One of five criminology case studies selected by the C-Sap Criminology SIG.
In order to get students thinking about the ways in which we as people are influenced by social factors and historical events (the sociological imagination) we ask them to think about their own experiences and the experiences of others as a means of making this link between the ‘personal’ and the ‘public’. Students will normally have conducted tutorial discussions around the Life Course (page 7) using Thompson’s Life Cycle Matrix (pages 8 and 9) and the Gendered Life Cycle. We then introduced the issue of crime and discussed how the ethnographic tool of auto/biography might be used to understand the development of a criminal identity or career using Goode’s ideas on ‘hegemonic masculine auto/biography’ and a case study (an extract from John McVicar’s autobiography).
