Emotions and Contemporary Developments in Criminology

Abstract

It can be argued that criminology is a good example of a discipline that might draw considerable benefit from a more psychosocial approach. It is one of the social sciences that has suffered from the rift between social and psychological perspectives which has consequentially left ‘emotions’ quite neglected (Rustin, Jones this volume). Yet criminal activity very often provokes considerable emotion, and arguably much of it has its roots in the world of feelings such as excitement, anger, shame, greed or envy. This chapter focuses on a number of different dimensions of emotion in the criminological field. Firstly, I describe something of the ‘scientisation’ of criminological discourse. There are obvious resonances with earlier chapters here, but it is arguable that if we want to understand the relationship between criminology and emotion we have to delve into the origins of the discipline. Alas, it is a tale of neglect both in the shaping of traditional crimi- nological discourse and in the development of early critical discourses. Early individualistic perspectives searched for the causes of crime within physiology, while sociological approaches tended to focus on functionality and rationality as a field of enquiry and deliberately avoided engagement with emotions. Later critical perspectives in sociology still avoided emotion, this time through a rather romantic identification with offenders that required evasion of the feelings of victims.