Look at that. That's impressive. It was quiet. Welcome to the first of this very exciting series of our 50th anniversary lectures.
Well, you will see in front of you a pile of these beautiful cars.
Yeah. Okay, so there's three different cards in case you put to the thinking.
You've already got one. One is about all the events we have during the year.
One is about the big conference we're going to hold in June, on June the fourth,
which is called Contemporary Dilemmas in Criminal Justice, and one is about her 50th anniversary lectures.
So commit these to your memory, your iPhones, your calendars, to them all,
because we expect and hope to see you with all of these events, by least most of them.
So what we do for the anniversary lectures is that as a service,
people within the universities in the centre criminology are going to host these seminars.
And the first host for the first of the anniversary lectures is Professor Roger Hurt, who is no stranger to all of those no stranger to criminology,
having run the place very successfully for decades and having been in all cells for how many years?
For years? Well, 31.
I was a fellow and knows another 15, I think virtually forever.
So you think of hosting seminars in general and certainly industry.
I think going to host the seminar tonight, which is a wonderful event for us and the first 50th anniversary lectures.
So I'm going to pass over to him, say a little bit about the series or at least about the purpose of the series.
And then he's going to she's asking us to. When I penned the last report as director of the centre in 2003, I think the first one says something.
Criminology in Oxford is already over 50 years old, so you might wonder why we've got 1966.
It's 50 years old. Now, of course, as you know, in causation, it's very difficult to decide what starts something.
But I would like to say that this college really played a very,
very important part in the establishment of criminology in Oxford, because in January of 1939,
on the cusp of the Second World War, a German refugee scholar, Dr. Max Graham,
had been removed from his post under the Aryan Laws of the Nazis in 1933, came here to All Souls.
He had tried to come to England for five or six years,
but the main criminology post had been held by another famous refugee from the Nazis, Dr. Hermann Mannheim.
And our guest this evening from the Mannheim Centre of the London School of Economics.
We have close connections because I was Mannheim Research assistant in 1957, and it started me out really on my career in criminology.
Max Graham, after the war, was the first person to be appointed as lecturer in criminology in this university,
actually preceding posts other than at the LHC established posts in criminology anywhere in the country.
In 1950, he was made leader. Now you have to understand that the post of Rita meant something different in the 1950s.
It was a kind of mini professor in a subject which was new, small, and didn't have a large department.
But it was a very distinguished post, the read from criminology at Oxford, and he was there for ten years until he retired.
And then in 1961, the Dr. Nigel Walker was appointed and after a period of five years working his way into criminology,
he'd been a civil servant in the Scottish office. He decided that Oxford needed a permanent place for research in criminology.
Max Graham had started in a very small way and indeed was one of the first scholars to get any research money
from the Home Office after the 1948 Criminal Justice Act had made funds available for criminological research.
So Oxford had started off in this field. Nigel Walker decided to also Nuffield Foundation of the Home Office for a rolling grant,
which would enable the establishment of a penal research unit.
I think at the time it was three researchers.
How it's grown absolutely remarkably, and especially I would very happy to say, since I departed in 2003,
it's much, much bigger and more students other things, because then the university has not been committed to it.
So it's a very important period since 1966 to look at where criminology stood and what's been achieved
and in part everywhere within this country and elsewhere on how criminology is developed and also,
of course, here within Oxford.
And we couldn't have anybody better to lead us off than my very old friends, David Downes, Paul Rock from the LSC and Tim Newbold.
I first met David in 1961 when I went as a research officer to the NSC,
and David was doing a magnificent piece of research in the East End of London, published in 1966, as doing what was called delinquency.
The delinquent solution. The delinquent solution.
Paul met we decided now about 1967 when we said no, but it was about that time and I met him about 1989.
I love him in the in the in the Home Office before.
No. The reason why this is very appropriate is that they've been entrusted with writing
an official history of the development of criminal justice in England and Wales.
Is that right? England was from 1959 until 1997.
It's been a big task because I remember you coming and talking about it several years ago and somebody has done some of that long term history.
It's very difficult to do any of it and finish it within ten years.
So you're doing you're doing fine. So they're going to talk today on the subject in the beginning,
and I understand this is really to give us an idea of a prospective idea of what criminology was doing in 1966,
what the state of criminal justice and penal systems were, and what the major issues were that confronted the government and US scholars.
So I welcome the I think O'Rourke is going to speak, first of all, as I should have said,
been writing a great deal about penal policy, particularly about the role of victims of crime.
And his work is really outstanding.
And I should have mentioned Tim, of course, who hardly needs mentioning, because when I look through his list of publications,
it seems to me that he publishes eight books or articles or something else,
some reports or newspaper pieces or appears on the television every year for the last 15 years.
He is really fantastically productive across a wide range of fields, so we're very pleased to have such distinguished speakers.
I've spoken to long, but I'm very, very pleased that they're here. Thank you very much.
I wasn't intending to say this machine is very apt.
Aside from Wolverhampton on the facade of criminology in the lift with people from the conference and Porteous from the university,
but lifting large boxes around, I said two of my fellow conference members, at least criminology doesn't involve heavy lifting.
And somebody said from the back, not necessary about two new bones textbooks.
Let's assume that, as Roger said, we were commissioned to write the history of criminal justice between 59 and 97,
and it seemed appropriate to review the state of affairs right at the beginning,
when our history began, when this centre was founded,
and I assume the Council of Criminology was one of the very few students studying criminology at this institution.
There were just three of us, three graduate students, one of whom began remarkably successful,
Kit Carson, who became, I think, vice chancellor, University of Adelaide.
What follows is an abbreviated version of part of that tour from Horizon and our trying to convey
something of the intellectual environment in which the new central of criminology was placed.
No doubt much of what I have to say will be familiar enough to quite a few, and certainly to Roger, who knows more about it, I think, than I do.
But and we we do forget the past.
We will forge it. And it may be worthwhile repeating what in part was common knowledge.
I want to remind ourselves not only of a palpable sense of anxiety and bafflement, a kind of spot in the mid 1960s,
but also the apprehension that the new discipline of criminology lacked the capacity to do much to understand what was happening.
Recorded crime. And this is where I put my spark that rose continually until almost the end of the 20th century.
And it rose steeply. And it rose for reasons that were obscure.
Rose Absolutely. Rose disproportionately when set against population growth, although they might now appear.
Although they might not appear modest enough.
Official crime rates were almost invariably regarded by people writing in the 1960s as new, disturbingly large, extraordinarily rapid in their growth,
largely inexplicable and indicative of a major and somehow perverse transformation of the societies in the world.
They increase offended common sense arguments about what should have been the proper links between national prosperity,
education, employment and criminality. Cultural declined, not grown.
After the Second World War, if I may be so given to alluding to him here and on this occasion, Leon Retsinas,
which was the Wolfson professor of criminology at the University of Cambridge and perhaps the foremost criminologist of his day remarked in 1965,
I'm not going to feel the slow going haywire.
I put these things on slides rather than leave them out for want of time and because it's tedious to to to have things recited.
But there he was expressing his astonishment at the fact that crime should have gone up when all other indices would have promoted a decline in crime.
It went down and like and like famed the very influential Lord Pakenham,
the late of the of Longford, who became a member of the Cabinet under Harold Wilson,
remarked that an article in the Times what prompted him to form the impression that
everything that militated in favour of the decline had operated the opposite way.
