The past is prologue: Towards a historico-narrative approach at the intersection of historical criminology and narrative criminology

Introduction

Despite the intradisciplinary boundaries that have shaped and defined criminology for much of the last century, the last 20 years have seen the emergence of several new subfields or methodological approaches that have disrupted the existing criminological zeitgeist. It is perhaps no coincidence that these attempts to redefine what it means to ‘do criminology’ have come to the fore in large part since the early 2010s – a time when Jock Young’s rallying cry against ‘the bogus of positivism’ prompted an important (and necessary) reassessment of modern criminology’s preoccupation with objective empiricism at the expense of lived experience or, as Young himself called it, the discipline’s pervasive ‘fetishism with number’ (Young, 2011). Riffing on C. Wright Mills’s conceptualisation of the sociological imagination, and its application in criminology, Young described a state of affairs in which ‘reality has been lost in a sea of statistical symbols and dubious analysis’ (Young, 2011: viii). A major element of Young’s critique was that modern criminology had become more concerned with the specific details of the methods used to discern this purportedly objective, empirical ‘truth’ and, in doing so, the spirit of Mills’s concept of sociological imagination was lost.

How then to apply the criminological imagination to a discipline wherein inherently subjective lived experience seemingly had no place? The answer lies in Mills’s own description of the sociological imagination: Mills (1959: 6) noted that ‘the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise’. In recent efforts in the discipline to balance abstract empiricism and the lived experience, we see both aspects cited by Mills reflected in narrative criminology and historical criminology, respectively. Each constitutes a relatively ‘new’ subarea of criminology, although it has been argued that both have as long of (if not far longer) tradition in the field than many of the ‘newer’ scientific methods. Narrative criminology ‘refers to the study of the role the telling and sharing of stories play in committing, upholding and effecting desistance from crime and other harmful acts’ (Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016: 129); historical criminology, on the other hand, is often described as ‘scholarship on crime, criminal justice and related matters conducted with respect to historical time’ (Churchill et al., 2022: Chapter 1). At their core, both narrative and historical criminology might be constructed as counterweights to the abstract empiricism that Young bemoans, not because they are unscientific but rather because they are concerned primarily with the matter of context (social, cultural, political and otherwise), and the way that context contributes to explanations of how and why crime and criminal justice takes place in the way that it does in society – beyond the raw data. Indeed, Henry Yeomans (2019) includes narrative historical research as one of three distinct types of historical research that together form a framework for historical contextualisation, which is essential to his conceptualisation of a three-dimensional, historically-informed criminology.

For Yeomans (2019), narrative historical research ‘provides information on what happened before the period that it is seeking to explain . . . while it can improve knowledge on the origins of current phenomena and ongoing processes of social change, narrative historical research functions primarily to provide background to the present’ (p. 465). While these emergent subareas share a common foundation, there remains much for each to learn from the other: as still-developing theoretical paradigms, narrative and historical criminology have (naturally) been primarily concerned with negotiating their own internal frameworks and norms, and effectively ‘prove’ their viability as theoretical perspectives. This article highlights areas where there is room for greater convergence between narrative and historical criminology, which could strengthen both subareas greatly. Just as a deeper understanding of historical time can assist in deciphering entrenched narratives about crime – and the impacts of those narratives – so too can a better appreciation of the subjectivity and social purpose of narratives allow for a more effective reading of the past that will serve historical criminologists greatly. Finally, in arguing for a collaborative historico-narrative criminology, this article muses on practical ways in which this union can have a broader impact on criminology as a whole and improve not just our understanding of what has come before, but our approaches to crime and justice into the future.

‘Stories have power’ – the emergence of narrative criminology

As Maruna (2015) writes, although ‘radical in its insights and implications . . . [and] a genuine departure from and viable alternative to mainstream criminology . . . the irony, of course, is that there is nothing radical about narrative criminology at all’ (p. vii); Maruna (2015) refers here to a decades-long tradition of the ‘notion that identity is an internal narrative’ (p. vii). As Sandberg and Ugelvik (2016) explain it, ‘the sharing of stories is an important part of the human condition . . . a basic device for creating, providing and assigning meaning’ (p. 129). Sandberg and Ugelvik note that the conceptual origins of narrative criminology are challenging to trace because, even though the term itself has only been in wide circulation since 2009, the practice of using stories to explain and understand crime and justice can be dated in not just decades, but millennia. For example, Aristotle sought to explain the purpose of story-telling, asserting that stories had a far greater impact than simple entertainment or education: to Aristotle, humans were ‘not just passive consumers of stories; we interact with them and they act on us . . . stories can have a cathartic function’ (Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016: 130). For example, to consume a ‘story’ about a murder allows people to engage and reflect on the issue of violent crime without personally experiencing those events. The roots of modern narrative criminology can also be observed in Sykes and Matza’s (1957) work on neutralisation, albeit in a different sense. Sykes and Matza do not invoke the term ‘narrative criminology’ directly, however the process they describe is predicated on the individual’s ability to operationalise an internal narrative in such a way as to rationalise deviant behaviours. Here, we see a more active use of the narrative: not just for understanding and processing purposes, but as a functional aspect of deviant (or, even, criminal) decision-making and behaviour.

