cultural criminology is very much in the straight line of sociol-
ogy of deviance, he argued
Its not a separate, odd thing that has occurred, but is very much a continuation. Rather than
cultural criminology being this isolated, new thing, its very [much] in the extraordinary line of
thinking which goes through the Chicago School, the important decades of the 1950s and
1960s, and then applying to the present, modern world. So its got two attractions for me. First
of all that it is part of this tremendous tradition, right? Secondly, it relates to this very, very
interesting world
His second answer formed more around issues of boredom and engagement, and in this way
recalled once again the anti-establishment intellectual energy that had animated Jocks career
from the first. His attraction to cultural criminology, he told us,
was about zest.When you get to certain points in your life, you get into your head that
youre not going to bore yourself. You havent got an interminable amount of time. Theres a
very strong feeling on my part that I dont want to spend hours doing things I dont want to
do. So trying to bring zest back into your work is important.
Beginning
Journal articles, like interviews, must end somewhere, and appropriately enough for Jock and his
career of zestful and creative reinvention, where better to end than with a beginning. Drawing the
interview to a close back in 2008, we decided not to ask Jock to reflect on his legacy within crimi-
nology, but instead to talk about the future trajectory of his work and of criminological knowledge
more generally. His response to both themes was characteristically upbeat and insightful. After
talking briefly about his current plans to revive what he called the Millsian project (the project
that ultimately became The Criminological Imagination),6 talk turned to a project that, sadly, was
never started, a new New Criminology for the twenty-first century:
Whats needed now is a systematic engagement with the other positions. The next stage, I
think, should be something that goes one-by-one through the [main criminological] theories,
rather like The New Criminology did What worries me is what happens in the States, which
is this really odd thing where you hive all the bits off, so that you just have different theories,
and even though they have different notions of human nature and sociological order and that
sort of thing, theyre just seen as separate ghettoes or separate reservations, and critical crimi-
nology is like that, a sort of special reservation for progressives. And people dont criticize each
other across the linesa sort of criminological multiculturalism.
To our minds, this quotation exemplifies Jocks cosmopolitan intellectual sensibility. His work
and his talks were always creditably broad and encompassing and yet, at the same time, selective
and discriminating discriminating in the original sense of the word: not prejudicial but rather
discerning, refined, perceptive. His goal was to disentangle the good from the bad, the useable
from the disposable. The quote also highlights his ongoing desire to break through sectarian intel-
lectual divides. He sought to cut across disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries, to embrace all
manner of material and perspectives, and thus to encourage thinking beyond the narrow furrows
of knowledge that can cramp our ability to see the social world in all its complexity and confusion.
The world is indeed a vast social and cultural tapestry; as Jock well understood, we need a crimi-
nology thats expansive and inclusive enough to capture all its maddening tangle of threads.
Notice also in this last quotation that there is still not a trace of disciplinary exhaustion, nor for
that matter any hint of a scholar winding down. Instead, as always, Jock was gearing up for the
next battle the old criminological campaigner making ready for yet another round of provocative
critique and theoretical jousting. From out of our outmoded cassette recorder Jocks voice crackles
with excitement as he criticizes todays criminologists for not being critical enough, for being too
tolerant, too theoretically multicultural. But this was no rancorous disavowal of criminology.
How could it be? His passion for the discipline was simply too great to finish on anything but an
optimistic, inquisitive note. The lens of criminology is now so fantastically wide, he declared,
almost with pride, that were only really at the beginning of the story. White-collar crime, green
criminology, genocide, the crime drop, the greater enmeshment of criminalization in everyday life,
increasingly bloated criminal justice systems, you just cant get away from it.
Indeed you cant. From The Drugtakers to The Criminological Imagination, from the National
Deviancy Conference to the First International Cultural Criminology Conference and beyond, Jock