Changes in the figures appeared even more dramatic and threatening when it was, as was often the case and still is the case,
what looked like quite humble numerical increases were represented as percentages.
In 1969, for instance,
the Secretary of State for the Home Department in the State of Scotland reported in a memorandum that crime was shooting up in percentage terms,
even though on inspection it's quite clear that the the absolute numbers were fairly punitive by a puny by modern standards,
and it seemed impossible as a result to disparage what was in train.
The former colleague of Roger McClintock opened the 1963 study of crimes of violence in London with
the observation that so there is major concern about the incidence of violence in the capital.
Criminality was thought to be mushrooming, especially amongst the young.
A third of all people found guilty of indictable offence, as each were under the age of 17 and a half, under the age of 21 in the early sixties.
And it seemed that there was something particularly awry with those who be born in and around the wartime years,
the so-called affluent teenagers, not affluent by today's standards.
But it was a common enough expression who should have had no pretext to offend.
They were members of what were called the delinquent generations,
personified by the Teddy Boys and other young hooligans whose upright upbringing had gone amiss in 1965.
A Conservative Party report report made the observation that the.
Sorry. Yeah. I made the observation that this was a problem of major importance.
There wasn't sure what Dave Garland was slated to call a new experience of crime.
It was during this period, the popular political and expert responses began to change.
There was more property to steal. Crime was growing in volume even faster than the increase in the number of suitable targets,
and it was being spread by an increasingly mobile population.
It could move about by car to victimise previously exempt households that for demographic
and economic reasons of divorce and work patterns were less and less securely protected.
Whatever stance they might privately wish to take and whatever policies they may have sought to promote.
Ministers and home secretaries in particular of both parties were constrained throughout the period to convey publicly
that they were aware that crime is mounting dangerously and that they were attempting tirelessly to confront it.
RJ Butler, who on closer inspection turns out to be less heroic and I think some people have assumed a rather timid attempt to deal
with difficult issues was assailed with unremitting complaints about the crime wave from within the Conservative Party,
and above all, with almost unanimous protest from party associations about the dilution of punishments,
the abolition of corporal punishment, and plans to abolish capital punishment.
Lord Wilson, who became principal of prisoners next door,
recollected how R.A. Butler talked about the bloodcurdling demands made annually
at the Conservative Party conference for the restoration of corporal punishment,
which had quite clouded his time as chairman of the party.
And Butler himself talked about how how he had had to take an awful lot of opposition,
including calls of virtue and flogging, which haunted me almost every every week by the Home Office.
There was a brief but abortive campaign by the anti-violence league to stir
up a populist revolt about what was depicted as a craven response to crisis.
And in January 1960, he wrote to the deputy chairman of the party and the former conduit for those protests and recriminations.
Oh, I'm so sorry I got muddled up. Yeah, that's it.
The government is concerned about crime. He could not say otherwise.
The word public currency, or at least two dominant kinds of explanation to make sense of a manage what was afoot.
Both reflected the ethical, political, occupational and religious preoccupations of the observer.
Gillian Tett may have said that the modern world is littered with pockets of specialist knowledge,
where technical experts work in mental and structural silos.
But her observation does not apply to crime. Alexander Patterson, the great prison commissioner, said Everyone is interested in the criminal.
Everyone has views on the subject of crime. Crime impinges on all of us.
An official who joined the Home Office at the time in the early sixties told me an end to the face of
the Home Secretary rather than the Transport Secretary is that everybody knows what the solution is.
Everybody is his own home secretary. One explanation, which was more political and lay than scholarly, was the blend of common sense,
moralistic theorising and popular psychology that distilled a number of anxieties about the condition of England.
There was a collapse of discipline, especially in the home.
Mistakes in upbringing, the erosion, stable domestic life and the socialisation of the young that had been precipitated,
particularly by the dislocation of the Second World War,
a growing involvement of women in the workforce, and the breakdown of the Convention on the Family.
It was taken for granted that crime was, in the main, a breach of moral rules.
Those roots lay in moral failings and whose explanation must be pitched in moral terms.
It could take the form one pole of the proclamation,
a simple imperatives and the other of long omnibus and somewhat vague lists that test the principle that light causes, like the bad effects,
must have bad causes and points to the consequences of a decline in deference defective socialisation,
defective adherence to religious ethical instruction, defective school discipline,
defective informal and formal social control defects in the content.
The ever more consequential and ubiquitous mass media horror comics rupture of rock and roll and much of American culture.
In general and the emphasis on the workings of inform a successful Pro-level course, telling an important truth.
And all of you will know that only a very minor proportion of crimes known certainly to victims or even recorded by the police,
actually reach the court and are punished. And that informal search patrols in one way or another are far more consequential.
The other, exponentially more involved in the university, correctional institution and clinic,
was also mapped to multifactorial potpourri that was perhaps not so very different from its vernacular counterpart.
The academic study of crime was then, and David says, I quote him to excess on this point.
What David Darwin would have called a rendezvous excellence enterprise eclectic, multi-disciplinary,
polycentric and more heavily disposed to the empirical and the theoretical, the concrete, the abstract.
Look at the very first editorial in the British Job Delinquency.
Later The British Journal of Criminology. Now I've got it right.
It should come up that it will come to it will contain a great mass, a heterogenous mass of contributions from across different sciences.
Crime, it was said repeatedly, could not be attributed to a single cause,
but to a multitude of antecedent conditions that include the psychic, the psychological, the academic circumstances of the offender.
Each condition played its part, and the explanation of crime was so complex of how Jones, the author of an old textbook to some criminologists,
been that to abandon the quest of systematic theories and to lay emphasis instead upon calls were factors.
That was the theme of comparative criminology, written by Hermann Mannheim, who Roger has already mentioned.
And here, Nigel Walker had a long list of almost every possible kind of explanation in his encyclopaedia acts.
It's hard to predict. Textbook Crime Punishment in Britain.
Published notes of five authors during that time were pioneers knew that they were.
So Nigel Walker talked about his textbook as being innovative because there wasn't one who said my notes were better when turned into textbook.
There wasn't one, and he certainly didn't write with confidence.
Howard Jones said some may feel that claims of criminology to the call to science is very much in question.
It's methods like those of other social sciences are often highly subjective and
it's been able to establish so far no scientific laws that can general utility.
They were members of marginal utility and knew them to be so and they weren't wholly convinced of what they were doing.
Lord Longford recalled when he talked to Barbara Wootton, who I think is an unjustly neglected criminologist of great importance.
He said when Mrs. Wootton was asked what help the criminologist could give to the Home Secretary today about the causes of crime,
she replied Not very much. The substance of form,
the criminology in the late 1950s and sixties flowed in some significant parts from those for whom crime was a practical preoccupation with doctors,
policy officials, psychiatrists, prison governors and others who cheated, measured and managed the criminal.
There were few others around to develop the craft. I overheard Roger say of criminology at the time.
There just were very few of us that they were professionally positioned at close quarters to their subject.
And it was they who, as a matter of course, supplied many of the data which we were to become the materials,
the catalysts, the contacts and products of analysis. Criminology was infused deeply in psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis.
It was instrumental because it had to be useful to reform and rehabilitation and correction.
