Volume
41, No. 2
April 1999
Introduction
Christopher Murphy and Philip Stenning
Disenchanted
criminology
Jean-Paul Brodeur
Risk society
and actuarial criminology: Prospects for a critical discourse
George Rigakos
In
defence of liberal models of research and policy
Don Clairmont
New possibilities
for a feminism "in" criminology? From dualism to diversity
Elizabeth Comack
Then and
now: Federal support for justice research
Gerald Woods
Implications
of public service reform for criminal justice research and policy
in Canada
Philip Stenning
On the fragmentation
of Canadian criminal justice history
Russell Smandyh and Bryan Hogeveen
The current
and future state of police research and policy in Canada
Christopher Murphy
Youth justice
research in Canada: An assessment
Anthony Doob
Sentencing
research in Canada
Julian Roberts
Corrections
research in Canada: Impressive progress and promising prospects
James Bonta and Robert Cormier
The impact
of aboriginal justice research on policy: A marginal past and an even
more uncertain future
Carol LaPrairie
A Northern
taboo: Research on race, crime and criminal justice in Canada
Scot Wortley
A persistent
paradox: Drug research and policy in Canada
Patricia Erickson
Discipline
in dissent: Canadian academic criminology at the millennium
Robert Menzies and Dorothy E. Chunn
La criminologie
au Québec: 1960 - 1999
André Normandeau and Maurice Cusson
Reinventing
intellectuals
Jennifer Wood and Clifford Shearing
Concluding
thoughts
Philip Stenning and Christopher Murphy
RCJ-Net
- Res-RCJ
Irving Kulik
Instructions
to Authors
Abstracts/Résumés
Abstracts of the articles in this special issue on "Criminology
Research in Canada" are not available. Instead, the introductory
and concluding thoughts of the special issue editors, Christopher
Murphy and Philip Stenning, are provided.
INTRODUCTION
Christopher Murphy
University of King's
College Dalhousie
University Halifax, Nova Scotia
and
Philip Stenning
Centre of Criminology
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
Over the last
10 years the Canadian Federal government has significantly redirected
and reduced funding and support for both university and government
criminal justice research. This decline is evident in the termination
of the University Centres of Criminology funding program in 1994,
recent elimination of the research division at the Solicitor General's
Ministry, radical research down-sizing at the Department of Justice,
closure of the Canadian Police College research section, and the lack
of any federal government commitment to a coherent research agenda
and funding process. The resulting decline in both the amount and
significance of social research in the Canadian criminal justice policy-making
environment is puzzling given comparatively strong government support
for criminal justice research in England and the United States, and
an ambitious and ongoing criminal justice reform agenda (e.g., aboriginal
justice and policing, youth justice and alternative "community"
justice initiatives).
While government
research funding and support for academic institutions and individual
scholarship has changed, internal disciplinary discourses and debates
are also challenging established "modern" notions about
the nature and role of criminal justice research and justice reform.
Social scientists, including criminologists, are increasingly raising
questions about the social production and use of research knowledge,
the limits of established research methodologies, the rationality
of its epistemology, gender and culturally privileged research issues,
and the universality of established liberal values and models of social
and criminal justice reform.
Declining government
support and increased disciplinary conflict and intellectual diversity
can be seen as creating both problems and opportunities. One consequence
of a diminished role for criminology research is that criminal justice
operations and reforms remain largely unexamined and uncontested.
Less research support is also problematic for established academic
programs, the development of research expertise, an adequate knowledge
base for rational policy-making and modern liberal reform ideals.
"Postmodern" research and policy-making may, however, also
encourage more inclusive and de-centred research relationships and
more consultative and collaborative policy-making processes. Intellectual
debates and paradigmatic change produce new modes of scholarship and
research, while globalization, and technological and information development
may offer new research possibilities and partnerships.
Whatever the
reading of the current criminology research and policy environment,
the future remains uncertain. Such significant intellectual and environmental
change suggests to us a need for the Canadian criminology and criminal
justice community to begin a collective dialogue aimed at gaining
a better understanding of what is actually happening and why, and
how best to respond to the challenges of doing criminological research
in the new millennium.
This special
issue of the Canadian Journal of Criminology arose from these shared
intellectual and personal interests about the present and future state
of criminology and criminal justice policy development in Canada.
As experienced participants in academic and criminal justice policy
research, we felt growing concerns about the trends just described,
and the apparently declining influence of research in the processes
of criminal justice policy-making. We wondered, however, to what extent
our view of these developments was shared by other colleagues in the
field, especially as they related to their own areas of research interest,
and whether these changes were viewed positively or negatively. What
was clear was the absence of public or published discussion about
these changes and their impact. So as the millennium in which Canadian
criminology was created and institutionally established is coming
to a close and as we are on the brink of a brand new but uncertain
century, this seemed like the right time to take intellectual stock
of our current and future research and policy environment. We hope
that, by beginning an intellectual conversation, we might promote
a more active process of collectively defining appropriate academic
and policy roles and strategies for the criminological research community
in the uncertain research and policy future that awaits us.
Fortunately
the Canadian Journal of Criminology and editor Julian Roberts shared
our interest in this issue and gave us the green light to put together
this thematic edition. The next step was to articulate the intellectual
focus or framework for the Journal's content and then invite appropriate
contributors. A key criterion in exploring this topic was that the
Journal should represent as much as possible the diverse intellectual
interests that engage Canadian researchers and criminal justice policy
makers. To accomplish this and still meet the limits of time and journal
space, we decided to invite a large number of contributors to submit
contributions of limited length on research and policy areas that
we thought deserved special attention. We sought contributors who
would, collectively, reflect not only a wide range of subject matter
expertise, but also regional, gender, and institutional diversity.
We were particularly pleased that most of those whom we invited accepted
the challenges we posed to them, and that some even managed to adhere
to the very restrictive word limits that we had to impose on them.
Unfortunately,
even this attempt to achieve broad representation inevitably left
many prominent criminological researchers in Canada unrepresented
among the contributors to this special issue. In addition, as it turned
out, some specific research and policy issues which we had sought
to have included (such as crime prevention and restorative justice)
fell by the wayside as invited contributors were unable to meet publication
deadlines. We regret these omissions. While the resulting collection
of articles published here cannot, therefore, be regarded as either
substantively or intellectually fully representative of the diversity
of criminological research in Canada, we do believe that it provides
a broad-ranging and interesting commentary on the current and likely
future state of research and policy in this field.
Our intent
was to initiate a public conversation about these matters, and we
hoped that, by gathering together 23 disparate contributors to share
their particular knowledge and ideas, we would as a result not only
have a better understanding of our diverse and rapidly changing research
and policy environment but that, in the future, we might actually
move beyond conversation to some sort of collective action or response.
Finally we
would like to thank all those who contributed their work to this edition,
editor Julian Roberts and Journal secretary, Réal Jubinville,
for their support and assistance and a special thanks to Bob Cormier
of the Corrections Branch of the Solicitor General's Department for
their financial support for this "expanded" version of the
journal.
CONCLUDING
THOUGHTS
Christopher Murphy
University of King's
College Dalhousie
University Halifax, Nova Scotia
and
Philip Stenning
Centre of Criminology
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
The remarkably
vigorous response, which our invitations to submit articles to this
Special Issue received, makes it clear to us that, whatever else may
be said about the current state of criminology and criminological
research in Canada, any rumours of its irretrievable decline or imminent
demise are almost certainly exaggerated. The collection of papers
we have been able to assemble runs the gamut from pessimistic, through
guarded optimism, to some quite unrestrained celebration of past progress
and future prospects.
