Pub - Theoretical Criminology From Modernity To Post Mod PDF

THEORETICAL CRIMINOLOGY:
from modernity
to post-modernism
Wayne Morrison, LLB, LLM, PhD,

Barrister and Solicitor (New Zealand)
Senior Lecturer in Law
Queen Mary & Westfield College
Cavendish
Publishing
Limited
London • Sydney
First published in Great Britain 1995 by Cavendish Publishing Limited,
The Glass House, Wharton Street, London WC1X 9PX
Telephone: 0171-278 8000 Facsimile: 0171-278 8080
© Morrison, W, 1995
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
The right of the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any person who infringes the above in relation to this publication may be
liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Morrison, W
Theoretical Criminology: from modernity to post-modernism
I Title II.
344.205
ISBN 1-85941-221-1
Printed and bound in Great Britain

In memory of Thomas James Morrison
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
All texts share in contingency and the desires of their writers, stimulated by various
interactions and experiences. This text is no exception.
The field work on Juvenile Justice teams which began this project was funded
by a small grant from the External System Legal Research Fund administered by
the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London. Ann Marie Gayle served as
temporary research assistant. During the course of preparing this text I have been
aided by the unstinting support of Terence Kelly, whose close reading of drafts of
this text saved me from many mistakes and inspired improvements, and in other
forms by Juliana Georgiadis. I thank Julie Herd at QMW for typing tapes and
other sections when my word-processing fingers threatened to give out, and Kate
Nicol of Cavendish for making copious last minute changes to the manuscript.
The longest standing personal debt is owed to Eryl Hall Williams who has been a
constant source of encouragement since I was a Phd student several years ago. A
number of people, but particularly Nils Christie, Monika Plateck and Tonia
Tzannetakis have helped fashion my opinions. I have been moved by the writings
of James K Baxter and the new forms of urban poetry exampled by Snakes and
Apples. Finally, this text would not have taken on much of its ambitions if not for
a certain interaction with Parosha Chandran. Her own post-modernism seeps into
many of its pages.
Ultimately, however, while the stimulations which inform this text’s creation
owe much to others, responsibility for the faults of its reality must rest with me.
Wayne Morrison
March 1995
iv
PREFACE
This is not a textbook in the traditional sense. Once criminological textbooks could
be written in good conscience – they were a rather tedious lot made possible by a
diverse set of assumptions (many of which are explored in this text, such as
eurocentricity, positivism, a belief in progress, and the mirror of nature thesis). As
criminology became more theoretically sophisticated and reflexive in the 1960s
and 1970s, those assumptions became questioned and the discipline lost its pretence
of coherence, splitting into a range of perspectives.
Criminology has no need to recreate or experience a longing for textbooks
which present writings without any attempt to integrate various schemes or
contextualise the act of writing. Such a text is either a babble of discourse or a
sleeping pill. However, as the concept of a textbook has rightly vanished, so to, it
seems, has the idea of grand theorising. Conversely this text is an attempt to lay
out a framework for theorising in criminology – it sets out a narrative of the
development of criminological theory in terms of central themes in the rise and
intensification of modernity.
The text has several interacting layers
• It can be read as a lengthy response to the thesis of Gottfredson and Hirschi
(1990) that the secret to explaining crime lies in defining criminality in
terms of the varying amounts of self-control individuals possess. Self-
control is indeed central, but the position is much more complicated that
Gottfredson and Hirschi envisage. To explain this the current text takes up
those writers own, albeit undeveloped, proposition that any theory of crime
must be a theory of the social order. To this end it has a second function.
• To position criminological theorising within a narrative of the changing
themes and social structures of modernity – criminological theorising is
both a reflection of, and an attempt to understand, features of the changing
forms of modernity. This reading not only allows us to see criminological
theory in a different light but also allows us to develop a particular theory
of crime; a theory inspired by existentialism in which we seek out the
criminogenic processes involved in modernity and post-modernism. This
theory provides the third layer.
• The theory holds that a dominant focal point of the social structural changes
of modernity and its cultural messages is the creation of self-controlling
and self-directing individuals. Individuals who are called upon to relate to
the world as an environment to control and fashion to their own ends.
Modernity creates an ideal type of self-possessive individuality which is
able to cope with a de-naturalised modern life and the multiple expectations
demanded by an increasingly complex and differentiated social structure.
Not all can live up to this ideal. Reduced to a caricature of itself, the theory
presents a similar structure to Merton’s (1938, 1957) classic strain theory,
that of the tension between the dominate cultural demands and the uneven
social-structural position of individuals. Whereas, however, Merton
v
Preface
proposed the dominant messages of monetary success and class mobility,

this text proposes cultural images of self-possession, self-creation, self-
esteem, and self-motivation, which are held out as the driving force behind
the various life-projects individuals are encouraged to pursue, while the
social structure unevenly distributes the kinds of capital (economic, social
and human) which are involved in the creation of this ideal modern person.
However, the theory is not a simple redevelopment of strain, since it re-
reads control theory in terms of enabling bonds; the freedom at stake in
modernity always exists in a dialectic with discipline. Much of the research
traditionally conducted under the positivist umbrella of searching for the
constitutional features of the offender can be read as indicating processes
and events which can reduce or increase the various forms of capital the
late-modern individual can trade with in the games of contemporary life.
Those with high degrees of capital will find success – those who are keyed
into the system have little need to resort to crime and much to lose (in
Bauman’s words they are seduced) – while those who are phased out (and
we use the concept of the underclass and changing forms of economic
production to describe this feature) are increasingly subjected to
surveillance and repression.
To become self-defining is the fate that the social structure of late-modernity imposes
upon its socially created individuality. The individual is called into action; actions
which are meant to express his/her self and enable the individual’s destiny to be
created out of the contingencies of his/her past. But to paraphrase Marx, while
individuals make their own choices they do not do so in conditions of their own
choosing. The settings of late-modernity emphasize the contingency of the resources
informing the mechanisms of choice in the vast market-place of goods, ideas, styles,
opportunities, and representations the individual is surrounded by. And while
resources differ, all are subjected to variations of a similar pressure as modernity
moves into post-modernism, namely that of the overburdening of the self as the
self becomes the ultimate source of security. The tasks asked of the late-modern
person require high degrees of social and technical skills. To control the self and
guide it through the disequilibrium of the journeys of late modernity is the task
imposed upon the late-modern person, but what if the life experiences of the
individual have not fitted him/her with this power? This text proposes that much
crime is an attempt of the self to create sacred moments of control, to find ways in
which the self can exercise control and power in situations where power and control
are all too clearly lodged outside the self.
A note on the terminology of modernity, post-modernism and post-modernity.
A debate concerning post-modernism has been raging for some time in the literature
of the social sciences; criminology has been slow to catch on. The questions raised
are not mere terminological issues. Has modernity given way to post-modernity?
If so what is it? While it is apparent that we have experienced vast changes in
recent decades it is not the case that we have entered into a new domain. In particular
vi
Preface
post-modernity could be defined as the time when we lost confidence in the projects
of modernity, but doubts were always part of being modern. Instead of a radical
break it is more apt to define post-modernism as the intensification and
multiplication of trends and features of modernism occurring simultaneously within
modernity while denoting the problematising and ambivalence of modernity. Thus
while I contend that we live in processes we can call post-modernism there has not
been some grand transformation into a post-modernity. We live within modernity
but at a distance from the assumptions which gave it security, which made modernity
appear ‘natural’. It is therefore possible to talk of ourselves as living in late-
modernity, or the post-modern condition, or post-modernism, but not to talk of our
inhabiting post-modernity.
Talk of post-modernity or post-modernism has often appeared abstract.
Conversely, this text argues it is the lived reality of our being. The text was
energised by field research conducted on various Social Service Juvenile Justice
teams carrying out community sanctions with young people. Various projects
were visited and a number of staff and young offenders interviewed: while I have
only reproduced sections of the interviews, two themes stood out: (i) the
concentration by Juvenile Justice team members upon what we might call
everyday technologies (as opposed to the client-orientated therapy deriving from
Rogers (1951)) of the self – their routine tasks were aimed at deriving boundaries
around the everyday activities of the offenders, at building the self-esteem of
offenders and enabling the offender to cope with the pressures of everyday life
without resort to crime (although the staff were conscious of success – the reality
of a developing underclass, of client families known for decades to social services,
the staff only retained a professional task through a ‘principle of methodological
optimism’); (ii) the degree to which the discourse of the young offenders mirrored
not a reference to stability or equilibrium, but the confusing and pulsating world
so central to the images of radical differentiation in post-modernist descriptions of
social structure.
While self-control and self-expression have always been a minor concern of
criminological theory, its centrality in recent conservative criminology is not
accidental. The radical differentiation of social spheres (predicted in the classical
sociology of Durkheim as the fate of modernity) so apparent in the social theory of
Niklas Luhman (1986), positions the individual as the site of multiple messages,
as the intersection of various codes and communicative technologies. Messages
and codes which stimulate and faciliate the dialectics of desire and action. The
accounts of the young offenders indicate the impossibility of satisfying the melange
of desires experienced. The world depicted is one of perpetual entrapment in
conditions of stimulated desire and images of an abundance of material goods,
with a scarcity of the means of obtaining them. However, while relative poverty
and a feeling of absence (of deprivation) shine through their accounts – we are apt
to lose sight of Marx and Engels’ 19th century message that man must be in a
position to live in order to make history, and that life involves, before everything
else, eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things – it is also
vii
Preface
clear that resentment at exclusion from sites of obvious consumption, so clearly

packaged in the communications media but also apparent in the significations of
class visible throughout the city (buildings expressing power, BMWs etc), is a
motivating factor. While Eysenck would present us with the image of hoards of
cortically under-aroused individuals roaming our streets looking for excitement,
accounts by young offenders indicate the radical distance involved in the
contemporary city between groups geographically close but distant in terms of
meaning (for a published series of accounts by young offenders see Graef, 1992).
At stake are dilemmas involved in fashion, display, spectacle and the illusion that
the self controls the practices and interests operative in the demands for self-
definition.
The post-modernist talk of the world becoming ‘a plurality of heterogeneous
spaces and temporalities’ (Heller and Feher, 1988:1) may appear strange to some,
but young offenders are clear: ‘You don’t live in my world’. And it is implicit in
their accounts; as, for example, when one matter-of-factly states:
‘when you [referring to the author] go down a street you only see cars and houses... I
see opportunity... Within five minutes I can tell you how many cars have their boots
unlocked and windows unbolted... just by looking... I look behind what’s there.’
(Morrison: Fieldnotes)
But this is a special kind of look. When a young offender claims (with reference to
stealing from cars and joy-riding): ‘I don’t hurt people I only deal with things’, he
does not simply speak the language of Sykes and Matza’s (1961) techniques of
neutralisation, but offers a comment on the degree to which objects (such as cars,
wallets, bikes, goods in shops) can circulate without connection to their human
‘owners’.
Multiple realities, attention to the surface, interaction with a world which takes
on the semblance of the imaginary – but behind which lurks the cold reality of
victimisation – is simply the way contemporary life is lived. While academics may
debate the meaning of post-modernism, and wonder if it actually has arrived, young
offenders live it out.
If the offender is helped into crime by this non-identification of the victim
behind the goods, the same processes inform the growing displacement of the
underclass into another world. The homeless on the streets of London or New
York, the depiction of the drug trafficker as the new evil menace, and the abstraction
of the criminal into sentencing tables, mean a crimin-o-logy can be constructed as
if no real persons were involved, since this highlighting of the other in no way
requires that we notice what the ‘other’ is actually like. To paraphrase Durkheim
and John Stuart Mill, tolerence is the virtue of a liberal society which knows
interdependency, but what happens to tolerence when the society has no need for
sections of its population?
Both the victim and the criminal (the underclass) are effectively denied a face
(one strand of post-modern ethical concern is founded on the concern with the
face found in the writing of Emmanuel Levinas, 1988), since in late-modernity we
viii
Preface
have no need to meet and interact with the ‘other’ beyond the routinised
methodologies of (non)communication. As post-modern cities develop, even public
space is in danger of becoming privatised.
It is difficult to make sense of much of the contemporary world, thus we come
to the dangerous ambiguity involved in the post-modern movement. Some have
referred to post-modernism as the disappearance of meaning, as the impossibility
of attributing labels and qualities correctly in the face of the reflexive questions of
our times. We have so much history and so much information that no innocence is
possible. This is true but no reason for cynical despair, nor for abandonning the
hopes for rational discourse in favour of a privatised universe of speech in which
only the loudest or the best backed get a hearing. While post-modernism announces
potential liberation in the destruction (deconstrunction) of the modernist structures
of binary oppositions (reason-unreason, male-female, white-black, normal-deviant)
it confronts us all with the risks of a splintering of the world into competing domains
at a time of immense powers and little criteria of how to use and relate to them.
While this text cannot provide the answers it can at least offer a narative of how we
have come to be, and highlight various features of, ‘how we find ourselves’.
ix
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements iv
Preface v
1 NARRATING THE MOOD OF THE TIMES: CONFUSION, SELF-

DOUBT, AND AMBIVALENCE 1
Finding places, finding time, finding beginnings... 1
Journeys, snippets... modernisations 2
The problem of the modern world 4
Reflexivity, and the principle of the recognisability of the world 6
The subject matter of criminology is inherently contestable 6
How is criminology presented? How are criminological texts structured? 7
Classicism 8
Positivism in the 19th century 8
In the early development of positivism, crime was viewed as a
natural problem to be cured, similar to a disease 9
A crucial area of conflict has been, to what does the concept of crime refer? 10
A period of contextualising of criminology occurred in the 1960s and 1970s 11
The consensus or functionalist model 13
The pluralist model 13
The conflict model 14
The meaning of the central concepts of criminology varies
according to your scientific perspective 14
Contemporary criminology has different perspectives on central issues 15
Post-modernism and the acceptance of language games
as the reality of social life 15
Living, and making sense of life, within multiple perspectives
is the problem of the post-modern condition 16
But if there is not any natural crime how can criminology have
a basic phenomena to investigate? 17
Because we are trapped in the circles of social processes does not
condemn criminology to mindless relativism, nor should it amount to a
surrender of modernity to the forces of the pre-modern masquerading
in the guise of a return to basics 18
The current position: etiological scepticism and conservative responses 18
The final (conservative?) position: the concept of the self and self-control
as the bed-rock for founding a general theory of crime 20
Interactionism as a theme for a general theory 22
The possibility of a criminology of modernity? 23
2 THE PROBLEM OF MODERNITY 25

The concept of modernity 25
Modernity and control 28
Modernity and civilisation 28
Modernity as the product of a transformation 29
xi
Contents
Modern social life as a normative project 29

The twin stages of modernity 29
Is modernity exhausted? Has it lost its force? 32
Post-modernity, or the realisation of the impossibility of fulfilling modernity? 33
The strains of modernity contained within the discourse of emancipation 35
The need for empirical analysis of the reality of the socio-political location
of individuals and groups 35
The discourse of liberation and authenticity impact upon the modern self 36
Criminology and the social structure of modernity 37
The role of liberalism in the constitution of modernity 39
3 THE THEORISTS OF MODERNITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO

MAX WEBER, KARL MARX, EMILE DURKHEIM AND
FREIDRICH NIETZSCHE 41
Max Weber and the rationalisation of the world 41
The nation state and the rise of capitalism 42
The mood of Weber 44
The problem of discipline 45
Karl Marx 45
Jurisprudence is not to be trusted 48
What is the real basis of the law? 49
Policing becomes a core concern of capitalist social structure 50
What is required to escape? To achieve true emancipation? 50
What happened? What was the effect of Marx’s writings? 51
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) 54
Sociological positivism 55
Social solidarity 55
The use of law as an index of social solidarity 56
Crime is normal in a society 57
Durkheim and the openness of human nature 57
The notion of anomie 58
Durkheim’s analysis of suicide as the paradigm example
of positivism and statistics 59
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) 60
Man’s intellectual frameworks were not modern enough 61
The paradox of the whole and the parts 61
The danger of nihilism 61
The legacy of Weber and Nietzsche in the work of Foucault 63
Culture and knowledge largely constitute the conditions of the modern 63
The void underlying modern existence 64
The created nature of modern man 65
xii
Contents
4 THE PROBLEM OF CLASSICAL CRIMINOLOGY: STABILISING

DISORDER THROUGH LAW; OR HOW TO ACHIEVE THE
RULE OF LAW AND HIDE THE CHAOS OF
EARLY MODERNITY 71
Introduction to classical criminology 71
God’s death demands new legitimation strategies 72
Beccaria (1738-1794) 72
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) 74
Understanding classical criminology and its continuing appeal 76
The rule of law as an expression of current features of modernity 77
A basic question: how is legitimacy of criminal justice established? 78
Classical criminology destroys the magical irrationality of the pre-modern 79
The legitimation of decisions in the theological system depended
on an overall synthesis 80
What does this foundation of mystery entail? 82
How is modern society made if not as a reflection of underlying
natural laws of social evolution? 83
Classical criminology talks the language of a ‘true’ science of
man and society, but actually creates a structure separate from
nature; it founds the social upon myth and politics 86
The need for objectivity and professionalism 87
What is rational government? 88
The need to stabilise potential chaos 89
The results of the constructionist project: the creation of hybrids such as ‘rights’ 91
5 READING THE TEXTS OF CLASSICAL CRIMINOLOGY: BEYOND

MERE COMMAND INTO SYSTEMATIC LEGITIMATION 93
What is the nature of the criminal justice system? 94
Reading classicism I: The construction of Beccaria’s text 96
Reading classicism II: John Austin and the role of knowledge 103
After the destruction of the classicist faith in utility what guides the law? 107
Jurists hold that legal regulation, by its nature, seems to imply obedience; why? 107
H L A Hart: the critique of classicism in Austin and the response of the civilised man 107
Without faith in utilitarianism, and devoid of a natural law
system, how can the positive law earn respect? 110
Conclusion: the dialectic of systems and selves 113
6 CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM I: THE SEARCH FOR THE

CRIMINAL MAN, OR THE PROBLEM OF THE DUCK 115
Introduction to criminological positivism 115
Intellectual revolution or a narrowing of concerns? 117
Modernity, construction and the social control perspective 121
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) 124
Raffaele Garofalo (1852-1934) 126
Enrico Ferri (1856-1929) 126
xiii
Contents
Early criminological positivism and the rule of law 128

A E Hooton 129
W H Sheldon 130
The legacy of positivism: disentangling the mess 133
7 CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM II: PSYCHOLOGY

AND THE POSITIVISATION OF THE SOUL 139
Positivism, learning and psychology 139
Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation and crime 142
Eysenck’s theory of crime 144
Edwin Sutherland and the theory of differential association 150
The prevalence of white collar crime demonstrated the normalcy of crime 155
The extreme criminal: the idea of the psychopath 155
The aetiology of psychopathology? 158
If this is not a ‘moral disorder’ then there must be a treatment? 159
What sort of regimes do the penal systems of England,
Wales and Scotland use? 160
Evaluation of the treatment effects of Grendon 161
Psychopathology and interactive communication 162
The knowledges of psychology: tools of control in modernity? 163
8 CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM III: STATISTICS,

QUANTIFYING THE MORAL HEALTH OF SOCIETY
AND CALCULATING NATURE’S LAWS 165
The resolution of chance and the chaos of the natural state 165
The battle for sociology: a moral science or a statistical science? 167
Criminal statistics 168
The problem of criminal statistics 168
Problems in the compilation of official statistics 169
Attempts to mitigate the failings of the official statistics 171
The contemporary problem of reflexivity and criminal
statistics – do we need a science of interpretation? 173
How did we get to the point where statistics dominate
criminological discourse? 174
Strain theory 175
What can we make of this? 180
Social control theory 183
What are we to make of these ‘control theories?’ 187
xiv
Contents
9 POSITIVISM AND THE DREAM OF

ORGANISED MODERNITY 189
Criminology and the dream of organised modernity 189
Social distance 190
The development of bureaucracy and the knowledges of disciplinisation 193
Governing the population came to mean creating a bourgeois citizenship 197
The dialectics of the civilising process 199
The reflexive questioning of civilisation 202
The impact of crimes of obedience and crimes of bureaucracy 203
The structural features of crimes of obedience 205
Authorisation 207
Routinisation 208
Dehumanisation 208
Alasdair MacIntyre and the critique of managerial expertise 209
Is post-modernism the end of the dream of organised modernity? 210
The post-modern condition: life within the unorganised
structures of organised modernity? 211
Social control in post-modernism: the seduced and the repressed 212
10 MORALITY, NORMALCY AND MODERNITY: T

HE MORAL INTENSITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE 215
Analyticism and the problem of contemporary criminology 215
H L A Hart: everyday life as the site of analysis 218
The complexity of the mundane: the richness of everyday life 219
The narratives of civil society 223
David Hume (1711-1776) and the foundation of experience 223
Immanuel Kant and the need to rely upon pure reason 224
The problematic of being a modern and being moral 228
Durkheim’s model of modernity restated 230
The task of moral socialisation in late-modernity: the
example of gender relations 232
11 LOCALITY AND CRIMINOLOGY: FROM THE

POLIS TO THE POST-MODERN CITY 237
The paradox of city life: social distance, physical proximity 237
Crime links with fear, trust, and predictability 239
Telling the story of urban existence: I, the oral-ethnographic efforts 240
Telling the story of urban existence: II, the ecological paradigm
and the attempt to develop a science of the city 243
The Chicago School used a concept of social disorganisation to
explain the ecology of crime 246
Understanding urbanity: III, beyond the naturalist paradigm 249
Can cities be controlled so that community can be created as a
livable urban space? 251
Locality as a site of social interaction 252
xv
Contents
End-Game: the city as a site of communication and the arrival

of the post-modern city 253
The onset of new divisions, social polarisation and the
development of an underclass 255
An environment of communication 257
The late-modern, or post-modern, city as a mobile site 258
Modernity: the desire to construct a home and the
differing experiences of post-modernity 261
Southall 261
to be a woman in new york city 262
New left realism 262
Investigating Los Angeles: Mike Davis and the
post-modern City of Quartz 266
12 CRIMINOLOGY AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNITY 273

Culture as a restraining medium: the case of Japan 277
Culture as criminogenic 281
Albert Cohen 281
Cloward and Ohlin 284
The criminal sub-culture or gang 286
The conflict sub-culture or gang 286
The retreatist sub-culture 287
Walter Miller 288
Culture and social structure: does working class culture, or a culture
of poverty, determine social conditions, or social
conditions determine culture? 291
Bridging concepts: from social structural to individual or
psychological states 293
Culture and crime: an extreme example? 295
13 CULTURE AND CRIME IN THE POST-MODERN CONDITION 297

The challenge of culture under post-modernism: democraticism or incoherence? 297
Conceptualising modern identity 299
The post-modern condition is the contingency of the normal 302
Contingency and the sense of justice 306
The melange of the late or post-modern 308
The skills of post-modern living: or how can we live in the
absence of ‘real’ meaning? 309
Location by consumption patterns 313
Desire, growth, materiality and the coherence of practical justice 315
Understanding the (non)reality of crime: the non-positivist sign 319
The cultural paradox of post-modernism: energy and exhaustion 319
xvi
Contents
14 LABELLING THEORY, AND THE WORK

OF DAVID MATZA 321
Introduction 321
Labelling theory: from mechanical naturalism into interactional process 321
The understanding of social psychology espoused by Herbert Mead 322
David Matza: from hard to soft determinism 328
Drift theory 332
Direction One: the irony of labelling and the reproduction
of delinquency by state intervention 334
Direction Two: the power of collective representation:
from Matza to Foucault? 337
The importance of the sign: the construction of hyper-reality 338
Direction Three: positivism fights back asking for a reconciliation
with process: seeing criminality as a thought process 341
Direction Four: Does the act of labelling invite irrational responses?
The games of law, desire and death 343
The overuse of law: law’s ability to create crime 346
Direction Five: the latent power of existentialism within criminology 348
15 CRIME AND THE EXISTENTIALIST DILEMMA 349

Combating the vertigo of freedom: the existentialist reconciliation
in sincerity and authenticity 349
The optimistic ethos of criminological existentialism 351
The harsh end of criminological existentialism 352
Early modernity and the crime of passion 354
Tactic one: the beast within who can overtake us when we are weak or asleep 357
Tactic two: the psychopath 358
Recognising the existential sensuality of crime 358
The sensuality of stealing 360
Street Elites: Aristocrat verses rabble 364
Rape and sexual homicide 365
The dialectic of self-awareness and self-control 367
The events which constituted these offences were social actions
embodying relations; actions mediated through culture and emotions 368
Moral transcendence 373
Symbolic displacement 378
Conclusion: the message of existentialism? 380
16 MODERNITY, GENDER AND CRIME: FROM THE

BIOLOGICAL PARADIGM INTO FEMINIST
INTERPRETATIONS 383
Do women exist? 383
Women in the construction of modernity 384
Boundary setting: modernity and the otherness of women 385
xvii
Contents
What has criminology said about all of this? 386

Statistical discrepancy in the commission of crime
between men and women 387
Individuals found guilty or cautioned for indictable offences
per 100,000 people in the population 387
Indictable offences (tried in Crown Court) 388
Summary offences (tried in magistrates’ courts) 388
Understanding the official statistics and criminal involvement 388
Several writers have denied the truth of differential involvement in crime 389
Victim surveys and self-report tests support the official statistics 390
Has there been leniency or chivalry by officials within the
Criminal Justice System in their dealings with women? 390
What type of crime do women commit? And should we
expect their crime to increase? 394
Why have there been so few theories on crime which are gender specific? 395
Criminological explanations were not set out as ‘arguments
explaining why men commit more crime then women’ 396
Biological and psychological explanations: a critique 398
The effect of aggression and biology? 399
Sex role socialisation 400
Is there an increase in female crime? Does the liberation
of women necessitate that they become as criminal as men? 405
What is the empirical evidence in criminology? 407
The problematising of masculinity in post-modernism 409
Questioning the post-modernist turn 412
Can a criminological theory of rational conformity, which does
not reduce femininity to passivity or over-control, be developed? 413
17 CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND THE

DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNDERCLASS 417
The arrival of the underclass 417
The radical right’s tradition of constitutional or cultural features aided
by mistaken social policy as explaining the emergence of the underclass 419
The radical right’s image of the future of civil society 425
The social democratic thesis of the underclass as a consequence
of post-industrialisation 426
The class thesis that the underclass is partly a creation
of a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich in the 1980s 433
The underclass and criminology 436
The underclass and post-modernism 436
Conclusion 442
Postscript: A note on the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 443
Visualising reality 448
The riot as an indicator of the post-modern future? 449
xviii
Contents
18 BUILDING CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORY IN

POST-MODERNISM 451
Lyotard and the death of modern social theory 453
Does post-modernism imply the impossibility of constructing a
general theory, or even of integrating different theories? 455
Eleven structures of criminological theory 458
If post-modernism comes out of modernity, then who are we?
Where are we? How do we make sense of criminological ‘reality’? 460
How can social arrangements appear just in post-modernism?
How can social order be legitimate under the culture of contingency? 462
Social justice, positionality and the emotions of post-modernism 464
How can a form of social justice be constructed that copes with
the culture of contingency? 466
Without a continuing narrative of modernity, Just Gaming
becomes just gaming 466
Is post-modernism the collapse of any drive towards social
individuality; are we mere modular components? 467
The ideal late-modern self fits a variety of late-modern games;
our modular man possesses social capital: is criminality a
function of social capital? 469
A final end-word? Beyond post-modernist doubts? 473
Index 509
xix
CHAPTER ONE
NARRATING THE MOOD OF THE TIMES: CONFUSION,

SELF-DOUBT, AND AMBIVALENCE?
‘So hard to focus the ball of the human eye

On our terrible Mother, that stone Medusa
Sitting on her hill of skulls – suicides, abortions,
Gang-splashes, bloodstained mattresses, a ton of empty pill bottles,
And whatever else the wind may blow in the doorway, including, one may
hope, the tired dove
Of the human spirit, raped again and again in the skyway
By the mechanical hawk. So hard for us to praise
The century of Kali - since a poem has to celebrate
Its moment of origin. As yet I am only able
To smile a little, and say, ‘Not yet, not yet, Mother!
You must wait till I have bought the right kind of sawblade
‘To turn the top of my skull into a drinking cup, –
Then begin! Things have to be done in the right order.’
(James K Baxter, extract from Letter to Peter Olds, 1980:578)
Finding places, finding time, finding beginnings...
This book should start in a sensible fashion; but where? In what sort of mood
should it commence? What is the time and where is the place that we begin from?
We could begin in a mood of contentment, perhaps even joy. Things, on the
whole, appear fine for those of us who live in the west. In fact we have never
enjoyed so many goods and opportunities. There are some problems with the world...
but domestically progress seems stable if only wages for labour can be cut to
ensure a competitive product, etc. John Kenneth Galbraith has recently analysed
the mood of the influential groups in the US and Europe in terms of a Culture of
Contentment (1992), warning that such a culture is short-sighted, and is detrimental
to long term social stability and health. In particular he argues that the economically
fortunate and those aspiring-to-be have a strong electoral position (since those
who are not gaining from the system tend not to vote), and control large portions
of the media; they oppose public expenditure except where they personally stand
to gain; they attack attempts to regulate corporate raiders, property speculators or
junk bond dealers, yet if disaster strikes, as when a bank fails, they demand
immediate action. The contented seem to believe that others in society only fail for
lack of effort, or for deficiencies of their constitution such as low IQ, and thus
argue that payments for welfare and public infrastructure should be reduced in
real terms. This contentment places future social harmony horribly at risk. It involves
a collective refusal to look seriously at the problems of the discontented.
Or, we could begin in melancholy. This appears to be the mood of many
intellectuals, particularly those who speak of the coming of a post-modern society.
1
Theoretical criminology: from modernity to post-modernism
It is a hard mood to describe. Elsewhere I have tried to locate the current mood of
criminology within such a post-modern and melancholia frame (Morrison, 1994).
The feeling is best summed up by a conception that something has been lost from
human endeavour, that the great social projects – liberalism, socialism, communism,
radical democracy, nationalism in the third world – have lost their energy as the
hopes held out for them in earlier times have been compromised by reality.
Or, we could begin with depression. Things are bad, very bad world wide with
social chaos threatening and bad for a lot of people in the west. There are record
numbers under psychiatric counselling, drug abuse aids in the wrecking of many
people’s lives, unemployment climbs and climbs (kept in check only by various
changes in the way statistics are compiled); the only growth industry appears to be
in prison building and private security.
And our recent history? Two world wars, a third which would have been totally
destructive prevented by weapons of such power that using them would have been
MAD (mutual assured destruction). Instead we have fought numerous wars by
proxy... and we remember the holocaust.
There are so many books, and articles, and TV shows, and films, we are
threatened with drowning in this sea of communication. Images, messages, and
interconnections... Naomi Campbell’s image everywhere, and where she isn’t there
are books which remind us that the beauty of the architecture we are surrounded
by in Bristol and London was built in significant part on the basis of the slave trade
in Africans... books which tell us that the contentment of the west is built upon the
exploitation of the third world... articles which tell us that while we may be afraid
of street crime, we are really being ripped off by the vast world of unreported and
unpunished corporate and white collar crime... The impossibility of escaping from
images... TV... where does the real world begin and spectacle end?... what’s real
and what is imaginary?
What does it all add up to? We need criteria... big criteria... big enough to
differentiate between kinds of information, between kinds of knowledge, between
varying perceptions... Big enough to escape an inhuman emotivism. Big enough to
tell us what are real crimes and what are not, who are the criminals and who are not.
Journeys, snippets... modernisations
This text takes up the theme of a journey... Where are we? Over 200 years ago with
all the flush of 18th century optimism Saint-Simon declared:
‘The Golden Age of the human race is not behind us but before us; it lies in the
perfection of the social order. Our ancestors never saw it; our children will one day
arrive there, it is for us to clear the way.’ (1952:68)
We are those children – are we at the place foreseen? That is one question of this
text... also the attempt to ask, what does it mean to think like this... what words
should we use? One key word that will infuse this text will be modernity. What
2
Narrating the mood of the times
does it mean? By its nature the term is vague, Chapter two shall attempt to define
it, but for now we can see it as denoting a grand construction project – the attempt
to build the good society; post-modernity is the realisation that the construction
has fallen apart.
Our part in this? Crime is read as the most obvious sign of this disintegration.
Why study crime? Crime is both an example and a result of immediate and pressing
concerns. The first motivation which drives criminology is the feeling that crime is
a serious social problem and this reflects for some a feeling that our modern societies
are ‘out of control’ in certain key respects. The existence of such a social problem
is also problematic in an important second respect, in that it offends against certain
cultural assumptions of modern western societies. Put another way, the cultural
underpinning of the confidence of the modern west relies upon certain cultural
assumptions, such as ‘progress’, prosperity and the power of social engineering;
mushrooming official crime rates taunts these, showing their falseness, exposing
the weakness of modernity.
In the US the Final report of the President’s Task Force on Victims of Crime in
1982 stated:
‘Something insidious has happened in America: crime has made victims of us all.
Awareness of its danger affects the way we think, where we live, where we go, what
we buy, how we raise our children, and the quality of our lives as we age. The spectre
of violent crime and the knowledge that, without warning, any person can be attacked
or crippled, robbed, or killed, lurks at the fringes of consciousness. Every citizen of
this country is more impoverished, less free, more fearful, and less safe, because of
the ever present threat of the criminal. Rather than alter a system that has proven itself
incapable of dealing with crime, society has altered itself.’ (1982: vi)
The presence of so much desperation and social unrest complicates the notion that
modernity would create ‘good’ or ‘grand’ societies of peaceful co-existence and
economic plenty, in which the conditions for harmonious social co-existence would
be achieved. But the present... How can we characterise the present? In the mid
1970s Bell was clear:
‘If the natural world is ruled by fate and chance, and the technical world by rationality
and entropy, the social world can only be characterised as existing in fear and
trembling.’
While the leading Australian criminologist, John Braithwaite, was ambivalent about
the prospects for criminology:
‘[Contemporary] Criminologists are pessimists and cynics. There seem good reasons
for this. Our science has largely failed to deliver criminal justice policies that will
prevent crime. The grand 19th century utilitarian doctrines – deterrence, incapacitation,
rehabilitation – are manifest failures. The return to classicism in criminology – the
just deserts movement – has been worse than a failure. It has been a disastrous step
backwards.’ (1992:1)
Should we be in a good mood or bad, has modern society progressed? It’s getting
hard to tell. Bauman (1991) has defined post-modernity as modernity taking a
3
long look at itself and being confused at what it sees. What has it all amounted to?
What has this task of becoming modern been all about? Thus we face a crisis of
confidence... a lack of direction... a demand for directions... a crisis of law and
order.
Although crisis may have always been a term used by those deeply embedded
in the complex flows of social ordering of their contemporary society, the driving
force for the post-modern condition seems a sense of bewilderment and
ambivalence. It has become difficult even to define the nature of the problem.
The problem of the modern world
The German social theorist Friedrich Nietzsche best expressed the problem of the
modern world as our growing perception of the death of God. God’s death left a
huge void. As Morse Peckham put it: ‘in Medieval European thought, the
epistemological authority was the word of God as revealed through the teachings
of the Roman Church’ (1962:8). Writing towards the end of the 19th century
Nietzsche was perplexed. Surely the whole scheme of rational and critical
intellectual enquiries which Europe had thrown up in the 17th and 18th centuries
had removed any rational basis for belief in God? The foundations of modern
thought needed to be thought anew. But while this period had seen important
thinkers – Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Comte,
David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, to name a few – Europe appeared
not to have succeeded in the radical revaluation of values, the wholesale
redevelopment of its institutions, beliefs and aspirations which Nietzsche believed
were necessary to avoid a forthcoming social disaster.
Without such a revaluation Nietzsche feared that nihilism or meaninglessness
would overtake the world. For without God how could there be ultimate answers
to the fundamental questions of existence? If we really face up to the fact that God
was dead what will become of man? Indeed... what is man? Where did he come
from? What gives his existence meaning? What will make him happy? What should
structure his relationships with his fellow humans? What is the aim of social life?
What is the point to his desires? What gives his life purpose? What ensures
frustration? What is the basis of concepts such as guilt, tolerance, good and evil?
What is the phenomological reality of his behaviour? What, for example, is a crime?
What or who is a criminal? Is the criminal to be loved as a strong man or feared?
Is he a social rebel actually to be encouraged, or despised as a socially retarded
individual?
We are 100 years on from Nietzsche’s bitter discussion of God’s death. In the
1990s, for most westerners, God is a memory from more certain times or something
to tell the children to believe in to aid socialisation. Occasionally the odd
Conservative politician will argue that the fact that we no longer fear suffering in
Hell is the cause of the rise in crime, but, by and large, God has been replaced by
science, hedonism and the ‘care of the self’. Modern westerners live, not so that
4
someday they can gain entrance into heaven and exist in God’s grace, but to make
a success of their own lives – so that they achieve things for themselves. Science,
technology, research institutes, the welfare state, human rights, the United Nations,
McDonalds, the world cup, mortgages, holidays in the sun, exercise regimes and
cosmetic surgery, all are more important than religion.
Whom do we obey in our daily lives? We do not obey God’s will, God’s
commands – and while we may obey or follow the commands of others, parents,
friends, bosses, throughout modern life it is the law that we are principally called
upon to obey; the law and the state. It is the state that organises, the state that we
appeal to for change... for legislation... And of the masses of legal regulation
which constitutes our modern socio-political framework, it is the criminal law
which appears to cut closest to our interests in personal security and the protection
of our property. Those who do not obey the criminal law are criminals. And we
have a science, criminology, which investigates why crimes are committed and
what to do with those individuals who commit crimes. It is tempting to claim that
belief in God has been replaced by faith in reason and science. Criminology
claims the status of the rational and scientific attempt to study the phenomena of
crime. It was born with the death of God. It was meant to aid in the journey, the
construction of a secure modernity, its presence offered confidence and its
discourse solace:
‘The surest sign that a society has entered into the secure possession of a new concept
is that a new vocabulary will be developed, in terms of which the new concept can
then be publicly articulated and discussed.’ (Skinner, Quentin, 1978: vol 1 xii-xiii)
Thus a different definition can be given: criminology is the attempt to produce a
coherent and productive vocabulary to delineate and comprehend certain aspects
of the social world loosely grouped around the concept of crime.
What is criminology currently? The simple answer is to look at the word:
crim-o-logos – the logos, or rational speech, concerning crime. What makes
human society possible is language, discourse. Criminology is the discourse
concerning crime and the methods by which society deals with crime. Given
such a topic it is not surprising that criminology is a blanket label covering a
large set of discourses and diversity of material; material which may at times
verge on the political, the sociological and philosophical, the rhetorical and the
technical. But can this material be read as having a central core, a coherent
domain? Or is it totally unstable, a mass of perspectives which tease the reader
of an article into thinking that the discourse encountered has sense but negates
this as soon as various other articles are read? There is another tension between
treating criminology as a special discipline in its own right with its own topic,
that is the analysis of crime, and regarding criminology as a synthesis of social
sciences (such as jurisprudence, sociology, anthropology, psychology) which
themselves may be uncertain as to their own constitution. (After all what is
sociology? does it contain politics and economics? Where does social geography
fit?)
5
Reflexivity, and the principle of the recognisability of the world
Modern western societies are reflexive. They constantly ask themselves questions.
People are paid, in government think-tanks, in universities, in the media, to ask
questions and to reflect upon social processes. Their questions and the attempts to
answer them, are recorded in language – but since language is a social cultural product
it is a socially constructed grid of understanding. The various attempts to understand
the modern world are part of the social process which constitute modernity. For a
long time the search for knowledge presupposed that the world was easily recognisable
to man’s intellectual tools, reason and observation. But recently we understand that
the social sciences constantly move in what is termed an hermeneutical circle. The
human sciences are human cultural enterprises attempting to understand human
cultural enterprises – they cannot produce absolute certainty since that would require
some place outside the circle from which to judge pure truth.
Because we are locked into society, because our journey of knowledge occurs
within the journey of our societies, we cannot know things about society with
absolute certainty – the ‘truths’ of the social sciences are interpretative. But we
need concepts, we need to clarify and analyse our linguistic products. They define
the objects we bump into, they lay out the meaning of the courses of action we
undertake. As the contemporary Scottish social theorist Alasdair MacIntyre put it:
‘... the limits of action are the limits of description, the delineation of a society’s
concepts is therefore the crucial step in the delineation of its life.’ (1962, 62-3)
It is no wonder then, that in the 200 or so years that some form of criminology has
been in existence controversy has raged over the meaning of its basic concepts.
The subject matter of criminology is inherently contestable

It may appear strange to begin a book with an admission of confusion but
criminology is a subject with a complicated history and a set of polemic arguments
about its fundamental subject-matter. Traditionally, the simplest definition has been
to define criminology as ‘the scientific study of crime and offenders’. As Hermann
Mannheim defined it:
‘... criminology means the study of crime... Provisionally, we may define crime in
legal terms as human behaviour which is punishable by the criminal law.’ (1965:3)
This legalistic perspective has been the accepted definition of crime since at least
Blackstone in the 1760s:
‘A crime... is an act committed, or omitted, in violation of a public law, either forbidding
or commanding it.’ (Jones, G ed, 1973:189)
Law creates its own ontology. But if a crime is something which is solely the
creation of law, how can a thorough going social science study it? Surely a social
science should control its own basic central core?
6
Thus, such a definition which, we may note, has basically survived as the
foundation of criminology, soon becomes subjected to a whole set of qualifications.
There has been and still exists a debate whether the subject-matter of criminology
should be restricted to conventional legal definitions of crime, adopt a sociological
lens focusing upon ‘deviance’, or some form of moral-political conception of
socially injurious conduct. Since the advent of the Labelling theory perspective in
criminology in the 1960s, the issues of linkages and interconnections between the
role of the state and the definition of crime, between attaining knowledge about
the causes of crime, policy applications, and the punishment question, are hotly
debated and complex in their nature.
Reflexivity has meant that criminologists spend a great deal of time and effort
pulling apart the apparent simplicity of the definition of criminology as ‘the scientific
study of crime’. The definition opens up a range of questions concerning issues:
• of motivation, ie why study crime?
• of definition, ie what is a crime?
• of the relationship between crime and offenders, in other words, to what extent
can the problem of crime be reduced to the problem of criminals?
• of identification, ie who, or what, is actually the criminal?
• of methodology, ie what is the scientific method?
• of application, ie is criminology a disinterested subject, or one tied to quite
specific policy concerns?
• of boundaries, ie is there a clearly defined limit to criminology, or are all
questions relating to the creation of criminal labels, of the response to such
categories and the understanding of human behaviour, acceptable as part of
the field?
• of meaning, ie does explaining crime necessarily mean entering into a general
social theory?
How is criminology presented? How are criminological texts

structured?
Most criminological texts are organised so as to present a history of criminology,

and organised as if criminology had a coherent history which progressed, step by
step, improving upon the simpler theories of the past. Until the 1970s this history
was written with the assumptions of humanitarianism, progress and efficiency.
The past was being overcome, the future was being constructed – criminology was
providing knowledge to build the good society. If history is progressive then
greater weight must be placed on what comes later in time; the past is the
repository of myths and mistakes. Moreover, all effort is cooperatively proceeding
towards an end, the realisation of a rational programme of improvement,
production of knowledge, education and emancipation. Criminology was playing
7
its part in the civilising of man, in the production of a new, more advanced way of
social life.
This comfortable image fell into despair in the 1970s and 1980s. Things which
had been relegated to the past, such as the classical approach to crime (or, indeed,
pure constitutional theories) were back on the agenda. Here criminology could not
be divided from general trends in the social sciences and culture. This is part of the
crisis of modernity. In one definition, modernity ends when it is no longer possible
to believe that history is moving in a progressive uni-linear fashion. Then things
appear to repeat themselves, and we are assailed with growing support for patterns
of belief modernity thought of as traditional, tribal, or irrational. Thus, human
events cannot be simply read as making up a uni-linear continuum; social
organisation cannot be read as proceeding towards a goal. Instead it is realised that
these ideas only made sense when certain fundamental assumptions were in place,
when a central ideal of man and society was placed as the criterion of value.
Inherently this was the ideal of the civilised, liberal European-American.
Instead of a progressive history we can better present several periods of
criminology.
Classicism
The first set of writings we consider as criminology are labelled classical

criminology and date from the later 18th century. These had depicted the lawyer as
the important person on this planet. It was not, as the later Italian school was to
claim, that classical criminology was unscientific, far from it. Classical criminology
adopted a certain reading of the sciences of man but simply left the ultimate
questions unanswered. It did not matter what was the ultimate cause of human
behaviour, the task was to find ways to control and direct it via affecting rational
motivation. The underlying social conditions of crime were less important, what
was important was administration. The task was to free society from arbitrary
authority, to open up the society so that basic true forms of the human condition
could be visible. Crime was a concept of demarcation; an inevitable fact of the
social condition; law would be an instrument of rational government.
Positivism in the 19th century
In the late 19th century the medical doctor Cesare Lombroso claimed that the
answers to crime were to be found in a particular scientific approach called
positivism. In particular Lombroso laid claim to found a new science – the science
of criminology. Lombroso’s answer to the problems of human behaviour lay
specifically in biology; but in wider terms we can see it as arguing that all things
which occur on earth can be explained by a naturalist paradigm. Man was a well
8
developed animal and the processes of the natural selection of individuals for
survival in a complex world threw up variations which were simply predestined to
crime. Henceforth the priest and the lawyer/judge were to be replaced by the
scientific expert. The mysteries of life had become mere problems for the scientist
to remedy.
In the early development of positivism, crime was viewed as a

natural problem to be cured, similar to a disease
Consider the language and the implications of the concepts used in the following
extract. It is from a 1935 introduction to criminology written by the marxist writer
Willem Bonger.
‘We have to deal, indeed, with an extensive and deeply-rooted social disease, which
has dug itself into the very body of society like a kind of ulcer; at times even
threatening its very existence, but always harmful in the highest degree. Countless
crimes are committed, and millions of criminals condemned, every year.
Economically, the disadvantages to society are very great... I think it is undeniable
that crime is a source of stupendous waste of money to society. Next to the economic,
we have, moreover, the still more important moral disadvantages. If criminality is
closely bound up with the moral standards of a people, in return it sends out
demoralising influences towards the normal sections of the population. And when
one adds to all this the damage and grief suffered by the victims of the crime, and
also the constant menace which criminality constitutes to society, the total obtained
is already a formidable one. Neither ought we to forget the suffering on the part of
the criminal himself, who – in whatever way one may wish to judge him, is after
all, a part of humanity too.
The reasons for the study of criminology should therefore be clear. Admittedly
it is a science which is widely studied for its own sake, just like other sciences;
crime and criminals are not a bit less interesting than stars or microbes. The element
of la science pour la science should be present in every scientist, otherwise he will
be no good in his profession; and this applies to the criminologist too. But this
point of view is secondary as compared with the practical aspect, just as in the case
of medical science. Indeed, comparison with the latter repeatedly suggests itself.
Criminology ought before anything to show humanity the way to combat, and
especially, prevent, crime. What is required more than anything is sound knowledge,
whereas up to the present we have had far too much of dogma and dilettantism.’
(1936:5-7).
The confidence espoused by positivist criminology to solve the problem of crime
waned with the advent of labelling theory, and the increases in crime of the late
1960s. There are various reasons. One was a reassessment of the nature of
criminological discourse which came about with the labelling perspective in the
1960s. We came to ask can we trust criminology? Is the principle of the
recognisability of the world correct? Is there any firm relationship between the
word and the world? This became a key question. Is the scientific status, and our
acceptance of the ontological entities criminology deals with, warranted? For
9
example are its sources of knowledge truthful, what is the accuracy level of criminal
statistics – can theories be based upon these sources of knowledge?
A crucial area of conflict has been, to what does the concept of

crime refer?
For much of its history criminology has accepted the legalistic definition of crime
as human behaviour which is punishable by sanctions specified by the criminal
law. This automatic linkage between crime, the criminal law and liability for
punishment has not been universally accepted by criminologists (in part because
what can be defined as a crime by the powerful agencies of the state varies over
time and place). The struggle to find a method by which the criminologist could
scientifically define an object of study (crime, deviance), has been an ongoing
feature of criminology since its modern formulations.
• In the late 19th century, and early 20th century, members of the Italian positivist
school rejected a legal definition because they considered this as unscientific.
They tried to find some underlying natural order to social relations which
demonstrated that deviance was unnatural or pathological.
• In the 1930s and 1940s the argument continued but Michael and Adler argued
that a scientific criminology could only be developed around a precise and
unambiguous definition of crime, which was, in their view, behaviour prohibited
by the criminal code.
• Conversely Sellin (1938) decided that acceptance of a legal definition violated
a basic criterion for a scientific discipline which should define its fundamental
entities itself. He wished to look for conduct norms of social interaction which
would provide a universal foundation, irrespective of political and cultural
boundaries.
• From the 1940s Sutherland advocated close attention to the notion of social
harm, and encouraged criminologists to study a wider range of behaviours
than those which the process of criminalisation and prosecution had brought
to their attention.
• Tappan (1947) criticised the influence of Sellin and Sutherland, arguing that
vague, non-legalistic, definitions of crime were a blight on a sociology which
sought to be objective. Instead sociology was to assume that the laws were a
reflection of underlying social consensus as to fundamental norms of behaviour.
• In the 1970s the Schwendingers argued that actions which violated human
rights should attract sanctions, and should be regarded as the central topic for
criminologists. The Schwendingers, however, were not content with legally
specified human rights, but claimed that we should label as crimes many of the
activities of governments, and agents of national governments. Their critics
argued this was to turn criminology into politics, bringing a hopeless relativism
to the discipline.
10
• Clinard (1968) argued that deviance consists of those acts which do not follow
the norms and values of a particular social group, crime consisted of behaviours
and actions which exceed the limits of tolerance of any particular social group.
This approach appeared to leave us with relativism; the criminologist could
only study deviance as any particular social group defined it.
• In 1994 Sumner took this approach further, announcing the ‘death’ of any
scientific confidence in the sociology of deviance, or liberal ideas on the rule
of law. If criminology was to be scientific it would have to study a ‘sociology
of moral censure’.
How are we to understand this constant to-ing and fro-ing? This constant search
for something to orientate intellectual inquiry? We should be clear about a subsidiary
thesis of this work: criminology has been obsessed about the accumulation of
information and knowledge, it has not been as consciously concerned to ask ‘what
is the meaning of all of this information and knowledge?’ Nicholas Maxwell (1984)
argued that the orientation of modern scientific inquiries was based on the
accumulation of knowledge and technological power at the expense of wisdom. A
dull specialisation and proliferation of disciplines flourishes with little idea of what
if anything it all adds up to. Perhaps criminology is a prime example (in a recent
textbook the author, Williams, (1994) could only conclude criminology was a Tower
of Babel of discourses).
A period of contextualising of criminology occurred in the 1960s and

1970s
Dissatisfaction with the naive forms of traditional criminology surfaced in the

1960s, and it was felt that criminology ought to be more self-consciously aware of
its value positions, more socially concerned, committed, and critical of its
relationship to power and how it conceived of the social structure. If the world was
not a simple place, and crime was something far more complex than a simple
matter of anti-social deviance, then the whole status of what it meant to be engaged
in criminology needed to be investigated. So-called radical writers claimed that
criminology was concerned with providing knowledge to control the lower classes
of society, and Becker even asked ‘Whose side are we on?’ The deviant was, for a
time, viewed through a romantic haze: the deviant was the one who fought back
against the dominating capitalist structure. But then who did the deviant fight? His
(and it was predominately a he according to criminal statistics and victim surveys)
victims were overwhelmingly working class. There was little scope for conceiving
of crime as inter-class warfare. Intellectually, the issue concerned not only the
earlier question, namely, what sort of scientific variable was the concept of crime,
but from what view of the social world does the concept derive? How should the
11
criminologist locate him (and increasingly her) self within the overall social order
and social history?
In the 1980s criminology quietly began a process of reflexivity. There cannot
be an enterprise of intellectual study, of analysis of an object without some prior
act of synthesis or conferring acceptance for the place of that object into something
more fundamental. Logos, our language, must meet the world in some form, and
we are always making some assumptions. Of course, the normal way we encounter
the world is through stories. Most trials, for example, are a specialised and
particularised modality of narration. What, after all, are the rules of evidence if not
guidelines as to what may be included in the story told in court? Our earliest
experiences of understanding life come through our role as the audience for others
to recount life. We recount life to ourselves. When we analyse an object, or accept
a concept, we take for granted some broader recounting. What are the limits to the
stories criminology should tell?
An obvious problem arises. If the basic subject matter, ie the definition of crime,
is laid down by the political apparatus of the state, how can criminology simply
accept crime as some form of natural phenomena? Is not the subject hopelessly
compromised without always consciously investigating the creation of crime, or
without analysing the connection between the state, social processes and social
structures?
This issue has perplexed criminologists. Various ways of avoiding the issue
have been engaged in. On the one hand there has been a tendency to treat crime as
a formal category, to recognise that it owes its life to the state, but then to conduct
sociological or psychological study of offenders while virtually ignoring the fact
that this is a problematic issue. This is to assume that the subject matter of
criminology can be treated as a matter of analysis without the need for some overall
synthesis. However, all criminological work presupposes an image of law and
society. This is simply inescapable. After all, ask what is presupposed when we
trust the semantics of a label, the ascription of an event as being actually a crime?
In other words, the fundamental question of the relationship between the criminal
law and society is assumed as answered. Simplifying somewhat, three models
have dominated: a consensus or functionalist, a pluralist or interactionist, and a
conflict model. Each model brings out certain organising principles and expresses
differing suppositions regarding human nature, the operation of everyday thought
patterns, and the construction of society and social structure. Each appeals to
differing political philosophies. The consensus may appear to be the most
conservative politically with the pluralist being a mixture of liberal, conservative
and radical positions, whereas the conflict position is normally regarded as left,
radical, or possibly Marxist. Perhaps they reflect certain forms of social
development: namely the three processes of accumulation which have made up
western culture – industrialisation, the statecraft of organising plurality, and
capitalism.
12
The consensus or functionalist model
The consensus model incorporates certain features; (i) society is a relatively

persistent stable structure; (ii) society shows a high degree of integration; (iii) the
social structure is based on a relative consensus of values, and different positions
within it are functionally ascribed; (iv) legal regulation is functionally the most
efficient mode of management in modern society. The law may embody coercion,
but law reflects the collective will of the people. There is a basic agreement on
what is right and wrong in any given society, and formal law is the embodiment of
this underlying collective agreement. The law serves all people equally, under the
ideology of the rule of law the legal framework is a coherent and consistent body
of principles and rules which neither serves nor presses the interests of any particular
group of people. Those who violate the law represent some form of subgroup,
their behaviour stems from some form of deviant or pathological conception. The
normal position for individuals in the society is to agree with the definitions of
right and wrong, and the small group who violate the law in this way evidence a
maladjustment, or a pathology, or a distinguishing feature which makes them
different from the law abiding majority. Society is relatively well integrated, and
the consensus model may well claim that law comes out of the customs or the
mutually agreed, shared ways for conducting social interaction. It is unusual to
find the consensus perspective explicitly stated within criminological writings, but
a great deal of what was called traditional criminology simply seems to assume
consensus. Much of the work which went under the name of traditional criminology
may be seen as deeply imbued with this consensus pre-supposition. It equates
modern western society as a liberal democratic society where the legal system,
and structure of crime control is based upon the assumption that laws and their
enforcement represent what the people want, it is a reflection of their collective
will(s).
The pluralist model
The pluralist model reflects an interactive view of social organisation; while

consensus models seem to assume the existence of general agreement upon basic
values and interests; and the pluralist model recognises a diversity in beliefs and a
multiplicity of social groups and social interests. For the pluralist model, law exists
not because individuals come to agree upon certain substantive claims, but precisely
because they do not agree. It is in the absence of such agreements that law therefore
lays down the minimum conditions of the social game. It lays out conditions for
conflict resolution; individuals agree that no matter how much they disagree on
certain features they will agree to abide by the rule of law. While society may be
conceived as made up of different interest groups with divergent goals and divergent
values, it is in everybody’s interests to maintain a political legal framework which
permits these conflicts to be resolved through peaceful bargaining and through the
13
adjudication of an impartial referee, ie a legal judge. We can say that the social
structural principles of a pluralist perspective are five. First, society is composed
of diverse social groups, this diversity results from the presence of complex division
of labour, variations in economic, religious, gender, age, and ethnic variations in
the population. Second, there exists among these groups differing and often
conflicting definitions of value positions, even concerning the nature of right and
wrong. Third, there is, nevertheless, collective agreement on the mechanisms for
resolving such disputes, namely a legal system in which these conflicts can be
adjudicated. Fourth, the legal system is therefore neutral, it is independent of the
conflicts in society. The legal system is a coherent and relatively consistent
framework or structure in which the social disputes can be adjudicated. Fifth, the
legal system is concerned with the best interests of society. It is concerned, not so
much with siding with particular interests, but with the general well-being of a
social body.
The conflict model
The third major model was the conflict model. While many of its adherents come
out of the Marxist tradition this is not specifically a socialist or Marxist orientation.
While the consensus model tends to emphasise the stability and continuity of society,
with diversity coming out of the advanced division of labour which industrialisation
encourages, the conflict model emphasises change and the division of society which
industrial-capitalism relies upon. It has several presuppositions. First, that every
society is subject to radical change. Second, that underlying apparent consensus is
possible conflict and contradiction. Third, every element in the underlying conflict
or contradiction contributes to change, and that social stability is always based to
some extent on the coercion of some members of the social organisation by other
members.
The meaning of the central concepts of criminology varies according

to your scientific perspective
These models do not guarantee semantic adequacy. They are rather frameworks or
spectacles to make sense of a complex and multi-layered social reality which escapes
our gaze as we search for its totality. Wearing the consensus pair of spectacles one
sees stability, one sees agreement; one instinctively therefore sees deviancy and
crime in many ways as pathological. Wearing the conflict pair of spectacles one
sees more clearly the coercive and repressive nature of the legal system, and the
conception of violence which comes to mind is not so much that of the criminal
against the social structure, but of the structure against the people. The legal system
is not seen as some impartial tool for dispute resolution but rather a mechanism or
instrument permitting those with the greatest amount of political power to advance
14
their own interests over the others. Law is therefore neither a reflection of general
consensus about values nor a neutral, impartially agreed upon mechanism for the
settlement of disputes. It reflects more the methodology and the interests of those
who have political power to make and enforce structures which correspond to
their own interests throughout the society. The legal structure, although appearing
impartial, although in its categories seemingly subjected to principle and consisting
of a systematic application of rules, is, in effect, masking an underlying structure
clearly aimed at the maintenance of power. The apparent neutrality of law maintains
the interests of the elite in two ways; to some extent it may do so openly by advancing
their specific interests, but it also does it in a more general way helping constitute
a social structure in which particular groups are advantaged in the gaining, usage
and maintenance of power. One can say the organising assumptions are therefore
five. First, society is composed of diverse social groups. Second, there are differing
conceptions of right and wrong – there are diverse values, goals, interests and
these conflict with one another. Third, the conflict between social groups is also
one of political power; there is always an imbalance of political power, parties
who have it struggling to maintain it and subjects who do not struggling to obtain
it. Fourth, law works to advance the interests of those with the power to make it,
the law is not a value neutral mechanism but a dispute settlement, it is an instrument
of those with the power to make law to advance their own interests. Fifth, a key
interest of those who have the power to make and enforce the law is to maintain
their elite social position; much of the operation of the legal structure is concerned
with keeping those with interests different from those in power from gaining political
power in conditions where they could radically change the system.
Contemporary criminology has different perspectives on central

issues
This perspectivism is not anti-scientific. Note: these different models of social
organisation between law and society do not contradict the requirement to speak
in scientific terms. They represent more the pre-supposition within which the
scientific study takes analytical form. Analysis is orientated towards perceiving
differently the objects of investigation, depending on which of these models one is
operating in. The conflict position for instance would lead one more to analyse the
socio-political and economic relationships within a society and the influence that
these have on the rationality of particular individual actions. One would not be led
into a presupposition of the irrationality of conflict positions, one would be assuming
more the rationality of conflict.
Post-modernism and the acceptance of language games as the reality

of social life
What, however, is the impact upon ‘reality’ of all these perspectives? Surely only
one perspective is correct and the others false?
15
Various responses are possible:

(i) each perspective captures some truth of the social condition while neglecting
others;
(ii) the world is not knowable in its totality hence we must work through perspectives
which take us upon different routes;
(iii)since the world is unknowable in its totality the foundations of thought become
myths or narratives.
Social theorists have come to accept that there is no ‘natural’ mode of language.
There are only different practices, or to use a term which the Austrian philosopher
Wittgenstein coined in the 1950s, there are only different language games, by
which he meant different sets of practices of using words and ascribing meaning.
This, of course, implies there is no such thing as a ‘natural crime’. The ascription
of something as a crime is a cultural procedure. In criminology the theoretical
perspective which stresses this is called the labelling school and it came to
prominence in the 1960s. We can read it as the appreciation of the language-bound
nature of human existence at long last coming to criminology. Once you accept
this, however, sceptical doubts flare up as to the very basis of the discipline. Since
no ‘truth conditions’, no non-linguistic array of facts can be adduced as pre-existing
from the ‘non-social’ world so as to determine and stabilise linguistic significations
from the outside. But if the proliferation of images of the world, if the various
histories of our practices and institutions reduces our naive confidence in their
embeddedness in a progressive development, they also deaden our sense of reality.
To some post-modernist writers this is liberating, it is supposed to usher in a host
of previously discarded knowledges and practices, but its effect is also disorientation,
a lack of bite by knowledge. One response is, therefore:
(iv)the resort to common sense and the ‘back to basics movement’. If the
intellectuals come up with so many perspectives then why bother with them?
Why not trust to the ‘emotive feelings which are stirred in the breast of the
decent man’ or the rock of basic common sense?
Living, and making sense of life, within multiple perspectives is the

problem of the post-modern condition
At the beginning of this chapter an ambivalence of moods, of directions, of gaining

orientation was hinted at. This is regarded as the key theme of the post-modern
condition – if we live in a world of multiple perspectives, where everything could
be regarded from another direction, where one’s argument is automatically subjected
to the reply ‘on the other hand’, then the stability of the world becomes a matter of
mere perspective. But a world of mere perspectives ushers in relativity in values
and ethics and makes it difficult to state any position with certainty (at least
rationally). This leads to a loss of direction which in turn results in pessimism,
disenchantment and melancholia and the demand for simplistic solutions (is it
16
mere coincidence that the present is characterised both by a drug-ridden culture

and a war on drugs?).
But if there is not any natural crime how can criminology have a
basic phenomena to investigate?
Some commentators have become sceptical of the whole enterprise of

criminology. One, increasingly popular, intellectual tactic is called
deconstruction. It means breaking down the comfortable ‘normal’ reading of a
concept, or piece of writing, and exposing the sets of assumptions beneath. In this
way we can show that what looked like quite a solid piece of everyday social
reality is actually a pragmatic construction over a set of (contestable) attitudes and
assumptions. As Carol Smart sees it, the challenge to criminology is so severe as to
rob it of all confidence:
‘The problem which faces criminology is not insignificant, however, and arguably, its
dilemma is even more fundamental than that facing sociology. The whole raison d’etre
of criminology is that it addresses crime. It categorises a vast range of activities and
treats them as if they were all subject to the same laws – whether laws of human
behaviour, genetic inheritance, economic rationality, development or the like. The
argument within criminology has always been between those who give primacy to
one form of explanation rather than another. The thing that criminology cannot do is
deconstruct crime. It cannot locate rape or child sexual abuse in the domain of sexuality
or theft in the domain of economic activity or drug use in the domain of health. To do
so would be to abandon criminology to sociology; but more importantly it would
involve abandoning the idea of a unified problem which requires a unified response –
at least, at the theoretical level.’ (Smart, 1990:77)
This is both true and unnecessarily reductionist – why should sociology be the
master discourse? The message of deconstruction runs something like this: if God
is actually dead then there ultimately is no ‘absolute’ or ‘real’ presence in language.
A text cannot guarantee its own meaning. Therefore all texts, all intellectual projects,
are mere reflections of the wills to power in some form or other of the authors, or
of the groups which engage in them.
Why is this misguided? Certainly, it is true that accepting the death of God
means accepting her abstention, of accepting her absence as the fundamental
coordinator of existence. And any presence which we substitute will be an expression
of our desire to interpret human history, society and culture in some way. But this
does not mean that we are doomed to a state of non-presence. There is an ontological
status to being, to crime, to the criminal. An ontological status which is, however,
pragmatic. In other words it is a function of social processes and we define it, we
know of it, through the epistemology of other processes. In other words – social
processes are social processes, social reality is social reality. The trick is to realise
that this is no mere tautology. To know a social process is to engage on a social
17
process, to try to understand social reality is to construct social reality. Crimes

must be located in social processes, this does not destroy criminology but adds to
it. We must then come up with some criteria for judging social processes; and for
developing an idea for how to proceed.
Because we are trapped in the circles of social processes does not

condemn criminology to mindless relativism, nor should it amount to
a surrender of modernity to the forces of the pre-modern
masquerading in the guise of a return to basics
Crimes do not have a self-sustaining ontology, and thus there can be no one solution
to the causation of crime for criminology to find. But there is another presence
which gives meaning to the events of the social world. The ultimate presence to
social reality is the act of creation of the social; if criminology has an ultimate
presence it lies in the interpretation of an aspect of this. Perhaps in the attempt to
transform the inhospitality of human society into the conditions of social and
personal hospitality. Put another way, God was replaced by human endeavour.
Modern society, not just in the west but throughout this planet, is the result of our
attempts to master and transform the world. There are many processes, many layers
of interaction, many contingencies and unintended consequences – but it is a human
creation and thus the burden for understanding it falls upon us alone.
The current position: etiological scepticism and conservative

responses
One way of handling the difficulty of life in the midst of multiple perspectives is to
concentrate upon the task at hand, to become a mere technicality. Technical power
is, of course, one of the features which marks out modernity from the pre-modern,
but for most of modernity technical power was regarded as one mode of building
better societies, of enabling greater happiness through enabling people to possess
a greater variety of social goods and attain greater mobility etc. Criminology took
as its task the understanding and control of crime: but in recent years the ambivalence
of the late-modern or post-modern condition has resulted in a new orientation. The
task of developing a society without crime has been quietly replaced by the ideas
of mere containment or management of crime and offenders. Target hardening,
opportunity theory, humane confinement, just deserts, the allocation of scarce
resources as between police areas, differential policing (ie community policing for
safe areas, military policing for tough inner-city areas) are reflective of a narrowing
of concerns for criminology. It is as if the possibility of gaining secure knowledge
as to the causal process of crime has been surrendered as too difficult.
But criminology only makes sense when it is joined to a task: criminology
always has had a conservative task – unthinking control – but it also has had a
18
liberating and utopian orientation, in which the task for criminology was to peruse
the emancipatory dreams of the enlightenment.
In British criminology this was most clearly articulated in the now classic modern
text of ‘radical criminology’, The New Criminology (Taylor, Walton and Young,
1973). This text called for:
‘... a criminology which is... normatively committed to the abolition of inequalities of
wealth and power, and in particular of inequalities in property and life-chances.’ (Ibid:
281)
The text warned that if criminology was not so normatively committed, it was bound
to fall into correctionalism, or the simplistic attempts to merely reform individual
offenders without looking up from the task and considering the nature of the social
order. Specifically, the text argued that criminology had to face up to ‘the total
interconnectedness of these problems and others’, which was only possible if
criminology turned what was previously regarded as ‘a discussion of what were
previously technical issues’ into a ‘need to deal with society as a totality’ (Ibid: 278).
The New Criminology took the Marxist understanding of the social structure to
attempt this. Specifically, their notion of the type of ‘social formation’ in which
crime existed in the west, was basically the structure determined by the economic
foundations of the capitalist mode of production; thus the text could end with a
romantic anti-capitalist flourish:
‘For us, as for Marx and the other new criminologists, deviance is normal – in the
sense that men are now consciously involved (in the prisons that are contemporary
society and the real prisons) in asserting their human diversity. The task is not merely
to ‘penetrate’ those problems, not merely question the stereotypes, or to act as carriers
of ‘alternative phenomenological realities’. The task is to create a society, in which
the facts of human diversity, whether personal, organic or social, are not subject to the
power to criminalise.’ (Ibid: 282)
This soon looked terribly naive and possibly anarchistic. The causes of crime were
not really at issue, they were the inevitable by-product of the radical poverty, social
inequality and disorganisation of capitalism; instead the real issue was
criminalisation. Freedom and happiness were a matter of throwing away the
confining and dominating institutions. Such Marxist-inspired faith has vanished:
but if the utopian appeal of socialism was thrown out, then is criminology doomed
to little imagination and mindless technicism?
The advent of post-modernity has thrown all of this into a grand state of confusion
– not only does it seem strange to talk of utopias but is any form of utopian thinking
possible? Criminology appears to have become dominated by a refusal to think of
the big picture and a piecemeal reaction to the pressing demands of the political
right. It has become easy for some commentators to talk of the paradox of an
increase of crime at the same time as we witness an increase in social wealth. Why
do they see this as a paradox? It is argued that if poverty and social deprivation or
exploitation cause crime then we would expect crime to decrease in the west as the
welfare state, the increase in living standards and the increase in workers rights
19
and so forth took place. Instead the opposite has occurred. Crime has increased at
the same time as western societies appear to have become much richer. This has
caused several conservative writers, for example, James Q Wilson (1985) to refer
to the ‘paradox’ of ‘crime amidst plenty’. For Wilson the ‘ethos of self-expression’
has taken precedence over ‘self-control’.
The final (conservative?) position: the concept of the self and self-
control as the bed-rock for founding a general theory of crime
This conservative position reached its most eminent expression in the recent work
of Gottfredson and Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime (1990). This text has
received widespread attention, particularly in the US. It asserts two things:
• the possibility of creating a general theory of crime;
• that the key to this lies in controlling the independent variable, that is, the
concept which serves as a common ground, which will enable the various works
undertaken in the name of criminology to be reconciled. The concept they
propose for this is self-control.
According to social control theory, as previously developed by Hirschi (1969),
people commit criminal acts when they are not prevented from doing so by their
bonding to conventional society. Motivation to crime is assumed as part of human
nature, and any crime is capable from those unrestrained by fear of the social
consequences of detection, whether seen in terms of the formal, or state sanctioned
responses to crime, or informal. The social control paradigm does not in principle
differentiate between types of crime; there are not types of criminals, people merely
differ in their propensity to engage in certain activities.
Building upon the control perspective, Hirschi and Gottfredson seek to combine
control and the emphasis which positivism has shown upon differentiation and
typologising individuals, to create a positivistic general control theory for
criminology. First, they differentiate criminality, as stable differences among
individuals in the propensity to engage in criminal acts, and crimes, as criminal
events which may be occasioned by a variety of factors, for example, opportunity.
Second, they conclude that ‘self-control’ is the constant which ties together the
various theories which have previously accounted for criminality. For Gottfredson
and Hirschi, crime is a mundane and little paying occupation, criminals are losers,
yet they keep on, relatively speaking, at it. Why? Different levels of self-control
provide the answer.
Of central importance to their work is the demand that any criminology actually
be clear as to the concept of crime used as the foundational core. Gottfredson and
Hirschi analyse the formal properties of crime to argue that certain general features
can be taken from any crime, no matter its seriousness or type. In doing this they
draw upon earlier attempts at constructing analytical structures, such as that which
Hindelang, Gottfredson and Garofalo created for victimisation:
20
‘For a personal victimisation to occur, several conditions must be met. First, the prime
actors – the offender and the victim – must have occasion to intersect in time and
space. Second, some source of dispute or claim must arise between the actors in
which the victim is perceived by the offender as an appropriate object of the
victimisation. Third, the offender must be willing and able to threaten or use force (or
stealth) in order to achieve the desired end. Fourth, the circumstances must be such
that the offender views it as advantageous to use or threaten force (or stealth) to
achieve the desired end.’ (1978:250)
Hirschi and Gottfredson differentiate between crime and criminality. Crime is an
event for which various circumstances are required, while criminality is a relatively
constant propensity of individuals:
‘Crimes are short term, circumscribed events that presuppose a peculiar set of necessary
conditions (e.g., activity, opportunity, adversaries, victims, goods). Criminality, in
contrast, refers to stable differences across individuals in the propensity to commit
criminal or theoretically equivalent acts.’ (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1988:4)
The independent variable – criminality – is the key to the criminological task. The
concept of self-control provides the explanatory foundation. Their analysis is a
refined positivism: we are offered a theory which sticks close to the proximate and
the observable. There is no attempt to place on the agenda the broader context of
these events and acts. Moreover, a reduction occurs in the nature of crime which is
presented as unplanned, trivial, and mundane activity carried out by persons who
are lacking in self-control. These authors state they are concerned with the
characteristics of ‘ordinary crime’, and claim that we can see a common core in
white-collar offences, homicides, burglaries, thefts and various other offences. These
all share similar features and the people who engage in these activities share similar
characteristics”
‘Crime involves the pursuit of immediate pleasure. It follows that people lacking self-
control will also tend to pursue immediate pleasures that are not criminal: they will
tend to smoke, drink, use drugs, gamble, have children out of wedlock, and engage in
illicit sex.’ (Ibid: 90)
We can read Gottfredson and Hirschi as demanding that criminology reorient itself
away from a mindless production of information and knowledge. In other words
that criminology develops an intellectual rigour based around an understanding of
the nature of crime. This is an essential point and moves us away from the obsession
with information and knowledge onto at least a weak form of wisdom. Gottfredson
and Hirschi, however, draw their net extremely narrowly. The theory produced is
classical positivism in the true sense, ie it is faithful to the data. Indeed it is a
comprehensive reassessment of the data and a sophisticated embodiment of it. It
also suffers in true positivist fashion, ie its limits are the limits of its data.
Self-control is talked about as if it were an entity, as if it were an ontological
substance, as if one could have a certain quantity of self-control. By contrast we
may conceive that the ontological reality of self-control is relationality. Quantities
can thus be seen as related to power; the study of self-control as being fundamentally
a study of power forms, the mediation, representation and articulation of power
21
flows and strategies through human forms. Nowhere within A General Theory of
Crime is a critical reading of the social creation of self-control entered into. Strangely
in their conclusion they note:
‘A general theory of crime must be a general theory of the social order.’ (p 274)
But this is left undeveloped, something to be engaged in ‘had we unlimited time,

space, and imagination’.
Interactionism as a theme for a general theory
Let us take Gottfredson and Hirschi at their word: a general theory must be a
theory of the social order. But how is such a theory to be constructed outside of the
certainties that the perspectives of the consensus, conflict and pluralist models of
law and society provided?
One way is to work outwards from the routine interactions of everyday life.
Based on a reading of the crime as routine activity Robert Reiner (personal
communication) suggests a broader four-fold analytical structure to understand
the factors of crime. For crime to occur there needs to be:
• A legal category which specifies that the action or omission which the person
or group has engaged in or failed to perform is to be called a crime. This is the
reality of the labelling perspective as this labelling process varies across time
and cultures/societies. To understand this aspect we need to study the labelling
process and the socio-political factors behind the creation of criminal categories
and the de-criminalisation of others.
• The motive to engage or refrain from the action so labelled. Criminology has
sought to study this through both individualist and sociological approaches.
• The opportunity. There has to be the possibility of engaging in the activity or
refraining from the required activity. In other words there has to be:
(i) a target, something which provides the material for the crime, the situational
aspect; and
(ii) vulnerability. The target must be soft enough for the act to be successful.
In recent years a lot of activity has been focused on crime prevention
techniques and target hardening.
• The absence of control. This can be either:
(i) external or situational. This is where the classical emphasis upon the fear
of punishment and the impact of deterrence impacts. Under the image of
the offender as a rational actor crime is a rational choice, a calculation
able to be changed by an efficient system of criminal justice; or
(ii) internalised control or conscience which is the result of proper socialisation.
If we wish to think towards a general theory which faces up to the dilemmas of the
late-modern, or post-modern social order, then our understanding of the nature of
22
crime and self-control must not be created in such a way that it is separated from a
meta theory of modern life and its problems – we must locate the domain of study
within modern life and its problems. That is, it must place on the agenda questions
which it may not be able to answer, but which it must recognise. Questions about
the form and development of what is of value for human life, actually (ie positively)
and potentially. It must offer ways of better interpreting and understanding the
problems of living, proposing and analysing possible programmes, suggesting and
activating possible forms of human action and interaction. The problem of crime
is a problem of victimisation and of suffering, of power and abuse, of action and
reaction – the problem of criminology is thus to help understand the conditions
and factors which influence these, and, thereby, help to discover activities and
modes of living which develop and strengthen human interaction and solidarity.
Maxwell suggested:
‘... the basic task of rational inquiry is to help us develop wiser ways of living, wiser
institutions, customs and social relations, a wiser world.’ (1984:66)
Put briefly, if the problems of criminology are to be properly understood,

criminology requires an understanding of modernity. It is modernity which breaths
life into the criminological enterprise and which provides the context for its material,
in other words we need a criminology of modernity.
The possibility of a criminology of modernity?
The attempt to phrase the project in this way, is a recognition that many of the
competing perspectives (of which the most central was between consensus, in its
varying forms, and conflict or Marxist) were differing ways of fighting for the
progressive imagination within modernity. The collapse of communism throughout
the late 1980s and early 1990s has resulted in a re-reading of Marx and we can
now see the similarities in humanitarian desire between central themes of liberalism
and socialism.
The critical task is to try to find ways in which modernity can be challenged,
humanised, developed and understood. To call for a movement into post-modernism
may be ill-conceived, after all modernism may be more complex than many claim.
It may offer many ways of development which have yet to be expressed... we may
not know the resources and extent of the task until we attempt to bring modernity
even more to wholesale fruition.
Our bias is therefore clear – before we join the post-modernist bandwagon and
lose ourselves in the dialectic of hope and despair let us try and see through what
modernity was about and what it has to offer. To see in what ways both crime and
the study of criminology are located in its networks.
23
CHAPTER TWO
THE PROBLEM OF MODERNITY
There is a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of the self
and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women
all over the world today. I will call this experience ‘modernity’. To be modern
is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy,
growth, transformation of the ourselves and the world – and, at the same time,
that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything
we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of
geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in
this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical
unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration
and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be
modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts
into air’ (Marshall Berman, 1983:15):
‘There is merit in the “modernity” of a society, apart from any other virtues it
may have. Being modern is being ‘advanced’ and being advanced means being
rich, free of the encumbrances of familial authority, religious authority, and
deferentiality. It means being rational and being “rationalised”... If such
rationalisation were achieved, all traditions except the traditions of secularity,
scientism, and hedonism would be overpowered.’ (Shils, 1981:288)
The concept of modernity
Recently the concept of modernity has come into wide use complementing the
rather simple-looking but not unambiguous term of ‘modern society’. We rather
naively labelled the social formations of Europe and North America during the last
few centuries ‘modern society’, and relied upon a basic distinction between these
social formations and so called primitive or traditional societies. The concept of
modernity denotes more a sort of condition or an experience, an existential
interpretation of modern society. The concept is used to try to analyse what it is
about social existence in modern society that renders it fundamentally different
from what has gone before.
The birth of modernity is roughly placed at around three centuries ago in the
period that has come to be called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is most
commonly described as a strange sort of ‘coming out’ party. A party where there is
a great deal of behind the scenes preparation, confusion on the night, but, once
over, its subject ‘man’ has ‘come of age’, and is free to go out into the real (the
true) world, a free man to make his own destiny.
In a sense stories of the Enlightenment and its resultant ‘freedoms’ appear
inescapably linked to certain spatial metaphors also found in earlier writings. The
orthodox narrative of our progress portrays the crucial transformation of the
25
Enlightenment as follows: Plato had depicted men as living in a cave, prisoners of

their inability to use reason, governed by ignorance and myth; Plato, aided by
Aristotle, had formulated an awareness of the glorious potentiality of reason, but
this, in its turn, was surrendered to the forces of organised religion and subjected
to the politics of absolutist authority. Without the proper use of reason, man
looked out into the world and saw strange and complex things, and, afraid of
mystery, constructed new and even more elaborate mythologies to make the
events of the world appear meaningful. In the Enlightenment, man thrust free of
the hold of those mythologies and the domination of that authority, to bring light
to the cave – alternatively, he left the cave to construct a home outside in the light
of the continuing knowledge he obtained of the real causes and springs of nature –
he was no longer subjected to the illusions and personifications of the realm of
mystery but became possessed of the capabilities of scientific reason. From then
on, his continuing battle was to separate opinion from knowledge, politics from
engineering.
Requiring a place to inhabit, man set out to develop social theory and to use this
to construct a citadel in which co-habitation would be possible. The enemies of
successful co-habitation were strongly identified with politics and metaphysics. It
was felt that social and individual freedom would flow from proper social
arrangements, and man could only discover these when the logos of discussion
was freed from the illusions of metaphysics and the arbitrariness of politics.
We summarise thus: the aim of social theory was to create a building of objective
knowledge that would not be at the mercy of metaphysical speculation or of political
storms. Modernity was a constructivist project.
Whether guided by the empiricist or the rationalist approach, concomitant with
man coming out of the cave into the light of true knowledge, he also slowly comes
out of the social relations which the German theorist Tönnies was later to label as
the Gemeinschaft and into the Gesellschaft – this transformation replaces the
legitimations and ideologies of the Gemeinschaft, incorporating domination-
submission as the habitual acceptance of tradition or the authoritarian stipulation
of the significant relations of the world, and the centrality of the exercise of parental
responsibility with its accompanying submission to parental will. The growth of
Gesellschaft law and rationality is inimical to set relationships of dependence and
status and the transference of supposed hierarchies from nature requiring a new
way of relating to the world – a way in which the hold of tradition and authoritarian
stipulation over practice gives way to a new style; of openness to truth and to
‘problem’ as the drive of practice.
Modernity breaks from the grip of the past via an act of self-definition wherein
it conceives itself as a ‘problem’: a complexity which determines both the nature
of the structure of being – the problem of the ‘what is it?’, and the methodology of
action, ‘how is it/the other to be done?’. Modernity becomes a series of problematics,
and the achievement of this status is itself the harbinger of modernity. The symptoms
of modernity, are thus the very things which bring it about.
26
The problem of modernity
The problematics of modernity stand linked and indicative of the constructivist

project. The ‘solution’ of the one impacts and interacts with the nature of the other
and the framing of the construction of the future. The life of the cave of the
gemeinschaft rested on the ‘social space/terrain’ of a perceived harmony
constructed out of the ties of friendship, tradition and the habitual/common
acceptance of religious ordering and a telos of nature; the destruction of that
‘natural harmony’ throws open the ‘nature’ of modernity’s ‘nature’ as a problem
to be resolved. The problem of modernity consists, among others, as the problems
of:
• how is one to conceive of society – the methodology of vision and
understanding?;
• how is one to organise society?;
• how is one to control power?;
• how is one to achieve social control?;
• how is one to understand oneself? where the solution of each relates to the
others.
Modernity demands reasons for action as opposed to following custom and
tradition. Do you consider yourself an emancipated modern individual? Do you
consider that you are responsible for mapping out the course of your life? That in
living your life you are going to follow your own chosen thoughts and life plans
and not merely follow on expected paths which others, say family or social group,
have mapped out for you? If you claim to be a true modern it appears central to our
modern self-image as freed, truly modern, self-directing individuals, that we
moderns do not live in the customary and tradition-bound ways that people have
inhabited for thousands of years. We do not follow traditions as if they were
showing us the natural form of life. We take ourselves away at a distance from the
traditions and follow courses of action depending upon our choices – we map out
paths, choose rationally. We ask what are the ends we want to achieve – what are
the appropriate means? Action becomes rational, efficient, anti-traditional.
The processes that give shape and form to modern society are normally defined
as urbanisation, industrialisation, capitalisation, secularisation, democraticisation,
and a more empirical and analytical approach to knowledge. Perhaps, above all,
modern society exhibits rationalisation: modern life is a rationalised existence
emphasising planning and control. And we hold out modern society as a valuable
and progressive creation. Of course, these processes extend over a long period of
time and do not necessarily lead into each other. Modernity is a complex structure
with interacting processes which have different effects creating a range of conflicts,
implications and legacies. Spatially, different regions, and different precise historical
locations experience and develop different features.
27
Modernity and control
Central to modernity is an emphasis upon control and the reduction of the world to
a collection of phenomena to be analysed and mastered. Mankind takes charge of
building the future society rather than seeing social formulations as being in the
hands of someone other than man, for instance God. Politically, the American and
French Revolutions seemed to epitomise the notion of humans breaking out of the
old feudal hierarchical ‘natural social structures’ and attempting to build new social
structures on rational foundations. Such freedom became linked to technological
power with the intensification in the growth of industrial society, the whole
productive take-off in the mid 19th century of a number of European countries and
the US; a world of limitless possibilities appeared open.
Important areas are culture and knowledge. The French scholar Michel Foucault,
for example, analyses modernity in terms of a crucial development in the late 18th,
early 19th centuries, whereby new discursive formations emerged, namely the
humanities, or sets of discourses of biology, political economy and linguistics.
These discourses, or human sciences, claimed to set out the nature of modern man.
Other scholars define modernity in terms of the development of key philosophical
and political ideas, the work of Immanuel Kant, Frederick Hegel, Rousseau, and
David Hume, for example, create legacies setting out the contours of the modern
imagination. Modernity is partly constituted by philosophical discourse filtering
into, and helping to constitute, the intellectual structure of modern society.
According to Jurgen Habermas the modern imagination is a self-reflective attitude
towards our whole life conditions; to be modern is to see a new horizon unimaginable
to the pre-modern. It is to see the world as a site for progress, for productive and
co-operative labour, and as a location for the self to become happy. The modern
reorganises time and space so that the present and the future, rather than the past,
are our focal concerns. For the modern interaction is a process of constructing the
future, of making the future better than the present. It therefore becomes possible
to talk of modernity as a construction project: the project of building the future
good society.
Modernity and civilisation
The modern person is advanced, in control, skillful, in short civilised; in modernity

the civilised man replaces the natural man; he who was located in tradition and
custom, whose life chances were dependent upon his locality and environment.
Put another way, modern society can be seen as the end of natural history, a period
in which mankind in some way transcends his natural features, in terms of the
abilities of the body and his environmental dependency, and becomes more a product
of culture, a product of history, a product of the contingent interactions of diverse
social processes. For some time it was common to assume progress and talk of
modern man as civilised, as transcending his primitive state where he was presumed
28
to be ruled by basic needs and instincts. This civilised man is a product of culture
rather than being merely a natural entity, and is automatically seen as superior to
the primitive or savage predecessor. By contrast, Freud and Nietzsche talked of
civilisation as the suppression and sublimation of the natural, rather than the
replacement.
Modernity as the product of a transformation
Common to the talk of modern society and modernity is the idea of a transition, a
transformation beginning in the enlightenment, and intensifying in the 18th and
early 19th centuries, which brought into focus the outline of our contemporary
existence. Of course, it is not a question of simple clear ruptures or transitions,
there are many diverse developments and features in the economic, social, political
and cultural practices which occur over a long time. Capitalism, for example, did
not just spring into action in a particular way but developed slowly over centuries.
Modern social life as a normative project
Moreover, since the project of modernity relates to the idea of control, the idea of
progress, the idea of betterment, the idea that through co-operative and interactive
situations, one can construct a new social environment, social life becomes a
normative project. Of course to talk in terms of modern social life as a project does
not mean that there are neat pure institutions which automatically reflect our
normative aspirations. Contemporary social structure is the result of a whole
complex of determinants and contingencies, of ambiguous results and unintended
effects. Even at the level of the normative discourses (ie the philosophy of ethics
and politics and related disciplines such as jurisprudence) and working with the
idea that there is a discursive rupture which brings about the establishment of
modern ideas as new imaginary locations, significations, descriptions and attempts
at analysing both individuals and society modernity is not dominated by one set of
discourses – there are always competing domains and multitudinous sites.
The twin stages of modernity
It is a mistake to talk as if modernity is some easily understood social formation

brought into existence by the social processes released by the enlightenment. For
much of the last 200 years, social theory was imbued with ideas of progress, social
evolution and the functional coherence of the social order. Social theorists tried to
paint the big picture – they needed to. If the death of God defined the modern then
all the questions were unanswered. Two main methodologies for gaining the answers
were utilised, dominating at different stages:
29
• through philosophy – this is what is meant by the normative project. Men, such
as Descartes, use their powers of reason to find (supposed) certainties (such as
a pure, stable, reasoning self) and principles of organisation;
• through scientific observation – by subjecting the observable entities of the
world to scrutiny, and depicting the human condition as a series of socio-
technological problems solvable with the right application of knowledge and
technical power. These methodologies helped constitute two historical stages:
• the philosophical destruction of the old feudal order and its replacement by the
principles and universal pretensions of liberalism aimed at the creation of
rationally governed nation states – philosophy and law provided the tools to
construct a new structure, and in this social structure legitimation largely relied
upon narratives, such as the idea of the social contract, and legalistic notions,
such as rights, developed into the idea of the rule of law – this stage takes place
throughout the 18th century and into the 19th. Individuals are understood
through philosophy, thus we have ideas of universal human nature, and
differentiation is largely a case of their possession of some legally recognised
criteria (such as property), or citizenship;
• the construction of an organised and regulated social structure loosely based
on the demands of industrial manufacturing, the legitimation of which was
loosely based upon sociological ideas which saw society as a coherent whole,
with a relatively stable and developing structure within which people and
institutions (such as the family) had understandable functions to perform – this
stage takes place in the late 19th century and throughout most of this century.
Individuals could be recognised and located in this structure by exhibiting
some observable criteria which indicated their role (such as sexuality which
was thought to demarcate the respective functions of male and female), and
whether they were normal or deviant (we can call this positivism – the belief
that the surface characteristics of entities can be understood as reflecting their
true, inner nature).
Post-modernism, or late-modernity (the two terms may be used rather co-
extensively) occurs from the mid 1970s with increasing complexity, ambiguity,
and self-doubts as to the reality of social progress. These processes intensified
with the increase in communication, the tremendous increase in quantity and
diversity of information and information technologies (ie mass communication
technologies such as TV’s, computers), the internationalisation of mass culture
and, the growing inability of the nation state to control its economies, with the
development of international credit flows etc.
We have referred to large scale social processes, what about the individual? In
a very real sense the individual is the object or creation of modernity. Simply put,
the individual as we conceive it, the thing we moderns take for granted we are, is
the product of the social conditions of modernity. Of course individuals existed in
pre-modern society, but the constructive feature of modernity is located around
the ideas of freedom, emancipation and autonomy. We can call this the discourse
30
of liberation or progressive differentiation. But the process is not one way. Although
the individual is the subject of modernity, the individual is also the agent. Modernity
demands self-analysis, it demands reflexivity. Historically, although such self-
analysis appears as a desire of certain intellectuals, for example, Socrates, from
earliest writings, the effectual modern beginnings of this may well have been in
the quest for autonomy in the area of scientific research. This demand for autonomy
was linked to purity, the ability to pursue science as and for itself, the ability to
pursue pure knowledge, the ability to escape from the dilemma which Galileo was
in, wherein if the findings of your science conflict with the decrees of religion, the
science must be declared wrong. Instead of such dependency, and submission of
one sphere to another, modernity allows differentiation: we say that science can be
autonomous. Science can pursue its own criteria of validity. It can be a self-
determining structure.
Once the idea of self-determination is allowed to one sphere, the intellectual
concept can be universalised. It can be carried over from the scientific into the
political. This is obvious in the demands of the self-determination of nations, but it
impacts more imperceptibly into the constitution of the personal – it creates the
discourse of self-determination of the individual. Self-determination involves the
liberation of the individual from the supervision and regulation of other determining
spheres, the dominant structuring of submission either to an absolute ruler or a
settled hierarchy of feudal categories. Ambiguity cannot help but be present with
self-definition, since the proceeds must involve resources and the finding of goals.
How could the self be determining if the self has no idea of what to be, images of
becoming, or the means of achieving this? Hence the determining of the self depends
upon the constitution of the social.
At any point in an historical process it is only too easy to accept the present as
if it was some natural determination forgetting its contingent nature. Thus we have
become familiar with talk of freedom as a basic, or inalienable, self evident human
right. But there are no self-evident or inalienable human entities, only human
artifacts. The sociological imagination demands that we ask what the processes at
work are, and what is the collective outcome of such ideals? What are the
consequences, and what are the preconditions for this freedom of the individual,
this granting in our modern imagination, as we do in the legal mind, of a right to be
free, a right to be an individual? Sociology thus points us to the notion that for the
individual to find freedom there must be a political structure and a society in which
there are rules which contribute to the creation of such freedoms and indeed protect
such freedoms. For example, keeping violence, fraud and theft at bay enables a
space for a new individuality to develop. The establishment of individual rights,
the establishment of a legal order giving primacy to individuality and setting out a
collective justification necessary to these rights, namely the establishment of a
jurisprudence (legal positivism) or a political philosophy (utilitarianism; natural
rights) and a sociology which implicitly constructs a discourse of liberation of the
individual, was, and is, of fundamental importance as a means of understanding
and constructing modern society.
31
It may appear that I am defining modernity as if the end product of modernity

is the process of individuality and individualisation and that truly modern
discourse is that which promotes and strengthens such a process of
individualisation. Am I claiming that the true discourse of modernity is the
discourse which sets in motion the processes of individuation? From the vantage
point of Britain in the mid 1990s, the creation of a radical individualism appears
the historical purpose of the main discourses of modern society, but
individualisation has not been without valid critiques. Perhaps the greatest critic of
seeing modernity as a process of emancipation of the individual was Karl Marx.
He would have described the range of discourses feeding individualisation as
incoherent, as ideology. For Marx, as we shall see, the alleged universalist,
scientific theories of 18th and 19th century political economy and liberalism were
masks, or shadows, for the interests of the emerging bourgeoisie. But let us bear in
mind that Marx was not discarding the process of individuality and emancipation,
rather he was attempting to identify the real insights and the real benefits from
such processes, and to demarcate these real benefits from delusions. It is essential
to look beyond the mere superficiality of discourse to try and find what are the
underlying social structures. We need not follow Marx into the task of reducing
the complexity of social structures into some master framework which is
determinate, such as the workings of the economy. Although it may not offer the
illusion of control, we can settle for social complexity.
Most writers do not deny the idea of liberation, nor decry the idea of the
individual, but rather disagree about the form of the social context in which these
discourses occur and the consequences, in other words they disagreed about what
exactly is this project of modernity.
Is modernity exhausted? Has it lost its force?
For Marx the individuality and freedom of western 19th century liberal society
was a radically incomplete project. His contemporary heirs, such as Jurgen
Habermas (1985), would agree. But can it be completed or is the social structure
developing in such a complex and multi-layered form that it is no longer possible
to think in ‘modern’ ways? Currently there is a debate about whether modernity,
or modern society, has become radically transformed to something new, and the
terms post-modernity or late-modernity have surfaced. For many commentators
we are currently in the early stage of a whole new structure and are experiencing a
transformation out of modernity. Our current problems are viewed as radically
new and we can no longer talk of ourselves as moderns or of the need to carry out
the projects of modernity.
32
Post-modernity, or the realisation of the impossibility of fulfilling

modernity?
Modernity was that mode of organising experience so that constructing a grand

future on this world was the goal. This future society would be the place where the
Enlightenment project would be realised; its foundations were to be the scientific
knowledge gained from analysis of the physical and human worlds, its methodology
the commitment to following the knowledge project through instead of non-rational
forms of calculation. Progress was assured if one only kept to the task. Modernity
is destruction and construction, scepticism and commitment to knowledge –
everything must be subjected to the scrutiny of critical thought – all forms of
social life examined and replaced if necessary. The good will survive and new
forms of social existence will be allowed to rise up into permanence. In the midst
of this the true will stand out:
‘Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from
all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions are swept away, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy
is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions
of life, and his relations with his kind.’ (Marx, quoted in Callinicos, 1989:30)
But we have not found certainties, only the continual production of perspectives.
For Alisdair MacIntyre (1981) the great projects stand exhausted: socialism,
communism and liberalism, all are intellectually discredited. To Lyotard The
Postmodern Condition is characterised by an incredulity towards meta-narratives,
that whole spectra of understandings which lay outside science but which
legitimated not only science but all forms of social co-operation and purposive
activity.
‘The idea of progress as possible, probable or necessary was rooted in the certainty
that the development of the arts, technology, knowledge and liberty would be profitable
to mankind as a whole.
After two centuries, we are more sensitive to signs that signify the contrary. Neither
economic nor political liberalism, nor the various Marxisms, emerge from the
sanguinary last two centuries free from the suspicion of crimes against mankind.’
(1984: xxiii-iv)
Later he asks: What kind of thought is able to include Auschwitz in a general
process towards a universal emancipation? The question is simply left: ‘Where
after the meta-narratives, can legitimacy reside’? What can give legitimacy to social
life? Where can any co-operative or normative inspiration reside? If we killed God
in the name of science and science ends in chaos, what is to prevent us from
becoming a society committed to crime?
Some appear to see this as the consequence of the post-modernist denial of the
possibility of knowing total truth. There appears a fun or gaming element to post-
modernist discourse, an anti-epistemological thesis where we must learn to free
33
ourselves from a concern with truth and enjoy the present. What has been said of
the relativism of Feyerabend can be read as a general fear:
‘... life will only be worthwhile when we stop taking it too seriously, and free ourselves
from a puritanical and dedicated search for ‘truth’ and ‘justice’... Reasoning is simply
a game which the Dadaist plays preferably with those who are naive enough to believe
that we can get closer to the truth by attending to the content of arguments and by
discussion.’ (Krige 1980:109)
This aspect of post-modernism becomes labelled as part of a retreat to irrationality,
a consequence of failing to find secure overreaching perspectives; it seems no
wisdom is possible.
For Zygmunt Bauman (1993) we face a paradox. The post-modern condition
provides a form of wisdom, but this is a wisdom which recognises the difficulties
of coherent action. Our concern to understand the nature of the human condition,
and the changes which have occurred over the last 200 years, and our description
of a project of the post-enlightenment offers a form of wisdom about our human
condition (after all is not Lyotard’s talk of the collapse of meta-narrative itself a
large meta-narrative?). However, the social conditions we live in make acting on
this awareness problematic. The post-modern crisis is the paradox of post-modern
wisdom, and post-modern impotence:
‘What the post-modern mind is aware of is that there are problems in human and
social life with no good solutions, twisted trajectories that cannot be straightened up,
ambivalences that are more than linguistic blunders yelling to be corrected, doubts
which cannot be legislated out of existence, moral agonies which no reason-dictated
recipes can soothe, let alone cure. The post-modern mind does not expect any more to
find the all-embracing, total and ultimate formula of life without ambiguity, risk,
danger and error, and is deeply suspicious of any voice that promises otherwise. The
post-modern mind is aware that each local, specialised and focused treatment, effective
or not when measured by its ostensive target, spoils as much as, if not more than it
repairs. The post-modern mind is reconciled to the idea that the messiness of the
human predicament is here to stay. This is, in the broadest of outlines, what can be
called post-modern wisdom.’ (1993:245)
We live in a time of strain; of contradictions and uncertainties. However, for writers
such as Habermas, to welcome this talk of a post-modern society or indeed embrace
it as something to be played within is a mistake. The problems that we face in
contemporary society are the problems of not having carried out the project, not
having taken the key themes of the modern imagination far enough. For the heirs
of Marx, modern society is a contradictory society. On the one hand we may have
universalistic rhetoric, talk of human rights and talk of the right to self-
determination, while, on the other hand, we have strong barriers and boundaries
between social groups which prevent the enjoyment of these liberties, and stifle
the reality of self-determination. The opportunities and resources available to groups
and individuals vary, while the rhetoric of emancipation and the rhetoric of liberty
carries across the social orders. Therefore the opportunities of expressing oneself,
34
the opportunities of developing one’s interests, the opportunities of becoming

thoroughly modern, are structurally limited.
The strains of modernity contained within the discourse of

emancipation
What are the strains of modernity? The process of individuality has burdens and
opportunities. If one sees the personal project of modernity in terms of a dramatic
increase in individuality, the social context displays an increased performance level
throughout the economy, politics, science, and philosophy. There is a dramatic
increase in opportunities, what we may call life-chances. However, if it is true that
modern society has an increased level of operationality which sets the individual
free from many of the concerns of traditional societies, we must be aware that the
new arrangements also put tremendous strains on these individuals who are required
to perform at a higher level. Today’s individuals, for example, have to cope with
multiple role expectations according to their status in different spheres of society,
and according to the idea that the question of who they are is not to be reduced to
one particular status (or a mere two statuses). For example, the notion of
individuality and equality places on a similar level the young black woman and the
young white male. The modern identity for both is as individuals possessing legal
rights. Their traditional status of blackness or whiteness, male or female are, ideally,
in the Utopia of modernity, irrelevant. The strains on the individuals, however, can
be clearly identified by contrasting the notions of their ideal role performance with
social reality. The empirical analysis of social structure reveals the gap between
the idea and the actual.
The reality of social stratification compromises the discourse of liberation and
authenticity. The discourse of modernity postulates ‘ideal’ universalisible
characteristics, but the socio-political conditions of life are localised and
contradictory. The outer skin of the black woman is not meant to matter in modernity,
this is the normative project of the discourse of liberation. But the living world
may locate her in the inner city, the subject of a familiarity with racism,
subjectification and degradation.
The need for empirical analysis of the reality of the socio-political

location of individuals and groups
In other words we can contrast the discourse of the ideal project in modernity with
what Habermas (1979) has come to call ‘a life world’ in which individuals are
located on their everyday levels. Moreover, if we accept the Durkheimian model
of modern development in terms of increasing division of labour, differentiation
of spheres, and the creation of multiple roles, we can expect even more strains
placed on the individual in carrying out everyday life amidst the radical pluralisation
35
and, perhaps, contingency or disintegration of any idea of fixed institution

arrangements or preplanned social lifestyle. Having characterised the discourse of
modernity as setting out modern society as a construction project within which the
individual life becomes also a project – we realise both are difficult. If the early
discourse of modernity as liberation has succeeded in creating the primacy of
individuality, then the new discourse we are currently surrounded by may trap the
self in a situation where it is impossible to satisfy the demand that one creates
oneself into a coherent whole. If one constantly strives, one constantly also,
therefore, works in a dialectic of desire and satisfaction or achievement; one creates
but has no time to relax, the new self instantly becomes compromised by alternative
conceptions of value and this stimulates further desire – coherence is rendered
problematic.
The discourse of liberation and authenticity impact upon the modern

self
The discourse of liberation and authenticity pose problems for the formation of
the modern self – instead of the joy of free self-creation and self-control an
existential void may be the result. Consider, first, the ideal discourse of
individuality. In the following extract the writers contrast the identity of a person
in a pre-modern or honour bound social network with the modern or dignity
bound situation:
‘The concept of honour implies that identity is essentially, or at least importantly,
linked to institutional roles. The modern concept of dignity, by contrast, implies that
identity is essentially independent of institutional roles... In a world of honour the
individual is the social symbols emblazoned on his escutcheon. The true self of the
knight is revealed as he rides out to do battle in the full regalia of his role; by
comparison, the naked man in bed with a woman represents a lesser reality of the self.
In a world of dignity, in the modern sense, the social symbolism governing the
interaction of men is a disguise. The escutcheons hid the true self. It is precisely the
naked man, and even more specifically the naked man expressing his sexuality, who
represents himself more truthfully. Consequently, the understanding of self-
discovery and self-mystification is reversed as between these two worlds. In a world
of honour the individual discovers his true identity in his roles, and to turn away from
the roles is to turn away from himself – in “false consciousness”, one is tempted to
add. In a world of dignity, the individual can only discover his true identity by
emancipating himself from his socially imposed roles – the latter are only masks,
entangling him in illusion, “alienation”, and “bad faith”. It follows that the two
worlds have a different relation to history. It is through the performance of
institutional roles that the individual participates in history, not only the history of the
particular institution but that of his society as a whole. It is precisely for this reason
that modern consciousness, in its conception of the self, tends toward a curious a
historicity. In a world of honour, identity is firmly linked to the past through the
reiterated performance of proto-typical acts. In a world of dignity, history is the
succession of mystifications from which the individual must free himself to attain
“authenticity”.’ (Berger, Berger and Kellner, 1974:90-91).
36
Modernity tells the person to break free of the structured status of his or her birth,
these are mere contingencies for her, or his, authentic self, which is her/his
responsibility to create and safeguard. For the modern individual personal
development and struggle is a battle against fate and social ascription of his/her
worth and appropriate role.
However, the potential cost is high, the reality may be to discover an existential
void. Who is the individual if he/she cannot rely upon the certainty of the traditional
institutional roles? Claude Lefort (1988) reads the contemporary individual as a
burdened site.
Thus when he is defined as independent, the individual does not acquire a new
certainty in place of the old. Rather he is doomed to be tormented by a secret
uncertainty while the emergence of the individual implies he is to control his own
destiny; he also has been dispossessed of his assurance as to his identity – of the
assurance that he once appeared to derive from his situation, from his social situation,
or from the possibility of attaching himself to a legitimate authority.
Having created the self which is to be authentic and free, self-controlling and
self-directing, modernity risks becoming a site of radical insecurity for the self.
Criminology and the social structure of modernity
We have identified the increase of individualisation and individuality as central to

modernity but we can ask ‘how universal was the reality of resources and conditions
for authentic individuality to come about?’
If we define modernity as being the last 200 years, in the early period a few
benefitted at the expense of many. Latterly, increasing differentiation and
democratisation occurred with a greater openness and plurality. The variety of
individual life styles and life projects available to the majority of the population
has expanded. This has various consequences.
First, there has always been a process of inclusion and exclusion. There have
always been winners and losers. We do not need to talk solely in terms of a Marxist
class analysis; instead we can talk in terms of those central to modernity, who have
access to the resources, who share in the increase of life opportunities, life chances,
and those who for some reason are excluded. We have also highlighted another
problem at the level of the individual. Socially, the increase in individualisation,
individuality, may be a reflection of the increase in division of labour, the increase
in differentiation of social spheres highlighted and perceived by writers, such as
Emile Durkheim, may have allowed the liberation of individuals through the
development of a range of different groups and different role activity. The project
has intensified; the current splitting of the self.
Thus individuals no longer need socialisation into one of a variety of social
roles, but need rather a high level of socialisation into an ability to construct,
safeguard, and control the self, in the face of multiple expectations and multiple
demands. Pluralisation and disintegration of institutional arrangements may reflect
37
in the pluralisation and disintegration of steady life styles, and the emphasis upon
liberation may take over from the emphasis on stability or order. The praise of
individualisation may intensify to such an extent that it is very difficult to ascertain
what exactly is this individual, self-racked by plurality.
Second, the discourse of liberation is always in tandem with what we might call
a discourse of disciplinisation or control. Liberation requires control – this is a
paradox of modernity, and the paradox of criminology. Much of criminology is
itself able to be viewed as a discourse about social control. Much of its practical
concern is to provide ideas and material for the powerful to govern the social body.
Writers such as Norbert Elias (1939, 1991) highlight the point that for the individual
to become the core entity of modernity, for the individual to become the basis of
the civilising process, a certain predictability of the self as well as the institutions
of the social is required. The state must be rational and predictable for the self to
be secure enough to experiment, experience and grow. But the individual must
also become predictable and self-governing to allow the state to keep to its legitimate
areas.
What is the state? The state may be identified (using the definition provided by
the German social theorist Max Weber) as that institution which has a monopoly
upon violence and the raising of taxes; the state is a container of modernity, an
instrument which restricts practices, which lays out methodologies for the
discipline of individuals, which lays down rules by which the games of the
modern are to be played. The state enables as it controls, frees as it disciplines.
Discipline is not always obvious. It is not a question of law alone, but also of
education and training. These disciplinary tentacles cannot as easily be seen as
coming from the state, whereas the criminal law appears a more open exercise of
power. But we may note a fact that any student who goes through a liberal law
course finds; we are offered a jurisprudence which does not speak of law openly in
terms of coercive rules. The idea that the criminal law is the will of the powerful
backed up by the threat of violence, institutionally reinforced by policing and
sentencing, by public execution etc, has become hidden in our jurisprudence.
Discipline also comes quietly and slowly through the emphasis upon self-
government, self-limitation and self-control. Much of the discourse which
surrounds the everyday operationality of modern law assumes an internal, or
acceptant, view of law as the norm. It assumes that law is rational and that the rules
of the social game are acceptable to all. Thus to break them is to take an unfair
advantage, in a sense to deny oneself the status of being modern. It is therefore
easy to see why in A General Theory of Crime, Michael Gottfredson and Travis
Hirschi (1990) argue crime is caused by the absence or failure of self-control
within the individual. In a way we can see this text as the culmination for
criminology of key themes of modernity. A reflection of the discourse of
individuality and the paradoxical discourse of discipline; at the level of the self,
the failure of self-discipline or self-control is defined as the cause of crime; the
level of self-control constitutes criminality.
38
The role of liberalism in the constitution of modernity
One critic may ask: ‘Your picture of modernity reads as if philosophical and political
liberalism is the discourse of modernity. Is not the ontological core of liberalism
the irreducible naturalness of the individual? And the primacy of the individual the
end state of social development? Your picture of modernity is therefore reducible
to the history of liberalism – are you suggesting that the history of criminology is
the history of liberalism?’
Let us be clear – the discourse of liberalism has dominated the West. Many
defenders of modernity hold out the concept of the open society, the liberal-
democratic West with human rights and the rule of law, as the great achievement
of the last 200 years. The liberal is proud to claim that his creed separates economics,
politics and religion, thus allowing the differentiation of spheres which ensures
growth and freedom. Some sociologists, such as Ralf Dahrendorf (1979), may
even confidently proclaim that the liberal rarely needs to be ashamed of the realities
created in his name as the socialist has to be much of the time.
Liberals are sympathetic – even if they wish to distance themselves from its
purity – to Friedman’s statement in Capitalism and Freedom (1962) that the country
is the collection of the individuals who compose it. The pure liberal appears unable
to recognise society blinded by the array of individuals. By contrast, the position
outlined in this text is that individualism is a product of social structure, the
individual cannot exist outside of the social and that neither freedom nor non-
freedom is natural. Our position cannot agree with liberalism that the individual is
the irreducible natural core of social ontology – there is no natural core. With
humanity there can be no recourse to some secure, objective, naturalist paradigm
which determines social development and social structure, there is only, at any one
time, the determinants of a context, of a situation. Instead of constructing or
deconstructing the tangled paths of criminology and liberalism we shall, in the
next chapter, look at the implications of four of the central social theorists of
modernity writing towards the end of the 19th century: Max Weber, Karl Marx,
Emile Durkheim, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
39
CHAPTER THREE
THE THEORISTS OF MODERNITY: AN INTRODUCTION

TO MAX WEBER, KARL MARX, EMILE DURKHEIM AND
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Max Weber and the rationalisation of the world
Max Weber’s (1864-1920) most famous theme is that modernity is crucially

constituted by a growing rationalisation of the social world.
Central to modernity is the use of reason and the desire to assert control over
the process and forms of the world. If we are to become the masters and possessors
of the earth, as the French philosopher Descartes had earlier claimed, then subjecting
the processes of the world to rational (scientific) investigation and employing reason
to organise ourselves, and our institutions, appears to be the enlightened mode of
operation.
Although this seems to be the only route to success, rationality has a price. For
if modernisation takes place through increasing rationalisation, what happens to
those aspects of social life that cannot be thought of as truly rational? Do they
become downgraded; cast away?
Weber thought rationality would dominate in three ways:
• the control of the world through calculation (resulting from the growth of the
technological attitude, the world becomes the site of problems to be solved
with the correct technology);
• the systematisation of meaning and value into an overall consistent scheme;
• the methodological living of daily life according to rules. Rationality means
following a rule, or an abstract moral principle, rather than acting on impulse,
randomness or emotionality. Rationality means building up a logically consistent
pattern linking our thoughts and actions, and following this pattern to its
conclusion. It means consistency in linking our words and actions, our aims
and like activities, creating an efficient ordering of means to ends.
As a consequence, Weber thought, we faced an inevitable systematisation of belief,
the elimination of logical inconsistencies, the disarming of the magical and mystical,
and a movement away from particular or local forms of thinking to the more abstract
or general. This entailed the reduction of all individual instances of experience and
of thought, whatever their diversity, to the status of general classes. Moreover,
rationalisation demanded that we purge from our ways of thinking and acting,
forms that could not be justified on the basis of their anticipated consequences,
themselves rationally justified by more generally defined ends and rendered
predictable by generally valid empirical laws. Rationalisation is the systematisation
41
of belief and action. But it is also the destruction and stifling of a great deal of the
richness of human life. What happens to the non-rational aspects of humanity?
Does the resonance go out of life? The tragedy? Are we doomed to live out formally
effective lives with little magic or warm human contact?
Although his belief patterns are being destroyed, the tribal person who believed
in demons and Gods, who followed customs and traditions, may have been
consistent in his thoughts, actions and beliefs. If we imagine ourselves inside the
pattern and structures of his beliefs then he is behaving in a rationally consistent
fashion; this rationality Weber calls substantive. Under substantive rationality there
are certain things, values which are simply accepted as true and fit a picture of the
cosmos (world) so accepted. But we ‘moderns’ argue that everything has to be
subjected to the test of sceptical reason, and if something cannot survive rational
testing then we reject these beliefs while committing ourselves to the methodology
of reason itself. The commitment to reason as the mode of organising life constitutes
a pattern in which the methodology outweighs any specific commitment to a
particular view of the world – this Weber calls formal rationality. Rationality comes
to dominate life. It does not matter what beliefs we hold substantially, we must be
rational – we must calculate, analyse, reduce.
The nation state and the rise of capitalism
The rise of modern rationality is closely linked to the development of capitalism as

a mode of economic and social life and the rise of the nation state. One of the
determining contexts for modern law is the growth in importance (and now possible
decline) of the nation state. Like the English Jurisprudent John Austin (1832),
Weber saw the state as a particular form of political association and was clear on
the necessary linkage between the ability of the modern state to govern and law. In
his famous lecture Politics as a Vocation Weber poses the question: ‘but what is a
political association from a sociological point of view?’
His answer:
‘Ultimately one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the
specific means peculiar to it as to every political association, namely, the use of
physical force. Every state is founded on force said Trotsky. That is indeed right. If no
social institution existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of state
would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be described as
anarchy in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal
or the only means of the state – nobody says that – but force is a means specific to the
state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one.
In the past the most varied institutions have known the use of physical force as quite
normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that
(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a
given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state.
Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other
institutions or to 42 individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The
42
The theorists of modernity
state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. Hence, ‘politics’ for
us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power,
either among states or among groups within a state.’ (1984:32-33)
To give more of the flavour of Weber:
‘Like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men
dominating men. A relation supported by means of legitimate (considered to be
legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority
claim by the powers that be.’ (1984:33)
For Weber more interesting questions were the issues of when, and why, do men
obey, and upon what inner justifications, and upon what external means does this
domination rest?
Let us consider for a moment the social context of Weber. He witnessed the
unification of Germany under Bismark, and the emergence of the modern German
state founded, in part at least, upon the strength of Prussian hegemony. In his later
life he saw the phenomenal growth of industrialisation in Germany; the failed
attempt to create a German empire, and the culmination of great power rivalry in
the catastrophe of World War I. He stood at a site where many of the processes of
modernity intersected. Weber asked how government, the maintenance of political
authority, operates within capitalism. To maintain political authority, power based
purely on physical force is unstable and ineffective. It is important to achieve
legitimate domination ‘ie the probability that a command with a given specific
content will be obeyed by a given group of persons’. How does such obedience
come about? Weber proposes a model of three ‘ideal types’ of authority:
• Traditional authority – which rests on an established belief in the sanctity of
immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising
authority under them. This form of authority had been most widespread in the
history of the world.
• Charismatic authority – which rests on devotion to the specific and exceptional
sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the
normative patters or order revealed or ordained by him. This form was unstable
and unpredictable.
• Rational-legal authority – which rests upon rational grounds and a belief in the
‘legality’ of patterns of normative rules, and the right of those elevated to
authority under such rules to issue commands. This form was coming to
dominate modern western societies.
Weber considered the growth of rational-legal authority as the predominant aspect
in the process he called the rationalisation of the modern world. Whereas for most
of human existence the legitimacy of social systems had rested on traditional,
magical or religious elements, modern society appeared to be founded on an
authority which had itself became rational, that is, it was understood as a calculated
form of social structuring, enabling the functional integrity of a society or social
organisation. This in turn, Weber thought, depends upon:
43
• A legal code which consists of legal norms, established by agreement or by

imposition, but which are accepted on grounds of expediency or rational values
or both. This has a claim to obedience of at least the crucial members of the
corporate body, and usually claims the obedience of all members of the society
or organisation.
• A logically consistent system of abstract rules which are applied to particular
cases. Thus social order exists within the limits laid down by legal precepts
and follows principles which are capable of generalised formulation.
• The typical person in authority occupies an ‘office’, which defines his or her
responsibilities. This person, who is an official, even the elected president of
the state, is also subject to the impersonal regulation of the law.
• The person obeying authority does so only by virtue of his or her membership
of the corporate group (that is, not on any personal basis) and what is obeyed is
the law (rather than the person in authority).
• Obedience is given to officials, not as individuals but to the impersonal order
they represent. An administrative staff (that is, a bureaucracy) is formally charged
with looking after the interests of the corporate body within the limits of the
law.
The power of the state officials resides in their legal office not themselves.
Thus it is law, its precise demand and its administration, which encapsulates the
element of calculation in rational legal authority.
Weber considered that the emergence of the Western form of capitalism had
given an immense stimulus to rational legal authority and the calculative attitude.
The predictability of relationships and outcomes, required for capitalist interaction,
was enabled by the formally rational structure of legal domination.
The mood of Weber
In the enlightenment (Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries), the appeal to
reason was on behalf of the desire to be free. Freed from the bondage of false
belief and the hierarchies of feudal society, humanity would enter into an age of
progress. Modernity should bring freedom – the liberation from the restraints of
substantive rationality; freedom from the necessity to believe X because that is
what your social group or society socialised you into. Freed from illusion we can
choose our values, develop new ones in the interaction with other individuals,
cultures, ways of life in the variation of the world. This freedom of culture could
mean the potentiality for a more varied and exciting world than any previously in
history. But Weber was pessimistic. Modernity was more likely to become a
gloomy, bureaucratic state, where administered uniformity severely limited
freedom. He talked of the iron cage of bureaucracy and rationality. Individuals
were not likely to have the capacity to choose among the possible array of life
chances, of values; instead a vast administered state would dominate. What would
44
individuals do? Weber thought that their life would be determined by their
functional role, their public space outlined by social rationality, and the only
happiness would be in the anti-rational spaces. The individual would find solace in
personal relationships, romantic love and escapist music, the experience of art, the
cultivation of a limited private sphere, as this-world escapes from institutional
routines. The only hope was that we might sustain a will not to be ruled like sheep
– but this was doubtful.
The problem of discipline
Nowhere was Weber’s gloom more evident than in his concept of disciplinisation.
The control of individuals in modern society was increasingly a matter of
discipline, an adherence to the norm, and an internal attitude of restraint and
foresight. Two institutional orders, the monastery and the army, had provided the
original sites for the development of discipline which had spread throughout the
social order.
The monastic orders of medieval Europe had provided a life lived under the
command of rigorous diets and timetabled regularities which subordinated
passion to the will and which separated the desires of the soul from those of the
flesh. Goffman (1961) recognised the monastery gave a total environment of
control and a culture of restraint devoted to the regularisation of human sexual
emotion. Weber argued the ideas of the protestant spirit transferred this culture to
the wider society.
Weber argued the army was the original focus of this social discipline whereby
large bodies of men were moulded into a disciplined unit by personal discipline
and bureaucratic demand systems. Modernity saw a spread of this disciplinary
focus throughout the social order.
Karl Marx
Whereas Weber pointed to the trap of rationality and discipline, Marx saw the
main limitation of modern society in the alienation (or distancing of modern man
from his real nature and products of his labour) of man under capitalistic economics.
Alienation means that man is unable to recognise his true state and build the required
conditions for real social progress.
Marx declared that capitalism values men primarily through their differing
abilities to produce commodities. The rich and diverse productive activity of
mankind is reduced into a process of producing commodities for exchange. Any
social relationship man has with the items he produces is lost; while the worker
puts his labour value into a product, this labour value is ignored and the only value
which is considered of importance is the quantity of money for which the
45
commodity produced can be exchanged. The productive features of human life are
further dehumanised when this exchange value is thought of as something which
inheres in the commodity itself, rather than relating to the activity of the worker.
Man’s basic productive activity is thereby obscured by the process of exchange,
and the productive role and capacity of the individual is not recognised. Instead,
an abstract thing, Capital, is seen as the primary productive entity. Capital is seen
as producing a surplus value, and buying labour power (the employment of the
worker) is merely a lesser unit in the means of production. The individualist
orientation of the contractual form of relationships which dominate modern
capitalist life disguises the social character of man’s existence and labour. In a
more subtle process than the openness of the master-slave relationship, capitalism
turns men into items for the market; man is reduced to one more commodity and
the very basis of social life becomes unrecognisable. What can people trust? What
process can rank values, offer rewards, distinguish between an important role and
an unimportant one? Where is certainty? The market becomes the only trusted
source of values and the social character of man’s existence becomes classified
according to the social activity of the market; that is the exchange relationship
between commodities and human deeds. By some strange slight of the intellect,
the market is perceived as self-regulating, and the role of law is merely to protect
against abuse. Ideally, there would be no laws for the capitalist except the laws of
exchange – those which protect property, enable and enforce contracts, or prevent
fraud and abuse.
But what of the normative content of customs, of morality? The social
relationships between men become merely ideological formations. Although law
and morality may appear to be self-sustaining and independent spheres of meaning,
their real meaning is found in terms of their relationship with the underlying
demands of the economic structure of the social order. Instead of capitalism being
controlled by men, it is ultimately the demands of capitalist commodity production
which controls men’s productive activity and the form of their social interaction.
Ultimately, the basic form of the economic structure delineates the social
structure. Society is dominated by the formation of a structure of class relations.
The bourgeoisie control and exploit the workers, taking away the proletariat’s
products and regulating their productive activity. In turn the bourgeoisie is locked
into, and controlled by, the demands of the process of exchange and the fluctuations
of the world market.
Above all, man comes to view the world, its components and social relationships,
in terms of commodities; life loses its coherence and the sociality of modern man
is radically devalued. How can modern life have real meaning? As life is reduced
to an exchange of commodities the magic of life turns into absurdity.
How is this made possible? Why does man not see the reality of his social
situation? Man is blinded by the dictates of the so-called science of liberal political
economy. This liberal science depicts the socio-economical conditions as actually
reflecting underlying natural processes. The emerging liberal social sciences were
an attempt to present production as encased in eternal natural laws independent of
46
history, at which opportunity bourgeoisie relations were then quietly smuggled in

as the inviolable natural laws on which society and the particular relationships of
people are founded (1975:45).
Instead of accepting the laws of political economy as truths, as proof of the
correctness of political economy, Marx claimed dominant economic interests
were the underlying origins of modern social relations. These interests create and
perpetuate the modern capitalist social structure. Modern capitalism is the most
powerful productive system yet evolved, and it brings out, as never before, some
of the range of man’s creative abilities, but it also frustrates other aspects of man’s
creative potential. This is the contradiction at the core of modern society.
Man’s alienation under political economy, and its super structural forms,
implicates the state and the law in a crisis of contradiction. Whereas real politics
would involve the pursuit of communal ends, under liberal bourgeoisie capitalism
the question of political legitimacy is visualised, not in terms of communal ends,
but in terms of the interests of liberal political economy. Concepts of justice and
morality are but elements of the super structure of particular societies and are, by
definition, ideological; they are both necessary concepts for the system to operate,
but they are also false to man’s true nature and real needs. It is not that society
under capitalism necessarily fails to live up to the principles of morality, or
standards of justice, which are thrown up by its philosophies, they may well do
that, it is rather that such standards and principles are themselves incoherent and
contradictory in their nature when one considers the potentiality of the social
structure and the philosophical ideal. Moreover, when we come to understand the
genesis, the operation and the prognosis for such philosophical ideas of justice,
morality and emancipation, we realise it is inherently impossible to realise their
emancipatory consequences under the structure of capitalist economic norms.
The essential element of modern law under capitalism is its intimate relationship
with the state. Liberal bourgeois accounts have drawn upon notions of independent
juristic relations, or an independent rational jurisprudence and the thesis of
separation of powers, to build an impractical ideology of the ‘Rule of Law’. By
contrast, Marx emphasises the relationship between law and the state apparatus of
a class society. For Marx the state is both a political body and a reflection of social
organisational power.
In a primitive society there was no political state to dominate; instead life was
characterised by a primitive, but simple, equality and groups which communally
owned and controlled the production of a relatively limited range of social goods.
The development of a complex division of labour, and the corresponding
development of class divisions shattered this primitive communal unity. Conflict
arose between individual interests and between individual and social interests.
This process created individuals who began to interact with one another by
exchanging units of private property, and to interact within a new social structure
by exchanging individual freedom for social protection. The state arose from these
exchange relations and was implicated in their regulation, and itself became a
power seemingly above them. As Engels stated:
47
‘... in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall
not consume themselves and society in a fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing
above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the
bounds of “order”; this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it and
increasingly alienate itself from it, is the state.’ (1973 [1884]: 229)
The state has the role of regulating the process of exchange through the framework
of law. Law renders social interaction and the market predictable. Thus the state
preserves society, but it does so at the same time as there is a growing fragmentation
of individual and social life. Whereas it appears to do so as an independent, ie a
non-specific, political power and is visualised in the developing jurisprudence as a
universal phenomenon, in fact the state is an expression of the interests of the
dominant economic class.
Jurisprudence is not to be trusted
Liberal jurisprudence expresses the liberal democratic state as if it were a

community, but this is an illusion. Marx draws attention to the deeply embedded
forms of social life in the ancient and feudal states which preceded the modern
liberal democratic state associated with capitalism. In these ancient and feudal
states, a ‘substantive unity between people and the state’ existed. In the modern
state, however, this becomes embodied only into the abstract form of the legal
constitution which develops a particular ideological reality alongside the real life
of the people. Thus citizens of modern liberal democracies lead double lives; one,
in the political community as an abstract species being possessed of rights and
whose communal nature is expressed in the constitution, and the other in the civil
society as concrete egotistical individuals. For Marx:
‘... where the political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a
double life, a life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness,
but in reality. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a
communal being, and a civil society, where he is active as a private individual. The
relationship with a political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship
of heaven to earth.’ (1975:220).
The political ideology of the state and jurisprudence gives an increasingly illusory
identity to individual and social life. Capitalist modernity dissolves the natural
unity of man’s social existence and the fruits of production, and increases the
distance between rulers and the ruled. Modern social existence becomes mediated
through institutions which is understood only through the writings of political
economy and the discourses of liberal philosophers. This philosophical discourse
speaks in terms of universal human interests but social reality distorts this. The
contrast between, for example, the ideas of democratic representative democracy,
and the reality of social life in civil society, means that social order is full of
contradictions. Bourgeois jurisprudence presents modern life as the greatest freedom
ever attained for mankind. In its philosophy modern society is based on the
48
ontological core of the fully developed independence of the individual. However,

these individuals occupy radically different places in a stratified social order.
Moreover, whereas individuals appear to be more independent in liberal democracy,
the state increasingly dominates and masters society. The state is far from being a
servant of society.
Such domination is achieved by the hidden hand of the market. Liberal
bourgeois philosophy has torn apart the motley feudal ties that bind man to his
supposedly natural superiors, it has left no other nexus between man and man than
naked self interest ‘in callous cash payment’. This domination was clear in the
appalling conditions of the working classes in the 19th century; there capitalism
had substituted an exploitation which was legitimated by religious and political
illusion, with a naked, shameless brutal exploitation so apparent in the slums of
Manchester and Liverpool. But the full extent of domination in the apparently free
liberal democratic state is not so obvious – whereas the domination by man over
man was more open, and economic exchange less developed, in previous
examples. In the modern liberal democratic state, domination is more hidden,
while exchange processes are more obvious. Public life has become an arena for
private individuals, and the seemingly universal and natural claims of the rights of
man are but a social expression of particular historical interests. Political
emancipation, the break down of traditions and hierarchical status of feudal
society, represents not real freedom but rather economic oppression of the
proletariat by the bourgeoisie.
What is the real basis of the law?
Marx identifies the liberal jurisprudential theories of Hobbes, and other

command theorists, as clearly founding the basis of right, the basis of law, in
power; but Marx goes further to demand that this basis should itself be
investigated. What gives rise to political power? Ultimately he finds this not in
the expression of specific individuals or groups, not in their will, as the
imperative theories may have told us, but in the real basis of economic conditions
which structure the state’s interest. Thus the new demands for freedom are claims
made for some ‘right’ to freedom, and are an expression of power which must be
traced through a series of economic processes. In class terms we see the power of
the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and
Engels were explicit:
‘... by freedom is meant, under the present bourgeoisie traditions and production, free
trade, free selling and buying.’ (1978:486)
The supposed freedom of modernity is only a formal freedom; in reality peasants

were driven from the land to become the ‘free labourers’ of the modern city.
Certainly man is freed from the old relationships, from feudal service, but he is
also free from his relationship with the land, his existential confidence in the ways
49
of a life which appeared natural and from the forms of existence which rendered
life into a whole. What is to replace this destroyed existential security?
Freed from all dependency on natural forms, or natural property, the modern
individual is freed from his means of production, and is forced to sell his labour
power to live. Capitalism is also freed to exploit this labour power to extract surplus
value. Although this may be expressed in terms of the supposed free contractual
agreement, the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in reality
is a position of forced labour and exploitation. What of rights? Does not liberal
democratic freedom throw up an equality of rights? In On The Jewish Question,
Marx agrees but states that:
‘... equality simply means equal access to liberty, namely that each man is equally
considered to a self sufficient nomad.’ (1975 [1843]: 230)
Policing becomes a core concern of capitalist social structure
The idea of rights, and the idea of society being increasingly an site of free equal
individuals brings to the fore notions of security and violence. We demand a right
to security:
‘... security is the supreme social concept of civil society, the concept of police, the
concept that the whole of society is there only to guarantee each of its members the
conservation of his person, his rights and his property.’ (1975:230).
The right to security protects egoism, it protects the possessive individualism of
modern civil society; security is the guarantee of this egoism, or driving force of
commodity exchange. Security preserves the capitalists right to extract surplus
value, and the proletariats’ right to sell their labour power. It preserves class relations,
which makes society a mere means to man’s physical existence, and not his true
social end.
What is required to escape? To achieve true emancipation?
Ultimately we must transform the class structure of modernity into a post-modernity

of communism:
‘When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all
production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole
nation, the public power will lose its political character... in place of the old bourgeois
society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which
the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’
(1978:490-491)
50
What happened? What was the effect of Marx’s writings?
This text is written in 1995; five years on from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and
the collapse of those political systems which claimed to be founded upon Marxism.
The historical period which began in 1917 has now come to an end. The combination
of Marxist-Leninism not only has no future as a political project but its history has
been rewritten as a horrific failure – we know it was inhuman; we know it extracted
a terrible cost from the environment.
What can we learn from the experience and what is left of the great counter-
tradition to liberalism after this political collapse? This is a question which has
vast repercussions, for it is not just in the societies where it officially took power
that Marxist and Leninist doctrine had real effects, but also in the West. The growth
of the Liberal West has owed a huge amount to a continual debate and learning
process with the critical tradition of Marxism. What, if anything, is to replace this
tradition?
Many of the thoughts of Marx, which made an impact beyond his immediate
political following, have been absorbed into the critical conversations which have
energised social-democratic and liberal thought. Among these was a uniquely
powerful image of the global energy and unrelenting expansiveness of capitalism,
an unforgettable focus upon the authority relations of modern industry, and a
dramatisation of the structural antagonism generated by this productive process.
At the most general level, Marx’s work has entered our language, transforming
our questions about the world. We can separate three themes:
• A critical methodology, we can call this a hermeneutic of suspicion. Thus we
must subject laws, and other forms of organisation in society, to a rigorous
testing. Who wins, who loses? This question can be our constant companion.
• A moral intuition, a demand that we must strive to build the good life. For
Ernest Gellner a simple moral intuition underlay the idea of socialism:
‘... greed, acquisitiveness, competitive ownership, possession as the main symbol of
human achievement and status – all of this is bad. It is not merely bad, it is also
perfectly avoidable: ownership and economic competitiveness are not inscribed into
the nature of things or rooted in human character. On the contrary, they are
incompatible with the true essence of mankind: men who endorse individual
acquisitiveness and possession are alienated from their own true nature. The
absolutisation of greed is a law of False Consciousness imposed by a temporary and
pathological social order, which tries to protect and fortify itself by such falsehood,
by generalising and treating as inherent its own distorted, historically specific visions
of man: but the truth of humanity lies in spontaneous work and co-operation.’
(1994:150)
This is more than any scientific creed; it is a commitment to an idea of what it

means to be truly human.
• The organisation of these aims into a scientific approach which can be applied
into areas such as criminology. Two examples:
51
(i) Marxism inspired a flourishing of ‘radical’ marxist orientated theorising during

the 1970s in the US of which Richard Quinney was, perhaps, the most prolific
theorist. In Quinney’s (1974) analysis, the law was structurally bound with
conflict and oppression, due to an economic determination in which the basic
demands of the capitalist mode of economic production determined, ultimately,
the form of everything else in the social structure. Thus:
(a) American society is based on an advanced capitalist economy.
(b) The state is organised to serve the interests of the dominant economic class,
the capitalist ruling class.
(c) Criminal law is an instrument of the state and the ruling class to maintain and
perpetuate the existing social and economic order.
(d) Crime control in capitalistic society is accomplished through a variety of
institutions and agencies established and administered by a governmental elite,
representing ruling class interests, for the purpose of establishing a domestic
order.
(e) The contradictions of advanced capitalism – the disjunction between essence
and existence – require that the subordinate classes remain oppressed by
whatever means necessary, especially through the coercion and violence of the
legal system.
(f) Only with the collapse of capitalist society and the creation of a new society,
based on socialist principles, will there be a solution to the crime problem.
(1974:16)
(ii) In the UK the major text was The New Criminology (1973).
Three young sociologists, Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young published one
of the modern classics of criminology in 1973. It was a socialist-orientated
critique of previous ‘traditional’ criminology, and a passionate appeal for a society
in which the power to punish was not used to control deviance; instead they felt the
freedom and non-oppressive nature of a socialist social order would enable a
society of non-aggressive diversity to flourish. The book was extremely hard
hitting in its criticisms of earlier theories, and rather patchy in its optimism. Its
utopian aspect has been shattered with the coming of post-modernism. One of its
leading authors, Ian Taylor (1994), remains a committed and extremely
sophisticated commentator on the linkage between the political economy and
crime; while Jock Young (1986, 1987, 1992; Lea and Young, 1984) has adopted a
left realist approach wherein the hopes for a fundamental socialist transformation
of the social order has turned into a concern with dealing with crime and social
disadvantage at a local level.
While we may wish to hold to some of the deeply humanist leanings of
Marxist thought, the organisation of Marx’s ideas into what came to be called ‘a
science of Marxism’ is problematic, for we can now fully recognise that the
predictive power of Marxism dealt in articles of faith rather than inescapable
truths. Marx was far more successful in warning of the power of capitalism than
52
in demonstrating in any conclusive fashion why it had to come to an end. It was

eloquence, rather than science, which established the association between the
end of capitalism and the destiny of the working class. Moreover, he never
succeeded in establishing a coherent theory of the connections between property
relations, legal regulation and political forms. As a result, his refusal to accept
that capitalism might be controlled by political reform and collective pressure
was ultimately a dogmatic assertion. Crime was always loosely fitted into the
scheme: one did not really know whether the criminal was the proto-typical
revolutionary, waiting to grow into the committed statesman of a new order, or a
true social parasite.
Post-modernism is linked to the demise of Marxism, both as the inspiration for
real political orders and as the source of the great counter-political culture in the
west. Marxism, in the sense of a set of sociological and political claims, cannot
stand aside from the political events of the last few years. While Marx was no
more responsible for the Gulag than Nietzsche was for Auschwitz, it is the case
that the legitimacy claimed by Lenin and Stalin was that bequeathed by Marx, and
the sad fact is that after allowance has been made for ‘backwardness’ and
‘underdevelopment’, the one social and political alternative to capitalism
constructed on the basis of Marx’s ideas, although arguably more egalitarian, has
also proved itself to be more authoritarian, less efficient and less desirable than the
system it was supposed to replace. For all these reasons, we need to understand
what was missing in communist societies which so-called liberal democratic
societies have. What gave the West the flexibility and the ability to survive crisis,
such as the depressions of the post Second World War, and retain of social
cohesion in the face of a plurality of populations and ideas?
But the west cannot be complacent: the need for critical thinking is as pressing
as ever. For the gulf between the world’s rich and poor is growing wider; inhuman
forms of labour exploitation, indebtedness and intimidation are still to be
combatted. New conflicts have emerged while old ones persist. Presently, in the
West there are huge arguments over the future of the welfare state (long a case of
debate for Marxists – was the welfare state a victory over the capitalist or does it
serve to keep capitalism flourishing by diminishing the harshness of capitalist
exploitation?). Moreover, the welfare state leaves the question of justice
unanswered. There has not been an acceptable answer to the search for the true
principles of justice that would guide modern western societies – they have
broadly accepted utilitarianism with various constraints (see, for example, the
constraints that the philosophy of John Stuart Mill in the late 19th century placed
on utilitarianism). But the search for set principles for social organisation has not
been answered. Philosophical arguments over justice have led not to settled
positions, but to a range of unsettled arguments which are vulnerable to counter
arguments. This self-created predicament has sometimes been referred to as the
post-modern political condition. It denotes the position where we accept that there
are no fixed and settled cannons for organising the just society. We have seen
recently a move from creating new theories of justice to spending time on
53
discussing procedures. What procedural consensus (eg law) is possible? If this is

the case we are indeed in a radically different situation from that which has
characterised much of modernity, but let us not forget that conditions of
exploitation do exist. An example from a not-too-distant place is the Bhopal
incident in India in the early 1980s where a large multi-national company clearly
ignored safety questions in the egoistic pursuit of profit resulting in the poisoning
of thousands of working-class people (Pearce and Tombs, 1989). Is it really the
case that underdeveloped countries can only develop by allowing the exploitation
of their workers? In the west, exploitation in real hard conditions is actually
returning. In reply the influence of Marx lives on in three areas at least:
• An idealist commitment to Marxism which claims that it is only by remaining
faithful to Marx that we can fully understand the nature of the state and its
regulation of society.
• A left realist approach which keeps the moral intuition and some of the critical
approach but works within the structures of liberal democratic society. This is
committed to a grass-roots democraticising of the institutions and taking
seriously issues such as the victimisation effects of crime.
• Many Marxists have become fashionable post-modern scholars; particularly
fond of deconstructive strategies.
The humanist sentiment and the critique of exploitation lives on... but the
methodology varies.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)
Durkheim and modernity

The work of Emile Durkheim has left a large legacy for criminological writings.
There are a number of themes in Durkheim’s work which we shall bring out:
• the idea of sociological positivism, and the argument that sociology could
provide a master-discourse as well as have its own special province;
• social solidarity as the glue to society, and the division between mechanical
and organic solidarity;
• the use of law as an index of social solidarity;
• the normalcy of crime in any society which has power centres;
• the openness of human nature and the vast range of human desire;
• the ever present possibility of anomie or a state of normlessness overtaking
social life;
• the necessity to construct a moral individualism to counter utilitarianism as the
basis of social solidarity in modern societies.
54
Sociological positivism
Durkheim specified that sociology should use the methods of observation and
hypothesis testing with which the natural sciences operate. However social
phenomenon are very different entities to observe than natural phenomenon. How,
for example, do we identify social class? For Durkheim the fundamental subject
matter for sociology was moral phenomenon. Moral phenomenon cannot be directly
observed, but must be observed through the use of indexes; through other
phenomenon which express a presence of the underlying moral conditions. In The
Division of Labour and Society Durkheim argued that law provided an index of
social solidarity. By observing the law and legal institutions we could identify
different forms of underlying social solidarities. Moreover, whilst the forms of
social solidarity were difficult to get at, the form and content of law can be easily
observed from the written record of legal history and the actual operation of
institutions such as the criminal justice system. Durkheim’s positivism is a
methodology of using indices or easily observable entities as expressions or
reflections of underlying moral phenomenon. Through the registration and
calculation of movements and trends in such observable indices, we can come to
understand trends and changes in the underlying moral phenomenon. This method
was clearly visible in Durkheim’s work in Suicide, where he used the official suicide
statistics as indices of social cohesion and social isolation. In using such positivist
methodologies Durkheim argues that there are no crucial distinctions between the
natural sciences and the social sciences. The subject matter of the social sciences
is social facts not visible to crude observation, but these social facts are to be
treated as natural things. Moreover, as is clear from Durkheim’s Rules of
Sociological Methods, social science can be value free. The sociologist or
criminologist is to be detached and objective in his analysis. Society and social
phenomenon are actual entities existing ‘out there’, and it is possible for the observer
to come to describe and explain them using various other indices.
Social solidarity
In The Division of Labour and Society Durkheim argues that there are two types
of social solidarity which characterise societies. Durkheim uses these types, or
models, in a similar way to a methodology that Weber had used in looking at the
vast variations in human society, namely we need to develop ideal types or models
which guide us in our understanding. Neither kind of social solidarity will exist in
pure form. In modern societies, organic solidarity predominates. While in pre-
modern, more simple societies, mechanical solidarity dominates.
In Durkheim’s work there is always a duality of processes and functions in
operation. For example, the very concept of society involves an almost positive
notion of solidarity (ie the achievement of cohesiveness or integration) and
regulation (ie restraints upon the pursuit of self-interest of people).
55
In pre-modern societies mechanical solidarity is based on likeness and

uniformity, on shared values, ideas and beliefs among the social body. These shared
ideas, values and beliefs constitute what Durkheim calls the ‘conscience collective’.
The life situation in pre-modern societies is a clear response to the homogeneity of
groups which demonstrate similarities between individuals and the strength of the
common moral symptoms. We may say that there is very little emphasis upon
individuality or individual personal identity, on the contrary, the emphasis is on
integration into the group and group identity.
In modern society, exemplified by a complex division of labour, an organic
solidarity develops. As roles and occupational tasks become more and more
specialised, individuals occupy different occupational roles, with a concomitant
difference in life experiences and social knowledge. These different experiences
and lifestyles lead to different outlooks and beliefs. Accordingly, the conscience
collective must become more fluid and decline in its intensity of hold over
individuals. For Durkheim the conscience collective of modern societies was
increasingly tied up with the moral affirmation of the dignity of the individual.
Organic solidarity was based not on likeness, homogeneity and uniformity of
belief but on heterogeneity and interdependency of social roles.
The use of law as an index of social solidarity
Mechanical solidarity found its legal effect in penal or repressive law. To

Durkheim the function of such law was to express and protect the collective
conscience, to affirm the shared belief by quickly condemning and punishing
those who denied, or went against, the shared expectations about behaviour. When
a crime occurred in conditions of mechanical solidarity the crime was not an event
against individual, but an attack on the entire social fabric and therefore likely to
be dealt with harshly. In organic solidarity the law comes to be more responsive to
individualism, for example, the criminal law moves more to protect the rights of
individual persons and their ownership of property. The law becomes more
concerned with restitution rather than punishment. Durkheim argued the growth
of restitutive civil law represented the most easily observable indices of the
development of organic solidarity. Empirical research on this point, however,
appears to show that Durkheim’s argument on legal evolution is historically
incorrect. Many would argue that it is modern society which makes use of
repressive law, and that the methodologies of simple or so-called primitive
societies were actually much more restitutive. Although the empirical evidence
weakens Durkheim’s analysis in terms of the empirical substance of his models,
this does not affect the theoretical validity, or insights to be gained from his
arguments on the forms of social solidarity.
56
Crime is normal in a society
Durkheim argued that crime is normal in society because there is actually no extra
social, or natural, dividing line between criminal activity and other more acceptable
activities. The dividing line is a process of demarcation and labelling, which serves
to distinguish the acceptable and the unacceptable conduct. The use of the concept
of crime is merely the strongest labelling procedure or processes which work to
maintain social solidarity. Its effectiveness actually comes from the process of
punishment and social emotions which are engendered. For by observing the
punishment of people, and participating in the feeling of moral and social outrage
at the offence, individuals become bound to the common perception of the justified
and unjustified, of the right and wrong. The process of punishment is inescapable,
as Durkheim points out in a famous example:
‘Imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals. Crimes,
properly so called, will there be unknown; but faults which appear venial to the layman
will create there the same scandal that the ordinary offence does in ordinary
consciousness. If, then, this society has the power to judge and punish, it will define
these acts as criminal and will treat them as such. For the same reason, the perfect and
upright man judges his smallest failings with a severity that the majority reserve for
acts more truly in the nature of an offence.’ (1965:68-69)
Even if the behaviours that are labelled criminal at time X in a society, were to be
discontinued at time X2, new behaviours would be considered as crime. Crime
therefore is an inevitable concept of organised society to respond to the
inescapable diversity of behaviour within society. Durkheim calls upon us to
consider that crime is actually a factor in public health, an integral part of social
organisation. That does not mean to say that there are not abnormal or
pathological levels of crime, but that both the absence of crime and a surplus of
crime is pathological. A society in which there is no crime would be a rigidly over-
policed oppressive society. But a society which is experiencing too high a rate of
crime is a society in which the balance between regulation and individuality has
broken down.
Crime is the flip side of modern individual freedom. As Durkheim claimed:
‘To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself. In order that
the originality of the idealist whose dreams transcend his century may find expression,
it is necessary that the originality of the criminal, who is below the level of his time,
shall also be possible. One does not occur without the other.’ (1965:71)
Durkheim and the openness of human nature
Durkheim built upon the philosophical tradition that human beings are ultimately
social animals. For Durkheim there is a difference between the regulation of physical
or instinctive needs, and social needs. For example, when we eat to satisfy the
57
cravings of physical hunger at a certain point the body itself will resist additional
food but our social needs for example, those for wealth, prestige or power are
regulated externally through the constraining forces of society. At root, our desires
were ‘an insatiable and bottomless abyss’. Without regulation, without a structuring
of understanding and interpretation of the meaning of being a human being, all
expectations are meaningless, all potentialities are both possible, and yet void.
Without regulation the desire for absolute freedom becomes self-destructive:
‘... it is not true, then, that human activities can be released from all restraint... its
nature and method of manifestation... dependent only on itself, but on other beings,
who consequently restrain and regulate it.’ ([1897] 1951:252)
Society installs a subjective understanding of the legitimacy of the state of affairs
of the social body. The smooth functioning of the system is founded on the subjective
understanding that a certain order of positions and rewards is natural.
‘As a matter of fact, at every moment of history there is a perception, in the moral
consciousness of societies, of the respective value of different social services, the
relative reward due to each, and the consequent degree of comfort appropriate, on
average, to workers in each occupation. The different functions are graded in public
opinion, and a certain coefficient of well-being assigned to each, according to its
place in the hierarchy. According to accepted ideas, for example, a certain way of
living is considered the upper limit to which a workman may aspire in his efforts
to improve his existence, then there is another limit below which he is not
willingly permitted to fall unless he has seriously demeaned himself.’ ([1897]
1966:249).
But this complex set of beliefs can come apart. Such was the case in the breakup of
the ancient civilisations and Durkheim believed a similar process was at work.
Discontent, frustration, meaninglessness, in short... anomie was growing.
The notion of anomie
Durkheim’s concept of anomie has spawned a vast literature. As with the Marxist
notion of alienation, it has symbolised one of the characteristic problems of
modernity, and the self-identity of modern individuals. Again there are two
aspects at work. One is the absence of regulations or rules so that one’s
understanding of social order is insufficiently co-ordinated. This sense of anomie
is a social structural problem, not a psychological condition. However, the second
effect is that this state of affairs produces in the individual a sense of isolation and
of the meaninglessness of life and work. Note that here the psychological factor
reflects a condition of the social organisation as a whole. Durkheim argued that
the economic structure of laissez faire society, with its strong emphasis upon self-
interested behaviour was itself a major source of anomie. Another cause, however,
was the forced division of labour where individuals are located in a structure of
specialisation and economic hierarchies where their position was not freely
58
chosen but thrust upon each person by the accident of birth, by the custom and
rituals of their socialisation, and by operation of law. Perhaps if all the rituals of
primary ordering were operating to make the individuals content with their
position, anomie would not be a danger. However a primary motivating force for
modern society is the drive for self-interest and the arguments that the self is
responsible for his or her destiny. In reality many individuals find themselves
estranged, resentful and aspiring to social positions which are in fact arbitrarily
closed off to them. Durkheim argues that this is most clear when we note that
individuals enjoy special advantages because of their possession of inherited
wealth, or where, because of prejudice in society, a distinction is attached to
individuals independent of their merits because of contingent facts (such as
gender, race and class). Robert Merton (1938) was to call the reaction to this an
‘anomie of injustice’.
Durkheim illustrated the concept of anomie through his analysis of the social
causes of suicide. Although it may appear that suicide is the ultimate individual
act, Durkheim attempted to show that this behaviour was, in fact, the result of
networks of social processes. His methodology has become the standard bearer of
sociological positivism, and consisted of an analysis of variations in rates of
suicide in different nations and different sub-groupings within French society. By
analysing the rates Durkheim sought to show that it was sociology, not
psychology, that could provide us with the real information for the understanding
of the nature of suicide. This reliance upon official statistics has also provided us
with a case study of the dangers in relying naively upon official statistics in
constructing theories, or ascertaining trends in phenomenon. Durkheim
hypothesises that there were two main ‘suicidogenetic’ social currents. These are
the dimensions of (i) integration (the extent to which individuals experience
belonging to the collective), and (ii) regulation (the extent to which actions and
desires of individuals are bound by moral values). Again with Durkheim it is all a
question of the mean. There can be too much integration and too little integration;
over-regulation and under-regulation. However, the empirical assertions of the
specific theory are called into question when the validity of the statistics he used is
doubted.
Durkheim’s analysis of suicide as the paradigm example of