It was intended to make criminal justice and penal institutions effective it deviant material.
It was heavily quantitative. It was given to the construction of typologies, and it was enormously productive of the list.
If I could find one. There we are.
Talks all about ambitious, psychosocial, logical, psycho social courses and the most recondite statistical particularity.
Those test schedules and questionnaires epitomise how many people of influence thought research should proceed?
One very influential figure was Tom Lodge, who was an actuary and actuarial statistician who was installed in the Home Office and first as a
statistical advisor and co-founder of the first and first director of the new Home Office Research Unit.
And what he said was, this is how the aims of criminology should criminological research should be envisaged.
This list it doesn't Durata McNally stemmed from with in government but it I think
captured a great deal of what was a what criminologist a lot would have said.
Nonetheless, despite all this, criminologists were very nervous about their fledgling science.
Home Office officials were certainly unimpressed by the volume of culture and quantity of criminology practised in the universities at the time.
Sir Charles Cunningham, the permanent secretary, reminded Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary.
They had been getting up, but he was not at all impressed by what he had found when he told the country,
as it were, looking at what criminology was being done.
I devote some space in the official history to the evolution of the proposals to remedy that situation.
First, by establishing the Home Office Research Unit and almost simultaneously the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge.
In 1957, the head of the unit, Tom Lodge, said.
And this is really quite a large quote, forgive me, but it was to look at it was to remedy the deficiencies of the universities.
But there were limitations. Nothing was happening in the universities, and the Home Office had to rely upon itself.
What was happening was regarded as an impressive exercise.
What happened was that the Home Secretary told the House of Commons at the time that some useful work has been done.
But nonetheless what we must do is spend our own money in order to establish a research program.
I want and I'm conscious of the shortness of time, but that was the pretext for the Home Office Research Unit,
which for quite a considerable period, I think, and very badly treated by academic criminologists,
produced a really quite monumental programme of work, very well funded with a large quantity of staff,
and I think too little appreciated by the academic criminologist at the time, the unit group.
And it grew in a benign climate and it was quite clearly utilitarian.
The other principal innovation, the new Institute of Criminology,
was to be established in Cambridge outside the Home Office, and it was the twin of the new research unit.
Tom Lodge remarked that one should not ignore the close links between the Institute and the research unit and the common origin and the
forces that for many years had been building up to make inevitable the development in Great Britain of scientific criminological research.
I do not propose, for reasons of time, to go into the reasons, the origins of that, but nonetheless see if I can get it up.
It was thought that it would be a good idea to have a companion institution which would do very much the same sort of work,
but free of direct government government influence.
They've had a tax bill that involves Rabinovitch talked about systematically plan research to
build up a body of objective information and the solution of more fundamental mental issues.
It may be seen in Garland's phrase, the criminology in England and Wales began life as institutionally based,
administratively or into discipline, and that orientation had been reinforced in the new organisation.
Create new organisations that had been created to take it forward.
Organisations that are in another niche, their nature sparks would like to say what people associate.
Members of loosely affiliated liberal elites remained in that vein for some substantial time.
But it also starts in the 1960s to betray the impact of the importation of a better established,
more robust, vigorous and avowedly American criminology.
There were the first terms of what were called labelling theory,
the doctrine that informal and formal social control also makes its mark in constructing criminal and deviant behaviour.
There were the beginnings of talk about anomie and some insight that my left back there downs in previous delinquent solution relative deprivation,
culture and subculture and the impact of rising expectations in a society marked by structured social and economic inequalities.
For some enemies, Syria promised to resolve the seeming paradox posed by the presence of useful crime in the midst of plenty.
By arguing that conditions of rapid social change and apparent prosperity,
when controls were weakened at all, was motivated to achievement awards in an unequal world.
The young and relatively deprived might experience frustration.
And Barbara Wootton put this very well.
It was, she thought, the solution to the apparent conundrum which rights in which and long sought her talked about there was
to be an emerging schism within the coalition of practical and academic criminologists for a period.
And whilst a number of academic criminologists have been small, the two wings have had to collaborate together sometimes on these meetings,
seminars, editorial boards and conferences that they started to grow apart towards the latter half of the 1960s.
As a new and distinct sociology of crime, deviance began to emerge partly under the spell of its American system discipline,
partly under the impact of the new radicalism on the streets and its resuscitation of what Taylor Young called the
addition of grand sociology and partly in response to the growth of a critical mass of boisterous young Turks.
That was us once upon a time, which coalesced as universities expanded and junior staff were appointed en masse.
The schism was underscored by Clare, the chairman of the Howard League,
set up the first British Congress of crime in 1966 and he reported that he was disappointed at the outcome of his attempt to bring them together.
The minutes of the meeting of the Howard League's executive committee recorded
that how incomprehensible a lot of what was being talked appeared to its members.
Two years later,
there was even more consequential fissure within the body of criminology at the third national conference organised by the University of Cambridge.
A group of renegades discovered that they had become numerous and comfortable enough to decamp to found a new,
an independent National Defence Symposium at the University of York.
In conscious opposition to Cambridge national campuses, they affected what David Towns called a deliberate break,
with what was seen as this grand stranglehold on the subject by the Orthodox criminology of the south east.
But scepticism was more endemic still. It spread beyond just mattocks, those whom the castigated to devote the entire body of criminology.
It was not as if any significant portion of the world of academics, practitioners,
policymakers and politicians took what Wootton called the factual and quantitative basis
of generalisations about human affairs to be secure within government and the university.
The widespread and grave uncertainties about what passed for assured knowledge about crime and justice.
And there were particular doubts about the meaning and reliability of the statistics in recorded crime,
which underpinned reports about individual instances and classes of offending.
Lord Longford said the end of the 1950s understood that there was an appalling incapacity
in our measurement and writes in the book said the most difficult and one of us imperfect.
All branch the statistics difficult to compile, difficult to comprehend and difficult to interpret.
And somewhat tardy recognition of those failings. The Home Secretary of the town, Henry Brock,
established the Departmental Committee of Criminal Statistics in June 1963, but it, I think, confess to failure.
It was unable to deal with the problem of what was called the dark sticker crime, the crime that was not reported to the police.
And it was only very much later in the seventies when Richard Sparks, the other Richard Sparks of was at the Time Institute,
I think, and with Hazel GED produced the first crime survey, which was followed later on by the British Crime Survey in 1981.
And it remained the disquieting, abiding, described heart condition funding, potential capacity of criminology.
Despite the foundations of two research centres in London and Cambridge, despite the growth of externally funded research, criminology was thin.
It continued to occupy a tenuous position in the academy lack numbers, coherence and authority.
Gordon Rose, another criminologist at the time, said the criminologist is humble and only too well aware of its failings.
Is achieved a mild degree of respectability to recently to be anything else.
When I was interviewed in this institution in 1966 by Max Beloff, I was when I was being promoted from probation to be left to do so.
I was asked over and over again to spell criminology as if it was some distasteful alien work.
Academic criminology certainly had not led to indictment.
Roy Jenkins said in late 1966 were still shrouded in a considerable fog of ignorance.
And on another occasion, seven years ago, any of us can say why there is a crime wave.
There are various theories which a lot of research would try to prove our knowledge,
but I think would be a very arrogant man who said, I know why people are doing criminal acts.
