DEVELOPMENT AND FRACTURE OF A DISCIPLINE: LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT BERKELEY

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12081
• Date: 01 November 2015
• Author: JOHANN KOEHLER
• Published date: 01 November 2015

DEVELOPMENT AND FRACTURE OF A DISCIPLINE:

LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT

BERKELEY∗

JOHANN KOEHLER

Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, School of Law, University of

California—Berkeley

KEYWORDS: history of criminology, professionalization, radical criminology,

neo-institutional theory, legitimacy, institutional logic

In the early twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley opened its

doors to police professionals for instruction in “police science.” This program ulti-

mately developed into the full-fledged School of Criminology, whose graduates helped

shape American criminology and criminal justice until well into the 1970s. Scholar-

ship at the School of Criminology eventually fractured into three distinct traditions:

“Administrative criminology” applied scientific methods in pursuit of refining law en-

forcement practices, “law and society” coupled legal scholarship with social scientific

methods, and “radical criminology” combined Marxist critiques of the state with com-

munity activism. Those scientific traditions relied on competing epistemic premises and

normative aspirations, and they drew legitimacy from different sources. Drawing on

oral histories and archival data permits a neo-institutional analysis of how each of

these criminological traditions emerged, acquired stability, and subsided. The Berke-

ley School of Criminology provides fertile ground to examine trends in the develop-

ment of criminal justice as a profession, criminology as a discipline and its place in

elite universities, the uncoupling of criminology from law and society scholarship, and

criminal justice policy’s disenchantment with the academy. These legacies highlight

how the development of modern criminology and the professionalization of American

law enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2015.53.issue-4/issuetoc.

The author kindly thanks the interviewees for participating in this research, Brendan Dooley for

help with the American Society of Criminology’s Oral History Project, and the librarians at the

Bancroft Library of the University of California—Berkeley and at the Radzinowicz Library of

the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, for their invaluable assistance in securing

the necessary archival materials. The author also thanks the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Pro-

gram and the Coblentz Civil Rights Endowment for generously supporting this research. Con-

structive insights provided by Calvin Morrill, Keramet Reiter, Ashley Rubin, Jonathan Simon,

Tobias Smith, Franklin Zimring, and the anonymous reviewers greatly improved the article. Ear-

lier versions of this research were presented at the 2013 annual conference of the Western Society

of Criminology, held in Berkeley, California, and at the 2013 annual meeting of the American

Society of Criminology, held in Atlanta, Georgia. Direct correspondence to Johann Koehler, Ju-

risprudence and Social Policy Program, School of Law, University of California—Berkeley, 2240

Piedmont Ave., Berkeley, CA 94720 (e-mail: jkoehler@berkeley.edu).

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12081

CRIMINOLOGY Volume Number 513–544 2015 513

514 KOEHLER

In the early part of the twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley

(herein often “the University” or “Berkeley”) became the site for an innovative experi-

ment in the realization of a Progressive Era project. In 1916, the first chief of the Berkeley

Police Department, August Vollmer, pined for a new approach to the administration of

law enforcement based on modern scientific techniques. He called for a School of Crimi-

nology (herein often the “School”) for the special training of police officers at the neigh-

boring university, citing its establishment as “a requirement of the times” (Vollmer and

Schneider, 1916: 878). Those times necessitated a consideration of the role of law en-

forcement as a profession, and Vollmer fancied himself as its champion. The legacy that

Vollmer left behind in his efforts to imbue criminology with the legitimacy and trappings

of a traditional academic discipline and profession is a story of fits, starts, and frustra-

tions. During the course of 60 years, criminology at Berkeley experienced a tumultuous

rise and fall. It rose to a preeminent position in both the establishment of criminology

and the professionalization of justice administration, and it then descended to a position

of notoriety in the policy sphere in the period immediately preceding its dissolution once

liberal scholarship on law enforcement reform had been displaced to the School of Law.

Indeed, before the School of Criminology’s dissolution in 1976, it had come to be recog-

nized as the embodiment of a generally prevailing illegitimacy endemic to criminal justice

studies in elite institutions of higher learning.

The School of Criminology at Berkeley therefore provides fertile ground to examine

important trends in the development of criminal justice as a profession; the legitimacy of

criminology as a discipline and its place on elite university campuses; the uncoupling of

criminology from law and society; and criminal justice policy’s eventual disenchantment

with the academy. This article charts all four of these trends, and in so doing, it demon-

strates that the development of criminology and the professionalization of American law

enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.

