Sport and Crime: Towards a critical criminology of sport
It might be unusual to start with mentioning the acknowledgements in a book review but here we go.
Laura Kelly and Emma Poulton are mentioned as originators of the idea for this book and I can attest that ten years ago I advised Routledge to publish it. The book in hand is the successor text to that sadly unpublished one.
And to look even earlier in the book we might ask why the book is in sport and leisure series not a criminology one?
But as the Oxford Handbook of Sports History (Edelman and Wilson, 2017) contains only 4 mentions of ‘crime’ and one of the grand texts aimed at criminology students (Newburn, 2013) barely mentions sport we should not be surprised.
I am extremely grateful to Andy Millie for pushing me and Bristol University/Policy Press for bearing with me in getting my book accepted as a criminology one.
And whilst we are still looking at such ephemera I must take issue with the claim ‘that this is the first book to fully explore the connections between sports studies and criminology’ (website and back-of-book blurb!).
Introduction
I am cited on page 1 in the Introduction as noticing the ‘sheer potential for a distinctive criminology of sport’. I am mentioned amongst a number of others who I also acknowledge - such as Meek (2013) and Nichols (2010). I give a chapter to considering whether sport can prevent crime or rehabilitate the convicted as those two argue. I’m more equivocal. Millward et al engage in this debate in Chapter 4.
They note Avi Brisman’s review of my book in which he suggests my work was an ‘opening bell or starting pistol’ and likening me to a ‘father wanting acknowledgement of paternity without the responsibilities of child-rearing’. They are kinder but I’m going to admit Avi - who I know and respect - has me sussed, nearly. I am staking a claim - hence my eye-brow raising at the claim that this book is the first. But unlike a stern father I don’t seek to lay down the law and terrorise my children but keep a kindly, perhaps avuncular or god-parental, eye on what is going on in the playground. I’ve always had a ludic intent to my work.
So whether as parent, uncle or god-father I am engaging strongly in this review and have also provided the afterword for Power Played edited by Derek Silva and Liam Kennedy.
Millward et al are hopeful of the future of connections to be made between studies of sport and criminology. They kindly note my emphasis on mundane acts as well as spectacular or scandalous ones involving elites; for instance, they give an example of the banning of skateboards in Norway between 1978 and 1989. I agree their conclusion that ‘the relationship between ‘crime’ and ‘sport’ is so diffuse, contested and broad’ (p5). I would add that our relationship as people and criminologists is similarly diffuse, contested and broad.
My book took a critical criminological stance, even critiquing sports and theories I favoured but also attempted to set out how a variety of criminologies might be applied to sport. Millward et al dive right in so spend some of the introduction setting out some critical points.
Those critical points are:
1) there is a starting point in my work and that of others and
2) citing Francis (2012) they note ‘sport is and always will be harmful’ and
3) those harms include dead workers on Qatar’s World Cup stadia (which they take up in Chapter 7) and increased control and surveillance at sports mega-events (taken up in Chapter 5)
and 4) critical criminology has become diffuse and disputed. Sport makes a ‘novel entry point’ (p6).
Chapter 2 then provides further history of critical criminology and its scant engagement with sport.
Chapter 3 looks at white collar crime and crimes of the powerful in sport. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fédération internationale de Football Association (FIFA).
Using a Foucauldian lens, sports based interventions (SBIs) are examined in Chapter 4. They are found to mask social inequalities and control whilst providing isolated cases of ‘success’ (p9).
Critical Security Studies inform Chapter 5’s examination of sport mega-events but also of athlete’s bodies.
Drawing on ‘edgework’ Chapter 6 looks at mixed martial arts, bare-knuckle boxing and other extreme sports.
Chapter 7 focusses on the upcoming football Word Cup in Qatar and the social harms caused by it.
Chapter 8 sums up and offers a research agenda. I’ll check it against mine in (Hall and Scalia, 2019).
I’ll review a chapter at a time over the next few weeks.
Chapter 2 - Sport and the Criminological Imagination
For criminology theory nerds chapter 2 offers a friendly history of some of the rifts (schisms?) in critical criminology from the work of Taylor, Walton and Young onward. I did my Masters and PhD at Middlesex University when Jock Young, John Lea and Roger Matthews were setting out a ‘left realist’ criminology opposed to right and administrative ones. I recall that at European events friendly but competitive relations were maintained with ‘left idealists’. Vincenzo Ruggiero provided a consistent sociological critique. (He was also my internal examiner. Tony Jefferson the external.)
I feel my criminology to be balanced (?) between ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ but broadened to include green and sexuality perspectives and possibly tempered by spending 20 years as a Home Office administrative and policy civil servant. I was lucky to know, but never work with, Tim Newburn, Ben Bowling, George Mair and Marian Fitzgerald and did work for Mike Hough when he was moonlighting as a pen-pusher.
The roots of my green and queered perspectives on criminology derive from my PhD on joyriding. I focussed on how similar joyriding was to the advertised pleasures of legal driving and how ungreen that was. Also the mainly young male joyriders seemed to have some anxieties around their masculinity. The fieldwork took place in ‘motor projects’ and some of this eventually found its way into my book years later. This will feed into my discussion of Millward et al’s chapter 4.
Whilst I hope that sports criminology is more than the extant studies of football hooligans I have to recognise with, Millward et al, that Taylor’s work on this topic is important. His first thoughts might be seen to be neo-marxist or left idealist in casting football hooligans as resistant ‘class warriors’ whereas his later accounts - moving in a realist direction - misread the Hillsborough disaster.
Taylor applied a critical criminology to a sport he loved. Few others did. We don’t get to find out how Millward et al relate to sport as participants or spectators. I have sometimes wondered if the lack of criminological engagement with topics close to our hearts like driving and car use has been an ambivalence which I think also applies to sport. They mention feminist critiques of left realism and other criminologies and suspect some feminists may not wish to engage with sport unless to note the masculinity of its adherents or the violence towards women of some sportsmen.
I would have been happy if this chapter had just told us that few attempts had been made to look critically at sport, cited my work and a few others on this before discussing Taylor’s trajectory from an idealist critical criminology to a more realist one. That could have been folded into the first chapter leaving space for another chapter of critical criminological engagement with more sports.
Chapter 3 Sport, Corruption and White-Collar Criminality’
The chapter is sub-titled Crimes of the Powerful (1) and we get part 2 of that in Chapter 7.
The focus of this chapter is the proven and suggested corruption within the IOC and FIFA related to a far too close connection with various commercial interests. Most of this work has been done by investigative journalists.
They use Sutherland to add a critical criminological edge to the work of the late Andrew Jennings and co-writers. They open their chapter with a very lengthy, and thoroughly justified, quote from Jennings (2011) in which he opens by admitting he is a criminal. That is that those he seeks to investigate and have prosecuted are so powerful that they can define his activities as criminal but not theirs.
I only briefly referred to Jennings in my work but I can now offer some personal thoughts on corruption. A quote from Andy Brown of the Sports Integrity Initiative sets the scene.
Nic Groombridge, […] argued that current anti-doping rules are ineffective as a deterrent to doping, in parallel to the argument that laws on drugs are ineffective in deterring users from taking them.
He argued that as in society, the focus should be on harm reduction rather than outright prohibition as the war on drugs has been lost. He explained that a needle exchange programme had found that 30% of needles tested showed use of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), illustrating that the public – and not just elite athletes – are widely using such substances.
Groombridge pointed out that athletes are an easier target to prosecute for PIEDS than the general public, as they too easily surrender their rights. Delegates argued that as athletes are involved in competition and the public are not, permitting them to take PIEDs risked forcing other athletes to do the same in order to stay competitive.
This was at the 2018 UEFA Anti-doping Symposium. It was held at the Royal Institution and some of my reflections on this event are here. So where was the corruption?
We were all put up in a five star hotel and catered well. Since I had warned the organisers I was not proposing to say comforting things I was not expecting to be offered any work or contracts but the cosy international milieu suggested to me that had I cut my cloth to fit I might have secured preferment. They all largely agreed with each other and resented my suggestion that corruption was the worse problem. And that doping/anti-doping served - even if not deliberately - as a distraction from that. And the recent news about ongoing corruption in UEFA backs this up.