Criminology excel to produce any solid, plausible explanation patterns.
Movements of crime, perhaps only achievement to be to debunk existing theories in what an Oakley biographer described
as a blistering attack on the confusions of criminals to the arrogance of social workers,
Barbara Wootton said. Up to now,
the chiefs have set a precise investigation into questions of social pathology as being to undermine the credibility of all that can't miss.
Perhaps as window to the criminological self doubts never deserted the discipline.
50 years later, precisely the same element could be heard.
This is, Edna said. Whatever the causes of its disgruntlement, there could be few disappearances.
Leading protagonists are so ready to denounce that common project as what they examine.
Criminal academic life is never perhaps what's going to be so.
Thank you. What's that like?
I don't have any PowerPoint to offer, I'm afraid.
What part of our division of labour is that? Carving up this vastly different subject?
My mind, my field is that of people policy.
And one of the first things I tried to tackle was the whole question of what happened
to policy on long term prisoners on the conditions of a maximum security in the 1960s.
The whole period really leading up to the mid 1960s in the penal field was one of optimism.
It's easy to forget that.
And in between the wars, there'd been roughly stability in the prison population, despite the crime rate more or less doubling in the 1930s.
Alexander Patterson It's already been quoted by Paul as embodying that that optimism about liberal forms of humane treatment in the penal system,
especially as far as young offenders were concerned. And the borstal system was held up to be rid of the army.
All of that whole approach about which culture has written a pioneering study.
The mid-sixties, however, brought about a fundamental change in the whole perspective on the penal system.
And this was partly because the number of prisoners had mushroomed from 21,000 or so in 1955 to 30000 in 1965,
and doubling from 1955 level to 1970 and escapes in particular had mushroomed from 88 and 55 to 522 in 1965.
Now, most of these were from open prisons,
but it was sudden spectacular escapes rather than increasing the rates of escape that triggered off the storm.
Neither the Prison Commission nor the Home Office official more generally had seen the problem of
liberalising regimes without tackling at all fairly obvious shortfalls and deficiencies in security.
All of this could be handled until the New Kids on the block, as it were in crime terms, stopped to escape in rather spectacular fashion.
For example, Ronald Biggs escape from Wandsworth in 1965.
Bit like an evening comedy in some ways.
There was a converted removal van with a hole cut in the roof for the prisoner who managed to scale the wall and as a rope that it was thrown over,
that was not too difficult to then jump onto the roof of this van and off you go again.
That might have been handled by the Home Office in a fairly intact perspective, as it were,
of everything more or less being okay until a much more devastatingly spectacular escape occurred from Wormwood Scrubs by the Spy George Blake,
who was assisted in his escape by two members of the Committee of 100 Pottle being being one of them.
And again, this was relatively easily done.
It made the top ten volumes, said the Home Office, something of a laughing stock because Blake's escape was at the time on a Saturday,
I think it was, when only wanted two guards regarding a whole wing.
He kicked in the rotting window frame, jumped down a roof and so on onto the wall, and it was away that there was therefore a problem.
What's to be done?
And in the political furore that ensued in which the Tory Opposition were mounting a censure motion of censure against the government,
Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, decided to appoint a leading political figure, a leading national figure, rather, O Mountbatten,
to have an inquiry ordering an immediate security review, which would be reporting within a few months.
In fact, Mountbatten and legendary fashion reporter within six weeks, he was accompanied by a few assessors,
one of whom was Robert Mark, who later on became Chief Constable of London.
Why was Mountbatten appointed? It was.
It was mainly because I think a heavy weight figure was needed to reassure the public that everything would ultimately be under control.
But one of the problems, I think, with the successful politics of that was that it was something of a rebuff to the Home Office culture of the day,
which was still very attached to the liberal hopes and the optimistic reforms that they embodied in the borstal system.
One very senior figure who was very much a newcomer to the Home Office in the sixties but went on to very high office in the Home Office,
actually called an interview about Baton and Monsour, who was the inspector of prisons, dictatorial.
And it was generally felt to be in many ways an affront that such a figure had been appointed to lead this inquiry.
So nevertheless, the major recommendations of Mountbatten were accepted,
which was that there should be the well-known classification of prisoners in terms
of their escape risks posed and the danger that that would constitute to society.
Category eight prisoners numbering around 120.
At the time, Mountbatten reckoned there should be an all round improvement in the security of prisoners
holding Category B prisoners who were somewhat less dangerous but still very escaped from the.
Only recommendation of Mountbatten that was not accepted was that there should be a single prison constructed on the Isle of Wight,
what he called vectors,
which should hold all the most at risk of escaped prisoners who constitute a some sort of recognisable danger to the public if they should escape.
And that was the only recommendation that was not immediately accepted in full.
It was accepted in principle, secretly.
But the task of constituting a regime for that prison was given to the subcommittee of the newly appointed Advisory Council on the Penal System,
headed by Kenneth Younger and Leon Rhodes of it was chosen to be the chair of that subcommittee, along with Leo Adams,
the Labour MP who was to the fore on the abortion law reform and homosexual law reform campaigns.
The Bishop of Exeter, Peter Scott, a leading psychiatrist who'd written about delinquency at the Maudsley Hospital in London's.
Whereas Mountbatten had taken a very short time to report the reason this committee took considerably longer, well over a year.
And there was some sort of concern in the Home Office that things would not be brought in quickly enough.
For example, on April the seventh, 1967, Sir Phillip Allen replied threads in bits that it would be sorry.
Allen Roach runs into bits, basically asking for time.
A deadline sounded rather like the Chilcot report and the right is a much shorter time.
When would this be ready?
As Mountbatten suggested a completion date for his report for the prison to be built by June 1969, only two years away by that point.
And rather than just write back to say it would take rather longer to report because they want
to do a study of comparative prison systems as well as conducting some of their own research.
The interesting questions, I think, ranging from this whole concentration versus dispersal issue,
which will eventually emanate from the report of the subcommittee, is that Mountbatten's report came to be seen as the most illiberal document.
It was seen as having unnecessarily raised the stakes in terms of security so as to wrench the system by disproportionately in that direction.
And it also led to the question on what grounds and by what means was the major recommendation of the report of Mountbatten rejected?
And one of the most significant documents strangely neglected in the field is a book by Leo Adams,
one of the four subcommittee members called Private Member, published in 1973 from the project.
And I think it was a difficult time to write the book.
It gives sort of. Amazing the full account of a machiavellian strategy which I've seen from copy,
to persuade the Sub-Committee not to accept Mountbatten's proposal for concentrating all prisoners in one place,
but to rather disperse them around lot three or four other prisoners.
And a key argument for the advance was and this was apparently something he persuaded the other members of the committee to accept was
that there should be alarming of gods of the perimeter to really mimic the Americans which which had great success in the States.
If you have an armed perimeter, you know, it does cut down the likelihood of escape.
But it would also, in the view of the resident of its subcommittee, also minimise having minimise the risk of escape,
would maximise the possibility of liberal regimes being pursued in the prison.
So this was a strategy partly propagated by APC in order to deflect liberal opinion from
the main issue which was rejecting round back to the side issue of arming prison guards.
And in a sense it worked because there was a general outcry against the arming of protocol on the perimeter.
And when the actual issue was discussed in the meetings of the Advisory Council, indeed it did tend to dominate proceedings.
So having rejected that, some members of the committee were rather more prone to accept the rejection about Burton's major,
major proposal and accept the dispersal alternative.
There were there were some issues concerning how the Mountbatten proposal came to be so stereotyped as a somewhat illiberal proposal,
even though Mountbatten himself had proposed the rather like the president of his committee,
that should be a liberal regime made possible by an invulnerable perimeter.
That that was. Indeed.
A similarity between the two reports and in the end, I think, is what unites the two reports and the liberal principles that underlay them.
That has enabled his party to avoid the supermax prison system,
which has operated to dire effect in America and even in so liberal societies as the Netherlands that there is a supermax prison,
we've managed to avoid that.
And I think that that part is because there was some sort of a similarity in the Mountbatten and Gladstone of this proposal.
But the the whole issue of why Mountbatten was in the end rejected does seem to have
been partly due to the stereotyping of the Mountbatten report as itself a liberal,
and also due to the ABC strategy of introducing armed guards is a major recommendation.
The economic angle vectors would have cost rather a lot of money.
Okay. Sorry. It's very, very difficult to actually get to the bottom of it.
This is the sort of difficulty one faces in pursuing the history.
A file, for example, a Treasury file labelled victims had nothing whatsoever to do with vectors containing a very detailed
description of a prison built three years earlier and not even related to the building victims.
So there's no evidence, as far as I can find, that the sheer cost of the project was what in the end ruled it out.
But it was quoted by James Calhoun,
who took over the same secretary as as a key reason for rejecting the Mountbatten proposal and accepting the alternative.
Right. I'll take a call it it today.
Thanks. My whole concept of it because I was going to start.
I want to stand and then take my glasses off my mouth.
I'm going to talk quick. Sleep on diverse.
Good set up for that. We're in business.
Clients are coming. I'm going to get this. We've overstayed all welcome already, so I'm going to keep it.
You've got a minute's silence. About 2 minutes for.
Give me a call in six. I'll I'll do this. I do this really quickly.
So let me start by saying thanks.
I'm really grateful to Colin and colleagues for inviting us.
It's a real it's a pleasure to be here as we marking the 50th anniversary.
I'm extremely grateful to Roger for two things. Firstly, for the in my case undeserved, for a very generous introduction,
but more particularly for his comment that this kind of work can't be done in at least less than ten years,
which makes me feel ever so slightly less guilty about the extraordinarily glacial progress that I seem to be making,
certainly when compared with my young, boisterous, young colleagues.
So what I'm going to do is talk about policing very briefly, so on.
In this official history. I'm responsible for a bunch of things writing about policing and probation and juvenile justice.
And although the drugs and policies and various the things and most of which I haven't done, but policing, I'm going to talk about 1966 and policing.
Some of this will be familiar to you. Some have especially familiar to Elizabeth, who's written considerably and in detail about this subject,
most particularly with David McKay in policing and condition of England.
So what does it look like? And policing in 1966, I would say looks very like policing.
Looked in 1956, not far off, 120 police forces of varying size,
the smallest of which in West Yorkshire, have an establishment of about 93% in the mid 1960s.
In the lead up there'd been a royal commission and a major police of legislation, police, not 1964, and yet very little change in fact.
So the extent that there was any really significant change, it didn't begin until somewhat later.
And largely as a consequence of the arrival of Roy Jenkins, who's been mentioned several times,
who has more of a role in recent British police and history than is he's sometimes given credit for, I think,
not least his role in forcing through amalgamations of police forces to reduce
this hundred and 20 or so constabulary is down to something more manageable,
but also in the promulgation of new forms of policing, things like unit based policing,
which I want to talk about right now, but which he don't he played a pretty central role.
So let me go back before it was the royal commission.
Why a royal commission? Well, sometimes the royal commission is tends to be presented as the kind of logical outcome of the things that preceded it.
There were a series of stumbles besetting policing, most of them very small.
But concerning the conduct of officers, junior and senior, the behaviour,
corruption cases, conflicts between police forces and the local police authorities.
There had been a variety of other things going on, but these were all pretty small there.
There were concerns about budgets and money. There was a significant issue of police pay.
There was, as both David and all the talks about rising crime and by the standards of the period, significantly rising crime.
And in the background also there'd been a race riots in the late 1950s in Nottingham and Notting Hill,
and yet none of this really explains the Royal Commission.
There was no interest in the Home Office in having a Royal Commission to the extent the the Home Secretary, Ralph Butler, wanted a royal commission.
He wanted a royal commission on the penal system.
He arrived in the Home Office really keen to do something similar to what he'd done in education in the Home Office.
But punishment in the penal system was what he was concerned about.
The reason we had fundamentally had a royal commission was his mishandling of one of the scandal cases in the Houses of Parliament,
which led to a motion of censure against him, which he dealt with as politicians from time to time,
to by announcing a commission of inquiry which turned in to the Royal Commission but had his sights set on other things.
It was an accident in many respects, linked to those previous, but nonetheless accidental, the royal commission itself.
So I've said a period of not very much changed that because leading up to 1966 and where we find ourselves,
the Royal Commission final report generally remembered for its construction of what we tend to call the tripartite structure of police.
Governance. But it wasn't really much of a creation. It was more of a tidying up exercise in many respects.
And it took a very positive view of police, public relations, extraordinarily possibly optimism of the times the polling voters have talked about.
It changed the police complaints system, but not much they rejected and the idea of some independent element in police complaints.
Most graphically, it recommended that the Home Secretary be made responsible statutory statutorily for the efficiency of the police.
And then perhaps most famously it rejected the idea of nationalisation, nationalisation which had been all nationalised,
like a combination of nationalisation and regionalisation which had been put forward by one of the commission's members,
Arthur Goodhart, who was master of University College London.
Yeah, such an impressive report.
His dissenting report at the end of the Royal Commission that won common sense.
And I will just read this community itself, but it's lovely described the Royal Commission's report as 22 pages by Dr. Goodfellow with
a preface seven times as long by faithfully admiring scindia as a diplomat and wonderful.
So that was the royal commission's final report, translates it fairly quick.
Well, not for that quickly, within two years, but but fairly smoothly into legislation.
What we now know as the 1964 police act, 64 Police Act Act is upon most of the record of many of the recommendations of the Royal Commission.
So a new tripartite structure, some changes to the police complaints system.
But in terms of the thing I want to focus on for our last two or 3 minutes structure of policing it too,
like the Royal Commission rejected the idea of a national police force.
Indeed, it went further than that.
That been very significant debates within the Royal Commission about what the problem of nationalising the police was.
So there was clearly a view among some members and also within the Home Office that nationalising the police,
putting the police force in the hands of a single individual might be seen as some sort of threat to liberty.
The beginning was in some ways the slippery slope to a police state and so forth.
Those broadly in favour of that within the Commission won the argument and there's a passage in the Commission
which says very straightforwardly that there's no in-principle problem with nationalising the police.
Simply this is not the time or the moment.
The Home Office, crucially in the period after with brief very strongly against what I would see as at least as I've said,
that it was one of the Commission's most radical proposals, which was to make the Home Secretary statutory responsible,
still not saying properly for the efficiency of the police, which didn't make it into the police act,
thereby in part I think neutral the proposals of the Royal Commission, a better title.