The School owed its founding to the efforts of Vollmer and his students, who doggedly

pursued an agenda of modernization in law enforcement without providing an argument

for the form that such modernization should take beyond rudimentary appeals to techno-

cratic ideals. They formulated a vocationally oriented “administrative criminology” that

was focused on improving the administration of justice, but this departed from the ap-

proach to criminological knowledge production practiced elsewhere in the country. The

failure to specify whether administrative criminology was a vocational or an academic en-

terprise also created ruptures with the institutional support on which criminology could

rely in its early years. Thus, the absence of a coherent institutional logic in administrative

criminology resulted in a gradual fragmentation and stratification of police education into

various groups without a shared value set.

By the 1960s, the School witnessed a failure to maintain cohesion between the academic

and the professional members of the discipline, and support for the School’s existence

on the Berkeley campus diminished. Shortly thereafter, the Russell Sage Foundation

launched a program of supporting scholarship that connected law with social science and

funded the establishment of Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS).

Many faculty members from the School of Criminology would be closely connected with

that Center, and it soon arose to prominence as a producer of “law and society” scholar-

ship (Wheeler, 1994). Contemporaneously, the School expanded its faculty and incubated

“radical criminology,” which was characterized both by a preoccupation with inequalities

of power and class and by a commitment to social activism in the neighboring community.

LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT BERKELEY 515

The three intellectual strands of scholarship represented within the School, administra-

tive and radical criminologies and law and society, were not always harmonious; each

professed a different set of epistemic premises about the nature and goals of criminolog-

ical scholarship, and they derived their legitimacy from different sources, depending on

the institutional field they defined for the knowledge they produced.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Previously, the story of the Berkeley School has been told as a case study in either “the

limits of academic tolerance” (Geis, 1995, p. 277) or as a casualty of academic politics

(Morn, 1995), or it has been studied with the purpose of piercing through the fog of ac-

rimony to clarify who was to blame for its dissolution (Schwendinger and Schwendinger,

2014).1To do so, the interactions among scholars, research groups, and university offices

are represented as though the dissolution of the School was a political response to satisfy

individual or academic imperatives, such as the School’s increasing reorientation away

from providing professionally trained law enforcement officials ready to fill the needs of

justice administration.

This analysis of the School is oriented toward a different purpose altogether. Apply-

ing a neo-institutional theoretical framework clarifies how criminology failed to articu-

late a system of values and norms around which professionals working in the field could

coalesce, and this failure resulted in continuing skepticism and bewilderment about the

appropriateness and function of universities in facilitating law enforcement profession-

alization more broadly. Moreover, the institutional logics of the various and competing

scientific research programs were shaped and managed within the organizational con-

fines of the School so as to project an institutional identity of legitimacy. However, be-

cause the criminological traditions in question relied on competing institutional logics, the

School is therefore theorized as part of a complex web of intellectual projects and bureau-

cratic constraints, and it is viewed through multiple levels of units of analysis (compris-

ing individual scholars, cohesive research programs, intellectual fields, and institutional

imperatives).

The following departs from previous analyses by eschewing a functionalist interpreta-

tion of the viability of a scientific research program or profession by reference to how

well it satisfies exigencies such as the need to provide efficient solutions (including, for

example, the School’s ability to produce effective police officers). It also departs from

an approach to the sociology of science associated with work by Bourdieu (1988, 2004)

and Collins (1998). Those frameworks view the intellectual field as part of a competition

for the scarce resource of scholarly attention, thus giving rise to Collins’s claim about the

axiomatic coexistence of only three to six “schools” of thought at a given time. This frame-

work is deficient in two respects. First, as noted by Lamont (2001), it imagines scholars as

rational actors who seek to maximize their position within the intellectual field’s attention

space. It thus discounts the many possible reasons that may explain a scientific research

program’s development and survival beyond the ability of scholars within that program to

1. I owe much to the impressive exposition of the School’s history found in these aforementioned

efforts. However, as will be explained in detail, they undertheorize the School by overlooking how

its scientific research programs are themselves distinct units of analysis, and they elide an analysis

of the search for legitimacy engaged by the institutions in question.