Narrative criminology is based on principles associated with symbolic interactionism and is particularly concerned with how an individual’s perception of self (including their social role, status and identity) informs their relationship with the world. Bruner (1987: 15) asserts that ‘the self-telling of life narratives achieve[s] the power to structure perceptual experience, to organise memory, to segment and purpose-build the very “events” of a life’. These principles, most commonly adopted in studies linked to life-course theory (e.g. Maruna, 2001; Verde et al., 2006), ultimately metamorphosed into what would now be described as narrative criminology with the term first being used by Presser (2009) in Theoretical Criminology. In making the case for narrative criminology in this article, Presser (2009) ‘positions the narrative itself, as opposed to the events reported in the narrative, as a factor in the motivation for and accomplishment of crime and criminalisation’ (p. 178). She notes that ‘conventional perspectives in criminology have too rarely, or too abstractly, grappled with emotion’ and, thus, narrative criminology has the potential to fill such gaps, as unpacking the underlying motivations and construction of a self-narrative can offer insights that abstract empirical data cannot, again wrestling with Young’s later concept of the ‘bogus of positivism’ (Presser, 2009: 179; Young, 2011).

The (unavoidably) subjective reality that is reflected in self-narratives of criminal behaviour represents useful data in that it ‘offer[s] reasons for our actions that make sense to our real, imagined and potential interlocutors, including ourselves’ (Presser, 2009: 180). Though she acknowledges that empirically-minded criminologists would question the authenticity of an offender’s self-narrative, Presser (2009) maintains that an objective factuality is just one part of the overall picture of crime in society whereas, from her position, narratives are perhaps better used as a guide to behaviour rather than being treated as a representation of what actually happened. Presser (2009) is open that ‘to contemplate a narrative criminology forces us to engage with myriad epistemological, sociological and methodological issues, and to exchange ideas with academics in other fields’ (p. 179) – a concept she has since furthered (along with Sveinung Sandberg) in arguing for narrative criminology as a form of critical criminology, considering that ‘the complexities of stories are a good match for the complexities of crime, harm and justice in late modernity – core concerns of critical criminology’ (2019: 131). In their plea on behalf of narrative criminology, Maruna and Liem (2021) claim that this interaction between narrative criminology and other branches of criminology is not just useful, but essential to its continued survival. Maruna and Liem (2021) warn that the (not insubstantial) challenges of narrative criminology – including, but not limited to, imprecise measurement, lack of causality and unreliability of testimony – may run the risk of ‘mainstream’ criminologists ‘dismiss[ing] or avoid[ing] the research entirely’ and cause narrative criminology to become no more than a fringe ‘clique’ within the greater disciplinary pantheon, rather than assuming a central position as a theoretical paradigm (p. 8.15). It is precisely this interconnectivity between narrative criminology and other subareas, such as historical criminology, that is argued for here – without such methodological connectivity, both run the risk of devolving into obscurity that Maruna and Liem warn of, to the detriment of not just these subareas, but of criminology-at-large as well.

The trappings of time – the rise of historical criminology

Like narrative criminology, the subarea of historical criminology is one that has long been practiced in an ad hoc way, and yet has only recently started to establish itself as a scholarly entity in its own right. It has been only a matter of several years since Churchill (2017) described it as an intellectual pursuit that ‘lacks a recognised scholarly lineage, shared conceptual resources or common methodological tools and conventions . . . “historical criminology” seems to demand accompanying quotation marks as if to hold it together’ (p. 379). Lawrence (2019) describes a ‘reticence of criminologists to attribute explicative power in relation to the present to historical data’; he notes that for much of the 20th-century ‘it was rare for sociologically trained criminologists to reference or incorporate historical data in their research to any significant degree’ (pp. 493–494).

As Catello (2022) charts in his survey of the field, the term ‘historical criminology’ can be found in research dating back to the early 1910s, albeit used with different meaning to the historical criminology practiced in the contemporary period. Indeed, Catello (2022) found that although ‘historical criminology’ had been used in scholarship for more than a century ‘the way in which the term has been used throughout the 20th century does not support the view that a single scholarly tradition is behind the popularisation of a coherent, overarching use or meaning of the term’ (p. 10). Bosworth (2001) was among the first in recent times to suggest that historical criminology had the potential to challenge dominant (read: arch-empiricist) approaches in the discipline, much in the way that Young (2011) argued in favour of, and narrative criminology also set out to achieve. Referring to the context of her own work on the carceral system, Bosworth (2001) asserts that ‘it is time to do away with old-fashioned ideas of “science” in favour of emotions and ideology . . . the prison should always be situated in its local and temporal context of social problems and government policies . . . we must vanquish certainty with uncertainty and interpretation, leaving room for prisoners’ voices as well as our own’ (p. 439).