burned brilliant and bright, illuminating the vast range of criminological inquiry. Like his great
friend and colleague Stan Cohen, he pursued the project of criminology in such a way that it
remained always open and unfinished; like Stan, he stood both for criminology and against it, as
social conditions and his own convictions demanded. After Jocks death in 2013, his partner Jayne
Mooney asked that we address a few words on Jocks behalf to the critical criminologists gathered
at the American Society of Criminology meetings.7 Before the night was over there was music,
debate and drinks, not unlike that night in Bloomsbury a decade before. But above all there was
a message from Jayne, a message that she knew came directly from Jock himself.
Keep up the good fight.
Keep working for a better world.
And never, ever be boring.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.
Notes
1. For a short account of cultural criminologys development and especially the important distinction between
early and late periods, see Hayward (forthcoming).
2. For more on the overlapping territory between cultural criminology and left realism see Hayward and
Young (2012: 11920) and Matthews (2014 ch.5).
3. The interview took place on the University of Kent campus on 3 August 2008. Although the format of the
interview was largely unstructured, its aim was to explore four historical periods of Jock Youngs career:
his early life and student years at the London School of Economics, including the period of the National
Deviancy Conferences; his time at Middlesex University and his involvement with Left Realism; his move
to New York and his later social theoretical work (Young 1999, 2007); and finally his involvement with
cultural criminology. For a more biographical account of Professor Young based on this interview see
Hayward (2010).
4. Reflecting on this era of his career nearly forty years later, Young importantly also recognized the limita-
tions of criminology as political advocacy. Later in the interview when discussing his work on moral panic
he stated: David Garland in an article hes just written about moral panics [see Garland 2008] has got
this very interesting thing where he talks about Stan Cohen, myself and Jason Ditton as being, sort of,
rather hip advocates of the counter culture. The whole thing about moral panic was that you were doing
an advocacy against the conservative world But a lot of the problems about moral panic theory come
from that tradition of advocacy. The problem was that, on occasion, we overestimated the irrationality
of the reaction, and underestimated the problem that provoked the reaction in the first place (see also
Young1975).
5. This might also be seen as a matter of method. While Jock knew and drew on an impressive range of
ethnographic work, he himself did not engage in the sort of ethnographic projects undertaken by some
other cultural criminologists, and so may have missed something of these less liquid, more structurally
determined life worlds.
6. For both authors respective reviews on Youngs final book, The Criminological Imagination, see Ferrell
(2012) and Hayward(2012).
7. For the full text of this address see The Critical Criminologist Newsletter 22(3), Summer 2014, pp.1618.
References
Einstadter W and Henry S (1995) Criminological Theory. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.
Fenwick M and Hayward KJ (2000) Youth crime, excitement and consumer culture: the reconstruction of
aetiology in contemporary theoretical criminology. In: Pickford J (ed) Youth Justice: Theory and Practice.
London: Cavendish.
Ferrell J (1993/1996) Crimes of Style. Boston: Northeastern.
Ferrell J (2001) Tearing Down the Streets. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ferrell J (2004) Boredom, crime and criminology. Theoretical Criminology 8: 287302.
Ferrell J (2005) The only possible adventure: Edgework and anarchy. In: Lyng S (ed) Edgework: The Sociology
of Risk. London: Routledge.
Ferrell J (2009) Kill method: A provocation. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology 1(1): 122.
Ferrell J (2012) Increase the uneasiness: Review of Jock Young, The Criminological Imagination. British Journal
of Criminology, 52: 431434.
Ferrell J, Hayward K and Young J (2008/2015) Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. London: SAGE Publica-
tions.
Garland D (2008) On the concept of moral panic. Crime, Media, Culture 4: 930.
Hall S, Winlow S and Ancrum C (2008) Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. Cullompton: Willan.
Hamm M (1993) Doing criminology like it matters. Social Justice 20: 203209.
Hayward KJ (2001) Crime, Consumerism and the Urban Experience. PhD Dissertation, University of East
London.
Hayward KJ (2002) The vilification and pleasures of youthful transgression. In: Muncie J, Hughes G and
McLaughlin E (eds) Youth Justice: Critical Readings. London: Open University Press.
