Researcher Profile - Stephen Farrall
Stephen Farrall
The long-term impacts of Thatcherite social and economic policies on crime and the criminal justice system
Stephen Farrall is a Professor of Criminology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy.
Criminal careers research was becoming dominated by psychological models, so I wanted to point out that there were 'big' and invisible social and economic processes at work which needed to be recognised and understood as affecting peoples' lives.
What is your current research focus or most recent research?
For the past 15 or so years, I've been researching the long-term impacts of Thatcherite social and economic policies on crime and the criminal justice system. This has meant using existing data sets, such as the British Social Attitudes Survey, national crime survey data and longitudinal, individual-level data sets in which the same people are re-interviewed several years apart.
We've mainly focused on social policies relating to housing policies (especially. the right to buy your council house), social welfare policies and changes in terms of schooling attendance, as well as national economic policies, unemployment rates and so on. This has resulted in several books and about 20 article articles or book chapters. We also commissioned two films about this too. The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on three occasions.
How would you explain your research?
We were interested in the 'down-streams' effects (aka legacies) of a dramatic change in social and economic philosophy at the heart of government and the effects which this had on citizens' lives and life-courses. This has meant doing a lot of what political scientists call 'process tracing' - where by you work out what a policy was, how it was delivered, what impacts it had, when it had these and who was most effected by them, and then trying to work out if this effected their engagement in crime. It's like a huge jigsaw puzzle carried out over time with numerous bits missing and some wrong bits thrown in for good measure! We've had to do a lot of rethinking what we thought we knew about the causes of crime.
What inspired you to pursue this area?
I grew up what might be referred to as the 'Thatcher era' (the 1980s), and started studying crime at university in the early 1990s. My first job was in Glasgow, which had been at the forefront of some of the changes in the 1980s. If I got the train south to England or east to Edinburgh, you'd pass old railway sidings full of rusting wagons and closed factories and mines. Following this, the next project I did was about how probation supervision helps people stop offending.
We collected data from lots of people who lived in some of the most disadvantaged places in England. At that point all the focus was on poor thinking skills and cognitive behavioural therapies. This struck me as missing the crucial fact that so many communities had been devastated by the loss of jobs in mining, ship building, car production and allied trades (like driving trains) that asking people to reflect on their thinking skills and styles was to miss the point. Criminal careers research was becoming dominated by psychological models, so I wanted to point out that there were 'big' and invisible social and economic processes at work which needed to be recognised and understood as affecting peoples' lives.
How will your research affect the average person?
To be honest, not much. Having said that, I have shown the films I commissioned to school children which has given them a better understanding of some of the processes which have affected the communities they live in.
How does your research influence your teaching?
I have drawn upon my research interests when lecturing on modules relating to society or social policy, as so much of what happened during the 1980s was an attempt to re-imagine society and how it worked, and that required a recasting of both the economy and social policies relating to unemployment benefits, childcare and so on.
What's been the greatest moment of your career so far?
I think probably winning a book prize for some research I conducted with a colleague many years ago was one of the recent highlights. The book is about petty crime in the market place (fiddling insurance claims, overclaiming travel expenses and so on, and being a victim of these in terms of second hand sales or inline scams etc). We won the American Society of Criminology’s Division of White Collar and Corporate Crime’s Outstanding Book Award, in 2020. The book is: Farrall, S. and Karstedt, S. (2020) Respectable Citizens – Shady Practices: The Economic Morality of the Middle Classes, Clarendon Studies in Criminology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, and it has a Foreword by John Braithewaite, who is one of the world's foremost criminologists himself.
What's the biggest challenge in your field?
I think that getting good quality longitudinal research funded time and time again is a real struggle. Too many funders will fund the first few waves of a study, but if you go back to them as say "we'd like to interview these people again" they tend to say "we like to fund new projects, not old ones" and so the studies die at that point. This is a real tragedy as we know that peoples' lives unfold and change over time and that understanding causal processes needs data which extends over time.
What advice would you give to someone considering an undergraduate degree in criminology?
Its a great way of developing an understanding of how people and societies work (or don't work!), so is useful in numerous careers, ranging from Human Resources, to social work, working in the criminal justice or legal systems, and, of course useful for work in social or market research. You get trained not just in ideas but the methods of research too and these are transferrable skills which many employers are looking for. Plus the UK's social science community is one of the best in the world - really only behind those in China and the US, so studying for a degree in something like sociology or an allied subject in a UK university will mean that you're being taught and trained by some of the leading experts in the world.