Recovering the early history of Canadian criminology: criminology at the University of British Columbia, 1951-1959.

• Author: Parkinson, Gary

Existing accounts of the history of criminology in Canada, as reported in introductory textbooks and The Canadian Encyclopedia (Criminology 1988: 540), claim that the country's first criminology program was initiated by Denis Szabo at the Universite de Montreal in 1960. This is inaccurate. In September of 1951, the University of British Columbia initiated a criminology program within its Department of Social Sciences. Two years later, the program offered a B.A., an M.A., and a postgraduate diploma in criminology. In 1954, criminology became a division with its own head within the broader department, in effect becoming a department in all but name. In 1955, the university approached the federal government to assist in funding a school of criminology. Many universities had taught criminology within a sociology program and, indeed, UBC had done so as early as 1945, but much more than this began in 1951. It was another decade before Denis Szabo (1963) of the Universite de Montreal declared the arrival of a "new discipline" and a "new profession." The UBC program was the first such program in Canada. Considering that criminology was just being recognized as an independent discipline and that programs had only recently appeared in the United States (see Short and Hughes 2007), (2) this was an innovative step. Although the program had a short life, it had a major impact both locally and nationally. What is equally notable is that the university, through its academic program, became involved in one of the most innovative prisons in Canada, the Haney Correctional Institution.

In the 1950s, the citizens of British Columbia were made aware that something novel was taking place at the university. The Vancouver Province reported on 13 March 1954 that UBC had appointed three people to "guide Canada's first full-fledged criminology course." A month later, on 13 April, it claimed that the "University of B.C. is the first in Canada to meet the challenge of training workers in the correctional field." The new prison was to be unique. The Vancouver Province reported, on 31 August 1957, that "British Columbia is as advanced as any part of Canada in this direction. Next month marks the opening of the Haney Correctional Institution, one of the most progressive of its kind in North America." A 27 August 1957 headline in the Province claimed "B.C. Starts Prison Revolution." The New York Times, 8 September 1957, reported that "an experiment in progressive prison administration will be tried ... [at the] Haney Correctional Institution, said to be one of the most advanced of its kind on the continent."

Drawing on archival research, correspondence with many of those involved, and a reading of the few things written about the programs, this article tells the tale of the founding of Canada's first criminology program and provides an explanation for some of the factors that led to its establishment and to its subsequent demise in the spring of 1959. It looks as well at some of the effects of the program on the development of criminology and criminal justice in Canada.

Context and framework

The initiation of the criminology program at UBC in 1951 must be understood in the context of changes then taking place in Canada's university system as a whole, within individual universities, and within specific disciplines, departments, and specializations. There is a growing literature on the history of university departments and programs in Canada (e.g., Hiller 1982; Shore 1987; Holmes-Hayes 2003; Whittaker and Ames 2006; Tremblay 2006) and in the United States (e.g., Morn 1995; Short and Hughes 2007), and these offer ways to understand developments at UBC. These studies focus on the following cluster of themes: What internal and external forces led to the development of the department? How did internal politics shape the program and its location within the university? What were the intellectual roots of the founders (e.g., Shore 1987; Holmes-Hayes 2000; Hiller 1982; Stark 1994; Nurse 2006)? How did faculty perceive their role in the broader community? What, if any, effect did faculty or programs have on the community? Although most of these themes are touched on in this paper, only two--the intellectual roots of the founders, and, how faculty perceived their role in the broader community--are examined in depth.

The two major players, Coral Topping and Elmer Kim Nelson, shared a commitment to what was referred to at the time as the new penology, a philosophy that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and was given legitimacy in Canada with the publication of the Royal Commission Report on Penal Reform (Archambault report) (Canada 1938). This new approach to correctional policy and practice arose from a more liberal and progressive view of society. Its intellectual roots lay in the social sciences and the idea that individuals are profoundly shaped by their social environments. In 1927, Topping argued that offenders could no longer be viewed as "born criminals" and that recidivism rates were an indication that prisons had failed. If prisons could fail they could also succeed (Topping 1927: 1). By the late 1940s, this philosophy led to widespread support for a set of recommendations in the field of corrections that included indeterminate sentences; classification systems; segregation of inmates based on age, offending history, and psychological testing; provision of educational, vocational, and recreational programs; the maintenance of family and community ties; and the development of probation and parole programs. (3)

Professor Nelson's commitment to this philosophy was most clearly displayed in his contribution to the planning of Haney Correctional Centre and in the report submitted when he was director of the Corrections Division of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (United States 1967). In a symposium on the 30th anniversary of the 1967 report of the commission he wrote,

[I]t is misleading to portray the corrections recommendations as "rehabilitation," a term that has become a slogan for ideological attacks on policies seen as soft on crime. The task force took pains to dissociate itself from the traditional focus on therapy for individual offenders, proposing instead the idea of reintegration--rebuilding ties between the offender and the community, restoring family ties, obtaining employment and education, securing in a larger sense a place for the offender in the routine functions of society. (United States 1998: 189) The development of the program at UBC must be seen against the backdrop of this emerging philosophy.

Topping and Nelson also shared a belief in the role of the social sciences in society and in the fields of criminology and penology, in particular. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was growing pressure to accept sociology as an empirical science based on observation and analysis rather than as a movement for social reform. Although Topping worked under a statistician while at Columbia University, and this influence is evident in all his research, it is clear from his writings that he believed it was the role of the social scientist to help change the world (Topping 1936). Much of his effort was directed to penal reform as signalled by his 1929 dissertation on Canadian penal institutions (Topping 1929). He served on the 1934 inquiry into the Boys' Industrial School in BC and on the 1936 Advisory Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. He also served on an influential commission on penal reform in 1950 (Commission Appointed by the Attorney General to Inquire into the State and Management of the Gaols of British Columbia), and in 1955, was called before the Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons on Capital Punishment, Corporal Punishment and the Lotteries, to speak against the retention of capital punishment.

Nelson, too, played an important role in the community, having come to understand the role of policy making in penal reform. He was consultant to the director of corrections in BC and then warden of Haney Correctional Centre. He submitted recommendations to the Fauteux and the Ouimet commissions on penal reform as well as to the 1973 BC Task Force on Correctional Services and Facilities (Matheson 1973). He played an important role on the 1967 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Both men were strong advocates for social reform and the new penology, and this was reflected in their approach to education.

There has long been tension between theoretical criminology and the criminology programs that apply this knowledge in the training of criminal justice workers (Morn 1995). Theoretical criminology developed largely within the discipline of sociology. Key figures include Edwin Sutherland, Clifford Shaw, Ernest Burgess, Robert Merton, and Walter Reckless. It was forward-looking administrators, however, who saw the need for justice workers to receive a university education, and it was this that led to criminal justice education, one of the branches of criminology. In California, August Vollmer saw the need to professionalize policing during the 1920s and 1930s and pressed universities to develop courses and programs for police officers. His efforts led to the School of Criminology at Berkeley (Morn 1995: 32). As programs for the police grew, and included more theoretical courses, tension also grew, within the program, between theory and research, on the one hand, and their application, on the other. These tensions were apparent at professional meetings, in professional journals, and in the many divorces and fresh starts that occurred. Morn, for example, argues that the transformation, in 1958, of the Society for Advancement of Criminology, begun by Vollmer, into the American Society of Criminology marked the marginalization of criminal justice education and the rise of the professional criminologist (Morn 1995...