The Cartographic School and the Governmental Project

Beccaria's programme had been adopted in France, and it was expected that crime would fall. There was no way to find out whether it had, because there were no annual crime statistics to measure whether crime was going up or down. The first annual national crime statistics were published in France in 1827.

What they showed did two things at once, and both are examinable.

First, they showed regularity. The rates of crime in general and of particular crimes such as murder and rape remained relatively constant from year to year; and some places in the nation had higher crime rates while others had lower, and these differences too remained relatively constant. We now take such regularity for granted. At the time it was startling, because those who held a free-will theory of crime expected random changes in the number of crimes, especially in unpremeditated crimes such as murders of passion. Regularity suggested that crime, rather than being entirely the product of free will, must be influenced by factors in the larger society — and, hopefully, that by changing those factors crime might be reduced.

Second, they showed failure. Crime rates were going up, not down; and recidivism was going up. People who had received the prompt, proportionate punishments provided by the new French code were committing more new offences rather than fewer. That suggested Beccaria had been wrong to argue that changes in punishment policy alone could reduce crime.

The new statistics therefore revealed the failure of classical punishment policies while simultaneously suggesting that other social factors might influence the level of crime. That combination gave rise to positivism, whose goal was to study the causes of crime either in the larger society or in the individual.

The cartographic or statistical writers claimed that crime is a property of places and populations, not only of persons, and that it can be mapped, correlated and explained by social and moral conditions.

Their method was to take judicial statistics and census data, chart the distribution and demography of crime, and match crime rates against other social indices. On the basis of carefully calculated correlations they drew conclusions about the moral and social causes which influenced criminal conduct, and presented their findings as instances of the new statistical science and its social uses.

Guerry and Quetelet did this in France and Belgium; Rawson, Fletcher and Glyde read papers to the Statistical Society of London doing the same for Britain.

The statistical work sat inside something larger, which Garland calls the governmental project: the tradition of empirical inquiry into crime, police, prisons and criminal justice conducted in the interest of governing the population.

• Colquhoun and Fielding, with a large number of parliamentary and private committees of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, used empirical evidence to situate and measure the extent of various crime problems — the late increase in robbers, the relation between indigence and crime, the alarming increase in juvenile delinquency, the police of the metropolis.
• These inquiries formed part of a wider science of police, concerned not just with crime or criminals but with the regulation and maintenance of the whole population in the interest of economy, welfare and good governance.
• John Howard's investigation of the state of the prisons in the 1770s was undertaken as a work of charity and reform, but his methods were doggedly empirical and laid much stress on measurement and systematic observation. His work began a line of empirical penological inquiry which from the 1830s became an increasingly important element in the British criminological tradition.
• Henry Mayhew, writing in the middle years of the nineteenth century, was essentially a journalist concerned with the social question and the problem of the poor; but unlike the moralists of a century earlier his journalism was founded on an empirical approach, using ethnographic and survey methods as well as life histories and statistical data. London Labour and the London Poor (1861–2) offered a series of empirically supported claims about the patterns and causes of professional crime in the city.

• It was not, at the time, a criminology. These studies were not viewed as distinct from other inquiries into the market, morals, workhouses or poverty. The broad concern animating all of them was governance and the use of empirical data and scientific methods to improve government's grip on the population. Only with the later professionalization of state agencies, and with the invention of criminology, did the study of governance in criminal matters come to be seen as distinct from the governance of the population in general.
• Correlation is not cause. The tradition's characteristic move — inferring moral and social causes from calculated correlations — is exactly the move later criminologists were required to justify.
• The recovery-of-tradition objection. Garland warns that each time a new element is added to the criminological armoury, someone discovers that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers were doing something similar and claims the approach as a central and temporarily forgotten feature of the tradition. That recurring recovery is better understood as a bid for intellectual respectability and disciplinary centrality than as a serious claim about the development of the subject, because the crucial requirement of a genealogy is continuity of descent, and it is precisely continuity that is missing wherever traditions have to be rediscovered.

- On the schools question, this is your answer to Cartographic School: name Guerry and Quetelet, give the 1827 statistics, and explain the two things the statistics did — establishing regularity, which embarrassed free will, and establishing rising crime and rising recidivism, which embarrassed the classical penal programme. - On the question whether criminology is a science, this is the strongest evidence on the affirmative side within the early material: a body of work asserting relationships between classes of observable phenomena and testing them against data. - As the hinge between the schools, it is the cleanest way to explain why positivism arose. Positivism was not simply a change of intellectual fashion; it was a response to a measurement, and you should say so. - As the ancestor of modern criminal statistics work, it explains why crime statistics remain a syllabus head in their own right: the questions of what is counted, by whom, and against what social index, are the questions Guerry and Quetelet opened. </content>