Hayward KJ (2004) City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience. London: GlassHouse.
Hayward KJ (2010) Jock Young. In: Hayward K, Maruna S and Mooney J (eds) Fifty Key Thinkers in Criminol-
ogy. London: Routledge.
Hayward KJ (2012) The Criminological Imagination, Jock Young, Symposium of Reviews. British Journal of
Criminology 52: 434439.
Hayward KJ (forthcoming) Cultural criminology: Script rewrites. Journal article currently under review.
Hayward KJ and Young J (2004) Cultural criminology: Some notes on the script. Theoretical Criminology 8:
259274.
Hayward KJ and Young J (2007) Zygmunt Bauman and Cultural Criminology. In: Daems T and Robert L (eds)
Zygmunt: Bauman: de Schaduwzijde van de Vloeibare Moderniteit. Den Haag: Boom Juridische Uitgevers.
Hayward KJ and Young J (2012) Cultural criminology. In: Maguire M, Morgan R and Reiner R (eds) The Oxford
Handbook of Criminology, 5th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Matthews R (2014) Realist Criminology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Morrison W (2004) Lombroso and the birth of criminological positivism: Scientific mastery or cultural artifice? In:
Ferrell J, Hayward K, Morrison W and Presdee M (eds) Cultural Criminology Unleashed. London: GlassHouse.
OBrien M (2005) What is cultural about cultural criminology? British Journal of Criminology 45: 599612.
Presdee M (2000) Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime. London: Routledge.
Taylor I, Walton P and Young J (1973) The New Criminology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Taylor I, Walton P and Young J (1975) Critical Criminology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Young J (1971) The Drugtakers. London: Paladin.
Young J (1975) Working class criminology. In: Taylor I, Walton P and Young J (eds) Critical Criminology. Lon-
don: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Young J (1986) The failure of criminology: The need for radical realism. In: Matthews R and Young J (eds)
Confronting Crime. London: SAGE Publications.
Young J (1987) The tasks facing a realist criminology. Contemporary Crisis 11: 337356.
Young J (1988a) Risk of crime and fear of crime: A realist critique of survey-based assumptions. In Maguire M
and Pointing J (eds) Victims of Crime: A New Deal. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Young J (1988b) Radical criminology in Britain: The emergence of a competing paradigm. British Journal of
Criminology, 28: 159183.
Young J (1994) Incessant chatter: Recent paradigms in criminology. In: Maguire M, Morgan R and Reiner R
(eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 1st edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young J (1999) The Exclusive Society. London: SAGE Publications.
Young J (2003) Merton with energy, Katz with structure: The sociology of vindictiveness and the criminology
of transgression. Theoretical Criminology 7: 389414.
Young J (2004) Voodoo criminology and the numbers game. In: Ferrell J, Hayward K, Morrison W and Presdee
M (eds) Cultural Criminology Unleashed. London: GlassHouse.
Young J (2007) The Vertigo of Late Modernity. London: SAGE Publications.
Young J (2011) The Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity.
Young J, and Matthews R, (eds) (1992) Rethinking Criminology: The Realist Debate. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE
Publications.
Author biographies
Jeff Ferrell is currently Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University, USA, and Visiting Professor of
Criminology at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of the books Crimes of Style, Tearing Down the
Streets, and Empire of Scrounge, and, with Keith Hayward and Jock Young, Cultural Criminology: An
Invitation, winner of the 2009 Distinguished Book Award from the American Society of Criminologys Division
of International Criminology. He is the co-editor of the books Cultural Criminology, Ethnography at the Edge,
Making Trouble, Cultural Criminology Unleashed, and Cultural Criminology: Theories of Crime.
Keith J. Hayward is Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, UK. He has published widely in the
areas of criminological theory, cultural criminology, spatial and social theory, popular culture, and terrorism
and fanaticism. He is the author, co-author, or editor of ten books, the most recent being the 2015 four-
volume set Cultural Criminology for Routledges Major Works series. The second edition of his co-authored
book Cultural Criminology: An Invitation (Sage) will be published in May 2015.

Joc Young A Cultural Criminologist

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Joc Young A Cultural Criminologist

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

558756

Special Issue Article

Crime Media Culture

Academically as well as politically, criminology was beginning to become an awfully boring,

Jock and Cultural Criminology

Potrebbero piacerti anche