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28 Brit. J. Criminology 45 (1988)
The Sociology of Crime and Social Control in Britain, 1960-1987

handle is hein.journals/bjcrim28 and id is 185 raw text is: BRIT.J. CRIMINOL. Vol.28 No.2 SPRING 1988 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CRIME AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN BRITAIN, 1960-1987 DAVID DOWNES (London)* The period under review saw the expansion of criminological studies from the scholarly cottage industry portrayed by Martin to the multi-institutional, academic enterprise documented by Rock. In 1960, perhaps a few dozen academics, including post-graduate students, and Home Office researchers, could be defined as criminologists. They were predominantly sited in London, Cambridge, Oxford and Liverpool. When the first National Deviancy Sym- posium took place at York University in Autumn 1968, its organisers were swamped by well over a hundred applications to attend. The first National Criminology Conference in 1987 had to limit attendance to 200 teachers and researchers in criminology. The Economic and Social Research Council Initiative on Crime and the Criminal Justice System in 1984 recdived appli- cations for project-funding in designated fields from 147 individuals or teams, a large minority from departments other than those of criminology, sociology and psychology. All indicators point to a momentous enlargement of the field in terms of both the number of practitioners and the scope of the subject. Criminologists are now to be found at virtually every institution of higher education in the land. It is easy, nonetheless, to see signs of coming crisis in the subject. For several years now, the contraction in funding for post-graduate students, source of much that was best in the effluorescence of the subject in the 1960s and '70s, has implied a problem of succession when, in little over a decade from now, the members of the fortunate generation retire. Though the rate of expansion of the 1960-1980 period was unsustainable, the rate of contraction has been unwarrantedly sharp. A recognisable first phase in the period lasted from the late 1950s until the first York Symposium of 1968. This phase saw relatively few published studies of real significance, but the ground work of training and recruitment was laid on the foundations described by Martin. As an entrant to the field in late 1959, it seemed to me to have been swept clean by Wootton's excoriating critique of that year. The only pointers in Britain to how useful work might in future be accomplished lay in the area study tradition developed so ably by Mays (1954), Sprott, Jephcott and Carter (1954) and Morris (1957). The work of John Mays, whose death in October 1987 overshadows the coming publi- cation of a book of essays in his honour (Downes, ed., forthcoming), stimu- lated a small but penetrating number of area studies of delinquency in Liverpool (Parker, 1974; Gill, 1977) and Sheffield (Baldwin and Bottoms, 1976; Bottoms and Wiles, 1986; Bottoms et al., 1987). Mays was at one with the British tradition of community studies born of Victorian social inquiry, which fotind its most formidable exponent in Henry Mayhew (1851-1861), *Professor of Social Administration, London School of Economics. 45

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