Criminology has very little to do with actual law, James Morton discovered when he went on a graduate course

When my bank manager and I finally sold my legal practice (I did the selling, he took the money ) – I thought about what to do next. A friend of mine had just taken an Open University degree and I had contributed to one of her papers on all-in wrestling – a subject about which I considered myself something of an expert. We collected an A + and I saw a new career in academia looming large.


But first I had to get a degree myself. In those long-lost days when I qualified, only five subjects at O-level were required for entry into the profession – three in one go and the others singly, and no maths, which, since I achieved 14%, was a comfort. Since my friend had a BA, nothing less than an MA would do for me.


As I had spent my life in the criminal courts, I thought criminology would be a most suitable (and untaxing) subject. She and I shopped around for an institution that would take me on a graduate course and eventually one in the north-east was kind or foolish enough to do so. It agreed that qualification as a solicitor was the equivalent of a first degree.


When I was sent the reading material I discovered that, like the employing and the working classes, law and criminology have nothing in common. Nor have the groves of academia anything to do with midnight at Caledonian Road police station. Now, instead of living among burglars and armed robbers, I was concerned with positivists and classisists. Not whether Tommy had actually nailed the cat’s tail to the kitchen table, but why he had done so. I had never noticed if my clients had differently shaped skulls from the rest of the population (Lombroso). Nor had I had the opportunity to see if my female clients had an abundance of pubic hair, which made them more likely to become thieves and prostitutes than their less well-endowed sisters (Lombroso, discredited).


Nor were the texts readable. One contained a sentence of more than 200 words. There were also many conflicting theories – twin studies was one. If your twin were a criminal, were you more likely to become one than if he were not? Not a great deal of data to go on for the fabled Chi squared test to see whether they were statistically viable, particularly as the other trouble was trying to determine what are called variables. So if you were, say, considering whether twin B were more likely to turn out to be a bank robber if twin A were already one, you had to factor in all sorts of things that could muck up the figures.


Other suggestions for the creation of criminals included having a parent in prison or at war, no living mother, an Uncle Jim in the nick, poor housing, alienation, labelling, strain, sub-cultures, peer pressure – the list was endless.


Given the limited number of bank-robbing twins available for research, by the time you factored in or out all these variables you got precisely nowhere. And it seemed if one criminologist could destroy the theories of another, then many were happy to do just that. I was never sure that these authors had ever seen a real live criminal, and if they had I’m sure the criminal had told them what he thought they wanted to know rather than what really happened.


I was comforted by the playwright Ben Hecht, who, when he was researching the Californian gangster Mickey Cohen, wrote in easily readable sentences: ‘Society does not, as sociologists… maintain, create the criminal. Bad housing, bad companions, bad government, etc, have little to do with why there are killers, robbers and outlaws. The criminal has no relation to society to speak of. He is part of man’s soul, not his institutions. He is an old one. A thousand preachers, summer boys’ camps, plus a congress of psychiatrists can barely dent even a minor criminal. As for the major criminal, he cannot be touched at all by society because he operates on a different time level. He is the pre-social part of us – the ape that spurned the collar.’


In class, we were a mixed bunch. I was the oldest but there were a couple of policemen within touching distance. They did not seem to hold it against me that we had, for so long, been on opposite sides of the fence. Most of the younger students were women, one of whom was exceptionally bright. We wrote and gave papers. We discussed defensive space, Merton’s theory of anomie and whether the Incest Act 1907 was a good example of a ‘symbolic crusade’ led by ‘moral entrepreneurs’. Asbos had not come close to conception or I’m sure we would have discussed them as well. It was all good if – to lawyers – irrelevant fun.


Eventually, we were sent to a local Crown Court for the afternoon to observe what one sociologist has called the ‘ritual humiliation’ of the defendant. I thought I’d seen enough Crown Courts in my life and the exceptionally bright one thought she had as well. Would I go with her to see whether a suede jacket she wanted fitted? I would. It did. When she took out her credit card to pay, the shop assistant asked: ‘In’t yer gran’dad going to buy it for you, then?’ I count that moment as the one when I began to feel old.


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist