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Lecture 9
Université de Paris 8
A : We have seen
Crime, and more specifically juvenile delinquency, are modern phenomena. Relationship to the setting up of a modern police force. Thesis of Storch & Philip Cohen
- police function to discipline the streets
street as a lieu of sociability
distribution of the right to the street
- at first, general resistance to the police force
- later, there is a split within the working class - rough continue to resist, while respectable welcome the stability that they bring (some observers suggest that this was evident from the start, and that the w/c aristocracy did not resist even at the start)
- finally resistance reduced to a kernel around street traders and the young
- today - inner-city populations, often with Caribbean element - resistance to police once again - partly around the street culture
So - in order to understand the modern phenomenon of crime, we need to place it within the context of a specific history, and a specific kind of society - industrial, based on social class, strong centralized governments
B : Crime, age, class and gender
We have noticed from the start that crime is overwhelmingly a phenomenon that involves young, working class males. Why is this?
Working class - the control institutions that were put into place through the 18th & 19thCs (see M. Foucault, 'Surveiller & Punir") were founded partly on a fear of the revolutionary potential of the masses, and of their disruptive tendencies in general. The modern criminal law, and its institutions, such as the police, the criminal law courts, the prisons, were set up with a view to controlling the 'dangerous classes'. Note how the idea of putting people in prison for debt becomes less palatable as prison becomes more and more the place where criminals are punished - debt is a middle class deviancy. This leads us to the idea that crime is mainly that form of deviance which is mainly a working class practice.
Middle class bad behaviour is often dealt with under the civil law - in the Anglo-Saxon system under the law of Tort. It does not appear in the criminal statistics which the law and order debate is about. Other kinds of m/c deviance are covered by special legislation - the laws on industrial safety, and are not usually enforced through prosecution, except as a last resort. (Factory safety is ensured by a very small number of inspectors, and in Britain a factory may be inspected only once every four years) Moreover, victims are often not aware of the fact that they are victims, or are not defined as victims of crime, but rather of accident. Some observers argue that , in fact, white collar crime is 'without a doubt more dangerous, both in physical and fiscal terms, than street crime' (Geis, 1990)
Note that this leaves us with the problem of fraud and other white-collar crime.
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Young - similarly, the redistribution of the population during modernization lead to the young being identified as a problem. Pearson notes that
- the young are under more surveillance than any other age group - actions are more publicly accessible
- young offenders are more inexperienced and so more easily caught
- crimes involving the workplace and the 'hidden economy' are not recorded to the same extent, but young people tend to be excluded from these domains
- there is a tendency to regard dangerous acts by adults - driving too fast - as somehow less reprehensible than those committed by the young - fighting or making a lot of noise.
- domestic violence, of which young people are disproportionately the victims, is largely excluded from the statistics
- fear of modernity - that is, rapid social change - is often crystallized on youth, who are feared as the agents of that change. (Youth, Crime & Society - Geoffrey Pearson in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 1994)
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Male - Males are far more likely to be arrested and convicted on nearly all crimes than are females (the two exceptions being fraud and prostitution). Farrington found that 43% of men, but fewer than 15% of women were likely to be convicted of a serious criminal offence during their careers. In France, in 1986 - 81.7% of those dealt with in criminal proceedings were male, and 18.73% female. Some suggestions to account for this have been -
- natural selection bred out criminal tendencies among women, because criminal women could not find partners (Lombroso - 1895)
- women are just as criminal as men, (or more) but their crimes are hidden in their own (housewives) and other people's (domestic workers) homes - Pollak (1950)
- police & control agencies find it difficult to take female crime seriously and so do not label female criminals as easily (Anne Campbell, 1972, Morris, 1987)
Some authors have suggested that when police do label women as delinquent, they debase them far more than they do men, subjecting them to sexual abuse and humiliation.
- typical female forms of deviance tend to be dealt with in the home, or through the medical and psychiatric professions
- girls are subject to greater surveillance than boys
In general, there has been a tendency to treat female offender as being either sick or especially bad - (Heidensohn, 1968, Dobash et al, 1986)
Thus we begin to see the police, the criminal courts and the prisons and other forms of punishment as designed mainly to survey, process and punish a specific sector of the population, whose misdemeanours are identified as being of a special and particularly reprehensible sort. The image of the typical crime, as put over by the press, as one of extreme violence, serves to justify the inclusion in the system of a large number of young men whose offences are not particularly serious. Thus, when the recent panic about joyriding was under way, much was made of those few occasions when joyriders were involved in accidents, killing or maiming either themselves or passers-by. This served the purpose of demonizing the joy-rider particularly useful, as it was beginning to seem that he or she was seen as something of a hero.