So back to the policing landscape. In 1966 we've had a royal commission, a rather timid royal commission in some ways of how the police act,
which acts largely on that royal commission's recommendations, but doesn't even go as far as the Royal Commission.
But the circumstances in 1966 are worse now,
very serious in which to take the things that I listed in relation to the establishment of the Royal Commission.
Well, crimes coming up and we went back to full thoughts on that because of the rate of increase of crime prior to the Royal Commission.
This has nothing to what's been happening in the period since through 1966.
Budget constraints are getting worse.
The economy is now not that strong and there are very significant worries about how the police will cope and concerns about efficiency,
which is why things like union policing and so forth, or at least in part come about,
even though the Royal Commission wasn't initially established to do so, dealt with police pay.
This is back on the agenda on a significant political issue by 66, and policing scandals haven't gone away.
For those who know the policing history, that was Harold Chukwuma,
the finest Sergeant Challoner of Western Central Police Station in London, the Sheffield Rhino.
What case? All worth looking up if you fancy the scandals continued apace and would get worse,
and yet always come largely within the Home Office officials for the largely undisturbed
final with that's a broadly optimistic view as with much of the policy of policing held sway.
And I would say that so little of. The change was a reflection of and as I'll keep this a reflection, at least in part, obviously,
if the social and political conditions of the time, but also the nature and style of official present a broadly.
Wickersham view of history still held sway within the Home Office extremely strongly took the view that whatever the problems,
the Bush's police service was, quote unquote, probably still the best in the world and needs to be and really such and so forth.
And that change, if there was to be change, was a classic example.
If there was to be change, it should occur slowly,
incrementally and automatically not pushed and not radically and certainly not stayed steady, as it were, in radical ways by the Home Office.
On top of that, there was a broadly utilitarian concern with limiting the powers of the state, whether that was local but also national.
But on top of that, I think there was and this forced the hands in many ways of the royal commission
and then lay behind the way in which that was put into legislative practice in 64.
There was a desire to protect the way the Home Office government, there was a desire to protect what one might call the soft power of the Home Office,
working to influence behind the scenes rather than explicitly being held to account in Parliament for all that.
And so if I haven't, that's been my welcome. A final slide, the legacy.
So I talked about structure and where we come from.
The royal commission, as I've said, was pretty timid.
It rejected nationalisation.
It largely defended the status quo. It did argue that the number of forces that existed could no longer be tolerated and should be reduced.
But it gave absolutely no sense beyond suggesting that perhaps 500 officers was the smallest you could live,
with no sense of principles of how modern British policing,
also what the principles for the reorganisation on the future of British policing should be.
It defended localism entirely on the basis of negative rather than positive arguments.
And yet I would say in some respects it remains more radical than the Home Office of the Time, which is the brief on reform.
So just speaking on the final word on structures offered, Goodhart had argued strongly,
and I would say to many of us convincingly in favour of rationalising or nationalising the police.
At the time he did so on the Royal Commission, there were several members who agreed with him, but who in the end decided not to sign his reports,
or rather to sign the official report on the basis that they felt that this
was a political strategy for getting other things that they wanted through.
However, the actions of the policy makers of Henry Brookes and his Home Secretary and of those who saw the act through Parliament,
despite many members of the Royal Commission,
they were very unhappy about losing some of their more radical proposals and also the way in which officials,
including the Home Secretary, set their face against any form of major structural reform reform of police by 1967.
The deputy chair of the Commission had come out very publicly in a major public speech to say he now favoured nationalisation of the police.
That prompted a Sunday Times journalist to bring up all the other members of the commission and found out
that actually they all now or pretty often there was still a number who were tied to local authorities.
But apart from them in the main, all members of the Royal Commission, apart from those few now faced with nationalisation,
the chairman, Sir Henry Willet, refused at the time, quite properly possibly, to answer the journalists questions.
But it seems he, too, had changed his mind by 1970 and his still unpublished autobiography, a very short autobiography,
in which he says almost nothing about the Royal Commission on the Police for a page
and a half or so in a little blue ink scribbled at the bottom of one of the pages.
There's a little amendments, a little addendum to what is written in which he says, this is written in 1970.
I assume it was going to be inserted into the final copy of the final manuscript.
In retrospect, Will said, I think the commission's policy of larger unions was right in 1960 264,
so nationalised would at that time have been to move too fast.
Echoes of the Home Office and a Conservative government would not have accepted Dr. Goodhart speech.
It may now or soon underlines the right to uniform unify the whole force.
That was, what, 46 years ago almost.
We still have 43 Constabulary's of England and Wales.
I mean, at no point in the intervening breeding period have we had policymakers willing seriously, I think,
to consider what the members of the royal commission by the end of the decade were willing to consider.
Thank you. The poll results come out.
What should I do with it? But those are three very, very interesting papers.
I'm sure you agree. And I'm sure there are questions for the speakers who would like to begin.
Somebody has to come up with it.
One of the things that strikes the interesting things that strikes me about these employees is that you're all more or less of been
asked to kind of go over and retrace and recover events and practices that U.S. policy of war through the like and instigating,
observing and commenting upon. And you're also going over a period in which there is a kind of the design of all this could have been
received view about what's happened over this period relation both to particular and the general.
And I receive you to some extent you yourselves have contributed to and I just wondered against that backdrop of engaging yourself in this process.
Have you felt the same thing that surprised you would get you to revise anything you previously thought about?
I say something very quickly because this is something that struck me. I taught criminology for a very long time up to retirement age,
and I was massively disconcerted to discover that I'm barred from this official history.
I had really know very little about this subject, very little about criminal justice.
I think two of the tasks I set myself partly on instructions from the government side office
was to look at the setting up of the prosecutions of some of the 85 Act and secondly,
the abolition of the South Sessions and the establishment of a Crown Court.
To the best of my knowledge, those have never, ever been covered in any of the historical literature.
So there was, as it were, a venture into the Virgin territory.
That was the first act. So it wasn't as if this was familiar terrain about which I had received a received opinion.
The second thing was, and Tim has hinted at it was across the board as far as I was concerned.
There were a number of things which I don't think have been very firmly addressed in our literature.
The impact of utilitarianism, in particular weakest things inherited from the 1830 moving forward is about
the distrust of the states you talked about in the connection of policing.
That certainly was very evident. And everything that Bentham said about the arbitrary dispensing powers of a prosecutor
will be said under the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure over 100 years later,
certainly being said about the setting up of a unitary court system.
So it's those things. And the third thing is that going back to some of my earlier my earlier observation and the importance of informal
social control as the dynamic of regulation and the inability of the state effectively to influence that,
it was a great deal of what about show of powerful rituals, of rationality.
We don't know what we're doing, but we ought to try, as it were, to look as if we were busy.
And the business consisted of what Harold Wilson called modernisation rationalisation, the introduction of scientific technologies and so on,
not with any great optimism about the impact, but to show that we were doing something.
And, you know, the Home Office papers are full of that.
But I think David may have a slightly different reading on that.
I'm slightly more optimistic. So those three things. But it's it seems to me as if what I mean to then read is simply, look, you know, not folding.
That's my project, you know. And I do think that is very heavily emphasised in the literature that we have.
