A Summary sheet covering post and late modern theories of crime – focusing on Jock Young’s ‘Vertigo of Late Modernity’, the cultural criminology of Katz and Lyng (edgework), and Foucault’s concept of discplinary power and the shift to control through surveillance.
Post and Late Modern Theories of Crime
(PM/ LM Theories of Crime Control PART 1)
Introduction – Post/ Late Modern Society and changing crime
Post-Modern society refers to society since about the 1970s
Numerous social changes mean that both the nature of crime and the causes of crime are more complex
Some of the key social changes which influence criminal behaviour (and crime control) include
The rise of the consumer society – the norm of high consumption
globalisation, de-industrialisation and increasing instability and uncertainty
The fact that we live in a media-saturated society which celebrates celebrity-culture
The increase in individual-freedom (individualisation) and cultural diversity
Various technological changes, especially the increasing centrality of ICT.
This revision sheet (and the main class-notes) only look at sociologists who have developed new theories about the relationship between changes in post/ late modernity and changing crime.
Other areas of the course which could be included under postmodernism include gloablisation and crime, and aspects of the media and crime.
Jock Young – Late Modernity, Exclusion and Crime
The 1950s was a ‘golden age’ of full employment, cultural inclusion and low crime
Today, de-industrialisation has resulted in low-employment, instability, insecurity, uncertainty, social-fragmentation and high crime rates
Economic exclusion combined with the pressure to consume and be a celebrity result in anomie
Crime is a means of coping with this anomie – it offers us a ways not necessarily to get rich (like Merton says), but to ‘be somebody’, vent our frustrations, or simply escape.
As a result, crime gets more diverse, more spread out in society, and nastier (more extreme).
Cultural Criminology – Edgework
Developed by Katz and Lyng in the 1980s and 1990s
Criticises Rational Choice Theory – crime is not always rational, it is done for emotional reasons
Crime is increasingly about ‘edgework’ – flirting with the boundaries of the acceptable because it’s exciting, or thrilling.
This is very much part of living in a risk-society (Ulrich Beck)
Simon Winlow – Violent Night
Researched young working class men in Northern cities who regularly engaged in binge-drinking and violence at the weekends.
Found that their jobs were low-status and insecure, they offered them no sense of identity
Binge-drinking was a way to escape the boredom and low-status of work.
Fighting meant numerous things – it was about status, but also simply thrilling and exciting.
Offers broad support for both the theories above.
Surveillance and Crime Control
(PM/ LM Theories of Crime Control PART 2)
Michel Foucault – The Birth of the Prison and the rise of Surveillance
Punishment used to be violent, carried out on the body and it used to be done in public, now punishment is psychological, it expects people to change the way they think, and it is carried out in prisons, behind closed doors.
This reflects a shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power.
Sovereign power involved controlling people through the threat of force – people were punished severely and other people obeyed because they were afraid of the same punishment.
Disciplinary power now involves controlling people through surveillance and expecting people to change their own behaviour – prisoners are locked away and monitored, and change their own behaviour because they know they are being watched.
This logic of control now extends to everyone – even non-criminals – surveillance is now everywhere in society – it is not just criminals who are under surveillance by agents of social control, we are under surveillance from cradle to grave – school, work, pregnancy, child-birth, on the streets and roads, our health data.
Most people now obey the rules because they know they are being watched – they regulate their own behaviour for fear of becoming the wrong kind of person – a failing student, an unproductive worker, a bad mother, an obese-person, for example.
NB – This is quintessentially sociological – it is only in very recent human history that we have become so obsessed with monitoring every aspect of our daily-lives, and one of Foucault’s points is that this constant surveillance doesn’t necessarily improve our lives – there are both winners and losers.
Jock Young (1999) argues we are now living in a late modern society characterised by instability, insecurity and exclusion, which make the problem of crime worse.
Structurally and economically there is much more insecurity and marginalisation than ever, but culturally there is more pressure to publicise how successful you are, even if you don’t have the means.
This is really an application of Merton’s anomie theory, but the nature of ‘strain’ between legitimate means and ends is different, more constant and more severe.
Increasing Insecurity and marginalisation
Young contrasts today’s society (since the 1970s) with the period preceding it, arguing that the 1950s and 60s represented a golden age of modern capitalist society. This was a period of stability, security and social inclusion, characterised by full employment and a well functioning welfare state. There was also low divorce, rate, strong communities and a general consensus about right and wrong, and crime rates were very much lower.
Since the 1970s, however, society has become a lot more unstable. De-industrialisation and the corresponding decline of unskilled manual jobs has led to increased unemployment, underemployment and poverty, especially for young people. These changes have also destabilised family and community life and contributed to rising divorce rates, as have New Right policies designed to hold back welfare spending. All of this has contributed to increased marginalisation and exclusion of those at the bottom.
A Media saturated society
However, just as more and more people are suffering from the economic exclusion described above, we now live in a media saturated society which stresses the importance of leisure, personal consumption and immediate gratification as the means whereby we should achieve the ‘good life’.
The media today generally informs us that the following are normal and desirable – in in order to belong to society we are required to do the following:
We need to have high levels of consumption – and buying now, paying later, and debt are seen as legitimate strategies for maintaining our consumption levels.
We need to have active leisure lives and publicise this – in effect we should turn ourselves into mini-celebrities – in short, we need to be somebody.
We should strive to achieve success ourselves rather than depending on others. Anyone can be successful if they try hard enough is the message.
Crime in Late Modernity
Young essentially applies Merton’s Strain Theory to explain crime in late modernity. He argues that today there are millions of people (just in the UK) who will never earn enough money to live a high-consumption, celebrity lifestyle, and this results in many people suffering relative deprivation, and frustration (basically anomie).
However, Young goes beyond Merton by arguing that deviant and criminal behaviour become a means whereby people can not only attempt to realise material goals, but crime can also the means whereby they can seek to achieve celebrity, or simply to seek a temporary emotional release from the anomic-frustrations of coping with the usual contradictions and pressures of living in late-modernity.
Two further consequence of the trend towards economic exclusion combined with the media message of ‘cultural inclusion through consumption and celebrity’ are firstly that crime is more widespread and found increasingly throughout the social structure, not just at the bottom, and secondly crime is nastier, with an increase in ‘hate-crimes’.
Examples of attempts to achieve celebrity through deviance include extreme-subcultures, or any form of extreme ‘one-upmanship’ videos on YouTube, while examples at escapism include binge-drinking and violence at the weekends. Young also argues that the anomie and frustration generated in late-modernity also explains the increase in more serious crimes such as hate-crimes against minority groups and asylum seekers.
Evaluating Jock Young’s theory of crime in Late Modernity
These ideas can add a new dimension to our understanding of the causes of crime and deviance – particularly with regard to the non-economic reasons why people commit crimes – those acts which seemingly have no monetary reward, by focusing on the emotions and feelings involved in offending.
Young argues against the idea that crime is committed when there are available opportunities (rational choice theory) or lack of controls against criminal behaviour. He says that crime here is depicted as quite a routine and logical act, and something which we, the victims, have to protect ourselves against.
Young argues that these approaches do not explain why why crime is such an attractive option for so many young people (particularly young men). He says that there are many crimes such as drug use and vandalism, joyriding and even rape and murder, which clearly involve much more than a simple rational choice. There is obviously something much more appealing for those involved in crimes such as street robbery than the promise of (very small) profits on offer.
Signposting and Sources
This material is mainly relevant to the Crime and Deviance Module. This is part of the A-level sociology (AQA) specification.
There’s a couple of really useful documentaries relevant to the crime and deviance module which have been on recently, which you might want to grab for college estream if you teach Sociology – As I see it you can get a good three-five years out of a good documentary.
Life Inside Wandsworth Prison demonstrates how under-staffing and overcrowding have resulted in a lack of care for prisoners, with many being locked-down for 23 hours a day, with scant mental-health care provision where required (which many prisoners do). In addition to this the documentary also shows how drugs are readily available in the jail, with weed being openly smoked in front of the guards and it’s clear that many of the prisoners are victims of violence. Available on iPlayer intil Friday 16th Sept – So either watch it now, or you should be able to grab using estream connect for another 11 months.
Britain’s Most Wanted Motorbike Gangs? is available on iPlayer until February 2017 and is useful for evaluating the relevance of all kinds of theories of crime – subcultural theories and interactionism especially.
Finally, don’t forget Bake Off – You can use this to demonstrate how social control works through the Synopticon – through the many watching the few rather than the few watching the many. I’m not going to explain this here, more on that later, but THINK about it and you should be able to figure out what Bake Off’s really about, and it ain’t just biscuits.
Right Realism believes individuals make a rational choice to commit crime, and emphasises tough control measures to reduce crime – such as zero tolerance policing.
By the end of the 1970s Marxist and Interactionist approaches to crime were beginning to lose their popularity in criminology. The basic problem was that these approaches weren’t that useful in actually helping to control or reduce crime – knowing that crime is an outgrowth of capitalism, for example, doesn’t offer any practical solutions to preventing burglary, other than abolishing capitalism, which, let’s face it, isn’t that likely to happen. Similarly, Interactionist approaches which saw crime as socially constructed, and thus not ‘real’ didn’t do much to help the millions of victims who were victims of actual rising crime rates in the 1970s and 80s.
Hence by the beginning of the 1980s, Realist criminology emerged, which differed from previous approaches such as Marxism and Interactionism because it thought criminologists should abandoned grand theorising about the ultimate causes of crime; they should work with governments to develop practical solutions to crime; and they should take seriously the widespread public fear of crime.
Realist Criminology differs to previous criminological theories because….
They abandon ‘Grand Theories’ such as Marxism. They are not interested in looking at the ‘deep structural causes’ such as Capitalism – It is not Criminologists’ job to get rid of Capitalism so it is pointless focussing on it.
They are more ‘pragmatic’. They ask how governments can reduce crime here and now, and work within the constraints of the social system.
They take a victim- centred approach to crime, putting victims and the public’s concern about crime at the centre of theorising and policy making.
Realist approaches emerged in the 1970s and 80s in the context of right wing neoliberal governments coming to power in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Although neoliberal governments favoured policies of lower taxation and the rolling back of the welfare state, the one area where the state did have a a role to play was in the maintenance of law and order, and realists take a tough approach to offenders, generally emphasising the increased use of police and punishment to keep crime rates in check.
Right and Left Realism
There are two types of realism – both share the above features in common, but there are significant differences:
Right Realism is associated with the right wing neoliberal government of Margaret Thatcher which came to power in 1979, although most of the governments which followed have adopted more right realist policies.
Right Realists Reject the idea put forward by Marxists that deeper structural or economic factors such as poverty are the causes of crime – they mainly hold that the individual is responsible for crime – although they do accept that high levels of ‘social disorder’ and low levels of ‘social control’ are associated with higher crime rates. Right Realism tends to focus on the individual as being responsible for crime, arguing that we need to get tough on criminals to reduce crime.
Left Realists on the other hand are more left wing and and argue that inequality is the main cause of crime and we need more community interventions to reduce crime.
Right Realism – The Causes of Crime
Although they aren’t especially interested in the causes, they still have a theory of what ‘causes crime’ – The two main theories about the causes of crime associated with Right Realism are ‘Rational Choice Theory’, ‘Broken Windows Theory’, and Charles Murray’s Underclass Theory (also a form of subcultural theory).
Rational Choice theory
An important element in the right realist theory of crime is the idea that crime is a matter of individual choice – individuals choose to commit crime.
Rational Choice Theory states that most criminals are rational actors. If the criminal calculates that the risk of getting caught is low, or that the punishment if caught will not be severe, then they are more likely to commit crime, assuming the reward for doing that crime is high enough. They are rational in that they weigh up the costs and benefits in order to assess whether a crime is worth committing.
What rational choice theory predicts is that crime will increase if the following happens:
If crime brings higher rewards relative to working within the rules of society. Rewards could be material, or they could be things like higher status or more security.
There is no risk of getting caught committing a crime
There is no punishment for crime
Routine Activities Theory
Rational choice theory has been developed by Cohen and Felson in their ‘Routine Activities Theory’ (1979). They argued that in most circumstances social control mechanisms, lack of opportunity and/ or the risk of getting caught prevented crime from taking place. Crime therefore needed three conditions to take place:
Individuals who were motivated to offend
The availability of opportunity and targets
The lack of capable guardians such as parents or police who might prevent crime occurring.
Most crime in their view was opportunistic, rather than planned in advance. Therefore, if individuals motivated to commit crimes encountered easy opportunities to commit them in the routine activities of their daily lives then crime was more likely to occur.
Criticisms of Rational Choice Theory
Rational Choice Theory rests on a fiction of ‘economic man’. Economic man is continually looking for opportunities to maximise his personal gains, making immoral and asocial choices if this helps him achieve his goals.
Economic man does not have a past, or complex motives, a rich social life or even a social identity. He just muddles through satisfying based on imperfect information.
RTC on analyses piecemeal episodes, not context. It treats the individual as just acting in the moment, on his own. It doesn’t take into account his social background, or wider social injustice factors.
Broken Windows Theory (Wilson and Kelling 1982)
This approach is based on James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s (1982) article ‘Broken Windows’, which has been described as ‘perhaps the most influential single article on crime prevention ever written’. (Downes, 1992).
Wilson and Kelling use the the phrase ‘broken windows’ to stand for all the various signs of disorder and lack of concern for others that are found in some neighbourhoods. This includes undue noise, graffiti, begging, dog fouling ,littering, vandalism and so on. They argue that leaving broken windows unrepaired, tolerating aggressive behaviour etc. sends out a signal that no one cares.
In such neighbourhoods, there is an absence of both formal social control and informal social control (the police and the community respectively). The policy are only concerned with serious crime and turn a blind eye to petty nuisance behaviour, while members of the community feel intimidated and powerless. Without remedial action, the situation deteriorates, tipping the neighbourhood into a spiral of decline. Respectable people move out (if they can) and the area becomes a magnet for deviants.
Charles Murray and the Underclass
Charles Murray argued that changes to family structure was responsible for much of the increase in the crime rate in the 1970s and 80s – he largely attributes the growth of crime because of a growing underclass or ‘new rabble’ who are defined by their deviant behaviour and fail to socialise their children properly. The children of the underclass fail to learn self-control and also fail to learn the difference between right and wrong.
The underclass has increased because of increasing welfare dependency. Murray argues that increasingly generous welfare benefits since the 1960s have led to increasing numbers of people to become dependent on the state. This has led to to the decline of marriage and the growth of lone parent families, because women can now live off benefits rather than having to get married to have children. This also means that men no longer have to take responsibility for supporting their families, so they no longer need to work.
According to Murry, lone mothers are ineffective agents of socialisation, especially for boys. Absent fathers mean than boys lack paternal discipline and appropriate male role models. As a result, young males turn to other, delinquent role models on the street to gain status through crime rather than supporting their families through a steady job.
Increasing crime is effectively a result of children growing up surrounded by delinquent, deviant criminal adults which creates a perfect crimogenic environment.
For Murray, the underclass is not only a source of crime, its very existence threatens society’s cohesion by undermining the values of hard work and personal responsibility.
Evaluations – THINK about the following…
Supporting Evidence: Crimes this theory can explain – Is there any statistical evidence or case study* evidence which supports this theory?
Criticising evidence: Crimes this theory cannot explain – Is there any statistical evidence or case study evidence which criticises this theory?
Evaluate using other perspectives – What does the theory under investigation ignore?
Historical evaluation – Has society changed so much that the theory is just no longer relevant
Evaluate in terms of ideology/ power – Is the theory biased, does it serve the powerful ?
Right Realism – Controlling Crime
Right realists emphasise two main techniques of crime control – situational crime prevention, and environmental crime prevention, both of which involve making it harder for criminals to commit crime and increasing the risk of getting caught committing crime, thus making crime a less attractive proposition to prospective criminals.
Situational Crime Prevention involves protecting specific targets from potential criminals – by putting window locks on windows, or putting CCTV in a shop for example.
Environmental Crime Prevention focusses on making whole neighbourhoods or larger areas more crime-resistant, through putting more police on the streets for example, or adopting a more ‘Zero Tolerance’ approach to minor crimes.
Situational Crime Prevention (SCP)
Situational crime prevention policies focus on the specific point at which potential victims and criminals come together, making it harder for the criminal to commit crime. They stem directly from Rational Choice Theory and involve either reducing the opportunity for people to commit crime or increasing the risk of getting caught when committing a crime.
There are two basic ways you can do this – through increasing surveillance of the population (monitoring their behaviour and making them aware of the fact they are being monitored) and target hardening (making buildings, objects and people harder to steal or kidnap or damage).
Marcus Felson (1998) gives an example of a situational crime prevention strategy. The Port Authority bus terminal in New York City was poorly designed and provided opportunities for crimes – for example the toilets were a good place to steal luggage, deal drugs and engage in homosexual sex. Re-shaping the physical environment to ‘design out’ crime led to a large reduction in crime. For example, replacing the large sinks which homeless people used for washing reduced the numbers of homeless people hanging around the bus station.
Another example of where situational crime prevention has been successful is around suicide prevention. In the early 1960s, around half of all suicides in Britain were the result of gassing. At that time, Britain’s gas supply came from highly toxic coal gas, but from the 1960s coal gas was gradually replaced by less toxic natural gas, and by 1997, suicides from gassing had fallen to bear zero, with the suicide rate overall witnessing a corresponding decline (ie people hadn’t simply switched to other means of killing themselves.
Other policies associated with Right Realism include ASBOs and the use of prison sentences for minor crimes.
Evaluations of Situational Crime Prevention
One of the major reasons why governments find such policies so appealing is because they are relatively cheap and simple to implement. Situational crime prevention techniques can be carried out by a wide range of actors – not only formal social control agencies such as the government, police but also local councils, schools, business and private individuals can make their property and possessions harder to burgle or steal relatively easily.
The Port Authority Bus Terminal Building is an example where this worked. Newburn (2013) points to an obvious link between improved car security measures and reduced car crime.
Limitations of situational crime prevention
Ignores factors such as inequality and deprivation as causes of crime (Garland 2001).
Ignores the role of emotion and thrill as a cause of crime (Lyng 1990)
Only tackles opportunistic street crime – won’t work for DV, white collar crime, or state crime.
It leads to crime displacement. – One criticism of situational crime prevention measures is that they do not reduce crime, they simply displace it, or make it move to another place or another time. After all, if criminals are acting rationally, they will simply move on to easier targets.
It creates divided ‘Fortress cities’ (Bauman), as the wealthy hide away behind gated communities leaving poorer people in the ‘mean streets’ outside.
Environmental Crime Prevention
Environmental crime prevention strategies involve changing the broader area or environment in which crime occurs through increasing formal and informal social control measures in order to clamp down on anti-social behaviour and prevent an area from deteriorating. These strategies tend to rely much more heavily on the police than situational crime prevention strategies.
Environmental Crime Prevention strategies stem directly from Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Window’s theory which suggests that disorder and the absence of controls leads to crime. Examples of ECP policies include Zero Tolerance Policing, ASBOs, curfews, street drinking bans, dispersal orders and the three strikes rule in America.
Zero Tolerance Policing
Zero Tolerance Policing involves strictly enforcing penalties for relatively minor crimes or anti-social behaviour such as begging, drug possession, public drinking.
This approach was famously used to crack down on rapidly increasing crime in New York City in the 1980s, which was suffering from a crime epidemic, linked to high levels crack-cocaine use a that time.
Specific examples of Zero Tolerance approaches adopted at that time included a ‘clean car program’ which was instituted on the subway, in which tube-cars were taken out of service immediately if they had any graffiti on them, only being returned once clean. As a result graffiti was largely removed from the subways.
Other successful programmes were put in place to tackle fair dodging, drug dealing and begging. This resulted in a 50% reduction in crime in New York City between the years 1993 and 1996.
Evaluations of Environmental Crime Prevention
The New York ‘Zero Tolerance’ study suggests that zero tolerance policies work to reduce crime.
HOWEVER, Levitt and Dubner in Freakonomics found that this correlation was coincidental – other factors were responsible for the decline in crime.
It is more expensive than situational crime prevention – it takes a lot of police to patrol an area and clamp down on anti-social behaviour.
Reiner (2015) argues that the police would be better deployed focusing on more serious crime hot spots rather than clamping down on minor forms of anti-social behaviour.
From an Interactionist perspective, giving more power to the police will just lead to more labelling and more criminal careers.
Rational Choice Theory/ Right Realism and Crime Control Methods (FULLER VERSION)
Below is a more comprehensive list of crime control methods from a rational choice/ right realist perspective:
Increasing the effort needed to commit crime
Target Hardening – defending objects by shields and other devices.
Access control – making it difficult for predators to approach targets.
Deflecting offenders – encouraging them to act in a legitimate manner by graffiti boards, litter bins.
Controlling facilitators – checks on selling vapes and cigarettes.
Increasing the risk of offending
screening of people – searches – stop and search, bag checks, borders.
Formal surveillance by more police.
Employee surveillance – train guards.
Natural surveillance – lowering hedges, cctv.
Reducing the rewards…
Target removal.
Cards not cash – less cash.
Removal of rewards – quick clear up of graffiti.
Property identification. For example markers on phones and laptops.
Clear rule setting – such as with tax regulations.
Three articles about the close and friendly relationship between politicians and big business caught my attention this week.
The three articles below all illustrate how the Marxist critical theory is still relevant, and also serve as good examples of why we have shifted towards neoliberalism – basically big business and government are tightly interwoven, so it’s no surprise that government policy is pro-business – whether we’re talking about the EU, or Ireland, a member of the EU, or the UK which is about to leave the the EU!
Theresa May ‘Banging the Drum’ for Free Trade at the G20 summit
According to this BBC news article, during her first international appearance since Brexit at the G20 summit Theresa May
“banged the drum for free trade, an increasingly lonely message as electorates around the world urge their leaders to greater protectionism”
It’s difficult to know precisely what this means – but it’s highly likely that this means more neoliberalismneoliberalism – lower rates of tax on TNCs, to attract them to the UK, more deregulation (cutting ‘red tape’) and more privatisation of public assets, (already raging under the Tories) – basically more of putting the needs of business and the capitalist class first.
The European Union recently decreed that that the Irish government should recover 13 billion Euros in bax taxes from Apple, whose headquarters are based in Cork.
Ireland already has one of the lowest corporation taxes in the world, at 12.5%, but it agree 25 years ago it agreed to give Apple a number of subsidies in order to attract the corporation to Ireland, which effectively means it has been paying 0.005% tax during that period.
The reason the EU is demanding that Ireland claim the money back is because the subsidies are against competition law – states aren’t allowed to give preferential treatment to one company over another – by giving them cash hand-outs for example, but allowing tax-breaks effectively amounts to the same thing.
This amounts to giving Apple 220 000 Euros for every year for each job located in Ireland.
The revolving door between Government and Big Business
A third article by John Harris in the Guardian reveals that there are very close links between EU and British cabinet ministers and big business – basically what happens is that ministers spend a period of time in political office, which often involves dealing with big business, and once they leave politics, the go on to work for big companies, advising them on how to get privileged access so they can easily lobby those in the corridors of power – which makes it easier for them to get ‘sweat heart tax deals’ like Apple did.
The event which prompted the article was that former EU commissioner Jose Manuel Barroso took a job as a nonexecutive chairman and adviser to Goldman Sachs which helped cause the financial crash of 2008, but Harris points out that this is normal – between 2009 and 2010 alone, six out of 13 departing EU commissioners moved into new corporate or lobbying roles.
Harris also suggests that we ‘watch closely as the alumni of the governments headed by David Cameron exit full-time politics. Already, in fact, an odorous cloud has started to form. Earlier this year a Daily Mirror investigation found that 25 former ministers in the coalition government had taken paid roles in sectors they once oversaw’
Somehow I get the feeling quite a few of these news update posts are going to be about the further advance of neoliberalism!
Environmental Crime Prevention strategies include formal and informal social control measures which try to clamp down on anti-social behaviour and prevent an area from deteriorating. They emphasises the role of formal control measures (the police) much more than situational crime prevention theory.
Examples, some of which are dealt with below, include Zero Tolerance Policing, ASBOs, curfews, street drinking bans, dispersal orders and the three strikes rule in America.
These strategies are associated with Right Realism and are based on Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Windows Theory – the idea signs of physical disorder give off the message that there is low informal social control which attracts criminals and increases the crime rate.
Zero Tolerance Policing
Zero Tolerance Policing involves the police strictly enforcing every facet of law, including paying particular attention to minor activities such as littering, begging, graffiti and other forms of antisocial behaviour. It actually involves giving the police less freedom to use discretion – under Zero Tolerance policy, the police are obliged to hand out strict penalties for criminal activity.
The best known example of Zero Tolerance Policy was its adoption in New York City in 1994. At that time, the city was in the grip of a crack-cocaine epidemic and suffered high levels of antisocial and violent crime. Within a few years of Zero Tolerance, however, crime had dropped from between 30 – 50%. For an overview of ZT in New York and criticisms see this video (and love the ‘tache).
In the UK Zero-tolerance policing allegedly slashed crime in Liverpool, a city historically blighted by antisocial behaviour and violent assaults, following its introduction in 2005. Overall recorded crime fell by 25.7 per cent in the three years to 2008 with violent crime falling by 38%.
It was not only the likes of drug dealers and burglars who were targeted. Boys kicking footballs against an old lady’s fence, litterbugs and graffiti louts were also on the police’s radar, and twice a month hundreds of officers flooded the streets to hunt suspects who had jumped bail or those wanted for a particular kind of offence.
Zero Tolerance Policing is still used today in Britain. For example, the Berkshire police adopted a Zero Tolerance approach to knife crime in Slough in 2022, following a 21 year old dying in a knife attack. This is part of a broader Zero Tolerance approach to knife crime rolled out as Operation Deter from Thames Valley policing as a whole.
Antisocial Behaviour Orders
ASBOs are one of the best known crime control methods in the UK – they’re probably best described as bring related to Zero Tolerance techniques – in that you can get an ASBO for antisocial rather than criminal behaviour, and go to jail if you breach it, thus they police minor acts of deviance, although they’re not a perfect fit as the police have little to do with imposing them – that’s down to the local magistrate.
Antisocial Behaviour Orders were introduced in 1998 in order to correct minor acts of deviance which would not ordinarily warrant criminal prosecution. Anyone over the age of 10 can receive an Antisocial Behaviour Order, and about half of them have been handed out to 10-17 year olds or’juveniles.
(In 2014 ASBOs were replaced by Criminal Behaviour Orders (CBOs), but more on those later.)
According to the gov.uk website ‘behaving antisocially includes:
drunken or threatening behaviour
vandalism and graffiti
playing loud music at night
Getting an ASBO means you won’t be allowed to do certain things, such as:
going to a particular place, eg your local town centre
spending time with people who are known as trouble-makers
drinking in the street’
25000 Antisocial Behaviour Orders were administered between the year of their introduction in 1999 and the end of 2013, but how effective were they at reducing and controlling deviant behaviour?
Some (relatively) famous case studies of recent ASBO recipients
In 2013 the so called ‘Naked Rambler‘ received an ASBO stipulating that he had to cover his genitalia and buttocks when he appeared in public, apart from in a changing room. The 53 year old was jailed for 11 months, after he defied the banning order.
In 2014 Jordan Horner, 20, a Muslim convert from northeast London was ordered to stop preaching in public,as part of a campaign for a sharia state in Britain.
Criticisms of Environmental Crime Prevention Strategies
Zero Tolerance Policing in New York resulted in a lot more people being arrested for possession of marijuana – 25 000 a year by 2012 (one every ten minutes) – some of those people lost their jobs or rental houses as a result (the human cost of Zero Tolerance)
ASBOs give people a criminal record for not actually doing anything criminal – You could (past tense!) get an ASBO for being loud, which isn’t in itself criminal, and then go to jail for breaching the ASBO – by being loud again.
Zero Tolerance methods are not necessary – As the video above points out, despite the claims of the right wing governments who implement them, crime has gone down in cities in the US and the UK without the widespread use of Zero Tolerance techniques. This excellent article points out that ZT was never adopted widely in the UK or the Netherlands but both countries have witnessed a decline in crime in recent years. The simple truth is that crime has been going down for other reasons, ZT policing has little to do with this.
It creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy – ‘If police concentrate their patrols in a certain area and assume every young man they see is a potential or probable criminal, they will conduct more searches — and make more arrests. Which means a high percentage of young men in that neighborhood will have police records. Which, in turn, provides a statistical justification for continued hyper-aggressive police tactics.’ (It’s time to rethink ZTP).
It might be racist – the above two articles also deal with the fact that somewhere in the region of 85% of people dealt with under Zero Tolerance in New York were/ are black or Hispanic.
Sources and Signposting
This material is relevant to the Crime and Deviance module within A-level sociology.
Michael Foley: The Age of Absurdity – Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)
Most of what modern society tells you about how to be happy is wrong – at least according to a wealth of psychological and sociological research, most modern philosophers and the the insights of pretty much every religious tradition.
This book slates the messages about how to be happy that we get from the mainstream media – from consumer culture and advertising, and from the self-help industry – there is no simple easy-step guide to happiness, and it certainly can’t be achieved through shopping (at least not meaningful, lasting happiness); instead happiness can only be achieved through introspection and damned hard-work, basically, happiness worth having is a painful process of adjustment.
There’s a lot of sociological themes running through this book, it’s especially relevant to the sociology of emotions (it deals with happiness, but also anxiety and depression), hence why I’m summarising it here.
Part One, which consists of chapter one is just the introduction, which I read but haven’t summarised as everything in it’s covered below!
Part Two – The Sources (of unhappiness)
Chapter 2 – The Ad and the Id
Executive Summary –
The ‘Id’ is the unconscious, untamed aspect of ourselves – the root of our (irrational) wants and desires (opposed in Freudian terms to the more conscious, rational ego) – modern consumer culture stimulates our unconscious desires (for stuff, for sex, for whatever) through advertising and suggests to us that the way to realise happiness is to satisfy these wants, mainly through shopping.
In effect, consumer culture presents to us a norm – let your irrational, unconscious desires lead the way – don’t fight them, give into them, satisfy them through shopping.
However, most religious traditions and the findings of modern neuroscience hold and have found evidence for the validity of the opposite view of unconscious desires – religion tends to see wanting/ desire/ lust as bad, as something to be suppressed or overcome if we are to realise deeper, more meaningful happiness, and neuroscience has demonstrated how we make sub-optimal (bad or wrong) decisions when the unconscious rather than the rational parts of our brain are stimulated.
In short, modern consumer culture tells us that we should give into our desires in order to be happy, yet religious and scientific world-views and evidence tells us that doing so will not make us happy.
Shopping won’t make you happy!
More detailed summary
The ad appeals to the ‘Id’ – it appeals to the unconscious, emotional aspects of ourselves through flattering, impressing and stimulating.
Never have adverts been more numerous, ‘entertaining’ and subtly aggressive; and they now infiltrate more corners of our lifeworlds, they are more personalised, and increasingly demand that we interact with them rather than just passively watch them.
This suits the contemporary id, which is rampant, and in no mood to be tamed. Never have so many wanted so much so badly, and never have these wants been so indulged by the advertising industry. Consumer culture (shopping centres and advertising) give us the impression, in fact, that it would be churlish to not want to buy things, and the Id in general embraces this.
Once upon a time, in fact in most religious traditions and many classic and modern philosophies, the id was despised, was seen as something to be suppressed, tamed or overcome. Buddhism is the most obvious example of this – where unconscious desiring is seen as one of the roots of all human suffering. In Buddhism, self-knowledge is applied to generate a method to ‘consciously overcome’ the wanting id.
In Buddhism, the ‘truth of the self’ is that consciousness has no substance – it is merely flux, so all wanting (when it becomes conscious) is fickle – and part of the Buddhist strategy towards happiness is to realise this through meditation – to watch desires rise and then fade, without acting on them, and in this way desires lessen and the ‘mind’ becomes more at peace (less subject to the whims of desire). (NB this is easier said than done!)
Similar ideas of this ‘two-part’ self – the unconscious, emotional wanting side as ‘bad’ and the rational, reflective conscious side as ‘good’, are found in Western philosophies too,– such as Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but these ideas have not been well-received by a wider audience. Most recently, a similar idea of the self is to be found in Freud’s theory of the self.
Modern Neuro science suggests that the rational brain generally makes wiser decisions than the emotional brain*, as demonstrated by the following experiment:
The neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen put subjects into a scanner and gave them the option of receiving a gift certificate immediately or a certificate for a larger amount in a few weeks time. The prospect of receiving a certificate right away activated the emotional brain, while the prospect of a larger certificate in the future activated the rational brain, the pre-frontal cortex – and the area with the strongest activation decided the choice. Most people opted for the smaller certificate immediately.
Here the chapter ends, somewhat suddenly for my liking, but that’s the way it goes I guess!
*Foley does also point to research showing that the brain isn’t simply divided into the emotional and the rational, the two are interconnected and overlap.
Chapter 3 – The Righteousness of Entitlement and Glamour of Potential
Executive Summary
We live in a culture which suggests to us that the individual is hugely important, and in which we believe that self-fulfilment is not only a basic right, but thoroughly deserved (the righteousness of entitlement) – ‘I believe I have the right to be happy’.
We also believe happiness is easy to achieve – as easy as going on a cruise – realising happiness is not that difficult (the glamour of potential).
However, all of this is an illusion and we need to get over these myths. Here Foley draws on existentialism and suggests that we need to realise the truth of our own individual insignificance, and accept the fact that achieving real happiness is a never ending chore of taking responsibility for our own choices in life, and that there is no guarantee that any of the choices we make will ever lead to true happiness (i.e. we are entitled to nothing).
Having said this we can take some comfort in embracing an absurdist position towards modern life (as do existentialists) – by relishing the fact that living modern life means realising that individual freedom means not happiness but hard-work and uncertainty.
Finally, there is at least some hope of transcendence/ change and great happiness in modern-life, we just need realise as a starting point that these things are not deserved and not easy to achieve, and that I am not that important.
Commentary – My way of looking at this is that modern western culture encourages us to pursue ‘shallow happiness strategies’, while Foley seems to be suggesting that we should pursue what I call ‘deep happiness strategies’ – as I outline in this post – What is Happiness?
More detailed summary
We are all influenced by culture, and over the last couple of centuries the demand for specific rights has degraded into a generalised demand for attention and anger at injustice into a generalised feeling of grievance and resentment, the result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.
Today we believe that fulfilment is not only a basic right, but thoroughly deserved, and that attaining it requires no more thought, effort or patience that an escalator ride to the next level of the shopping centre.
The following shift in values has occurred – we now prefer:
Change over stability
Potential over achievement
anticipation over appreciation
opportunism over loyalty
transaction over relationship
passivity over engagement
eloping over coping
entitlement over obligation
outwardness over inwardness
cheerfulness over concerned
Examples of some of the above lie in the following:
Our sense of entitlement is seen in our culture of complaint, and the practice of ‘taking offence’.
Shopping has become an end in itself and there is an increasing tendency for shopping pleasure to become detached from the actual goods
We are obsessed with travel – which increasingly based on expectation of the promise of the next place.
NB – Foley doesn’t state it explicitly at this point, but he obviously disapproves of the above cultural norms and practices – being constantly on the move and feeling entitled do nothing to foster meaningful happiness. Interestingly, a lot of these themes seem to chime with Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity.
What is to be done about this?
After a quick trip through the Stoics and Christ to demonstrate that we can live in a wealthy world without withdrawing from it, he lands on existentialism as offering us a viable strategy to cope with life in the modern world.
Following Satre, Camus and Kierkegaard Foley now argues that realising and even celebrating the absurdity of modern life is one way we can cope/ thrive in this society.
Two of the absurdities of modern life emphasised by the existentialists =
(1) Just as we realise that we are free, we also come to realise our complete insignificance – applying this to modern times, the absurdity of our culture is that it tells us that we are somebody special and that we deserve recognition (in reality, this simply isn’t the case).
(2) Freedom brings with it the responsibility of unremitting choice, but this does not lead to happiness – choice is unsettling, hard work, and full of uncertainties, but it also brings with it the potential for transcendence. Again applying this to our contemporary culture – the message we get is that we should be happy and that this is easy to achieve, in reality the only way to true happiness is struggle.
So I guess what Foley is saying here is that we should realise the truth of existentialism (not dissimilar to Buddhism) and then adopt all or any of the following attitudes towards this absurdity – enjoy it? Relish it? Play with it? Or (ideally maybe) take part in it and take advantage of the real potential for transcendence?
It strikes me that Charlie Brooker does a very good job of pointing out the absurdities of modern life… especially in this clip!
Chapter 4 – The Old Self and the New Science
‘You can have anything you desire and become anyone you wish to be, and there are no limits to potential, achievement and reward… such are the seductive claims of the frenziedly cheerful self-help industry.
The self-help industry has three basic assumptions:
– Fulfilment is a consequence of worldly success
– There are a number of simple steps for achieving fulfilment
– Anyone who follows such steps will discover vast, untapped potential.
However, the message of serious psychology is the opposite of self-help – fulfilment is not easy, but exhaustingly difficult. Self-help insists on transformation, but psychology shows us how difficult transformation is – the id prevents us from making changes through self-deception, self-righteousness and self-justification.
Foley identifies the following barriers to changing ourselves, these are six reasons why most self-help books won’t work (I’ve put the numbering together myself, I think it adds clarity.)
1. Psychological and sociological research show us we are deluded about our current state of happiness
For example:
– Everyone reports an above average level of happiness, this can’t be possible
– Most people in the west report above average levels of performance at work (this isn’t the case in Asian countries)
– Most us think we are less selfish than we are.
If we don’t have realistic ideas about our starting points, then it is impossible to measure genuine change.
2. It isn’t easy to achieve happiness, it takes sustained effort
Firstly Foley wheels out the old happiness survey research to remind us that happiness levels do not improve with increased income in a country, once average income raises above about $20K/ year.
There is, however, evidence that resisting immediate gratification can bring long term fulfilment as evidenced in Walter Mischel’s 1970 marshmallow experiment:
Mischel sat a succession of four year old children in front of a marshmallow on a plate and explained that he had to leave the room for a moment but that, if the marshmallow was still uneaten when he returned, the reward would be two marshmallows instead of one. Only a third managed to resist the urge to ear it and when Mischel surveyed the children fifteen years later he discovered that those with self control had turned out to be more successful in every way, while the most ‘immediate scoffers’ were more likely to be low achievers and to have drug and alcohol problems.
Next Foley cites some interesting sounding research by Richard Easterlin who surveyed young people about what they thought they needed to leave the ‘good life’ and then surveyed them later in life – the one’s how had realised their aspirations, had just developed new, higher materialistic aspirations. This is the problem of the headonic treadmill – when we get the things/ states/ people we want, we quickly adapt to them and get used to them and the just want more – we up our level of wanting, suggesting that simplistic strategies of acquisition do nothing to improve our actual levels of well-being.
3. We justify our own beliefs to ourself (which tells us it’s OK to carry on just as we are)
-A classic example of this Leon Festinger’s research based on his infiltration of a UFO cult in America – the followers believed that a UFO would save them from a doomed world on 21st December 1954 – but when it failed to turn up, the leader convinced them (and/ or they convinced themselves) that this must be evidence of the truth of their believes – their faith in salvation had in effect saved the doomed world, or at least so they believed.
Foley also cites the examples of violent people in relationships and violent political leaders, who justify their violent atrocities in numerous ways (kind of like Matza’s techniques of neutralisation)/
4. We have a ‘set point’ of happiness, which we revert back to after change occurs
The reality about the future is that it is never as amazing or as bad as we expect it to be – we get used to pretty much any state pretty quickly – we adapt, thus the hopes of self-transformation touted in self-help books are extremely likely to be exaggerated compared to the experience of actually realising the transformation.
5. Our position relative to others effects our happiness (so if everyone’s status changes, so will our level of happiness)
Here Foley cites the classic example of bronze medal winners being happier than silver medal winners because the later compare themselves to fourth place, while the former compare themselves to first place.
Foley also suggests that there is cultural pressure towards being better than the next person – and we live in a society where we invent new ways of being superior – he cites ‘coolness’ as an example – but the numerous forms of cultural capital proudly displayed by the middle classes would be better illustrative to my mind.
6. The asymmetry of emotions
The negative effects of going through a painful process, for example, taking a wage-cut, are greater than the positive effects of going through a pleasurable process, for example getting a pay rise. This suggests that any gains we make are more fragile than we might think – we might get a 10% pay increase this year, but if we then get a 5% pay decrease the year after, we’ll probably feel worse off, even though we’re still better off than our starting point!
