Jock Young (1942-2013)

More than any other criminologist of his generation, Jock Young shaped the nature and direction of the discipline and has been at the forefront of almost every major development in the sociology of crime and deviance over the past four decades. Revered and respected for his scholarly activities, he will also be remembered for his charisma, humour and famously warm and relaxed manner that inspired all those who knew and worked with him.

Jock was the leading light of an intellectual movement inspired by the radical political currents of the 1960s that questioned conventional ways of thinking about crime and its control. Despite subsequent shifts of perspective, this radical sensibility remained undimmed throughout the entirety of his long and immensely distinguished career. He was instinctively sceptical of organised coercive power and consistently took the side of those affected by it. He was also critical of the tendency among criminologists to transform the fascinating and vibrant subject of crime and justice into an abstract and lifeless academic enterprise. Instead, he urged sociologists and criminologists to appreciate the richness and diversity of social life.

In 1962 he enrolled atThe London School of Economics (LSE), where he would go on to complete his formal academic training. At the LSE he became inspired by new developments in American sociology such as symbolic interactionism and labeling theory. While this work greatly influenced Jock, just as significant was the countercultural revolution taking place outside the University seminar room.These were heady times: R D Laing was promulgating his anti-psychiatry message in public readings at the Roundhouse and the Rolling Stones were hard at work shocking the post-war British establishment. It was this countercultural sensibility that inspired Jock to co found the first National Deviancy Conference (NDC) in 1968. Avowedly anti-institutional and highly critical of orthodox criminology, the NDC instigated a decade-long series of interdisciplinary conferences based around emerging research in new ‘the sociology of deviance’. It was at the first NDC that Young presented his first conference paper, ‘The role of Police as amplifiers of deviance’. Like the NDC itself, the paper was a reflection of changes underway in British society in the 1960s. It was also the foundation for his first major work, The Drugtakers, a ground-breaking 1971 study of bohemian counterculture in 1960s Notting Hill. This text, together with Folk Devils and Moral Panics, authored by his great friend and fellow LSE student, Stan Cohen, trail blazed the concept of ‘moral panic’, one of the few criminological concepts to be adopted for general use beyond academia. Equally influential was his next work, the 1973 critically-acclaimed co-authored book with Paul Walton and IanTaylor, The New Criminology, which revolutionised criminology by infusing it with an unapologetically critical agenda.

Jock was one of a number of radical LSE graduates who decamped to Middlesex Polytechnic (as it then was) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period the social science department there wasahotbed of radical and socialist thought where many of the staff could be heard punching out articles on manual typewriters for journals like New Left Review and Socialist Worker. Soon after arriving, Jock established a single honours degree and set up one of the first Masters programmes in criminology in the country. In the 1980s Jock laid the foundations for a more engaged ‘realist’ criminology that argued for critical criminologists to take crime more seriously. He argued that ‘law and order’ was indeed a socialist issue, insisting that the victims of crime are predominantly the poor and the marginalised. During this period he conducted research into crime victimisation in several London Boroughs, and acted in a formal advisory capacity to London’s Metropolitan Police Authority. Working closely with members of the Labour Party during theThatcher years he encouraged a rethink of their approach to crime and policing. However, Jock was disappointed with the way in which New Labour dealt with the crime issue after it came to power in 1997, pointing out that Tony Blair’s stated commitment to ‘get tough on crime and the causes of crime’ tended in practice to concentrate disproportionately on the first half of the equation. Throughout his 35 years at Middlesex, Jock was offered professorships at several more ‘prestigious’ universities, but turned them down. Unlike most career-minded academics he always maintained an endearing humility and was indifferent to the trappings of status. He also enjoyed London, particularly his beloved ‘Stokey’ (Stoke Newington). In 2002, he took up a position at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and later back to the UK, where he held a position at the University of Kent, playing an active role there in developing cultural criminology. In 2009 he returned once again to New York, this time as Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

His writings have been translated into 11 languages in 15 countries, and he has been honoured on numerous occasions. Most recently, in 2012 he was the recipient of the British Society of Criminology’s Outstanding Achievement Award.

Jock will leave an immense void in a discipline which owes so much to his singular vision and path-breaking originality. All those who knew and loved him will feel that the world has suddenly and tragically become less full of humour, colour, and meaning.

Keith Hayward and Roger Matthews are both Professors of Criminology, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent