PART I: POSITIVELY UNDERTAKEN

Correctional criminology, whether as purely administrative statis-

tical correctionalism or as theorized correctional criminology, is in
the first place a state-dependent enterprise. “For most of its existence
criminology has been located, for all practical purposes, within the
institutions of the criminal justice state” (Garland and Sparks 2000:
201). This means it is motivated by, constituted as and responsive
to, the state’s fundamental interest in managing, administering and,
where necessary, correcting its population. It further means that it is
unavoidably political, economic and bureaucratic in character, being
responsive to the requirements of the government in power – not
least the need to budget and allocate its resources, the demands issu-
ing from the public at large or particular segments of it, and the
demand characteristics of the organizational infrastructure in and
through which its tasks must be carried out. It is with respect to
these contexts that the meaning and use must be assessed of the
official crime statistics on which administrative and correctional
criminology depend. The fact is, however, that the debate over the
meaning and use of official statistics in professional sociology has
not been addressed in this way, but rather in terms of the utility of
these data for the purposes of scientific description and theorizing
on the assumption that crime exists independently of any inquiries
into it. In grammatical terms, this is a clear case of “taking language
on holiday”; that is, removing these organizational objects in quan-
titative form from the very contexts where they alone make sense.
First, we shall briefly consider the issue of official crime statistics
in sociology at two moments of their assembly and use; namely, in
the production of the index called “crimes known to the police”
and at their major point of consumption in the halls of government
administration. Second, we will characterize the general form of cor-
rectional criminology’s theories. Third, we will return to reflect on
the significance of the place of these sociologies in relation to the
state.

The meaning and use of official crime statistics

Assembling crimes known to the police

In the epigraph that heads this chapter, the economist Josiah Stamp
captures in a particularly colourful way a point that no serious

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