Mike Presdee (1944-2009) - cultural criminologist and champion of a life less ordinary

Mike Presdee was a sociologist of international acclaim and considerable personal

magnetism. His work focused on the sociology of youth and cultural criminology. He was

fascinated by the way in which young people are criminalized and controlled; of youth

being seen as the problem rather than young people being the locus of the problems

of the system. Later in life he emerged as a key fi gure in the burgeoning fi eld of cultural

criminology, convinced of the impossibility of understanding crime (or any other form

of human behavior for that matter) in terms of survey data and quantitative analysis.

He argued that ‘numerical life’ had little if any relationship with ‘actual life’, that there

was a chronic split between academic knowledge, the gaze from above, and everyday

experience and the view from below revealed by ethnography and biography. He maintained

that orthodox criminology was driven by the administrative concerns of the

powerful which present problems as obvious and uncontested and set the research

agenda of the social scientist. Why he asks is it ‘obvious to all…that we need research into

the “evilness” of young people rather than the oppression of young people; the evils

of drink and drugs rather than why we take substances that might even include enjoyment

and the excitement of transgression’? (Presdee, 2004a). Such a power driven knowledge

presents itself as part of a rational research agenda where the very presence of

power is occluded. He then turns to the researchers themselves, noticing their poverty

of experience, their exclusion from the lived worlds of the people they research, thus

neatly reversing the conventional nostrum: it is the social scientist who is marginalized

from the social world rather than those deemed marginalized and objects of study.