IN a letter to Home Secretary Rab Butler in June 1957, the Howard League for Penala Reform decried the fact that the UK lacked an established centre for criminological research while "most continental countries have one or more institutes of criminology and even small universities have chairs in criminology". The government responded enthusiastically and within four years an independent institute had been established at Cambridge.
Forty years on, Ireland continues to lag far behind. While teaching and research in criminology are carried out in a systematic fashion at many universities in England and elsewhere, there is still no academic department of criminology in this State.
Research in the area is considered something of a novelty. There can befew other modern societies in which the causes and consequences of crime are so poorly understood and the activities of criminal justice agencies are so opaque.
But criminological research is important. It is not a form of academic indulgence. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how effective strategies to tackle rising crime rates can be devised in the absence of any detailed understanding of the nature and dynamics of this difficult social problem.
It seems scarcely credible that vast and increasing amounts of public money can be directed to law enforcement without any critical debate 11 about the purposes of punishment or the most acceptable modes of social control.
The informational vacuum which exists at the heart of the decision making process means that principled high level discussion simply cannot be sustained.
In order to rectify this situation the Government should work to foster an environment in which public discussions are informed by accurate information and rigorous analysis. A good start to this process would be the establishment without further delay of an independent centre for criminological research.
The opening research agenda for such a centre would have several priorities. At a basic level, it is important to unravel the geographical distribution of crime and to understand how levels of crime have changed over time. We also need to get a picture of how these trends' relate to demographic and socio economic shifts or to changes in opportunity structures.
Similarly, it would be important to investigate how the various criminal justice agencies (police, probation, courts, prisons) exercise their discretion, account for their actions, inter act and overlap. To do this would involve tracking a series of cases see how the system operates at every level from the processing of the initial complaint to arrest, to charge, prosecution conviction and sentence.
Other projects might involve community victimisation surveys, which would give some indication both of the magnitude of unreported and an recorded crime what criminologists call the "dark figure" and of the feelings and attitudes of victims.
This would provide an interesting point of contrast with Garda statistics. Equally essential would be a study of sentencing practice and some evaluation of the relative efficacy of various penalties in terms of reducing recidivism.
NO ONE would doubt that in recent years there has been a real increase in the incidence of some of the most serious offences. However, people's fear of crime has grown out of all proportion to the actual risk of victimisation which they face.
A high level of public anxiety can have corrosive effects on quality of life even if this fear is to some extent misplaced. An accurate understanding of patterns of crime would help to put these general anxieties in context and perhaps refine or even alleviate them.
The Minister for Justice, Mrs Owen, revealed recently that the average annual cost of keeping one prisoner in custody was £45,000. The Government has not been slow to several hundred additional prison cells will be made available as part of its "war on crime" and to provide for the likely increase in the remand population which will follow any change to the law on bail.
A commitment to fund research on a reasonable scale say, equivalent to keeping 10 prisoners in custody for a year would be enough to create a small research centre. Seen in this perspective the lack of attention to research is all the more shocking.
It would, of course, be unrealistic to expect such a research centre to provide a "quick fix" for an intractable social problem. However, what it could do is further our understanding of the true level and nature of crime and the options which are available to deal with it. It would also sharpen our ability to think critically and help us to devise and evaluate strategies to control crime, support victims and work with offenders.
Nor can the existence of criminological research guarantee that policy making will be driven by reasoned argument and strategic planning. However, if sufficient data about crime in Ireland, this allow for a more informed debate would mean that the cynical scare mongering tactics of some politicians could be exposed. In an environment of increased awareness about crime it will become more difficult to persuade through rhetoric and through rhetoric and mere assertion.
It is important to remember that our crime rate is still low by international standards. We should take the time to learn from jurisdictions where crime has risen rapidly that increased punitiveness is not the only or most successful response. We should seize he opportunity to cultivate an environment where penal policy is directed by understanding rather than condemnation.
This is by no means the soft option. It is much more difficult to confront honestly the messy of crime than to punish ever severely the few who come before courts and are convicted. A meat to establishing a research centre would be one taut strand in the development of a rational and forward looking approach to crime and punishment. All that is lacking is the political will.
