THE INSTITUTE OF CRIMINOLOGY

The Institute is a postgraduate teaching and research department housing 40 full-time M.Phil. students, 50 Ph.D. students, 50 academic and research staff, plus a fluctuating population of visiting scholars. The largest group of students is the 180 strong cohort of M.St. students on the policing and penology courses. They are senior practitioners working in the field, studying as distance learners with short residential study periods in Cambridge three times a year. These students are functioning under very different circumstances to the full-time M.Phils; they are in demanding jobs with little time to dedicate to academic pursuits, usually fitting their study around both professional and family lives. Supporting their work can be logistically difficult, not least because many live overseas. The current M.St. students are based in Denmark, Sweden, Australia, India, the USA and the Caribbean, as well as the UK. The Institute has no undergraduate students of its own but academic staff teach criminological courses for both the Faculty of Human, Social, and Political Science and the Law Faculty. The library serves the needs of those courses too. Beyond Cambridge, the library is internationally known as a world-class criminal justice collection and forms an important resource for the global research community, many of whom are regular visitors to both the Institute and the library.

Figure 1:

The Institute of Criminology at Cambridge.

THE RADZINOWICZ LIBRARY

As a research library of international standing, we try to ensure that our collections reflect the development of the subject, not just the academic or teaching interests of our staff and students at any particular point in time. As such, it is part of our mission to represent the broadest possible spread of criminological research and to safeguard future access to this knowledge. As a strongly interdisciplinary library in a time of shrinking resources, this is difficult.

Figure 2:

The Interior of the library looking to ground floor.

THE INTERDISCIPLINARY NATURE OF CRIMINOLOGY

The interdisciplinary nature of the subject is a source of both creativity and tension. There is, of course, an obvious sense in which criminology exists as an academic subject in its own right, with a corpus of theory and knowledge, and a history arising from the 19th century's twin fixations with taxonomic and social order. There is also a sense in which it is a meeting ground for other disciplines when their attention turns to rule-breaking. Its core interests of crime and deviance stand as the foundation for the field but are also sources of legitimate and necessary study for many other disciplines. With justification, Ronnie Lippens and Don Crewe recently wrote, “Since its inception, criminology has had trouble answering the question of what it is about”Footnote ¹. Being interdisciplinary is a great strain on budgets because it means that we need to collect in a range of areas: psychology, psychiatry, sociology, philosophy, policing, prisons, criminal law, sentencing, politics (to cover terrorism, for example), as well as the bread and butter material, such as criminological research and theory and social research methods. Balancing the needs of these diverse fields, along with providing material for both teaching and research requirements, means that resources can sometimes be spread thinly. Looking through publishers' catalogues is always an exercise in listing essentials and desirables, and there is always a tug when you must leave behind desirables in one subject so that you can afford the essentials in another.

THE COLLECTIONS

We collect internationally too, because a lot of criminological research is comparative and many of our staff and students come to us from overseas. Because crime and deviance research is mature and widespread in the UK, it makes us a good comparator for other jurisdictions. Scandinavia, the United States, Australia and Japan all have well-developed and long-standing criminological research histories, although crime and justice statistics are increasingly easily available from many more countries and territories across the world. Comparative work also applies to more than just what is criminal in the UK at any one time. The recent history of UK legislation on sexuality is a case in point: moving from legalisation to same-sex marriage, via the equalisation of the age of consent and civil partnerships, in five decades is a strong record to measure against jurisdictions where attitudes and legislation are repressive or slipping backwards.

The Institute of Criminology is a multilingual community, with around 65% of our students and many academic and research staff originating from overseas. Apart from specific requests from staff or students, we only buy stock written in English, as a way to limit expenditure. A steady stream of donations from our international visitors, with whom we often form long-lasting relationships and from other organisations across the world, means that we have a small but continuous inflow of current material in other languages.

Figure 3:

Reading space, the collections and some striking artwork!

THE CHANGING NATURE OF CRIMINOLOGY

Like any other subject, criminology is a moving target. New fields of study open up in addition to the existing ones. A few years ago, for instance, in the wake of September 11, criminologists began to engage more widely with the subject of terrorism. With the exception of some interest in, and research on, the IRA, terrorism had, until then, been very largely the preserve of political science. With so much of the public and political conversation about these matters, it became clear to criminologists that we already knew a lot about the issues that were on everyone's minds. The basis of terrorism is fear of crime and that has long been a subject of criminological interest and research. Violent crime, social exclusion and the policing of minority ethnic communities are also evident areas of expertise. However, there are less obvious ones too which have contributed to a growing understanding. The extortion and black markets used to fund terrorism are an example, where terrorist networks cross over into drug markets and become comparable to organised crime bodies. Much of the early intensity of that time has passed in the years since, but some aspects have stayed live and become embedded in the subject. The issue of religious radicalisation in prisons is still very current, for example. New perspectives come about and older ones evolve. Biological criminology goes quiet for a while then resurfaces as neurological criminology, perhaps more closely aligned with forensic psychiatry. How important and prolific will green criminology be in the future? There is also the debate over whether we should be studying crime and deviance or whether we should be studying harm.

