Professor Mike Levi: Celebrating 50 years as a criminologist at Cardiff University

Professor Levi has amassed numerous awards from all over the world as an expert in crime and crime policy, specialising in fraud, corruption, organised crime and money laundering.

Reflecting on his time as a criminologist in its ever-changing landscape, Professor Levi looks back on how he began his illustrious journey and the evolution of the field in the advent of rapidly developing technologies.

Looking back to when you first started, what drew you to criminology?

Interest in why and how people committed different sorts of crimes, and in patterns of social reaction to crimes and how and why they varied within and between countries.

Long before the study of “harms” rather than “crimes” became fashionable, I was interested in why some harms became crimes and others did not, both in theory and as a result of differential law enforcement attention.

What were the biggest changes you’ve witnessed in the study of criminology over the past 5 decades?

Expansion. When I was appointed to Cardiff in 1975, there were two criminology lectureships that year in the UK.

When I was a student, it was possible to read much of the English language material ever produced (though I didn’t!).  Now I cannot even plausibly read all the literature in my specialist areas, and if I did, I would not have time to research and write.

There has been an expansion of the ‘territory’ of criminology to include various gender and ethnic identities, ‘crimmigration’ and environmental/green crimes. We used to be interested in labelling theory, but the study of social harms and their creation and sustenance has vastly grown.

Which of your research projects or publications do you feel most proud of, and why?

My PhD – published as The Phantom Capitalists – was highly original conceptually and empirically, using an intuitive version of what is now routine activities theory to make sense of the organisation of bankruptcy frauds – an activity engaged in by gangsters and by ordinary businesspeople – and their control by business and by criminal/administrative justice. I interviewed ‘organised criminals’, businesspeople, police, and lawyers for it.

Regulating Fraud took a long historical view of the criminalisation of fraud, the political economy and attitude issues that underlay law making, enforcement and sentencing or prevention.

Later studies in the UK, EU and globally of organised crime and responses to it, payment card fraud prevention, the development of money laundering and anti-corruption controls, of proceeds of crime confiscation and reviews of their impacts or that over-used term ‘effectiveness’ were both interesting and original.

How have your students influenced your own thinking over the years?

My PhD students have broadened my understanding of comparative crimes, policing, and regulation across societies.

All of them showed the importance of nuance and deep immersion in our understanding of social and criminal phenomena in the variety of countries they have come from in the Global North and South alike.

More generally, my undergraduate and masters students remind me of the challenges of making sense of and communicating complex issues to people who, like the general public, are not as immersed in the political economy of business, and in national and transnational crime control, as I am.

Was there a defining moment in your research that shifted how you understood crime or justice?

I was always interested in testing propositions – qualitatively and, where feasible, quantitatively – rather than ‘proving a point’, and that included the role of socio-economic status in the commission of crimes and in the way we react to and handle them.

The relationship between social stereotyping and becoming an enforcement target, and the difficulties of getting agencies to change their priorities and practices even where there is careful research by me and others surprised me less than it has done some of my colleagues.

What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a criminologist, both academically and personally?

The main professional challenges have been access, funding, and getting as honest a picture as possible of how criminals, law enforcement, prosecutors, regulators, policy-makers, and the media are doing.

Much of this work is international, because economic and organised crime often cross borders, and travel takes time and money.

Personally, there is always a lot more work to do than a human can cope with, and time management for family life (as well as technical competence) remains a challenge. So too does translating analysis into things that practitioners and policymakers can use.

Some criminologists have large datasets; I’ve mostly worked in fields where data are patchy or privately held. But data always need interpreting in context. “Impact” depends on decisions by others, and short time horizons inhibit success. No point moaning – that’s real life, and it’s a feature of most societies I’ve observed.

What advice would you give anyone considering criminology, as a student or researcher?

The mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer said, “Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it”. I was a pretty lazy undergraduate until I discovered things that interested me.

Then I changed.