As a solution to these 6 delusions Foley suggests CBT, or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – he draws here on Albert Ellis who further developed Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy – which was intended for the multitude suffering from unrealistic expectations – Ellis’ unholy trinity was the three crippling musts – ‘I must succeed’; ‘everyone must treat me well; ‘the world must be easy’ (he called the three together musterbation’ – related to the three curses of perfectionism, neediness and stupidity. Foley now suggests that we should have balloons floating above cities saying such things as ‘ failure is more common than success’; ‘many will dislike you, no matter what you do’; and ‘the world will not oblige’.
He finishes the chapter by pointing out that a few quick sessions of CBT may help change a few thought patterns, but probably won’t help us overcome the delusions of modern life – The Buddha for example realised that realising genuine happiness would necessarily involve a very long and painful process of introspection.
Chapter 5 – The Quest and the Grail
There are many meta narratives still competing for our attention in the ‘life-explanation and strategy market’ – from religion to politics to evolutionary psychology. There is a temptation to surrender to one belief system, there is evidence after all that believers are happier, but many of these BIG solutions involve too much commitment for most people, and many of the big thinkers who developed strategies for self-transcendence didn’t actually lead regular lives in ordinary society.
So we are left with a situation in which we are forced to pick and mix a strategy of ‘how to live’ from many different systems of thought, and the big question is what do we choose and how?
The American pyschologists Peterson and Seligman observed many cultures and tried to extract the universals for how to live well. They found that the following six elements kept turning up:
– Humaneness
-Temperance
-Wisdom
– Justice
– Courage
-Transcendence
While acknowledging that finding that ‘transcendence’ was surprising, Foley actually dismisses the above research as not really finding anything that interesting, and being too platitudinous.
He suggests that we should instead see what the great thinkers say about how we should seek to live well – and here the problem is that what they say is in contradistinction to what modern society suggests the good life should be about.
Many of the great thinkers (religious and philosophical mentioned earlier) emphasise the importance of (a) an awareness of our own mortality and thus relative insignificance and (b) the importance of striving and struggling to achieve transformation via detachment, struggle self-knowledge.
He also points out that most of these thinkers did it for themselves, none of them passively accepted the existing order of things, and none of them wanted an easy life.
Next Section – The Strategies (by which we’ve been duped into thinking that being happy is easy)
A brief summary of Steph Lawler’s ‘Identity’ – Chapter One – Stories, Memories, Identities
Introduction: living lives and telling stories
‘We endlessly tell stories, both about ourselves and others, and it is through these stories that we make sense of ourselves.’
This chapter explores the perspective which sees people engaged in a creative process of producing identities through assembling various memories, experiences and episodes within narrative. From this perspective, identities are not seen as ‘fake’ in any way, but as creatively produced by selecting from an enormous range of raw materials.
Paul Ricouer identifies three things as crucial to narrative – characters, action and plot. The plot is what brings together everything into a meaningful whole, and both narrator and audience take part in emplotment – through a shared cultural understanding that these events have a place in this narrative.
A sense of time is crucial to understanding our identities – narratives link events in sequence through time – thus we come to understand ourselves as developing from a certain point and moving forwards to a future point, this is crucially a process which involves interpretation, and thus is creative.
However, the narrative cannot stand alone, in order for it to make sense it must stand in relation to broader cultural frames of reference.
Sociological thinking about narratives
Stanley and Morgan (1993) identify five trends which have led to an increasing focus on narrative within sociology –
1. A turn to textuality – where texts are increasingly seen as products rather than reflecting reality
2. A questioning of the distinction between structure and agency
3. An examination of referentiality and lives – attention to the relationship between representations of lives and the lives themselves
4. An increasing attention to time
5. A turn to intertextuality – we increasingly draw on other texts to tell our stories
What is a narrative?
A narrative is a synthesis of heterogeneous elements brought together through the interpretive process of emplotment.
According to Paul Ricouer, there are three main forms of synthesis at work in emplotment:
– between many events and one story
– between dissonance and concordance
– between open time and time as something which is over with.
Through the process of emplotment, we turn events into episodes, but this is an interpretive processes, because by looking back at the past self, we have no more direct access to that person than any one else.
Narrative and identity
Emplotment configures a self which appears as the inevitable outcome and actualisation of the episodes which constitute a life. The self is understood as unfolding through episodes which both express and constitute that self. Identity is constituted over time and through narrative, and the whole processes is profoundly social.
Identity is not something foundational, but it is something produced through all of the above processes.
In narrating stories, we interpret memories, but these memories are themselves interpretations.
Evidence for this lies in an experiment carried out by Frederic Bartlett in 1932: white north American college students were asked to read a Native American legend and then recall the events as accurately as possible. Bartlett found that students tended to forget those parts of the story which did not fit their cultural framework or expectations.
We engage in what Ian Hacking calls ‘memero-politics’ – we reinterpret past events in light of present knowledge. Thus (according to Ricouer) the process of constructing a narrative is teleological – the story we tell is that we are who we are because of past events, but in ‘reality’ the events we select to explain how we got here are selected because they seam meaningful now.
As Kiekergaard said ‘live is lived forwards, but understood backwards’ – but it might be better to understand life as being both lived and understood both forward and backward – in a spiral movement of constant interpretation and reinterpretation.
Self and other
A focus on narrative challenges the concept of the atomised individual and replaces it with a concept of a person enmeshed in and produced within webs of social relations – this is for two major reasons – first because life stories must always contain the stories of others and second because the social world can itself be seen as storied.
Two early ways this happens are through the teaching of literature and history in school – the former encourages us to identify with characters and reflect on our inner selves, and the later offers us a way to understand our own personal history in relation to the social world.
Identifying with the subjects of pain
Carol Steedman argues that identifying with the pain and suffering of others is a common way of developing self-understanding. This has been the case since the 18th century, identification with someone worse off than we are is common place.
This may go some way to helping us understand the current fascination with trauma narratives – such as those who suffered abusive childhoods.
Identifying with victims of suffering is one way in which those in power can obtain authority – however, this can only ever be imagined and it can backfire dramatically. There are limits on the stories we can borrow from.
Nb – I’m not convinced that this is that significant – the powerful only choose to identify with certain types of suffering others (not the poor, disabled or refugees for example) and I’m sure there’s more of an identification with those who are self-made despite social disadvantage?
Left realists believe the main causes of crime are marginalisation, relative deprivation and subcultures, and emphasise community oriented programmes for controlling and reducing crime.
Left Realism was developed by Jock Young, John Lea and Roger Matthews as a response to the increasing influence of Right Realism.
Left Realism is Left realism is a fusion of anomie theory, radical criminology and symbolic interactionism.
It is realist because it focuses on practical ways of solving crime, unlike Interactionism and Radical Criminology which it sees as too idealistic and having unrealistic ideas about how to solve crime.
It is left wing because it focusses on the structural inequalities of class, race and gender. It still acknowledges the practical force of crime on society and especially the heavy impact on the poor, ethnic minorities and women.
Key ideas of Left Realist Criminology:
As a criticism of Marxism, Left Realists point out that the victims working class street crime are most likely to be the working class, and it is these types of ‘ordinary crime’ that worry working class people. Criminology should thus focus on dealing with these types of ‘ordinary crime’ rather than focusing on elite crime.
The three three major causes of (working class street) crime are relative deprivation, marginalisation and subcultures.
Solutions to crime should focus on social and community crime prevention and improving relations between the police and local communities.
Left Realism – Causes of Crime
Young (1997) argues that you have to be tough on crime, but this does not just mean being tough on criminals, it means being tough on trying to change the social factors which have a long term impact on crime rates and ensuring that the criminal justice system promotes social justice.
He argues that since the Second World War, rising living standards and the development of welfare provisions have gone hand in hand with a higher crime rate. Lea and young conclude that they can explain this using the following key concepts; relative deprivation, marginalisation and subculture.
Relative deprivation
Lea and Young argue that crime has its roots in deprivation, but deprivation itself is not directly responsible for crime – for example, living standards have risen since the 1950s, so the level of deprivation has fallen, but the crime rate is much higher today than it was in the 1950s.
Left Realists draw on Runciman’s (1966) concept of relative deprivation to explain crime. This refers to how someone feels in relation to others, or compared with their own expectations.
The concept of relative deprivation helps to explain the apparent paradox of increasing crime in the context of an increasing wealthy society. Although people are better off today, they have a greater feeling of relative deprivation because of the media and advertising have raised everyone’s expectations for material possessions – we are wealthier, but we feel poorer, and thus there is more pressure to get more stuff to keep up with everyone else, which generates historically high crime rates.