My association with penal charities and as an occasional lecturer with Kings College London has given me access to some high end law firms for wine and canapé type events and I always sense the power that flows through such places and the interconnections of powerful interests.
Being well fed and entertained is very nice as is being thought to have some significance if only for an hour or two is nicer. But it does not match up to ‘free shotguns, skis, clothing, video games, hunting trips, shopping sprees’ etc noted by Boycoff (2016) that some IOC members received in Utah prior to Salt Lake City getting the Winter Games.
Chapter 4 Governing Young People and Communities Through Sport
Millward et al point us towards the work of Lauss and Szigetvari (2010) who deploy a foucauldian concept of ‘Governing by Fun’ and other critical approaches are used to look at sport as a hook and general good thing (my coining). This is also picked up by Kelly (2013) who evaluates projects aimed at preventing crime or rehabilitating offenders in terms of: ‘sports for all’; ‘social cohesion’; ‘pathway to work’ and ‘giving a voice’ to young people.
This illustrates the difficulty of determining what counts as ‘working’. And Chamberlain (2013) is rightly cited as noting that many evaluations are not robust and rely too often on anecdote.
As a Home Office civil servant in the Probation Service Division I funded a number of projects under the Supervision Grant Scheme (SuGS, named by me for Madness frontman). Amongst the schemes funded were some sports ones and several motor projects which took convicted offenders and young people seen to be ‘at risk’.
I left to take my PhD on car crime and my two fieldwork sites were at motor projects that I had visited often before. As a side project I undertook an ‘evaluation’ of one. Clearly it was impossible to indisputably impute any reduction in offending to attendance at the Motor Project. Especially since this might just be one evening a week with no added educational or rehabilitative modules or packages. Though anecdotally know some of those attending seriously reduced their taking of cars but continued to offend (ordering 'weed' by phone whilst be interviewed by me in their home).
My cultural criminological take didn’t seek to say whether the projects worked in strict crime reduction/prevention or even foucauldian fun terms but interrogate why the ‘homeopathic/naturopathic’ solution to car crime was seen to be limited access to cars. I concluded that the problem of car crime could only be seen in addressing the wider ‘car culture’. This lead in the direction of ‘green criminology’ and through an interest in masculinities (tip of the hat to Tim Newburn and Betsy Stanko) onto ‘queering criminology’.
If working with cars and occasionally racing them (only some motor projects allowed this) did work it seemed to me it did so by (re)integrating the young men into a ‘car culture’ which was still problematic. I met only ever one young woman at a project, and she may have been ‘at risk’ but car-obsessed rather than a joyrider. I accept that a foucauldian fun/governance framework could be applied to such projects but that the ‘norm’ they are to internalise need challenging. To be clear that norm is the use of cars as transport and (as advertised) the means to fulfil our dreams. See my Ambivalent Criminology – ‘Have you stopped driving your car?’ Paper given to BSC Conference LSE 2007'
The sports-based interventions that Millward et al review should stand a better chance of ‘working’ as more ‘work’ is done for those attending beyond the ‘hook’ of sport and yet beyond anecdote few can.
The fun/governance nexus is further explored in respect of fan zones and here I can offer another anecdote.
In 2019 I went to Japan for the Rugby World Cup. I saw Wales beat Georgia and Australia in early rounds. I attended fan zones prior to and post match for those events. I also saw more matches from later rounds at a fan zone in Tokyo, particularly enjoying watching Japan progress. I more my Japan rugby shirt and enjoyed drinks and chats with English, Welsh, Scottish and American fans.
Since I was not likely to start any fighting I’m not sure I needed governing through fun (Japanese boy bands anyone?) but certainly prefer that to be governed in ‘unfun’ ways. We do need to remember that the ‘fun’ of projects or zones is often condemned by those with more straight forwardly punitive views. On fan zones think we need work on researching differences between the different audiences for live and zoned sports and between different sports.
Obviously discussion of fan zones and the Rugby World Cup lead us into their fifth chapter.