THE WIDER LIBRARY COMMUNITY IN CAMBRIDGE

In Cambridge, we are lucky to work in a broader environment of library and information provision. The university has over 40 departmental and faculty libraries, plus the University Library itself, a legal deposit library with approximately 8 million items that adds 100,000 more each year. The Squire Law Library, one of the largest legal libraries in the UK, is situated in the Faculty of Law building which is adjacent to the Institute.

The 31 colleges each have working libraries which, whilst being generalist rather than subject specialist, provide material for a great many courses across the university. Most colleges, too, house special collections of early printed books and manuscripts, invaluable to scholarly research. Until relatively recently, purchase of journals was done individually, library by library, each dealing with different agents and publishers. Over the last few years, as journals have moved almost entirely online, periodical budgets and purchasing have been centralised, eliminating duplication and giving us all immediate access to a vastly broader range of titles. We no longer need to send our forensic psychiatrists on a bus ride to the other end of the city, in search of journal articles from the Medical Library. However, we do need to keep a close eye on the book stock of our sibling libraries in related fields, to ensure that duplication is kept to a necessary minimum.

THE EMBEDDED LIBRARY

We are also fortunate to have a close relationship with so many of our readers. Donald West, a former Director of the Institute, wrote in 2009, ”from its earliest days, the library has always been for me, and I suspect for many others, the heart of the InstituteFootnote ²”. Supporting the work of postgraduate students, project staff and academics, many of them early career researchers, means that library staff can get to know the interests and workloads of readers in some depth. Our involvement goes far beyond the quick issue-and-return transactions common in fast-turnover teaching libraries. Much of the research carried out by our readers involves offenders, especially prisoners, and the library reflects this in some of our own outreach relationships.

ART IN THE LIBRARY

In particular, the library holds and displays an extensive collection of artworks. Most of these are works made by offenders and other people in places of confinement and have been purchased through the Koestler TrustFootnote ³. This is a charity that works with prisoners, patients in secure hospitals and other detainees, to provide opportunities to participate and achieve in the arts. The Koestler Trust holds an exhibition of these artworks each autumn, with categories covering visual arts, crafts, music, poetry and prose; anthologies of the writing are published each year. Of the prisoners and patients who enter a piece of work, around one in four wins a cash prize. Where artworks are sold, half the cost goes to the artist and half is shared equally by the Koestler Trust and Victim Support. We buy these works from library fines, so the delinquency of our own readers helps to contribute to the rehabilitation of others. To make a successful piece of art—a picture, a pot, a poem—means to make something that communicates directly with other people. The only way to do that is to be honest, about yourself and with yourself. In turn, that requires the courage to face shaming truths. That can be the start of an extremely important process of recovery and rehabilitation. It may not be that painting pictures will save anyone's life but learning to paint honest pictures can help someone start to build a healthier life.

Figure 4:

A piece of art that is displayed in the library entitled Geograph Mythology.

Our involvement with the Koestler Trust has changed the library too. It has become a more distinctive place, both visually and in the quality of our working practice. It is part of the library's continuing engagement with aspects of the criminal justice system outside the academic estate and beyond the usual profile of our readership. The artworks also stand as a clear visual marker of the choices that we make. Readers will almost never ask me why I choose to buy a particular book for the library stock; they trust that the decision arises from professional knowledge and experience. But, in the few weeks after each new piece of art goes on display in the library, there is at least one conversation about the process of choice each day. In the nicest possible way, and always asked from genuine curiosity, people want to know, what were you thinking when you bought this?

NOT JUST A LIBRARY BUT A CONTINUOUS ENTERPRISE

Writing about the ethics of library classification, Jens-Erik Mai noted that libraries present themselves as “neutral and independent spaces for intellectual and personal inquiryFootnote ⁴”. As working librarians, ethical abstractions are rarely our most immediate concern and so our presentation of this image can often be unreflective and habitual. But libraries are formed and stewarded by people with their own histories and beliefs, assumptions, hopes and intentions, and specifically through the choices those people make, consciously or not. Part of the purpose of our art collection is to remind our readers and ourselves that the library is not an institution. It is a continuous enterprise, a collaboration between staff and readers that requires conscious and purposeful engagement. Our library is not a place, or a series of collections in a place, it is an ongoing human endeavour that belongs to everyone who takes part in it.