In this rallying call, Bosworth essentially outlines the mission statement of historical criminology: to develop and apply historically-informed interpretations of crime and the criminal justice system, in ways that allow us to not only understand modern systems and patterns more effectively, but to challenge them as well. While others (e.g. Godfrey et al., 2008; Knepper and Scicluna, 2010) continued to develop the foundational concepts essential to modern historical criminology in years that followed, David Churchill was among the first to truly focus in on providing an operational, theoretical ‘definition’ of the term. For Churchill (2017), historical criminology differs from previous ‘histories of crime’ in its concern with historical time – ‘rather than seeing it as a unitary, continuous thread running through the chronological expanse . . . [these] newer interpretations centre on multiple speeds, planes or movements of time, intersecting and interrelating in complex ways’ (p. 381). This acknowledgement of the plurality of history and, especially, historical change that underpins much of the current body of scholarship in historical criminology, and offers the most potential to achieve the disruptive effect on traditional criminological work that Bosworth (2001) initially forecasted. Churchill returns to the concept of historical time in 2018, and argues that there are several reasons that a more concerted commitment to historical time may enrich and advance not just historical criminology, but criminology itself on a holistic level. For example, he asserts that closer attention to matters of historical time may shine a light on ‘which aspects of crime and justice are privileged by these periodising frames, and which are marginalised?’ (2018: 9); he also claims that a historical criminology built on the basis of historical time ‘might promote attention to “the past in the present” – how relations to the past inform and shape today’s challenges in crime and justice’ (Churchill, 2018: 10). Again, Churchill’s argument for the embedding of historical time as a cornerstone of historical criminology speaks to a scholarly pursuit that goes beyond a simple retelling of the past, but instead operationalises the past in a way that is reflective of multiple narratives and multiple interpretations, with much utility (and opportunity) for contemporary scholars in the discipline.

In recent years, historical criminology has transformed from an area of research treated ‘with reticence’ (Lawrence, 2019) into a recognised subarea of mainstream criminology, formalised with the creation of various networks and divisions of academic societies which have essentially ‘organised’ the field to a greater extent, such as the British Society of Criminology’s Historical Criminology Network, the Australia and New Zealand Historical Criminology Network, the European Society of Criminology’s Historical Criminology Working Group and the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Historical Criminology. The result is a state of disciplinary discourse that is Yeomans et al. (2020: 253) refer to as ‘conversations in a crowded room . . . in which groups of people (established subgroups and subdisciplines) noisily converse, each on their own terms’ to the point that meaningful interchange is often lost. They assert that one of the only ways that historical criminology can achieve its potential to make an impact on the field is to actively pursue ‘mutually-enriching exchanges between disciplines’ (Yeomans et al., 2020: 254), and in doing so prevent sub disciplinary siloing – something Maruna and Liem (2021) also warned about in their discussion of narrative criminology’s own challenges. For Churchill et al. (2022), historical criminology cannot (and should not) be conceived as a subdiscipline of criminology, but rather as a ‘core approach’ that focuses on how the concept of time and temporality is accounted for and interrogated in criminological research.

Given that temporal context is an inescapable variable within the social sciences, the ‘core approach’ construction of historical criminology suggests that adopting a historically-sensitive perspective has much to offer not just to narrative criminology, but all other criminological subfields – and, further, other disciplines that deal with the subject of crime and/or criminal justice. Inter- or trans-disciplinarity is central to not just Yeomans, Churchill and Channing’s position, but other diverse views on historical criminology’s place in the criminological pantheon. For example, Bleakley and Kehoe (2021) conceptualise historical criminology visually as a spectrum, wherein researchers ‘doing historical criminology’ may err closer towards a more historical approach or a more ‘presentist’ approach alternatively, while still having in common a shared use of methods, and shared methodological approach (e.g. engagement with historical time; contextual periodisation). Of course, this spectrum model continues to be focused internally as a response to questions of where history ends and criminology begins, essentially rejecting the premise of any clear distinction and/or division entirely. Just like narrative criminology, however, historical criminology continues to prove its place within criminology more broadly, while at the same time grappling with its identity, paradigms and guiding frameworks on an internal level.

The historico-narrative approach on a micro-level: seeking individual justice?

There are several avenues of opportunity by which historical and narrative criminology might come together and offer a joint contribution to the discipline, with each approach serving to enrichen and add a greater level of depth to the other. The potential value of this model (described here as the historico-narrative approach) can take place on a micro- or macro-level, each allowing for a revisitation (or reinterpretation, even) of the past in distinct ways that can, further, inform our understanding of contemporary crime patterns and criminal justice practice. Turning to history to take advantage of its explanatory powers on a microlevel is also the modus operandi of life-course criminologists. As Godfrey et al. (2017: 6) describe, life-course criminology delves into individual histories to assess a range of factors such as ‘the correlations between relationship formation, employment, residential stability, and desistance from crime’. Earlier, Godfrey et al. (2007) conducted a large-scale longitudinal archival study on 600 persistent adult offenders from the North-West of England, determining that historical actions taken by the state to encourage desistance were less effective than life events outside of the state’s control (e.g. marriage, employment, parenthood). Where life-course criminology differs, however, is that is takes a comparably myopic focus to the past: by its nature, life-course studies focus on the history of the individual and, while there are obvious connections between personal experience and the broader historical context it takes place in, this is typically not the primary concern of life-course and/or narrative criminologists, and is often left underdeveloped in favour of a more individualised approach to life history.

Historical criminologists have regularly explored the way that addressing the gaps and silences, often encountered when studying historically marginalised communities (e.g. women, minority racial/ethnic groups), can precipitate a fundamental shift in our approach to even the most oversaturated of crimes (e.g. Bleakley, 2021; Nagy, 2021; Seal and Neale, 2020). A prime example of this can be observed in Rubenhold’s (2019) The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, a popular non-fiction book about the lives of the canonical five women killed in the Whitechapel Murders of 1888, grounded in archival research. Rather than persist in attempts to ‘solve’ the Whitechapel murders more than a century after the fact, Rubenhold ‘makes clear that she does not intend to proceed with an inquisitorial approach to the case. Instead she adopts a sociological standpoint, using the canonical five as an entry point into a discussion of the varied experiences of Victorian [era] women who all, for one reason or another, found themselves living in one of London’s most destitute areas’ (Bleakley, 2022: 12).

Rubenhold is not the first to place an emphasis on the lives of the Whitechapel victims rather than their killer, however ‘The Five’ was published at a time where the contestation of popular social narratives has become more accepted, or even de rigueur in some sectors. This is especially true where a historical narrative is gendered as with the Whitechapel murders, where a historical focus on the murderer (i.e. ‘Jack the Ripper’) has done ‘a terrible and ongoing disservice to the women that were so brutally killed . . . [and] provided a role model for subsequent misogynist serial murderers and abusers’ (Gray, 2018: 52). The dominance of an offender-centred narrative in this case has been attributed, in part, to the reluctance of professional historians to engage with the Whitechapel murders. Gray (2018: 52) asserts that there has traditionally been ‘a general attitude among historians of crime that “Jack the Ripper” is the preserve of amateurs, that we (as “proper” historians) should avoid getting our hands dirty with what is often seen as a merely pointless game of pinning the blame on the usual suspects’. The result of disengagement is a vacuum that, as Grey points out, is filled by non-experts and the entertainment industry, where the romanticised myth of the Ripper became embedded in the zeitgeist. As noted, Rubenhold is not the first to address the lives of the victims; however, in a post-#MeToo society where the ownership of personal narratives (and agency) has been increasingly returned to women victimised by men, ‘The Five’ found a receptive audience and, thus, better challenge the established narrative of the Whitechapel murders.

From a historical criminology perspective, the impact of Rubenhold’s work goes beyond revisiting the Whitechapel murders: rather, it uses the biographies of the Ripper victims to shine a light on persistent social factors (e.g. alcoholism, unemployment, family breakdown, domestic violence) that contributed to their vulnerability to victimisation and, importantly, continue to underpin the same kinds of victimisation in the present context. While this achieves the objective of historical criminology to bring the ‘past into the present’ (Churchill, 2018; Lawrence, 2019), it does not achieve this through a simple retelling of historical facts. Here, narrative is central: the story of each of ‘The Five’ is communicated in a way that restores identity (and agency) to a group of women who have, in the past, been treated too often in a reductive and dehumanised way.

Indeed, we need not venture to the 1880s as Rubenhold does if our goal is to explore the importance of elevating the personal narratives of marginalised victims: there are echoes of the Whitechapel victims’ stories in the modern tale of the Long Island Serial Killer (LISK). sometimes referred to as the ‘Craigslist killer’, who is credited with between 10 and 16 murders – in most cases, sex workers – from 1996 to 2010 (Kolker, 2013). As with the Whitechapel murders more than a century ago, the victims of LISK were largely ignored by police and public alike until their bodies were discovered and, even then, the victims’ social identities were largely reduced to the role they were performing immediately before death, as sex workers. What is missed in this version of events are the personal narratives that go some way towards explaining the circumstances that preceded them taking to sex work, and putting them in the position to be targeted by LISK. Should a historico-narrative approach be adopted in relation to the LISK victims, just as Rubenhold (2019) undertook in relation to the Whitechapel victims, a similar (and more contemporary) level of understanding would undoubtedly emerge that stood to re-humanise LISK’s victims and, to some extent, provide insight into how to prevent the kinds of social conditions that made them particularly susceptible to victimisation.

Filling the gaps in the Ripper story by focusing explicitly on ‘what came before’ effectively shifts the narrative in a direction that many had not considered prior, with tangible impacts for the contemporary response to these notorious events. After The Five was released (to critical acclaim), the industry that had been built around the Ripper crimes over a century experienced substantial change: there was an uptick in feminist-oriented, victim-centric tours of the local area, and the Jack the Ripper Museum in Whitechapel – heavily criticised for its exploitative treatment of the victims – was forced into closure (BBC Arts, 2019; BBC News, 2021). While the campaigns for these changes began before The Five’s release (and thus the extent to which they can be attributed to Rubenhold’s research is uncertain) there is a correlation between the release of the book and its championing of the victims’ stories and these efforts coming to fruition, suggesting the opportunity that historico-narrative approaches may have to disrupt even the most resistant and established histories of crime. Rubenhold’s work is but one example of how historico-narrative criminology can fill extant gaps in relation to individual cases: her archival method, necessitated by the period of time since the events occurred, is a useful model for cases from earlier in the timeline, but is not the only avenue by which such silences can be addressed (Bleakley, 2022).