Subculture
Left Realists see subcultures as a group’s collective response to the situation of relative deprivation, and they draw on Cohen’s theory of status frustration to explain how they emerge. There are many different subcultural adaptations to blocked opportunities, and not all result in crime – but those subcultures which still subscribe to the mainstream values of material wealth but lack legitimate opportunities to achieve those goals.
Marginalisation
This is where people lack the power or resources to fully participate in society. According to Left Realists marginalised groups lack both clear goals and organisations to represent their interests. Groups such as workers have clear goals (such as wanting better pay and conditions) and organisations to represent them (such as trades unions), and as such they have no need to resort to violence to achieve their goals.
By contrast, unemployed youth are marginalised – they have no specific organisation to represent them and no clear sense of goals – which results in feelings of resentment and frustration. Having no access to legitimate political means to pursue their goals, frustration can become expressed through violence.
‘Multiple Aetiology and The Square of Crime’
Left Realists argue that crime is caused by several different factors. They call this multiple aetiology. Crime is a product of formal and informal rules, actions of offenders and of reaction by victims, the state and its agencies, it is therefore important to understand why people offend, what makes victims vulnerable, the factors that affect public attitudes and responses to crime and the social forces that influence the police. This can be done by drawing together a number of different agencies in the community, who should all work together to solve crime.
Left Realism – Solutions to Crime
Left realist solutions to crime emphasis Social and Community Crime Prevention strategies which focus on individual offenders and the social context which encourages them to commit crime.
They were interested in working on situationally based projects to prevent crime and the fear of crime.
There are two broad approaches – Intervention, identifying groups at risk of committing crime and taking action to limit offending, and Community based approaches– involving the local community in combating crime.
Early Intervention
One of the best-known intervention programmes aimed at reducing criminality is the Perry pre-school project for disadvantaged black children which took place in Michigan, USA. IN this programme a group of 3-4 olds were offered a two-year intellectual enrichment programme, during which time the children received weekly home-visits.
A longitudinal study following the children’s’ progress showed significant differences between the experimental group and a control group. By age 40, they had had significantly fewer arrests for various types of grime, and a higher percentage had graduated high school and made it into full-time employment. It was calculated that for every $1 spent on the programme, $17 were saved on welfare, prison and other costs.
Community Based Approaches to Reducing Crime
As far as community-based strategies for reducing crime are concerned – Young and Matthews (1992) argue that improving leisure facilities for the young, reducing income inequalities, improving housing estates, raising the living standards of poorer families, reducing unemployment and creating jobs with prospects, will all help to cut crime. Long term problems must be addressed, but more immediate measures can also be taken.
Improving Policing
A third strategy for reducing crime according to left realists is to improve policing. They argue that over 90% of crimes are cleared up by the police as a result of information from the public, however research suggests that public confidence in the police has declined.
Left Realists argue that if this relationship breaks down, the flow of information from the victims of crime will dry up. If Police do not have the information they need from the public, they have to find new ways of solving crime, and there is a drift towards military policing (the police having to resort to tactics such as stopping and searching or using surveillance) they then alienate people in the community and make everyone feel like criminals, and as a result trust in the police declines further.
Therefore the police must concentrate on improving relationships with the community and the public should have more say in shaping police policy –where the police should listen to the public about what crime affects them most in their area.
Two practical examples of Left Realist Policies
Left Realism inspired new and confusing configurations of streets to make it difficult for kerb crawlers to cruise in search of prostitutes.
They also assisted in rehabilitation of dilapidated housing estates.
Evaluations of Left Realism
Left Realist solutions are the most costly of all crime prevention measures.
HOWEVER, if done properly, community prevention measures can save hundreds of thousands of pounds, by ‘turning’ a potential criminal into an employed tax-payer.
Marxists argue that these policies may tackle deprivation but they do not tackle the underlying structural inequalities in the Capitalist system which are the root cause.
Such approaches target working class, inner city communities and do not tackle elite crime.
Michel Foucault and David Garland interpret the these strategies as being about surveillance and control rather than real social change which prevents crime.
Ian Taylor’s Crime in Context developed Left Realism from a global perspective. He focused on how political and economic structures impinge upon poverty, race and class to affect national and transnational crime control.
Left Realism seems to go a long way to explaining the recent rise of Young Teams in Scotland.
Signposting – Related Posts
Left Realism is taught as part of the compulsory module in Crime and Deviance, usually delivered in the second year of study.
It is usually taught straight after Right Realism and followed by Post and Late Modern Theories of Crime.
Jock Young was one of the main left realist theorists and he went on to develop the Vertigo of Late Modernity theory, which is kind of an evolution of Left Realism plus a bit extra!
A summary of Steph Lawler’s ‘Sociological Perspectives on Identity’, chapter 7
During summer 2000 and in January 2001, there were two separate community-protests over the housing of child-offenders in the local community, one in a working-class area, by working-class people, another in a middle class area, by middle-class people.
The first protest took place in a working class housing estate in Palsgrove, Portsmouth, in which local residents were demanding the removal men believed to be sex offenders already living in the area; the second protest took place in middle-class Balham, London, where locals were protesting against a proposition to build a residential centre for sex-offenders, including child sex-offenders.
Both received press coverage, but both the amount and the tone of the reporting differed.
The working-class protest received an enormous amount of coverage, and commentary, with the women involved presented in dismissive and disgusted terms and not a single broad sheet newspaper reported their protest as rational or understandable, preferring to cast the protesters as a mob of rioters. In addition, frequent reference was made to personal aspects of their lives – such as their appearance, how they furnished their homes, their relationship status, as well as details of their past relationships.
In contrast, the middle class mothers in Balham were almost entirely sympathetic – they were presented as ‘vigilant’ rather than vigilante, and identification was invited so they became part of an imagined ‘we’ uniting against the sex-offenders; there was minimal reference to their personal lives – other than details of their children’ ages and their jobs, which were all ‘solidly professional’.
The Paulsgrave women were vilified across three different axes:
Their bodily appearance
Their ignorance or lack of understanding
Their inadequacy as mothers
And through this vilification their protests were rendered ridiculous through assumptions of immorality, incompetence and ignorance.
Lawler now asks what can these representations tell us about identity? They tell us nothing about the subjectivities of the people involved – but they do tell us something about how class is conferred on people: there is a long tradition of representing the working class as a mob, against which middle-class individuality is asserted, but it is doubtful that anyone identifies subjectively as part of a mob, so mob-identity is conferred on the working classes rather than coming from them and/ or how they feel about themselves.
One of the subtlest ways this works is through the middle classes claiming to ‘know’ the working classes, thus claiming the right to identify them (when in reality, they don’t know them at all).
One of the ways class works is through marking identities as ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, pathological or healthy, normal or abnormal, and classed identities are part of the stakes in class politics – working class people don’t know the right things, they don’t value the right things, they don’t look right and they don’t act right, while the middle classes silently pass as normal.
This chapter looks at how middle class identities are normalised, and defined as ‘right’ against a working class identity which is defined (by the middle classes) as wrong. This is important for two reasons
1. We have traditionally understood class in economic terms, but increasingly cultural markers matter.
2. Class still matters as a source of identity but recently it has taken a back seat as academics have focused on other aspects of identity – such as sexuality.
‘What we read as objective class divisions are produced and maintained by the middle class in the minutiae of everyday practice, as judgements of culture are put into effect’ (Skeggs, 2004, 118).
The persistence of class
Class divisions and distinctions have not disappeared, class has not ceased to be a meaningful frame for analysis, instead it has become an absent presence – it circulates socially while being unnamed.
The drawing of class distinctions has become displaced onto individual persons and families who are approved or disapproved of.
As Bourdieu has demonstrated ‘taste’ is now one of the primary means through which class is configured – that which is tasteful is seen as middle class, and vice-versa for vulgar working class taste – the problem here is that there is nothing natural about taste – it is simply what the middle class say it is.
Expressions of disgust at working-class existence remain rife among middle class commentators and middle classness relies on the expulsion and exclusion of (what is held to be) working classness.
(Lawler thus adopts a relational approach to class and sees it as dynamic, rather than static categories dependent on economic position).
She effectively argues that the public bourgeoisie (mainly journalists and academics, and social commentators), those who are low in economic capital, but high in cultural capital, use their voices to express contempt for the working classes, and at the same time position their middle class selves against them.