Yes. That's certainly something coming in to surprise me just after that was how you trawl through all the cabinet notebooks,
just how little law and order discussed in cabinet.
You would think that would be much more of a major concern.
The fact is, and if the examples of thing I've just been talking about,
the Mountbatten report wasn't discussed in Cabinet at all until Liam Gallagher
announced that effectively it would be put into the legislative package and
things like that to responsible business intellectuals monomania to assume that
his or her subject was terribly bought by politicians to a degree to surprises.
The first one, just naivety I'm not trying to story and so therefore it came as a surprise to me to find how few surprises to the bill.
But I thought that the the archives would be, if not stocked full of they would at least occasionally reveal a smoking gun.
But I've really still yet to find them. And the second one is, I think I don't know how much of a surprise it is, but the,
the thing that's interested me and it would be a subject for further discussion another time is the role of individual agency,
I think constantly surprised by just how influential individual ministers are, especially secretaries of state,
on the kind of tenure and direction of their departments and how a change of an individual such can make such a substantial difference.
And most important of all, perhaps the general government. But hopefully.
I said, thank you. I wanted to pick up on that part of what you're saying.
That's fascinating, and I look forward to seeing it. Soon started for them.
But I want to pick up on Paul's point about the about this being a utilitarian
project and simultaneously the point you made about distrust of the site,
because it sent me thinking about something that I was wondering about when you went to think of your presentation,
which is what motivated the state sponsorship and funding and motivation of
criminology within the universities and most obviously the Institute in Cambridge,
but also very generous funding to that to be a reason to do criminology here.
And how far was that, in your view,
any of it the consequence of a recognition precisely of this distrust of the state and the desire to create an independent body,
a cadre of researchers who would would assess and criticise without a doubt to do things independently from the state.
And how far was it really just part of that utilitarian project about having having agents in the field to collect this?
I suspect Roger could answer that festival. Well, I would think it's the latter myself.
I mean, I was wondering whether you whether you had really come across good examples of where this interface between the state as the funders,
the promoters of research have sought to constrain the kinds of knowledge and
access necessary for that research to be carried out effectively and candidly.
I mean, that is the thing that we visible this is what we hit upon in Oxford.
As soon as we started to examine sentencing, in particular in the Crown Court, that's a very great example in the parole system.
I actually being a member of the Early Parole Board where I came to do research on it,
we weren't allowed to go and sit and listen to what the parole board said,
although two journalists were allowed in there and it was astonishingly restrictive and many,
many people who were working on research, some of the official one here found that very frustrating.
And it's not easy to explain, given this is Quest question.
See what I mean? You know, what's the purpose of this? Why are they spending this money on it?
Well, I mean, it came up with the welfare state to begin with, I think in 1948 on the criminal justice bill,
when they put forward the view is we have to cope with this crime problem.
How does this how does criminality fit in with the development of a welfare state?
How can we learn all that crime? What can we do to prevent it?
Pure kill, in inverted commas it.
And we need social scientists and psychiatrists and other people working in that field to help us to find the answers to this question.
And it was, of course, a time when following on from the 1930s where there had been,
as David said, a great deal of optimism about the prospects of a reformative system.
The work I mean, my very early work, my thesis on the postal system just showed that this famous commissioners,
Alexander Patterson, really believed that the system is working to kind of recidivism at its roots.
We no longer have these adult criminals, recidivist criminals,
circulating repetitively through the prison system and for which the prison system simply wasn't set up to deal with.
So there was a strategy there. And a lot of this research, I think, was connected with the idea of how do we put this strategy into effect.
It because it was a it was a really genuine to many cases arose that a lot of the
research that was being practised a time we're talking about mid-sixties or thereabouts,
does not engage. It was not intrusive. It was not likely to expose scandal.
That came rather late. I mean, your work on the Crown Court, which is called the private lives of judges similar to it, isn't that right?
Which was. But we weren't allowed to interview Judge. Yes. Yeah. But when was Terry Morris's work on pensions of 60, late fifties and early sixties,
there was a whole chapter that was sense of that in which he had been present to arise consequent upon an execution.
And the Home Office on was this was not proposed. It did not exist because it could not be analysed.
So the were the beginnings for that. That was because Terry was using the beginnings of a kind of crime.
It became really came to a head. And it much later with Stan and Doris on psychological survival, where, as it were, in a rather covert way,
they talked about the coping strategies along temperate Christmas in Durham and that sort of relations for a long time in criminology.
And the was I don't think up until that point anything was regarded as being particularly contentious or prone to generate scandal.
You could think of examples where split research actually supported the political programmes of people,
of the homicide of, for example, the Home Office.
It showed that the 57 Act had not made a difference to the rates of murder, was very, very influential.
I think probably the most successful piece of early work to to to that policymaking.
Hello? Yes, please. So thank you guys for coming through.
And my question revolves, involves that the history of appears very quiet, very masculine and very male.
And I have a very interesting question involving how can we see the fact that how do we see
this in a reflection of the chronology for it and what impacts and what has been lost,
do you think, in the orientation of the discipline, because these voices are not present in the discipline from these early ages?
Or do you think that there wasn't? Well, I think that's quite fair.
I mean, I talked on a number of occasions by Barbara Wootton, who was a woman of considerable importance.
I think she taught at a benefit for colleges that there was Pauline Morris, who was a woman of of, of some importance.
The trio who set up a human research unit here included Sarah McCabe.
So there were there were a series of women's groups and also the Home Office Research Unit.
So the that there weren't many women about the work, but it was heavily male wife's.
Yes, it probably was oldest came later.
There's an article that influenced me greatly in Social Problems 68.
I think that a recent article, the how businessmen talk about the revolts of the cloth,
talking about the way in which something populations started rising up against experts and trying to redefine fields in Scotland.
So that came later.
And you get people like Ken Plummer talking about, you know, homosexuality, gay men, you talk, you get people to talk about issues of race.
And so those things weren't in evidence then. It was very low dumped on the at the time.
And it was very difficult session.
I mean, the thing that one thing that interested me was the setting up of a criminal interest compensation scheme in 1965 by Lesley Wilkins,
not by those people that informed him. He provided a lot of the research.
There was no sense of the time. You've talked to victims and asked what they needed you knew best and there was a lot
of knowing Best Buy as you were using it in a rather a group of white intellectuals.
But I think the gender thing could be overstated to us too.
So, I mean, the point that you raise about both criminal justice and criminology appearing very white, very male, which is right in many respects.
There's still are, although elements of that are changing as part of the object, the study of the official history as well.
So if you just take policing policing in 1966 was indeed very white and very well, but it's now rather less white and significantly less money.
And in its relation to women as citizens, be they reporting crimes or victims of crimes and so forth,
the nature of the world has changed somewhat, not as much as we would like, and certainly so that's that is part of the object.
So the subject of the study, too. So it's the problematic.
It's a very it's a very important. Still there are three old white geezers sitting up here, so it must be something like the towards work.
Quite interesting work being done on. John Lambert, for example, crime, police and race relations, for example.
There are a number of other studies. So it's not as if they didn't exist.
They made a real hobbyhorse of mine.
Is this idea of Kurdish centrism, the fact that we forget our past and we tend with the blitzkrieg,
that a great deal of the early history of social science research in this industry, in this country, including early work on race and race.