From a presentist perspective, the coronial inquest and public inquiry system can also serve as a platform for elevating unheard voices and effectively reshaping the narrative of individual crimes, in a manner that is essential to the historical record. In most judicial contexts, the coronial inquest serves not as a prosecutorial body, but as an entity that is primarily concerned with establishing the truth around events leading to a death (Freckelton, 2007). While the coronial inquest has several functional purposes, such as identifying a cause of death, perhaps its most important function is the establishment of the narrative of a crime, constructed via the various (and, often, competing) narratives presented by witnesses, experts and suspects. To fully understand a coronial inquest or public inquiry, the application of narrative criminology has obvious benefits in that it allows us to better understand the subjective motivations and underlying context of each personal ‘story’ that contributes to the official narrative that ultimately emerges from the proceedings (Bruner, 1987; Presser and Sandberg, 2019).

There is also a role for these narratives in the sense they can reshape the historical record by elevating the voices of the (previously) voiceless, much in the same way that Rubenhold’s work on the Whitechapel murders was able to do. Take, for example, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, a public inquiry conducted in Australia over several years in the 2010s. Covering an extensive set of allegations from across the nation, the royal commission was a fundamentally truth-seeking exercise predicated in large part on giving victims of child sexual abuse opportunities to speak about their experiences in a public forum, in a way they were unable to (or prevented from) previously (Mitchell, 2021). While these proceedings did result in criminal prosecutions, this was not the primary goal – rather, the purpose was more so to examine narratives of the past in an effort to understand safeguarding failures (and prevent them occurring in future), as well as restoring victims’ agency through a public recognition of their abuse, and ensuring that their stories would be committed to the historical record (Bosworth, 2001; Lawrence, 2019). This is a key case study of historico-narrative criminology in action: not only did the royal commission’s process require a chronologically-contextualised investigation of the past (in the vein of historical criminology), but also an appreciation of the contribution of personal narrative to our understanding of crime and victimisation (as narrative criminology supports). The result is a more holistic, complex perspective on past crimes that not only allows for deeper understanding of criminal behaviour and systemic responses, but also has utility in the sense that it offers a cathartic experience for those who are given a platform to tell their stories and, at the very least, contribute to the historical record in a meaningful sense (Presser, 2009; Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016).

The historico-narrative approach on a macro-level: to challenge institutional myths?

For the historical criminologist, ‘the archive’ (in whatever form that may be in a given context) represents perhaps the key source of data from which interpretations can be made, and conclusions reached. Though various forms exist, the most expansive cache of historical primary source material is typically found in the archive managed by the state, which holds documents that can provide valuable insight into governmental and bureaucratic decision-making. This is useful to the historical criminologist who seeks to explore the institutions of the criminal justice system, and how they operate: by developing an understanding of why systems operate in a certain way, the historical criminologist is better placed to identify avenues for improvement and reform (Bosworth, 2001; Churchill et al., 2022). This understanding is predicated on an engagement with historical time, without which it would be impossible to decipher the complex sociocultural, political and personal contexts that informed the creation of archival material in the first place (Churchill, 2018). Herein lies yet another intersection of historical and narrative criminology which fundamentally demands their use in combination with each other. Ultimately, the archives are more than simply a source of ‘historical data’ – each document held within reflects the world as told by the person who created it and, indeed, those who saw fit to preserve it as part of the archival record as well (Cook, 1984; Ketelaar, 2005). By nature, the archive is a repository of narratives that shape societies understanding of the past and, from there, who we are in the present as well.

The origins and purpose of our institutions, and the people who serve in them, are tied up in the narrative of the archive; as a result, the archive has the power both to reinforce dominant hegemony and challenge it, depending on the level of historico-narrative perspective that is applied when interrogating the material that it holds. The old cliche that ‘history is written by the victor’ refers to the generally-accepted view that our perspective of the past is invariably shaped in the favour of the powerful, often at the expense of the marginalised. Derrida (1996: 4) highlights the importance of the archive to this process, noting that ‘there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory’. From Derrida’s standpoint, the narrative reflected in the archives has power to legitimise systems (and governments) by constructing them in strategic ways. For example, it is far simpler to justify settler colonialism when the only archival documentation preserved by the state reflects the ‘best intentions’ of government, while at the same time excluding the perspectives of the Indigenous communities in whose own narrative ‘colonialism’ is described by a different word – ‘genocide’. Eric Ketelaar (2005: 284) asserts that ‘these [archival] instruments have an intrinsic power . . . public and private agents do not merely observe and describe reality: they shape people, events and the environment into entities that will fit their categorisations . . . [and] this social reification entails that there are virtually no other facts than those that are contained in records’. When a state is largely responsible for maintaining its own archival records, it stands to reason that those documents will (generally) reflect but one perspective: the state’s own.