Together this group, what Bourdieu refers to as the ‘dominated section of the dominant class’ construct a doxic understanding of class – they have a shared understanding of what working class and middle class means, and this is largely goes undiscussed.
This is ultimately all about power, about the middle classes trying to position themselves above the working classes by defining them as inferior along the axis of taste.
Having the knowledge
Lawler begins by quoting a definition of cultural capital form Johnson (1993)…
Cultural Capital refers to a specific form of knowledge which ‘equips the social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for or competence in deciphering cultural relations and cultural artefacts…. cultural capital is accumulated through a long process of acquisitions or inculcation which includes the pedagogical action of the family or group members (family, education), educated members of the social formation (diffuse, education) and social institutions (institutionalised education)’
For Bourdieu, it it is only the cultural capital of the middle classes which is legitimised and becomes symbolic capital – around which prestige and status are conferred – it is only middle class tastes, knowledges, and dispositions which are encoded as inherently ‘right’.
However, the fact that all of this is social in origin, and the fact that power is operating here is obscured, because
– part of this process of constructing middle-class ness (converting cultural capital into symbolic capital) involves using knowledge itself
– because the cultural capital is marked as ‘normal’ the fact that it is classed at all is obscured.
– the competencies and knowledges associated with the middle class are not generally seen as social mechanisms because they are believed to be part of the self, and thus class is not seen as an objective position but it becomes configured into ‘who we are’.
On this final point, Sennet and Cobb (1977) famously observed that class inflicts hidden injuries – in terms of the ridicule, shaming, silence and self-scrutiny which go along with a position of pathology.
What Lawler’s basically describing above, I believe, is the process of individualisation – the cultural capital dimension of class is social in origin and circulation, but part of that circulation involves sending out the message that these tastes are all down to the individual – thus if someone has ‘superior’ ‘middle class’ tastes they believe they have chosen this, and vice versa for those with vulgar working-class tastes – they are invited by the middle classes to feel a sense of shame about this and to blame themselves for their own inferiority.
Habitus and the subject
Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is central to his analysis of social identity and is his attempt to theorise the ways in which the social is incorporated into the self.
Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus has been described as ‘second sense’, ‘practical sense’, or ‘second nature’ that equips people with ‘know-how’. Habitus refers to both physical and psychological aspects of the self – it is the way we stand, how we move, how we look and how we feel, and it is our dispositions, attitudes and tastes, so it is a concept which cuts across traditional mind-body splits, with much of its force deriving from non-conscious elements.
In short, the habitus is not only something someone has, it is learned in the mind-body, it is what one is.
The habitus has also been referred to as ‘socialised subjectivity’, or ’embodied history’, a result of ‘deep socialisation’. It is learned, but we have forgotten that it is learned and so as far as we are concerned what we do and who we are ‘just natural’.
What all of the above suggests is that ‘taste’ is not innate but learned through deep socialisation of the habitus, furthermore what gets to count as ‘tasteful’ is what the group with the power to name things as tasteful decide is tasteful.
Habitus is not determining, but generative. It is dynamic, so it does not reproduce itself perfectly.
Central to the concept of habitus is relationality – habitus only makes sense in the context of specific local contexts or ‘fields’ – a field is a network of objective relations between positions. Fields are the games for which the rules of the game equip us.
Habitus are also relational in another sense – they exist in relation to one another – they carry the traces, or the lines along which society is divided – class, gender, ethnicity, the whole lot.
Habitus are also hierarchical – some are normalised, some pathological and they clash, and part of the embodied sense of habitus is the judgement of other habitus – however, only some people have the power to make judgements stick.
What gives habitus its power is that it’s not about what you do, or how you act, but about who you are, and some people (the middle classes) have more ability to make judgements about legitimate taste stick than others.
Disgusting subjects: narratives of lack…
Savage et al (2001) found that people were frequently uncomfortable and evasive when talking about class as a system, but middle class people consistently characterise working class people in the most horrific terms. The working classes being talked about are rarely named in class terms, but it is clear who the targets are.
Lawler now gives an example of Les Back (2002) who, when giving a paper on white working class youth was asked by an academic member of the audience whether ‘he was going to do the voices’ – imagine the outrage if this had been asked in relation to a study on an ethnic minority group, yet there was no such outrage surrounding ‘parodying’ the working classes.
Back observes that not only do the working class not deserve to be taken seriously, it is also assumed that they are easy to read and know, although they are seen as unable to know themselves.
The working classes are probably most obviously marked out by their appearance – their clothes and general demeanour – in the UK references are made to shell suits, large gold earrings and tightly permed hair – such easy signfiers do a great deal to code class difference and it is left to the reader (or viewer) to fill in the gaps by understanding that such appearances are the result of pathology.
Some commentators also comment with awed horror on the environments where working class people live and are often surprised that ‘people live there’, forgetting that for working class people these environments are completely normal.
There is also a discourse which has coded such working class areas as high-crime areas, given legitimacy through crime-mapping software.
Landscape and inhabitants are frequently described in terms of lack, but it in these discussions it is not so much money they lack, but taste.
On top of criticising working class landscapes and dress, character traits are also part of the construction of the working classes – Lawler now summarises the ways in which the working classes are demonised –
‘As cigarette-smoking teenage mothers, rearing children in deprived and arid backgrounds of instability, emotional chaos, parental strife, of moral vacuum.. whose children will grow up as socially autistic adults with little expectations and even less talent.’
Above all, she says they are held to lack everything perceived as having value.
This discourse of lack defines social policy – which mainly focuses around tackling social exclusion where social class is concerned.
Lawler is very critical of such accounts – especially of Simon Charlseworth’s (2000) account of working class life as picture bleak and empty, devoid of meaning – we have to ask – is this about working class life, or about a way of looking at it?
Two sociologists who argue coherently against such narratives of lack are Beverly Skeggs and Angella McRobbie
And narratives of decline…
Where discussion of the working classes is concerned, narratives of lack are accompanied by narratives of decline.
The narrative of decline is the tale that the working class used to be respectable, but that the decline of heavy industry has lead to the working class either moving upward to become middle class, or behind, effectively no longer having any value.
The working classes are also seen as suffering from outdated political values, or cultural lag, while progress and reason are on the side of the government and the middle classes. The characterisation of the underlcass has done little to change this.
All of this is worse for working class women get a double negative-label – not only working class but also characterised as unfeminine – and those who try to be feminine are themselves disparaged for it.
The move from working class to underclass also has a gendered dimension.
Representations of the working classes of the past emphasise masculinity – and radicalised, politicised male workers at least having respectability.
However, representations of the new underclass are feminised – with the teenage mother being the symbol of spite – hence we have a gendering of the ‘lower’ classes, all fundamentally tied into middle class attempts to empower themselves don’t forget.
We get the impression from current representations that the wc used to be OK but now they are a problem.
Savage argues that this is not the case – only a few wc members manage to claim the noble WC identity referred to above – the middle class have always seen an attempted to portray the WC as something problematic.
All that has changed is that today we don’t talk explicitly about ‘class’; instead the ‘disgusting’ traits are presented as the outcome of individual and familial pathology… representations of working class people are marked by disapproval or disdain not for the ‘objective’ markers of their position, but for (what are perceived to be) their identities. Their clothes, their bodies, their localities are all seen as tasteless, and faulty.
Lawler now notes that exactly how disgust comes to operate through class is relatively underexplored, but it is so important because it is an emotion which is literally experience in the body, so is very much part of us, but it is also social, because it needs collective affirmation – disgust is thus very much where the personal meets the social.
Lawler now reminds us that disgust does not arise because of something intrinsic within the object, but out of a relation between the disgusted and the ‘disgusting’ object.
Disgust is also bound up with identity – it works to push away others and establish one’s own identity as non-disgusting.
At the end of the day disgust is the opposite of taste, and the two are flexible – forever changing – what is tasteful today may not be so tomorrow – consider the way the middle classes adapt in the face of popularisation through mass consumption. This change however only serves to highlight the fragility of these classes boundaries via good taste and disgust – one is always aware that one can become the other, and hence the crucial importance of working on maintaining boundaries.
Concluding remarks
Basically a reminder that there lies an anxiety at the heart of all identities.
Most of what modern society tells you about how to be happy is wrong – at least according to a wealth of psychological and sociological research, most modern philosophers and the the insights of pretty much every religious tradition.
