University of Chicago Law School Chicago Unbound Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 2005 Seeing Crime and Punishment through a Sociological Lens: Contributions, Practices, and the Future Bernard E. Harcourt Tracey L. Meares John Hagan Calvin Morrill Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Bernard E. Harcourt, Tracey L. Meares, John Hagan & Calvin Morrill, "Seeing Crime and Punishment through a Sociological Lens: Contributions, Practices, and the Future," 2005 University of Chicago Legal Forum 289 (2005). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Seeing Crime and Punishment Through a Sociological Lens: Contributions, Practices, and the Futue A Conversation with Calvin Morill, John Hagantt BernardE. Harcourtttt and Tracey Mearettt t* There is a rich intellectual history to the sociological study of crime and punishment that encompasses multiple and inter- related traditions.' Some of these traditions trace their roots to the European social theorists of the nineteenth century, particu- larly Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. Although only Durkheim and Weber systematically studied law (and only Durkheim actually studied punishment), all three social theo- rists facilitated the development of sociological research and the- ory on crime and punishment. Durkheim's Suicide: A Study in Sociology 2 for example, investigated the relationship between t Calvin Morrill is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of California at Irvine, and is Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the School of Social Ecology and Professor of Business at the Merage School of Business at the University of Califor- nia at Irvine. tt John Hagan is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at North- western University and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. ltt Bernard E. Harcourt is Professor of Law and Faculty Director of Academic Affairs at the University of Chicago Law School. ttt Tracey L. Meares is the Max Pam Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago Law School and a Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. * Special thanks to Calvin Morrill for writing the historical overview in the introduc- tion to this conversation; and to Brian Hill, Angela Russo, and the editors of The Univer- sity of Chicago Legal Forum for organizing the Symposium. 1 Although this history is too complex and our space in this article too limited for a complete recounting, it may be useful for readers to understand, in a shorthand way, some of the intellectual backdrop to our conversation at the University of Chicago Legal Forum's Nineteenth Annual Symposium, "Punishment and Crime" (Nov 13, 2004). 2 Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology 145 (Free Press 1951) (discussing how social factors affect different types of suicide, such as "egoistic suicide," "altruistic suicide," and "anomic suicide"). 289 HeinOnline -- 2005 U. Chi. Legal F. 289 2005 290 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LEGAL FORUM [2005: social integration and suicide rates, which, in turn, provided a model of inquiry for multiple generations of sociologists investi- gating the social causes of crime, delinquency, and social devi- ance.3 Similarly, Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society inspired sociologists to examine the relationship between social structure and the organization of law and punishment.5 Weber's ideas concerning the "rationalization" of society and the legiti- mate bases of legal authority compelled sociologists to think comparatively and brought a historical dimension to sociological inquiry on law and punishment.6 Marxist sensibilities begat a small, but vibrant, industry of radical criminologists and sociolo- gists of law and punishment who located both the causes and control of crime in the exploitation, injustice, and class conflict inherent in capitalist society.7 3 A notable example in this line of inquiry comes from the work of Travis Hirschi, who drew from Durkheim's concept of "anomic" suicide (in which suicide is associated with social normlessness) to formulate his "social contro theory of delinquency. See Travis Hirschi, Causes ofDelinquency 17 (Transaction 2d ed 2002). From the perspective of social control theory, individuals with weak social ties to conventional institutions (hence weak normative regulation), such as the family or schools, are more likely to com- mit crime than those with strong ties. Social control theory later became "self-control" theory in which normative conformity is premised upon the effectiveness of primary so- cialization into mainstream values and practices. See Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime 154-68 (Stanford 1990). Although Robert K Merton's classic work on social structure and deviance did not cite Durkheim, his core idea that deviance and crime result from individual commitments to mainstream values to succeed in American society, coupled with a lack of means (such as education or employment) and/or blocked pathways (due, for example, to racial discrimination), echoes the theoreti- cal logic in Durkheim's arguments that "egoistic" suicide correlates with disjunctures between normative regulations and individual goals. See Robert K Merton, Social Struc- ture and Anomie, 3 Am Soc Rev 672, 679 (1938). 4 Emile Durkheim, The Division ofLaborin Society(Free Press 1964). 5 Perhaps the most well-known application of Durkheim's approach in this regard is Donald Black, The Behavior of Law (Academic 1976), where Black argues that the quan- tity and style of legal social control varies with the social structural locations of those involved, including social status and intimacy. 6 Weber's influence can be seen, for example, in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 231 (Pantheon 1977). Foucault argues, among other things, that intensive rationalization, as evidenced in the designs and techniques of pris- ons, ultimately produces the very phenomena that these institutions ostensibly seek to control. See also David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Con- temporary Society 167 (Chicago 2001) (drawing directly from Foucault and indirectly from Weber to document the increase and density of penal and social controls during the last few decades in two archetypically democratic societies, Britain and the United States); Bernard E. Harcourt, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing140-80 (Harvard 2001) (drawing on Foucault's work to re-examine the nature of order and broken-windows policing). 7 The earliest work on law and punishment along these lines is George Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Puzishment and Social Structure (Russell & Russell 1939) (describing the historical interaction between punishment practices and the development of social conditions and class structure). See also David F. Greenberg, ed, Crime and Capitalism: Readings in Marxist Criminology(Temple 2d ed 1993) (bringing together the writings of HeinOnline -- 2005 U. Chi. Legal F. 290 2005 289] THROUGHA SOCIOLOGICAL LENS 291 As influential as these theorists have been, not all sociologi- cal work on crime and punishment descends in a "top-down" fashion from these European sources. There is also a long tradi- tion in American sociology of "bottom-up" inquiry that begins with an intensive empirical inquiry into the dynamics of crime and punishment and builds conceptual frameworks upon that foundation. Perhaps the most influential bottom-up tradition in the sociology of crime and punishment originated in the Sociol- ogy Department at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. Re- searchers associated with the early "Chicago School" of sociology, as it came to be known, approached the study of crime and pun- ishment with the reform-minded concerns of the Progressive Era and the philosophical underpinnings of American pragmatism.' A hallmark of the Chicago approach was intensive, qualitative fieldwork, especially aimed at understanding the relationships between social "disorganization" (such as fragmented families and community institutions) and undesirable social "outcomes" in Chicago's vast immigrant neighborhoods (including criminal- ity, as well as chronic unemployment and homelessness).9 These commitments, in turn, fed into a flowering of influential field- based studies of crime and delinquency during the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. 10 Among the most influential of the works based twentieth-century radical sociological criminologists with Marx's and Frederick Engels' disparate writings on crime and punishment); Douglas Hay, et al, Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland (Pantheon 1975) (providing a histori- cal sociological examination of crime and punishment from a Marxist perspective). 8 John F. Galliher, Chicago's Two Worlds of Deviance Research: Whose Side Are They On?, in Gary Alan Fine, ed, A Second Chicago School: The Development ofPostwar American Sociology 164, 166-68 (Chicago 1995) (describing the development of the "Chi- cago School" of sociology). 9 Burgess, for example, directed dozens of dissertations that touched on both social disorganization and legal processing of crime among Chicago's immigrants.