And the John Rex did, for example, work on an important work on race remarks about a michelangelo so that,
you know, the statement that it didn't exist is a reflection more of,
as it were, of institutional myopia than I think of what might on, you know, closer scrutiny proved to be the case.
Yes. Else? Yes, please. Oh, yes.
So I was just thinking that like the 1960s and reflecting back on international history,
I wonder if there was any influence applied to the Cold War of high quality decolonisation around the world for me, like did that have an impact on.
I did not visible that I could see so.
Tim Armstrong. Let's hope they turn up Hong Kong policing, didn't they?
At one point in terms of crowd control, but well, from the 1950s, an aggression becomes an issue.
And I mean, earlier I was talking about Jenkins and police and with Jenkins, Jenkins was also important for his interventions in race relations.
I mean, again, not necessarily things that he is remembered for and Franciscans and Franciscans also,
but I would say not that I can think of in any major way in the 1960s.
Yes, please. I think that the analysis that we have kept wrong on the politics of the content of
the policy would suggest that actually across all of the other obvious policy areas,
including foreign policy and so on, you did have a lot of.
Political disputes, and I'm not going to make a point to tell them either on main parties.
But one area which was exempt for a very long time until the early 70, that's why I can't remember the exact date was actually prime justice.
And going back to this question about the investments in technology was this was a time when there was consensus that it
was preferable to leave it to the experts and to invest in that rather than turn it into a matter of operational dispute.
That's been changed in the seventies and obviously the rise in the eighties.
And so, you know, it was it's been like that ever since.
But there has there was a consensus which was exceptional.
At that time around the area, Jesus Christ, which didn't contain development assistance.
And I think that that analysis may tell us some of these.
I think what it represented. So.
We've got some comments. Well, I think I think that's broadly true, but we've had some very early signs of differences to come.
For example, the 1954 Labour Party Working Group under Lord Longford,
we've produced quite a challenge to his all stops to draw some links between social and economic conditions in France.
I think one of the things we cite is if you look at the party manifestos in the general election,
you can actually see where the watershed comes with the first time you want an order of justice becomes.
And it's between the political parties in the in their manifestos going out to the general election.
I mean, obviously, late on this point, there was no 1970.
You're kidding, right? Yeah. The 1979 is the real turning point.
It's not exactly the point.
We've been the period really covering is still a point where you have this consensus and that actually explains some of the questions.
There's a very interesting framing issue here,
is that not in front of thousands have started saying that they have time to call the conventional, conventional argument.
Women are not interesting, interesting criminological because they commit so little crime makes them very interesting indeed.
And I think the consensus initially, if we talk about race, is that what we call western new immigrants were remarkably little primitive crime.
I mean, that was that was the difference between 72 and 74, I think, in the Home Affairs Commission.
But I think it was used on, let's call, these statistics, which changed.
And I think of John Lambert's work in Birmingham too,
was it was mainly it was mainly the difference in the name discussing the methods of documentary that we've just same book you know.
Well, it's not change, but that was out with the main debate in the movie and the debates about race.
Well, I think it's really crucial.
I mean, the point that you made as well as well established, I think that there was a broad bipartisan consensus about law and order matters.
And so the dance more than anybody's who's written about the the third issue about criminological research and the experts,
I think it's not so much that there was a there was a political consensus out of which government was able to say,
well, necessarily that that was the main thing, able to say, leave it to the experts.
It wasn't that at that time it believed that there might be experts who would be able to solve the problems.
That's the fascinating thing. And that's what then subsequently disappears.
Buckley, who was the prime mover behind the Home Office initially between the Home Office Research Unit and the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge,
and also in a much more minor way, something within the realm of schools.
The Police Research and Planning Branch was a just an almost naive believer in the power of science,
Wilson's Y piece of technology that if you just were able to pull some resources for long enough at the disposal of experts,
they would help you solve these problems that I think sent us to the West over all that long.
And I mean, to go back to Roger's question about whether governments were good examples of government standing in the way of research,
I've certainly not come across them. But what it didn't necessarily do was, in many cases follow up with resources.
So something like the Police Research and planning branch was a great idea and and Butler and others who
followed them talked it up for something which would solve the problem of police efficiency and so forth.
But they never staffed it with anybody who might be who might have any obvious expertise, scientifically or otherwise,
or gave it the resources that might allow it to do such a job, even with substantial possible or even certainly waste.
So what it's done in research before making political pronouncements about how policing works, and that was much more of a problem with research.
It was the moment that was seized in the sixties when it was just announced because it's pontificating from grass less material,
people were actually behind promoting the idea that that is the way to manage it.
And that was what so many criminological research, even subsequently, you know, that was not respected and is increasingly being eroded and.
Skew compromise and disregard in design.
I mean, the very top concern for undeniable democracy.
Yet, you know, there's still a very strong tradition of independence.
There's a level of constraint. So you have to offer the constraints on what you could research.
At least there was this little research outcomes would not be accepted.
And that went pretty soon after that, the nineties.
But I think that initial sort of seed. The search was the product of that moment in the sixties.
And I think what we need to understand is in those terms, even subsequent.
Was the research very about the impact. I realised we're running out there is, there is a story that has not been told.
I'm not sure I'm the one to tell it of a time when there were very few criminologists established
in what were regarded as the better universities who exercised extraordinary influence,
I think, at least in terms of the influence of the drugs in a vegetarian.
Morris. Nigel Walker. And there were few of them and they were very busy and they had a rather grand
idea of themselves and at the same time knew that they had problems with offer.
And so that kind of and the kind of great separation so that the loss of the whole of this
research unit seemed to be one of the great undocumented tragedies of research in this country.
Nobody I don't know why it was disbanded.
I know a little bit of the process, but not much of it. It was doing sterling work and it's now lost to us.
And there's this gulf, I think, between expertise and government, which is really quite novel.
I don't know if you've recall. Well, I do.
I mean, right up to the 1980s, the Home Office really promoted research in the universities and expanded research and intelligence.
And internally, you you get normally from home office.
How do you know? Whereas you see the Oxford Centre was shielded from collapse.
We put it that way by the Home Office, which is an agreement that projects would be found and people could be,
could have some sense of security over a career even if it wasn't established first.
And you know, people like Mike Maguire, who made such a good name for himself,
moved on from project to project to project and never made sure that there was work available, which was, I mean, really pioneering.
Yes. I mean, the all the stuff on productivity, which is all paid off in terms of falling crime rates to some degree, anyway, was was pioneered.
Yes, absolutely right. Yeah.
Phil Clarke The paradox is that the greater the numbers of criminologists and the better their expertise, the less influence they have.
Yes, well, I think that's a good point and a good note.
And so I think Alan tells me that there's some drinks at the end of the table,
those who'd like to stay and chat with distinguished speakers, I'm sure that they'd love to have more conversation with you.
And how long we got the first 45 minutes.
I think that that would be about right, yes. So do help yourself.
And before we thank our speakers, but the same thing, can I just remind everybody that I hope Fourth Ismaila is going to be here.
Talk about the myth of the model of crime and Democratic politics, which will be absolutely wonderful.
So we look forward to seeing all the attention.
Oh, this is fine. Thank you very much.
I'm not sorry. No, no, no, it's not. Somebody else wrote this.