Criminology has already shown a commitment to balancing the archival narrative, even prior to a formalised ‘historical’ or ‘narrative’ criminology: there is a long tradition of utilising oral histories in the discipline (e.g. Laub, 1984), although the qualitative methods used to gather such material have perhaps been less widely-adopted (and/or impactful) in contexts where an over-emphasis on quantitative metrics described by Young (2011) is more notable, such as the United States. Here, again, is a point of intersection at which narrative and historical criminology can come together to mutually beneficial ends. As narrative criminologists conduct research that highlights the utility of qualitative, narrative-oriented research, the product of their work also provides historical criminologists (now, and in the future) with source material that does not come from the state-run archives, and offers an independent perspective on the past that cannot always be ascertained from government-held, or government-produced, records.

This is not to suggest that all historical data derived from the archive is inherently biased or problematic. That said, where an archive has been created and maintained by the state (as if often the case in a criminal justice context) there is perhaps a greater need for critical interrogation to overcome the risks of creator-bias. Cook (1984: 31) argues that ‘in-house archivists . . . despite the best will in the world and solid professional leadership, [are] usually impotent before the power of their bureaucratic masters’. He illustrates this using the example of Richard Nixon, musing on what the result would have been should Nixon had been in control of his own records-management process; however, we need not travel that far into the past to hypothesise, with questions around the lax and/or purposefully obstructive approach of the Trump administration to presidential records over the period 2017 to 2021 (Langford et al., 2022). While still a very recent history, the ‘archival silence’ of the Trump era has already had a demonstrable impact on areas of future study for historically-minded criminologists – how to understand the events of the January 6, 2021, incursion at the US Capitol in decades, or centuries, to come when the records historians will come to rely on were never created in the first place? For this reason, Manoff (2017) describes the purposeful strategy of the state not keeping and/or maintaining records of its actions as ‘archival violence’ and argues that ‘it is crucial to establish how power is wielded to shape the truth’ (p. 7).

Alternately, it is not just exclusion, but digitisation that also has potential to impact the way in which future researchers navigate archival research. Discussing the increasing digitisation of archives, Guiney (2020) cautions that it remains a ‘value-laden process that is central to the creation of “official history” and all the disputes over power, legitimacy and hegemony that come with it’ (p. 89). He goes on to observe that archival violence in the future may differ completely from the archival violence of exclusion, as described above: rather, Guiney speculates that ‘in an age of digital abundance, the State has the capacity . . . to record more about its activities than ever before’; as a result, Guiney (2020) notes that rather than files being excluded from the archive, they may instead be ‘merely hidden in plain sight’ – unable to be found amidst the sheer volume of files preserved amid the digitisation process (p. 88). For future historical criminologists conducting research on the Trump era, ‘knowing your period’ and an application of historical time may go some way towards understanding why the archival record reflects the historical narrative that it does. It becomes increasingly clear that, to achieve this, official written records will not suffice – the ‘violence of the archives’ is such that a combination of official and unofficial (e.g. oral, personal narrative) sources will be required to develop a richer understanding of the period. Absent an appropriate historico-narrative lens, the challenge will be to develop a critical and subjective appreciation of the historical narrative in such a way to not only understand what is missing, but also the Trump administration’s objective in constructing the narrative in the way it did.

The archival record around Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government provides a historical example of how the ‘archival silence’ of the Trump era may be treated by historico-narrative criminologists in future. Known for its ultra-conservative policies, embodied by the bombastic premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the Bjelke-Petersen government held power in the Australian state of Queensland for around 20 years, from 1968 until 1987 (Wear, 2002). Like Trump, Bjelke-Petersen was a controversial conservative politician with a distrust for the media, as well as other forms of left-wing opposition, going so far as to unofficially ban public protest in the late 1970s (Brennan, 1983; Wear, 2002). Bjelke-Petersen’s treatment of the protest movement offers an example of how the archive can be constructed in a consequential way. When exploring the archival material on the July 1971 anti-apartheid protests, the police files (e.g. correspondence, radio logs) held by the Queensland State Archives reflect a fairly straight-forward series of events: protesters gathered en masse to oppose the South African rugby team’s tour of the state, police moved to disperse said protesters based on public complaints (Hambrecht, 1971; Whitrod, 1971). This simplistic version of events belies a far more complex narrative, however: one in which protesters were brutally beaten by police officers given a ‘green light’ from the government to participate in violent repressive tactics in order to repress protesters (Condon, 2013; Whitton, 1989: 10). Historical data reflecting this version of events does not appear in the police files, for obvious reasons – where it appears in the archives, it can be found in the records of correspondence from members of the public to politicians, as well as an external report that compiled accounts of police brutality from the protesters themselves, again located in the political correspondence files (e.g. Cowen, 1971).