Drug offences are another case in point. Most drug users are not drug-addicts in the full sense of the word - even such drugs as heroin or cocaine are used recreationally by most users, who do not become 'hooked' Contrary to conventional wisdom, occasional heroin users hold jobs, live in stable families in conventional communities, and manifest none of the outward signs of social distress associated with the 'junkie' addict ... Drug use is important to them, but it is only one of a number of activities for them, and it is relegated to leisure time. (Leon Hunt & Norman Zinberg, 1976 Heroin Use : A New Look). Some 40% of American soldiers in Vietnam between 1970-72 used heroin or opium - between 14-20% were addicted. Faced with threat of being kept in the army, 93% of those classified as addicts and almost all the occasional users, were able to stop using heroin for the rest of their service. A follow up study found that virtually none of the ex-addicts had become readdicted in the year after discharge, although many continued to use it on an occasional basis. (Robins, Lee The Follow-up of Vietnam Drug Users; 1973).
Use of opiates was widespread in England during the 19thC. They were used both medicinally and recreationally. Moral opposition to the use of these drugs gathered strength during the latter half of the century - in particular as they were seen to be undermining the health of the working classes, and because parents were using them to keep their children quiet - leading to a number of deaths. However, the problem was at first seen as medical rather than criminal.
It was in WWI that drugs became seen as a vice to be controlled by law - largely because of fear that they posed a threat to the troops.? Possession of cocaine or opium became an offence in 1916 - restrictions on the sale of alcohol were imposed at the same time. In Britain, and in Europe generally, drug use was not widespread during the inter-war years. Drugs came to be seen as a serious problem again during the 1960s, and new legislation was introduced as evidence for a growth in the use of drugs such as amphetamines for recreational purposes grew. There was also an increasing will on the part of US governments to see drugs as one of the most important problems of the times - Nixon's War on Drugs of the 1970s.
We leave aside here arguments as to the general relationship between drugs and crime, noting that evidence has been found to support both the idea that using drugs leads to more crime, and that being criminal leads to drug use.
One of the main effects, from the point of view being put forward here, of criminalizing the possession of drugs, is that it gives police officers and courts a reason for intervening in the lives of a large number of people. Being in particular places at particular times, and wearing particular clothes, as well as being of a particular colour, become reasonable grounds for suspicion of committing an offence. One of the main complaints of black inner-city dwellers during the riots of the early 1980s in Britain, was that young blacks were targeted by police as being likely possessors or dealers in drugs.
C : Conclusion
The argument which I have outlined here is that criminality, and in particular juvenile delinquency, are to be understood as resulting from the efforts of the state to control a specific section of the population - young working class males. Their behaviour is seen as frightening in a number of ways - having neither a full stake in society as parents and workers, they are perceived as being freer to commit dastardly acts. The rough working classes are seen as being incapable of socializing their young and thus leave the task of controlling them up to formal agencies.
Predatory crime - murder and assault in the course of theft - is put forward as the central model, and justifies the use of the police as a repressive force. A large number of offences are not of a particularly serious nature, but are nevertheless covered by the blanket term 'crime'. The important role of the police is not so much that they catch criminals - as we shall see, they are not necessarily particularly good at it - but that they use the idea of crime itself as a legitimization of their activity.
This view in no way denies the fact that there is a large number of behaviours of an extremely dangerous and unpleasant nature, many of which are definable as crimes. Nor does it deny that probably many of these are perpetrated by the kind of people identified by Wadsworth, Farrington and others, and that intervention programs such as parent training might have some effect in cutting down on such activities. It also needs to be noted that many of the victims of such behaviour are drawn from the poorer and more defenceless groups within society - inner-city dwellers, women and children - both in the street and at home. However, it might be useful to point out that many victims are in fact drawn from the same population as the perpetrators - the person most likely to be the victim of a violent street crime is a young working class male. Indeed, it has been suggested that the perpetrators and the victims are not simply drawn from the same population, but are in fact the same people - sometimes perpetrator and sometimes victim - the football hooligan may be the paradigmatic figure here.
Nevertheless, crime, and delinquency need to be placed within their full historic and social context if we are to understand them. They represent not simply a different kind of deviance in themselves, but a kind of deviance which is treated in a particular way.
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