It is clear
that many of the contributors to this Special Issue share concerns
about evolving attitudes in government (especially the Federal government)
towards criminological research. The growing politicization of the
policy development process (as discussed by Brodeur, Clairmont, Woods,
Stenning, Murphy, LaPrairie, and Wood and Shearing) has placed increasing
constraints not only on what kinds of criminological research will
be supported by governments, but also on who will receive support
to do it. The effect of this trend, however, seems to be quite variable:
Doob, Roberts, and Bonta and Cormier give accounts of their research
areas (youth justice, sentencing, and corrections) which range from
guardedly optimistic to positively enthusiastic, while LaPrairie paints
a rather discouraging picture of the recent past and likely future
of research on aboriginal justice issues. Erickson similarly reaches
rather pessimistic conclusions about the impact of research on substance
abuse policy in Canada. On the other hand, Smandych and Hogeveen (criminal
justice history), Comack (feminist research) and Wortley (race and
crime issues) identify some definite concerns, but nevertheless see
real progress being made, and likely to continue.
Most encouraging,
however, is that the academic criminology environment (as described
by many contributors, including Rigakos, Comack, Smandych and Hogeveen,
Menzies and Chunn, and Normandeau and Cusson) seems to be continuing
to flourish despite this decline in government interest and support.
That academic criminology does not depend too greatly for its nourishment
on the very governments which run so many of the institutions which
are its objects of study can be regarded as a positive sign of its
intellectual vitality and independence. Rather, academic criminologists
(the "intellectuals" of whom Wood and Shearing write) seem
to find their inspiration and enthusiasm for exploring new ways to
see and think about issues, as they should, from their colleagues,
both in Canada and throughout the world. Technology, of course, has
made this kind of intellectual exchange possible to an extent which,
until recently, was largely unthinkable. E-mail, and the Internet
more generally, have made scholarly interchange easier and more instantaneous
than ever before.
For some (like
Brodeur), the apparent decline in the influence of academic criminological
research in the policy development process is a development to be
regretted, but which still leaves plenty of room for significant intellectual
work to continue in the academy, even as "the criminal justice
hinterland is in-creasingly laid waste". For those of this view
(including Clairmont), the well tried ways of intellectual and policy
development through empirical research are not to be lightly abandoned
simply because they are no longer politically fashionable.
While many
of the contributors are clear about what they think is wrong with
the current situation with respect to the relevance and influence
of research in the development of good criminal justice policy, not
many offer very clear prescriptions to guide us through this rather
uncertain future. Comack, LaPrairie, Murphy, Doob, and Roberts all
offer specific ideas about the directions which should be pursued
to improve the relevance and value of research in policy development
in their particular research areas, but are less clear about how this
is to be achieved in terms of persuading governments to be more supportive
of, and pay more attention to, research. For some (e.g., Clairmont),
the best course seems to be to insist that the academic voice continue
to be heard through the media and institutions through which it has
more or less successfully communicated in the past, and still does
so in some other countries.
For Wood and
Shearing, however, this is no longer a realistic option; their prognosis
and prescription for the future is much more Darwinian, in which academic
criminologists must either adapt or risk anachronistic irrelevance
or extinction. To be persuasive, however, this prescription will need
considerable further elaboration as well as some consistent demonstrations
of the effectiveness of the kinds of strategies which they recommend.
Furthermore, we suspect that many criminologists are not ready to
simply concede what they would perceive to be an unacceptable abdication
of responsibility for criminal justice and security policy by national
and provincial governments. Nor would they accept the withdrawal of
government support for, and attention to, research in the process
of developing sound criminal justice policy. For them, the recent
talk of the "death of the social", while insightful, is
premature, exaggerated, and unjustified.
A surprising
number of the contributors to this issue, however, seem to be relatively
untroubled over the future, apparently confident that neither retreat
into the ivory tower, nor radical adaptation ("reinventing ourselves")
to an uncertain and brave new world will be necessary to maintain
a flourishing and even still quite influential criminological research
community in the foreseeable future.
We hope that
this eclectic and stimulating collection of articles may be the starting
point for a more extensive discussion, both within and beyond the
research community, of the place of criminological research in the
new millennium in Canada. And more concretely, we hope that it may
stimulate the development of new practices and more productive relationships
between those who do research and those involved in the policy development
process here.