Had we been completely reliant on documents produced by the state (e.g. police files), the events of July 1971 would be recorded in history as a standard dispersal of protest action; only by incorporating outside voices into the archive was it possible to cultivate a more holistic and pluralistic version of events. It is possible to reconcile these two competing ‘versions’ in the archive through the adoption of a historico-narrative approach, which allows us to not just place the material in its appropriate historical context but to treat each narrative as an entity unto itself (Presser, 2009; Presser and Sandberg, 2019). While neither may be entirely factually accurate, both nevertheless serve an important purpose: one to prop-up and vindicate an institution which demonstrated a penchant for violence, the other to combat the narrative pushed by a state which – with full control over the historical and social narrative – sought to marginalise protesters as a dangerous movement requiring repression (Manoff, 2017). Understanding not just the facts and context of history, but the purpose of the stories told in the archives, permits the historico-narrative criminologist to approach archival documents not just as data waiting for them to apply meaning to, but material with inherent meaning, created with an underlying purpose in mind that is equally as important (at least) as what the source itself actually says.

The historico-narrative approach as a vehicle for sociocultural change

A key purpose of criminology as a discipline has always been to explain social deviance and criminal behaviour. Doing so has always necessitated some level of engagement with an overarching explanatory narrative discourse. Indeed, the traditional ‘schools’ of criminological theory are all underpinned by agreed-upon ‘explanations’ – whether the narrative is to blame spiritual corruption or demonic possession (as in the Preclassical School), or remonstrate on the condition of human nature itself, as the likes of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham did in the Classical School era (Dooley, 2013). The fact that criminology has built on these different narrative frameworks to develop as a discipline is more than just a matter of historical curiosity; there are tangible consequences to these theoretical narratives that have a great impact not just on how we perceive crime (and those who ‘do crime’) as a society, but also how we respond to it. Maruna and Liem (2021: 8.4) argue that ‘the core idea of narrative criminology is not only that stories help make sense of lives, but that stories themselves, when internalized by human actors, make “criminologically relevant things happen”’. One such ‘criminologically relevant thing’ that resonates is the architecture of the very criminal justice system we take for granted in contemporary society. The preoccupation with deferring to the Constitution in the United States of America demonstrates the lasting relevance of criminological narrative. Written in the late 18th Century – around the same time that Classical theory was at its zenith – the US Constitution is highly reflective of a very specific theoretical perspective on what causes criminal behaviour and, thereby, what type of criminal justice system is best suited to respond to it (Freilich, 2015). When the US legal system assesses what is and is not ‘constitutional’ what it is really doing is attempting to interpret modern criminal justice issues against an explanatory narrative model developed more than 200 years in the past.

Legal provisions set out in the United States Constitution have an impact on the experience of every person who engages with the criminal justice system, in any way – because of this, there are few more powerful examples of the real repercussions of our narrative approach to criminology. There are unquestionable benefits to adopting this historico-narrative approach for contemporary criminologists in other areas, also. An abolitionist taking a historico-narrative approach to the (relatively recent) history of policing may find a new avenue to challenge the prevailing narrative that modern police are an immutable ‘constant’ that are necessary to the survival of human civilisation (Channing, 2015). The anti-racist advocate who does the same may look to the flawed narratives on atavism promoted by Cesare Lombroso, and in doing so challenge the pseudo-scientific basis for modern scientific racism – and, in particular, the repercussions that criminological ‘stories’ like those pushed by Lombroso have historically had on minority relationships with the criminal justice system (Musumeci, 2018). The impact of taking a historico-narrative approach to these subjects goes beyond a simple appreciation of the history of these explanatory narratives, however. While it is important to understand where our institutions came from, what is more important is to develop a more historically-sensitive understanding of where collective sociocultural perceptions of crime have originated from (Churchill, 2017; Churchill et al., 2022; Lawrence, 2019). Even more than challenging the institutions that make up our justice system, this interrogation of social attitudes and beliefs is vital. These sociocultural factors are what sustains the criminal justice system, regardless of the context in which institutions were first created; while this historical detail is important, its true power lies in the influence the past has on social and cultural belief systems, which have immediate impacts on justice outcomes in the present context.

In some jurisdictions, there have been attempts to apply a historico-narrative approach (albeit, not using that terminology) within a contemporary criminal justice framework, to mixed success. The case of Bugmy v The Queen [2013] was a case in which the High Court of Australia considered if the collective experience of Indigenous deprivation should be considered by the legal system as a mitigating factor when sentencing – essentially, whether or not this shared history constituted a relevant part of the convicted person’s ‘personal narrative’ (Anthony et al., 2017). The case centred on William Bugmy, a 31-year-old Indigenous man who was found guilty of assaulting two prison officers and causing grievous bodily harm to another; lawyers for Bugmy argued that not only did his individual experience of deprivation in childhood constitute a mitigating circumstances for sentencing purposes, but so too did the general experience of the Indigenous community of which he was a part, asking the court ‘to affirm specific considerations that arise in the context of the likely consequences of being born Aboriginal in Australia’ (Krasnostein, 2014: 12). The court acknowledged these ‘likely consequences’ including lower life expectancies for Indigenous people, high rates of substance abuse, over-incarceration and poverty among others; however, while agreeing that personal experience of these factors constituted deprivation which may not decrease over time (and may thus allow for sentence mitigation), being an Indigenous person in-and-of itself was not enough to support an automatic sentence reduction, under the principles of individualised justice (Krasnostein, 2014; Rothman, 2014).

The result in Bugmy v The Queen provides an example of the historico-narrative approach in action: here, the High Court (a) affirmed the Indigenous experience in Australia as one with a unique historical context, and; (b) re-asserted the primacy of individual experience of disadvantage, rather personal deprivation being assumed solely by virtue of membership of a disadvantaged population. While a limited interpretation of personal narrative, it nonetheless accepts the principles outlined by Maruna (2001), Presser (2009) and others in relation to how an individual’s experiences have an effect on desistance, and their criminal justice outcomes. While incorporating the historical experience of Indigenous Australians collectively in the Bugmy decision would have provided a more refined example of the historico-narrative approach, the acceptance that Indigenous Australians are more susceptible to deprivation as a product of lengthy systemic oppression nonetheless recognises the concept of historical time as championed by Churchill et al. (2022): the decision affirms that events do not occur in discrete ‘periods’ but, instead, the events that occur in one time flow into the ‘next period’ and have an impact on outcomes beyond the direct repercussions of the events themselves. With further understanding how collective historical trauma impacts on personal narratives, the decision to not directly consider Indigeneity as a criterion for sentence mitigation may be revisited in the Australian legal system in future. Should this occur, a historico-narrative approach would provide a highly useful paradigm for interpreting the complex interrelationship between history and personal narrative, in a way that brings together two emergent strands of criminology towards a common purpose: to enable transformative justice.

Conclusions

When Young (2011) exhorted his peers in criminology to better engage with ‘the criminological imagination’ what he was asking them to do was to focus less on experiments and data, and more on stories – the lived experience of those who are affected by crime and the criminal justice system, as victim or perpetrator. Young believed that these stories could illuminate aspects of the criminological reality that were otherwise being missed in the rush to exclude personal narratives as too subjective, or inconsistent (Maruna and Liem, 2021). This shifting emphasis, labelled narrative criminology by Presser (2009), has become increasingly established in the years since as an important emergent strand within the discipline. The rise of narrative criminology comes in conjunction with that of another subarea that is also concerned with stories, albeit in a distinct way. For historical criminology, the stories of the past have an ‘explanatory power’ in relation not just to the period being examined, but (importantly) how the events of that period contribute to a continuity of historical time which informs the present (Churchill, 2018; Lawrence, 2019).

The shared focus on narratives shared by both narrative and historical criminology stands as a key intersection point, where collaboration is not just possible but necessary. Traditionally, the way that narratives are treated by historical criminologists has differed from the approach taken by their narrative colleagues: rather than an emphasis on analysing a narrative’s content for motivation, symbolic meaning and purpose (as a narrative criminologist might), the historical criminologist has typically been more concerned with the firmer foundation of ‘historical fact’. Nevertheless, there is also a recognition in historical criminology of the plurality of historical narratives, and the importance of this for understanding the varied experiences that different groups in society have with the criminal justice system, now and in the past (Churchill et al., 2022). This plurality ultimately invites the subjectivity that is central to narrative criminology into the historical criminologist’s world, again reinforcing the potential of a combined historico-narrative approach to develop more holistic understandings of the past and, from there, contemporary criminal justice issues as well.

The historico-narrative approach proposed here is designed to strengthen the work of historical and narrative criminologists, not replace it. For the narrative criminologist, to incorporate a level of historical research (especially archival research) could add new dimensions to both the personal and collective narratives that fall within their field’s purview – historical research can fill the gaps and silences in the personal narratives of individuals, restoring their agency and enabling social justice, and can go even further in terms of providing essential background context allowing us to challenge dominant sociocultural perspectives on crime, and our criminal justice institutions. Effectively, historical research provides additional fodder to the narrative criminologist, acknowledging that an individual’s choices and perspective is not something that simply occurs in the present, but is dependent on the past as well.

So too can narrative criminology add value to the work of the historical criminologist: it facilitates the type of content analysis that historical criminologists already recognise is necessary to unpacking the archival material which often constitutes their core data. The principles of narrative criminology can assist historical criminologists to ‘read between the lines’ of archival material, to account for the motivation and perspective of the creator of the documents, as well as their purpose when creating them in the first place (Cook, 1984). Further, the narratives of the past can in themselves stand as research foci for the historical criminologist, important as they are to determining social and political responses to crime, and the development of the criminal justice system over time. The historical criminologist is a scholar who appreciates the ebbs and flows of historical time (Churchill, 2018) and, with these sociocultural scripts playing such a role in this process, it is vital that historical criminologists continue to engage with historical criminal justice narratives. It has been said that ‘the past is prologue’ – that everything in our history provides context and foundation for events happening in the present. This only serves to reinforce the intrinsic importance of a collaborative effort between historical and narrative criminologists, allowing each emerging strand of criminology to thrive alongside the other.