positivism and statistics
Durkheim developed an analysis of suicide which has become a motif for

constructing positivist theories upon statistical data. To demonstrate his argument
that suicide, which was considered a personal act of the will of an actor, was actually
highly dependent upon a range of social factors, he measured the rates of suicide
for various groups and correlated these with indices of social factors: this would
lead us to the social laws of suicide. The individual will of a person heavily
59
constrained by a set of laws which flow through him and these ‘real laws are
discoverable’. The subject is constrained by ‘real, living, active forces which,
because of the way they determine the individual, prove their independence of
him.’ There are types of suicide determined by their own configurations of ‘social
facts’ (eg, the ‘egoistic’).
Durkheim built up his distinctions on the basis of treating the official rates as
given. The criticisms of Durkheim mirror those which positivist approaches to
criminal statistics suffered generally.
First, the positivist self-criticism: the data Durkheim analysed was official
statistics from the 1840s to the 1870s, and this information is subject to error.
Errors of collection and reportage thus prejudice the analysis, through data fault.
Similarly, much of subsequent criminological investigation can be seen as an attempt
to explain the official crime statistics – if these are suspect, then so is the whole
analysis. The positivists’ message is to correct such errors by providing real, actual
data as ‘true facts’ upon which to join correlations of ‘observable occurrences’.
Such alternative measures as self-report, or victim studies, are relied upon to correct
the picture the official statistics give.
Second, the interactionist approach. The statistics are never capable of
conversion into ‘real facts’ or ‘actual empirical data’ at all, since the original or
basic data, involve a process of interpretation and symbolic construction of
meaning which is unable to be analysed, other than spuriously, by positivist
methodology.
The interactionist approach to suicide can be seen in Atkinson’s
concentration upon the ‘process’ of categorising deaths as ‘suicide’. He rejects
the objectivity of a real rate of suicide which would provide the material for
analysis. Instead coroners interact with the situations surrounding death, and their
courts interpret events, producing suicide rates as a result of the interaction of their
‘common sense’ theories of suicide with the material presented to them. Coroners
bring sets of narrative expectations, or patterns of cultural history, which, if the
material fits, mean that a suicide will most likely be registered. If not further
investigation will be conducted, or no suicide is found (see JM Atkinson, 1971;
Douglas, 1967).
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Whereas Marx saw modern man as trapped within the capitalist mode of production
and suffering under commodity fetishism, for Nietzsche culture and ascetic ideals
constrained man. Mankind cannot exist without intellectual frameworks; horizons
which give meaning to the world and existence. Man needs imaginative leaps to
give purpose to social life and to create new projects.
60
Man’s intellectual frameworks were not modern enough
The structures of belief and meaning that modern man found were not yet truly
modern, they were still in the shadow of certain beliefs, such as the belief in God,
the belief in some foundation or point to being, and belief in a certain limitation of
truth. Modernity was one-sided in that it constructed technologies and forms of
knowledge which were the result of man’s desire to dominate nature by reason
and science, but they did not provide mankind with thoroughgoing structures of
meaning. Man had power without direction; knowledge without wisdom.
The paradox of the whole and the parts
Modern man would come to live in a paradoxical position where he was

surrounded by petty truths without the big truth. He would inhabit a structure of
understanding which would force men to keep searching for truth and for
meaning, even though that structure of understanding constantly reveals to
mankind that ultimate truth is not to be found. Nietzsche feared that the outcome
would be a form of social paralysis, or weariness, as man sees flux and chaos,
change and difference everywhere, and accumulated masses upon masses of
meaningless data.
The danger of nihilism
In modern society the will for truth, the will for science, the will for power, the will
to master, results in the inability of man, the esteeming animal, to actually fully
appreciate the value of existence. Thus, whereas Marx sees capitalism as the problem
to be overcome, Nietzsche defined the major problem as nihilism. Nihilism involves
man’s pursuit of goals, commodities and truths, in such a way that he cannot fulfil
himself. Again Nietzsche asks us to question the basic premises upon which modern
society has developed. Structurally, Nietzsche calls into question any identification
of positivist functionalism. We are not to accept that the structures of modern
society are in any way a natural or inevitable product of some form of evolution
for the better. Instead of any form of consensus about our institutions and our
networks of social control we must understand that behind them all have been
diverse programmes, sets of projects, and desires responding to different
stimulations and fears.
The structures of contemporary social life are the result of a combination of
what Nietzsche would call wills to power. Thus we must keep on asking, not what
things are for, but how do they come about, what are their historical origins? How
did the Enlightenment, or the structures of liberal bourgeois thought, come into
play and what and whose interests do they serve? What do their origins reveal
about the scope, the limits and the contradictions, of modern thought? The givens
61
of our society are historical products, nothing can be accepted as unquestionable,

and we must even at times suspect our very questions, for there is no virginal
pursuit of truth and knowledge. Knowledge is never pure; we do not seek knowledge
for itself, but always as useful for some project.
Is Nietzsche concerned with politics? Consider the notion of the state and the
choice of communal ends, and the fact that these ends are imposed and defended
by potentially violent political means. Weber demanded political legitimacy be
understood in terms of domination, not merely impartial principles of morality or
justice; the rule of law is one tactic, one conception of domination. Surely then
Nietzsche’s relevance is undoubtable, for, by denying the possibility of any
functionalist positivism, indeed any possibility of a pure regime of truth, Nietzsche
makes the question of any principles of social justice or of legality as one amongst
a range of objects for political and social analysis.
The supposed truths of political and social science, or of moral philosophy, are
not the truth of what we might call theoretical rationality, pure in, and of, itself, but
are rather products of thought in the realm of practical wisdom. There are truths
which are only an advanced form of the customary morality created by a people to
sustain particular forms of communal life. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
traces the historical origins of the moral world of modern man to sets of
psychological conditions and desires surrounding social existence. Nietzsche
understands the creation of all social values, indeed of the very structure of
society, in terms of political domination which is most powerfully achieved by
agreement as to the nature of things – ie by getting people to agree on the nature of
the problem. Who controls the modes of thought of a society has the keys to
domination. When we co-operate in a set of policies because that is the rational
course of action, we are placing ourselves in the supposed neutral grip of
knowledge, but can we trust that knowledge? Can we really be sure that the
knowledge is actually holding out the real image of society? As Nietzsche puts it
in his series of notes which were to be made into a text of reconstruction of social
values, and published after his death as The Will To Power:
‘... all unity, is unity only as organisation and co-operation – just as a human community
is a unity – as opposed to an optimistic anarchy, as a pattern of domination that
signifies a unity, but is not a unity.’ (1968: Aphorism - 561)
Domination is necessary for the creation and imposition of communal ends;
domination is the secret of politics. Therefore there are no apolitical positions. In
the complex psychological origins of all social values including, one might argue,
the principles of modern law, there is a struggle, an imposition by domination of
one set over another. All forms of reason, whether these are the reasoning forms of
political rationality, of moral rationality, or of legal rationality, cannot escape their
political nature. It then follows that there is no totally pre-determinate result to any
form of social, moral, political or legal deliberation. It is not that the structures of
thought themselves can ever determine an outcome. Outcomes can possibly be
determined by the political or moral assumptions which one section, or one
62
political position has adopted in the past, since if one is to be faithful to these
assumptions this may lead you onto certain outcomes. But even this commitment
is itself a political stance.
To many critics today this analysis of deliberation smacks of radical
indetermination of all decision making and therefore points to nihilism. But
Nietzsche’s argument is not that nihilism is the inevitable consequence of
modernity, but that nihilism is the result of the processes of modernity if we do not
develop a coherent position against it. It is necessary to be fully aware about what
one is doing even when one believes that one is being led by determinate
rationality.
The legacy of Weber and Nietzsche in the work of Foucault
As we shall see one of the most popular recent writers from France, Michel
Foucault (1973, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1988), creates a body of writing concerning the
concept of disciplinisation, a relation between discipline, constitutionalism and
power which is located in legacies of Nietzsche and Weber. Foucault identifies
power working:
‘perpetually to reinscribe this relation through a form of unspoken warfare; to reinscribe
it in social institutions, in economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves
of each and everyone of us.’ (1980:90)
Foucault develops the power and domination which Nietzsche highlights as not
the easily identified power of the sovereign, of direct political institutionalisation
of the state (which it would seem that Weber and indeed classical criminology will
point us to). Instead, Foucault implicitly draws upon Nietzsche and Weber to
highlight another form of power, a form he calls disciplinisation. In Foucault’s
analysis, we moderns are not free self-determining creatures, but are rather
subjected to a set of demands to be properly functioning, to be normal, to be the
best we can be. How do we know what this is? Only through the various
knowledges of normalcy, the knowledges of the self – thus we are subjects of these
knowledges. But are these knowledges actually true? We inhabit a multiple form
of subjugation which surrounds us, and indeed operates through our
understanding of the necessary functionality of roles and plays within the modern
social organisation.
Culture and knowledge largely constitute the conditions of the

modern
One consequence of this, of course, is that we are led into an understanding of

culture as not being merely expressive, but also as constituting modern identity
while repressing potential elements. This is a crucial area of focus in the modern
63
array of cultural studies which seek to understand and to investigate the operations
of what has come to be called the culture industry. Culture is often understood as
if it was the manifestation of the expressive needs of modern society but culture
may well sublimate on repress other needs even as it created further needs, in turn
creating forms of subtle domination.
What are the implications for criminology? One obviously concerns the
conception of crime and the various knowledges which criminology throws up.
Nietzsche in a way would be arguing that to think of any such thing as an essence
to crime, an essential nature to crime and therefore to search for the essential nature
of criminality or of the criminal is to create an illusion. It is to transform a mere set
of contingent facts, ie legislation, behaviour which goes against the legislation,
into some form of slippage of essentialism. One must constantly investigate in the
historical form how the facts of particular crimes came about and how these serve
particular interests.
Another central theme of Nietzsche is that of the modern administered world.
Nietzsche’s work espouses a radical individualism that strives to overcome the
constraints and repressions of such administration. We might argue, however, that
whilst Nietzsche highlights this concern, and points to the necessity for the individual
to undercut presuppositions and assumptions that structure this administration, we
cannot provide the individual with a radical new philosophy and conceptions of
existence which enables the individual to, if you like, float free. Social structure
binds. Nietzsche takes the drive of modernity towards radical individuality, radical
freedom to its rhetorical extremes;... the consequence is a void when the free man
searches for humane foundations.
The void underlying modern existence
Nietzsche’s radical individual is so free that the world, and the certainties of the
world, disappear into a metaphysical abyss. How can a truly modern individual
achieve stability? How can modern individuals create structures which give life
coherence without recourse to pre-modern formations, such as religion? Two figures
deeply inscribed in Nietzsche’s work are that of Apollo and Dionysus: the
Appollonian attitude desires stability, order, attachment, commitment, security,
while the Dionysian attitude involves:
‘... the affirmation or passing away and destroying... of saying yes to opposition and
war; becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of being.’ (Ecce
Homo [1888], in 1966:729)
What is it to be modern? Again with Marx, Nietzsche would agree that modern
life, the essential aspect of modern life, is not the pursuit of self-preservation, or
even of material comfort, but is a richer creative process. This creative process
must be viewed against a backdrop of striving to destroy what has gone before.
Creation is not merely a question of expanding life chances that are to be
64
proclaimed as a goal for modernity. What drives the creative process of modernity
is the very phenomenon of willing, of desiring to better ourselves, as individuals
and society; through this process modern man realises his destiny and also
understands the pathos of his condition. For, to will, to desire, if unorganised, is to
encounter chaos, a void of continual destruction, creation and deconstruction.
Mankind is trapped in the constant movement between scepticism and
deconstruction and the need for some certainty to give coherence to action. We
recognise that mankind has a metaphysical need for certainty, for a stable world
with fixed boundaries in which to act, otherwise man will become paralysed by
the chaos of his experience, and, in seeing the possibilities of becoming
everywhere, will be unable to progress at all.
‘This is a universal law, a living thing can only be healthy, strong, and productive with
a certain horizon; if it is incapable of drawing one around itself... it will come to an
untimely end. Cheerfulness, a good conscience, belief in a future, the joyful deed –
all depend, on the individual as well as the nation, on there being a line which divides
the invisible and clear from the vague and shadowy (Use and Abuse of History,
1957:7-8).
Man must, of necessity, create philosophical, moral, and political systems expressed
in language. These, however, are interpretations created by man and imposed on
the fluctuating chaos of reality to meet his needs for certainty. These interpretations
are the highest manifestations of the will to power:
‘... to impose upon becoming the character of being – that is the supreme will to
power.’ (1968: Aphorism, 617)
The created nature of modern man
Man’s destiny, man’s own being, is tied up with the process of knowing the world,
for, in the search to master the world, man must also constitute and master himself.
The role of intellectual endeavour is to give images, ideals, to structure our will to
power. As Nietzsche says of the philosopher:
‘... in the philosopher there is nothing whatever that is in person; above all his morality
be of decided and decisive to who he is – that is to what order of rank the innermost
drive of his nature, stands his relations to each other.’ (Beyond Good and Evil, in
1966: Aph, 6)
In seeking to understand the world, in creating structures of social theory, politics
and moral philosophy, man gives form to the world, he changes it and in a sense
changes himself. Whilst man is to some extent therefore, mastering nature, even
exploiting it, subjecting nature to his will, he is also creating and mastering the
chaos which is the openness of human nature. In knowing and striving, man creates
not only an understanding of the world, but also an understanding and interpretation
of himself. When man masters nature he also masters himself, and man comes to
65
obey the philosophical and moral systems he creates. All life is a form of exploitation
and domination:
‘... life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and
weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own form, incorporation and at
the least at its mildest exploitation.’ (Beyond Good and Evil, in 1966: Aph, 259)
Commanding and obeying oneself and others is the nature of life, as Nietzche’s
great literary character, Zarathustra, expresses it:
‘... wherever I found the living, there I heard also the speech of obedience. Whatever
lives obeys. And this is the second point; He who cannot obey himself is commanded.
That is the nature of the living. This, however, is the third point that I heard; that
commanding is harder than obeying; not only because he who commands must carry
the burden of all who obey, and because the burden may usually crush him. An
experiment and hazard appeared to me to be in all commanding, and where ever the
living command it hazards itself. Indeed even when it commands itself, it must still
pay for its commanding. It must become the judge the avenger and the victim of its
own law’. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: in 1968:226)
Nietzsche would agree with Marx that our modern consciousness is founded upon
the historical conditions and forces in which we live. However Nietzsche does not
agree that those forces can be reduced for some master model, for example, a
thesis of economic structuring, for even that particular interpretation of reality
would be an historical contention. Marx’s social theory is a reflection of his desire
to locate the source, or the essence, of man’s problematic condition in a particular
structure; in Marx’s case, the capitalist mode of production, etc. But Nietzsche
claims all the interpretations which make up social theory are attempts to shape
social consciousness and to impose particular interpretations upon the openness of
social reality. All interpretations, all knowledge, are creations of the will to power,
and serve to change man’s conception of reality. In so doing they change man’s
internal relationships to his drives, his ambitions, his desires; they structure his
relations to the external world and they create, thereby, the conditions for his future
activities. What is history? History is the ongoing set of projects, some successful,
some mere attempts. It is a set of frustrations of man in his attempts to understand
and master nature, himself, and his fellow human beings.
Man is differentiated from animal existence by a huge differentiation in power.
This power is cultural and imaginative; it gives man greater freedom and scope for
creative development than the animal, modernity creates social power by releasing
the processes of individualisation. The sovereign individual is the great creation of
modernity.
‘... this emancipated individual with the actual right to make promises, this master of
a free will, this sovereign man – how should he not be aware of his superiority over all
those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how
much trust, how much ear, how much reverence he arouses... and of how this mastery
over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over conditions and over circumstances
over nature and over more short willed and unreliable creatures.’ (Genealogy of Morals,
Second essay, Section 2)
66
Modern man exerts more power than the pre-modern, because he has distanced
himself from static routines, from being embedded into stable sets of traditions,
structures and rituals, he can direct his willing, his desire, his imaginative grasp of
the possible, to a broader range. This freedom means modern man can create formal
structures of rationality, abstract cultural and creative. Modern man steps out of
the locality through the power of writing and developing systems of information
storage. Mankind forces itself from the bonds of immediate experience so that
abstract thought and national planning is possible.
This new social/cultural understanding, the new social consciousness of progress,
of predictability and of the engagement in social projects, demands a certain
predictability and progressive being to individual man.
To ordain the future in advance man must first have learned to distinguish necessary
events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities,
as if they belong to the present, to decide with certainty what is a goal and what it
means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute. Man himself must first
of all become calculable, regular, necessary. (The Genealogy of Morals, second essay,
section 1).
This self-consciousness is a result of the modern conditions of existence, only as a
social animal can man become conscious of himself as an ‘individual’ self, and the
conditions of modern society are furthering this process via the reflexivity, or
creation of knowledge, about the social and the human. Modern man is creating a
new structure of intellectual and social consciousness; upon this his sensibilities,
his very civilisation is built. Modern man exists under the rule of language, under
the sovereign of words and naming processes. Man is trapped within the possibilities
and weaknesses of the structures of communication. As compared to many of the
animals, man is an extremely weak and vulnerable animal. Nietzsche calls man
the most endangered animal, he uniquely needs the protection of his peers. Man is
forced to communicate his distress and this requires the human species to develop
his consciousness to a higher level:
‘Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is
only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lives like a beast of
prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements
enter our own consciousness at least part of it, that is a result of a must that for a
terribly long time lauded it over man. As the most endangered animal he needed help
and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress, and to
make himself understood; and for all of this he needed consciousness first of all.’
(The Gay Science, 1968: Aph 354)
Is modern liberal society necessarily progressive? In Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche scornfully talked of the tendency for people to demand new conditions
of society in which exploitative aspects would be removed. Nietzsche thought this
was impossibly utopian: ‘It is as if they promised to invent a way of life that would
dispense with all organic functions’. There would be no ultimate escape from the
necessity of exploitation and politics. It may well be that the modern state is a
political mode of organisation which holds itself out as functional, as carrying out
67
necessary and natural tasks, but the society shaped and created under this form
will in a real sense, be an illusory community. The modern state is a political
organisation much greater in power than previous forms of social organisation;
it’s bedrock is ultimately its cultural forms, its ways of thinking. Whereas for Marx
the modern state responded to the need to organise social and political life, so that
particular economic relations centred around capitalist formations of credit, debt,
buying, and exchange, were effectual for Nietzsche the processes of buying and
selling and exchange are vitally important not so much for their economic
consequences, but for their psychological consequences. The organisational
instrument of the modern state is law, and underlying the legal framework, are
forms of knowledge, ie jurisprudence, structures of modes of discourse centred
around political legitimacy and which portray law in an acceptable mode. These
underlying forms of discourse enable the institution of law to gain psychological
acceptance by the populace.
This acceptance is blinded to the reality of coercion which still lurks behind
law – jurisprudence created concepts of justice and rights, but these are special
artefacts and ought not to blind us to the organic struggle beneath such civilised
discursive forms. Law remains
‘... the most decisive act of a modern supreme power... Just and unjust exist, accordingly,
only after the institution of the law... to speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless;
in itself of course no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction, can be unjust since life
operates essentially through injury assault, exploitation, destruction.’ (The Genealogy
of Morals, second essay, section 12)
One cannot step outside of the processes of political or jurisprudential or moral
discourse, to come up with some method by which one can say whether, for
instance, modern liberal democracy was truly or absolutely just or unjust. The
very terminology, the very ability to speak in terms of the just or the unjust, can
only be done through a particular form of language, which we might call a
language game. These language games come about as a result of a the work of
jurisprudence or political-social discourses. It is impossible to speak outside of a
language which itself is already deeply embedded in a relationship with the very
institution which one is trying to understand. What is the ultimate aim of legal
regulation? The state may claim that it is an organ operating so as to look after the
common interest. However, this is becoming difficult since the regime of legal
regulation is increasingly pluralistic, and deciphering its forms is increasingly
difficult. What constitutes the unity of the people? Political freedom must not be
seen as human freedom, while for Marx political freedom masks social inequality,
for Nietzsche it hides the psychological repression of individuals. Modern Europe
was being subjected to two distinct impulses. One was the drive to individuality,
associated with the need for individual freedom, and the creation of individual
projects; the other was a tendency towards equalitarianism. The discourse of
rights, political equality and the role of jurisprudential knowledge was to attain
equivocation between these processes. Justice would be a method of translating
68
different claims so that they could be rendered commensurable; although no two

individuals or things are ever fully equal, the desire for justice is to some extent an
expression of good will amongst the parties:
‘Justice on an elementary level is the goodwill amongst parties of approximately
equal power to come to terms with one another, to reach an understanding by means
of a settlement – and to compel parties of lesser power to reach a settlement amongst
themselves.’ (The Genealogy of Morals, second essay, section 8).
The discourse of liberal democratic life, the aims of the modern society, claimed
that it had found truths of political economy to guide the society. It claimed there
was a set of foundational structures which could be studied and understood which
explained how social processes worked. Writers who claimed utility provided the
key to social progress, moreover, made a false claim to reconcile differences and
oppositions. Nietzsche, however, asks what is to happen if in reality not all
individuals are actually incorporated? As Nietzsche expresses it:
‘... refraining mutually from injury, violence and exploitation and placing one’s will
on a par with that of someone else – this may become in a certain rough sense, good
manners among individuals if the appropriate conditions are present (namely, if these
men are actually similar in strength and value standards and belong together in one
body). But as soon as this principle is extended and possibly even accepted as the
fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is – a will
to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay.’ (Beyond Good and Evil,
Aph: 259)
If substantial sections are denied the will to life; if they cannot exercise their will
to power, why will they refrain from violence? From fraud? From expropriation?
Both liberal democracy and socialist equality could suffer. It is a strong criticism
of administrative social equality:
‘... equality of rights could all too easily be changed into equality violating rights –
namely into a common war of all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the
higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility and the abundance of creative
power and masterfulness.’ (Beyond Good and Evil, Aph: 212)
Behind the desire for equality, Nietzsche finds a herd morality, ultimately epitomised
in the rhetorical demands for a socialist structure. The pursuit of individuality,
rather than equality should be the goal of social relations. But in the liberal
democratic structure the demand for equal respect for individuals put down and
defended in law, criminal law and penality, may itself only make sense if all the
appropriate conditions are present. That is, if the social structure systematically
excludes individuals, then the conditions of the fundamental principle of individual
respect are not working to the advantage of all – the reality of law in this situation
is both oppressive and creative. In the conditions of modernity it is law, rather than
tradition or status, which formulates the conditions necessary to constitute and
preserve a community. Modern social life involves the creation of social structures
which intensify social power and enable the preserving of power – those who do
not fit in will feel the down-side of this power. The weak will become criminals,
69
and become subjects for the exercise of the power to punish; but others will be
labelled criminals because they wish to defy the herd. Criminal acts may be either
the result of weakness or of the will to power; criminality becomes the site of
multiple flows and effects. Social explanation is unavoidably multi-faceted, but
power, and the call to power, is at the centre.
70
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PROBLEM OF CLASSICAL CRIMINOLOGY:

STABILISING DISORDER THROUGH LAW; OR HOW TO
ACHIEVE THE RULE OF LAW AND HIDE THE CHAOS
OF EARLY MODERNITY
‘Julius stopped in front of his friend. “Listen, Rupert. If there were a perfectly
just judge I would kiss his feet and accept his judgments upon my knees. But
these are merely words and feelings. There is no such being and even the
concept of one is empty and senseless. I tell you, Rupert, it’s an illusion, an
illusion.”
“I don’t believe in a judge,” said Rupert, “but I believe in justice. And I suspect
you do too, or you wouldn’t be getting so excited.”
“No, no, if there is no judge there is no justice, and there is no one, I tell you,
no one.” ’ (I Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, 1970)
Introduction to classical criminology
The 18th century was dominated by two opposite psychological states: fear and
hope. Classical criminology was born in the dialectic of fear and optimism. Fear
of the breakdown of society, fear that the cosmos appeared one huge void, fear of
the absence of secure foundations to existence. Fear... of the mob, the ragged
poverty-stricken mass of humanity which the movement out of the tradition-bound
localities of the pre-modern had created.
God was slowly dying; the cosmos appeared unhinged. If there was no God to
centre things around, then there was only the mass of individuals and their capacities
(reason, experience, their ability to interact with nature). How could these be put
into productive form? What would secure order? By what device could practical
answers be given, what mechanism of control could be devised?
The 16th and 17th centuries grappled with the transition to the modern, the
English social theorist Thomas Hobbes (Man and Citizen: De Homine and De
Cive; Leviathan) stood above all in linking fear and knowledge to construct a new
imperative of human endeavour. The demand was clear: give us real knowledge,
knowledge of the human condition so that we can create a device to provide social
stability. Hobbes understood clearly that every human society is, at its most basic
form, men bonded together in the face of death. To brood on the inevitability of
death leads to despair. Hobbes arranged a bargain with the cosmic forces – natural
human politics is freedom and power structured only by the madness we face
when our reason encounters the mystery of the human condition – we resign our
search for ultimate grounding to organisation; we grant a sovereign the right, and
ability, to brood for us. Hobbes gave the legacy of sovereignty and law as the
instrument of command. He bequeathed a powerful intellectual device which still
71
provides guidance; we create governments of strength through the guiding idea of

contract, that fundamental jurisprudential imagination of the modern. The content
and shape of modern law is founded not upon God’s will, but on the will and
desires of man as he grapples with the problems of the human condition.
God’s death demands new legitimation strategies
God’s death left man alone on the world. True, there were a lot of men – if God did
not control the law then who did? If the will of the law was not God’s, then whose?
Two opposing answers: it must be the will of one of us, the strongest – or it must be
the will of all of us. The law must be the instrument of one, or all must be made
into one. Authority versus radical democracy; totalitarianism versus radical
democracy; the command of the sovereign versus law as the expression of the will
of the people (the general will as in Rousseau; law as the progressive uncovering
of right, as in Hegel; law as the peoples’ bible book of freedom, as it appeared to
the early Marx).
What does classical criminology comprise? Classical criminology is a label
used to make sense of a period of writings in the late 18th and early 19th century,
which reformed the system of investigation and punishing of criminal offences. A
reasonably coherent, rational intellectual structure was developed which legitimated
the creation of a system of criminal justice which predominates today.
We can give a narrow or wide reading of classical criminology. Most texts give
a narrow reading, they see it as concerned with setting up a rational framework for
a modern system of criminal justice, but it is also part of the attempt to provide
answers to the question of structuring government when we are in a social situation
devoid of a foundational touchstone such as God. We shall use the writings of
Beccaria, Bentham and John Austin as representative of this enterprise.
Beccaria (1738-1794)
Cesare Becarria is usually depicted as a humane reformer reacting to a time when

the criminal law, and its enforcement, was barbarous and arbitrary. Certainly
Becarria’s social context was one of secret accusations, brutal executions, torture,
arbitrary and inconsistent investigations and findings of guilt, and class-linked
disparities in punishments. However, we simplify the development in depicting
Beccaria as an humanitarian; the context is the rationalisation of the criminal justice
system. Rationalisation is no unitary process. There are many layers of cultural
and political implications and effects at work. For example, we can place classical
criminology within the history of ideas, in particular the development of
philosophical radicalism; in terms of constitutionalism and governmentability it is
part of the developing notion of ‘the rule of law’; politically it is part of the changing
72
The problem of classical criminology
political struggles where a growing middle class sought political power to

accompany their economic power and break down the political monopoly enjoyed
for instance, in England, by the landowning class; culturally it is an effect of the
hopes of progressive social engineering, epitomised here by the Italian Caesar
Beccaria and the Englishman Jeremy Bentham.
In On Crimes and Punishment Beccaria considered crime an injury to society.
It was this injury to society, rather than to the immediate individual(s) who
experienced it or the abstract sovereign, that was to direct and determine the degree
of punishment. At one level Beccaria’s text exemplifies Weber’s analysis of the
link between legal rationality and capitalism – Beccaria claims that the fundamental
principle of the criminal law should rest upon positive sanction. Every member of
the society is to have the perfect right to do anything not expressly prohibited by
the law. Thus the law is to simply lay out minimum rules of social life and within
those rules the populace can experiment, diversify and grow in knowledge,
experiences and life forms. The law would bind the society and guide society by
laying out clear, rational rules. The rules are laid down by a Sovereign body guided
by a new science of decision making, namely utilitarianism (or the assumption
that all social action should be guided by the goal of achieving the greatest happiness
for the greatest number). From this viewpoint, the punishment of an individual for
a crime was justified, and justifiable only, for its contribution to the prevention of
future infringements on the happiness and well-being of others. Beccaria reasoned
that certain and quick, rather than severe, punishments would best accomplish the
above goals:
‘... in order for punishment not to be... an act of violence of one or many against a
private citizen, it must be... public, prompt,... the least possible in the given
circumstances, proportionate to the crimes, [and] dictated by the laws.’ ([1764]
1963:99)
Torture, execution, and other ‘irrational’ activity must be abolished. In their place,
there were to be quick and certain trials and, in the case of convictions, carefully
calculated punishments. Beccaria proposed that accused persons be treated
humanely before trial, with every right and facility extended to enable them to
bring evidence on their own behalf. In Beccaria’s time accused and convicted
persons were detained in the same institutions, and subjected to the same
punishments and conditions. In place of this, Beccaria argued for swift and sure
punishments, to be imposed only upon those found guilty, with the punishments
determined strictly in accordance with the damage to society caused by the crime.
It is often said that classical criminology ignores the causes of crime, but Beccaria
certainly held that economic conditions, and bad laws, could cause crime.
Additionally, he was clear that property crimes were committed primarily by the
poor, and mainly out of necessity. Moreover, he was aware of what has come to be
called opportunity transfer; that is, that imposing a severe punishment on a particular
crime could deter someone from committing it, but at the same time make another
crime attractive by comparison. Beccaria was also aware of the cultural power of
73
severe punishments to add to the desperation of the populace and encourage them
to indulge in violence. As he put it, laws could promote crime by diminishing the
human spirit. A careful matching of the crime and its punishment, in keeping with
the general interests of society, could make punishment a rational instrument of
government. Jeremy Bentham extended this with his notion of a ‘calculus’ for
realising these interests.
Jere my Bentham (1748-1832)
A radical utilitarian, Bentham applied Beccaria’s ideas to British conditions.

Modernity was to be guided by the fundamental reference point of a science of
ethics founded upon nature’s command: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest
number’, a criteria Bentham attributed to the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Bentham gave precision to this idea, in part, through a pseudo-mathematical concept
he called the ‘felicity calculus’. This ‘calculus’ was intended as a means of
estimating the goodness or badness of acts, the only ‘measure of right or wrong’.
Thus Bentham declared that notions of indefeasible rights, or contractual limitations
on the power of government, were either meaningless or else confused references
to the principle of utility. The basis of government was not contract but human
need, and the satisfaction of human need is its sole justification. However, Bentham
had a rather limited notion of need.
Bentham meant to make the law an efficient and economical means of preventing
crime. Like Beccaria, Bentham insisted that prevention was the only justifiable
purpose of punishment, and, furthermore, that punishment was too ‘expensive’
when it produced more evil than good, or when the same good could be obtained
at the ‘price’ of less suffering. He recommended penalties be fixed so as to impose
an amount of pain in excess of the pleasure that might be derived from the criminal
act. It was this calculation of pain compared to pleasure that Bentham believed
would deter crime. These ideas were formulated most clearly in his Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation, first published in 1789, where the
foundation of progress appears to lie in fully understanding the key principles and
functionality of nature:
‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain
and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to
determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong, on
the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.’ (Chapter 1
Section 1)
We can read ‘nature’ and find not only a description of how we operate, but, properly
understood, the key to how we should operate. Moreover, this provides the key to
progressive rationality. We can quantify our pleasures and pains, we can create a
mathematics of happiness. With Bentham calculation overwhelms the humane
approach – humanism is always a quantifiable conception. While Beccaria kept to
74
some Kantian notions as to the dignity of man, Bentham would have none of these
limitations upon the scientific reorganisation which the principle of utility appeared
to make possible. For example, Bentham argued that capital punishment should be
restricted to offences ‘which in the highest degree shock the public feeling’. He
went on to argue that if the hanging of a man’s effigy could produce the same
preventive effect as the hanging of the man himself, it would be a folly and a
cruelty not to do so (Radzinowicz, 1948:381-382). He also suggested how capital
punishments might nonetheless be used to maximum effect:
‘A scaffold painted black, the livery of grief – the officers of justice dressed in crepe
– the executioner covered with a mask, which would serve at once to augment the
terror of his appearance, and to shield him from ill-founded indignation – emblems of
his crime placed above the head of the criminal, to the end that the witnesses of his
sufferings may know for what crimes he undergoes them; these might form a part of
the principal decorations of these legal tragedies... Whilst all the actors in this terrible
drama might move in solemn procession – serious and religious music preparing the
hearts of the spectators for the important lesson they were about to receive... The
judges need not consider it beneath their dignity to preside over this public scene.’
(quoted in Radzinowicz, 1948:383-384)
Bentham also attempted to radicalise imprisonment, an institution then used merely
to hold persons awaiting trial or debtors. He spent much of his life trying to convince
authorities that an institution of his design, called a ‘Panopticon,’ would solve the
problems of correction, of poverty, of idleness and mental instability.
There were three features to the panopticon. First, the architectural dimension;
the panopticon was to be a circular building with a glass roof and containing cells
on every story of the circumference. It was to be so arranged that every cell could
be visible from a central point providing a hierarchy of continuous surveillance.
The omniscient prison inspector would be kept from the sight of the prisoners by
a system of ‘blinds unless... he thinks fit to show himself’. Second, management
by contract; the manager would employ the inmates in contract labour and he was
to receive a share of the money earned by the inmates, but he was to be financially
liable if inmates who were later released re-offended, or if an excessive number of
inmates died during imprisonment. Third, the panopticon was to open to the
inspection of the world, an all-encompassing supervisor, which would control the
manager. The idea was not fully acted upon although two prisons along this design
were built in France (Petite-Roguette, 1836; Rennes, 1877) and one in the US
(Stateville, 1926-1935). The panopticon keeps its importance not for the institutions
actually constructed, rather for the type of disciplinary rationality the scheme
displays.
Bentham was a source of many modern ideas. He argued strongly for the
establishment of the office of public prosecutor, and he furthered the notion that
crimes are committed against society rather than against individuals. Beyond this,
he argued that many victimless crimes were imaginary rather than real offences,
and he argued for the development of official crime statistics or ‘bills... indicating
the moral health of the country’.
75
In reality, Bentham placed the civil law as the most important facility for modern
social life – the criminal law, ideally, would protect the workings of a social body
organised around the centrality of exchange relations. In his work on the penal
code more than a quarter of the total concerns schemes of compensation; just
under one half deals with indirect means of preventing offences; less than one
eighth is devoted to punishments. He argues for sure and direct punishment but
warns that the criminal law can be counterproductive; the civil law ought to be
doing the majority of work for a modern society. Bentham asked for a system
which will rid the world of ‘criminal consciousness’ and of the penal emotionality
epitomised by the executioner. Among the ideas he suggested: the tattooing of all
men; each person should have a unique name; vegetable gardening to be encouraged;
tea and coffee to be subsidised at the expense of alcoholic liquor; music, drama
and card games to be encouraged (not because he liked them, he apparently detested
the opera, but to keep people occupied and their attentions turned to harmless
pursuits). Time was to be filled up; marriages contracted for a limited period should
be permitted to use up the sexual passions of those men who could not afford to
maintain a family; prostitution should be permitted to prevent private vengeance
for adultery; symbolic measures should serve to minimise real punishments. To
his critics, this was to be the all-supervised society; the price of the happy society
was domination by the gaze of utility.
Understanding classical criminology and its continuing appeal
Many of the individual proposals have particular themes influencing them. For
example, the replacement of torture to gain confessions is clearly part of the
movement towards forms of evidence involving human judgment. What constituted
‘proof’ was changing in the sciences, and in the law circumstantial evidence was
beginning to be accepted.
The development of imprisonment has been much debated. (See Stanley Cohen,
Visions of Social Control, 1985) One point is surveillance. In the pre-modern village
and town strangers were not common. Visibility and understandability of action
was so much part of the reality of life that it went uncommented upon, but the new
cities were full of the dispossessed and homeless, the wanderers (vagrants) who,
by definition, had no neighbours, were not known. Confinement was one answer
as was the attempt to gain predictability in the behaviour of strangers through
techniques of disciplinary behaviour.
Part of the appeal of classicism is its self-image of rational administrator, but
there is a deep, epistemological basis for the success of classicism. It lies in the
type of knowledge, or the limits of knowledge, which can provide an adequate
foundation for legal regulation and reasoning. Note that we have defined modernity
as a radically reflexive terrain and seen modernity as a form of social organisation
which steps out of the local, out of tradition, embraces rationality and calculation,
seeks emancipation and autonomy, above all knowledge. It seeks information about
76
its practices and subjects them to analysis. Against this backdrop how is it that law
has become the pre-eminent device for providing frameworks for modernity? How
can law be so successful? What forms of knowledge and studies of organisation
are involved with legality?
This is a topical issue of no mere academic importance. Currently there are
fears that the authority of the legal order, in particular obedience to the criminal
law, is being undercut. In response we have seen a return to formal frameworks for
sentencing, and the demand for a strict adherence to clear-cut principles for
punishing offenders proportionate to the ranked seriousness of the crime they have
committed.
The rule of law as an expression of current features of modernity
Some questions appear and reoccur in every era – what are the contours of modern
life? What are its boundaries, what are its foundations? Is modernity founded on a
secure bedrock or on shifting sands?
Sociologists, and social geographers, tend to think they run the show of answering
these questions, but lawyers think differently. Lawyers understand that whatever
else we are in modernity, we are legal subjects. This is not just our prejudice.
Above the confusion of the modern urban locality certain signs of permanence
arise. Life is stabilised by the fixed points of symbolic reference, or monuments
that incorporate and preserve a sense of collective identity (think of the role of the
Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square or the
hope for Canary Wharf in London). One non-physical but vitally important
monument is the legal order. The countries of the modern west are proud to be
considered Rule of Law societies.
The contemporary liberal legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin may overstate
somewhat, but consider this opening statement from Law’s Empire:
‘We live in and by the law. It makes us what we are: citizens and employees and
doctors and spouses and people who own things. It is sword, shield, and menace: we
insist on our wage, or refuse to pay our rent, or are forced to forfeit penalties, or are
closed up in jail, all in the name of what our abstract and ethereal sovereign, the law,
has decreed. And we argue about what it has decreed, even when the books that are
supposed to record its command and directions are silent; we act then as if law had
muttered its doom, too low to be heard distinctly. We are subjects of law’s empire,
liegemen to its methods and ideals, bound in spirit while we debate what we must
therefore do.’ (1986: vii)
Consider the imagery Dworkin uses. It is not powerful groups which yield the
sword and order punishment, but law itself. It is not the decrees of humans that are
announced in the law, but the law itself that speaks. Dworkin tells us that we are
the products in part of one of the great ideas of modernity – the rule of law. The
law has a constitutive or productive capability. As moderns we ask the right to
reject the identities provided us by our locality, our gender, our ethnic origin, our
77
religion, our class, our physical appearance, in favour of something abstract yet
concrete – our legal identity as free and equal rights-bearing citizens of the legal
order. Before the law we ask to be considered as equals, irrespective of all our
empirical differences. And when our rights are breached we ask that the law hold
to account those who have breached our rights – the law it seems does the punishing
– society is governed by rules and principles and when the rules are broken other
rules determine the consequences. But what sense does this make? And what is at
stake in this area? What is the connection between legal order and social order?
Does law reflect sociological truths or can law create its own regimes of truth? On
whose terms is the discussion held? The legacy of Hobbes is usually referred to as
the image of sovereign and subject (Cotterrell, 1989: Ch 3); and while Hobbes
leads on to Bentham and Austin with the theory of law as the instrument of political
power (utility) the more basic feature of Hobbes’ scheme is not the repression of
anti-social desires and passions from without, but the dissolving of them from
within. Hobbes achieves pacification through control on language. The destructive
passions are constrained by depriving them of an appropriate vocabulary and site
of utterance. The courtroom under legal positivism (the theoretical perspective
bequeathed by Hobbes and developed by Bentham and Austin) speaks of law, and
law only; morality has no conceptual or necessary niche in the ontology of law. If
a vocabulary of ethics, law, and politics, entirely rational and neutral in tone can be
developed as the mode of speech, it might quieten the murderous and violent
passions within us all. In combining to form organised society, Hobbes declares,
we have also agreed to communicate upon the terms of the sovereign. This may
appear a well struck bargain. But the price is that henceforth important discussions
upon the human condition will be in terms of reason and science, rather than the
passions or myth, or theology. To authority we yield up our judgment, to the scientist
our understanding; the bargain may be worth it, but we have paid a high price (the
holocaust is but one example) and may pay more – even, ultimately perhaps,
environmental destruction.
The period of classical criminology is often down-played in criminological books
written by sociologists or relegated to mere historical significance in others (such as
Vold’s 1958, 1978, 1986 Theoretical Criminology). This is wrong. We have never
moved on from the dilemmas which Classicism contains – the advent of just deserts
and the return to legalism of the last two decades is only one indication of this. The
deeper concern is actually about understanding and organising human existence.
A basic question: how is legitimacy of criminal justice established?
Whatever the socio-cultural context, the concept of criminal justice combines the
idea of crime with the idea of justice. But what is a just judgment in criminal
justice? In other words, how do we actually know that the decisions made in the
name of criminal justice are correct? How do we know that the structure is legitimate
and the actions done are just?
78
The reflexivity of modernity places this constantly on the agenda. And we ask
it daily. We complain about unjust decisions, about miscarriages of justice. What
are we doing when we complain? Are we not demanding that criminal justice
create and preserve a structure of legitimacy? For Weber modernity relies upon a
particular form of legitimacy, we accept the social order and the commands of
political superiors, because of the combination of legality and rationality. It may
be that we desire a substantially just society, but what if we disagree on what that
means? Does this destroy legitimacy? It does not appear so; instead the quest for
legitimacy can become purely formal. Thus, whatever is done according to the due
process of law is a legitimate and correct outcome. In this way law creates its own
system of conferring legitimacy, it becomes an autopoietic structure which does
not need answers to the fundamental questions of existence to continue. We can
become creatures of the law and subjects of legal regulation whatever our beliefs
about the ontology of life. A Moslem, a Jew, a Catholic and someone who just
enjoys football and a cold beer, can disagree on everything about the meaning of
life and yet agree to abide by the legal system. We can call this the solution of
ambivalence through division. Of course, dialectics are in play – the legal system
cannot dictate the meaning of life otherwise disagreement about the meaning of
life, would become a problem for legality. What law regulates must be thought
out, law cannot behave irrationally. But it can determine the conditions of its own
rationality through its supposed autonomy. For the contemporary Harvard Law
Professor Roberto Unger the law achieves autonomy when:
‘... the rules formulated and enforced by government cannot be persuasively analysed
as a mere restatement of any identifiable set of non-legal beliefs or norms, be they
economic, political, or religious...
An autonomous legal system does not codify a particular theology. As a body of
profane rules, it stands apart from the precepts that govern man’s relationship to God
and from any single religion’s view of social relations... Legal reasoning has a method
or style to differentiate it from scientific explanation and from moral, political, and
economic discourse... A special group, the legal profession... manipulates the rules,
staffs the legal institutions, and engages in the practice of legal argument.’ (1976:53)
The themes of classical criminology help constitute the rule of law and remain
essential to contemporary life. How this came about, and in what ways this reflects
fundamental issues of the human condition, is a difficult and complex story some
aspects of which shall be sketched as follows.
Classical criminology destroys the magical irrationality of the pre-

modern
Our narrative has portrayed modernity as born with the destruction of the intellectual
synthesis of medieval Europe relying upon the belief in God. Theology provided a
power base to legitimate a political domination of church and sovereign throughout
Christendom – a domination torn asunder in the changes of the Enlightenment.
79
The conventional accounts of criminological development, ie Vold (1958, Vold

and Barnard 1978, 1986), Leon Radzinowicz, Ideology and Crime, 1966), Taylor,
Walton and Young, The New Criminology (1973), see the change in Weberian
terms of criminal law as surmounting its ‘irrational’ roots, and discern its
development and differentiation in terms of the process of the rationalisation of
societies in general, and of the law in particular. Weber’s typology of legal conflict
is carried out in the dimensions of rationality, versus irrationality and formal versus
substantive.
Vold (1958, Vold and Bernard, 1978, 1986) starts his narrative with the freeing
of intellectual thought on crime from the domination of semi-religious
demonological explanations. Demonological explanations make use of the principle
of other-worldly power to account for events, the rejection of demonism turns
man’s attention on to this world and the inherent structures of the world. The
enlightenment attitude is openly scathing of popular fallacies, and is also a criticism
of the current legitimative conceptions for authority. These popular beliefs tied to
the practices of wergild, a contest of sin and crime, trial by battle, trial by ordeal,
compurgation, and the use of miraculous signs or omens to indicate guilt or
innocence, in a ritualisation of life. Behind such popular attitudes were also,
however, sophisticated intellectual systems which drew out the remaining traits of
what David Jones (1986), in his selective overview of criminology, calls ‘classical
realism’.
The legitimation of decisions in the theological system depended on

an overall synthesis
What is characteristic of these systems is the interdependence of each part in an

overall conception; an interdependence which involves the aesthetic. In the
scholastic system of Thomas Aquinas, for instance, the emphasis is on a synthesis
of classical philosophy, Christian theology, and the concerns of politics. The duty
of civil participation, natural political action, must be viewed in relation to
citizenship in the Kingdom of God. The state is a natural institution, deriving from
the nature of man, and is orientated towards satisfying and encouraging man’s
natural potentiality. The entire scheme of society and its laws are evaluated by a
notion of the whole. A notion which, in its heritage, draws upon a sympathetic
dialectic with the legacy of Aristotle where the choice of, and respect for, a common
measure is what gives the polity a sense of balance and harmony. The identity of
the elements of justice, and what designates their place in the right order of that
society, the rule of justice at the foundation of the socio-political association, is the
centrality of the notion of the common good. The common good allows the
positioning of individuals since:
‘... the goodness of any part is considered in comparison with the whole... Since then
any man is a part of the state, it is impossible that a man be good unless he be well
proportioned to the common good. [Law is] a rational ordering of things which concern
80
the common good, promulgated by whoever is charged with the care of the community.’
(Aquinas: Selected Political Writings, p 57)
Penal activity is not merely to reflect the power and authority of the sovereign, but
to be aligned by reason and aimed at benefiting the common good. The penal
practices affecting the body share both in the rationality of obvious power but also
represent an intellectual acknowledgement that the defilement which sin brings is
close to the symbolism of the physical. It is a touching, a contagion of the social
world which demands a cleansing. This is a cleansing for which soap and water
will not suffice but demands a ritual purification, a prescribed and sanctioned
ceremony. Crime is a privation which comes about by a deterioration, or misuse,
of man’s reason by deference to the force of passion, or a training in vice not
virtue. Evil is the possibility of wrong choice which accompanies man’s freedom,
but choice is not something radically free, springing out of an existential void, but
part of the practice of life – the development of man’s practical rationality. Moral
evil is the product of the will, whereby the essentially good element in the willed
act lacks its true end. The privation may be righted by Divine grace; as Alisdair
MacIntyre (1988) brings out in his Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, for medieval
thought the human condition is incomplete in itself, it simply does not possess
powers of governing itself – it is created and ultimately dependant.
The critical philosophy of the enlightenment opposed such a state of dependency
and denied confidence in revealed knowledge. Knowledge must face a sceptical
challenge, and the progressive construction project was to be based on the security
of man’s epistemological properties.
One result was to frame foundational knowledge claims in a negative fashion –
thus for Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, and David Hume in the 18th, dominant
social institutions arise not so much from knowledge of the good but from the fear
of the consequences of unrestrained natural inclinations. The path to institutional
reform is via knowledge of the facts of the human condition. But these are isolated
facts – it is no longer, for Hume, possible for one man ever to claim that he can
know the human condition in its entirety, all he can know is some or other facts of
the human condition. This change is slowly apparent in the projects of writers who
change both the nature of their concerns (their ambitions as to their coverage of
humanity) and the facts they report. The writers who make up classical criminology
use a new science of human nature. Although criminological positivism was later
to claim that the writers of the classical school, who presented law as the only
mechanism that could govern society, were unscientific, and too wrapped in the
metaphysics of philosophy to understand humanity scientifically, the classical school
writers used a growing science of man that was laid out in the work of Thomas
Hobbes, John Locke, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume in particular.
What is central is the belief that law must reflect the rationality of existence.
The search for the truth of the human condition replaces the search for the revealed
truths of religion. For example, the first step Beccaria takes is the critique of religion
81
as the legitimation of law. For Beccaria the problem with God is that he knew too
much; instead the human judge must only act in accordance to human guidelines.
If the human soul is unknowable to humans then a particular system laying out
‘a truthful account of the totality of the basic intentions of the soul, evil and
wickedness’ cannot be legitimate foundations for judgments in the criminal law.
The source of judgments for punishments carried out under the criminal law must
be the law itself, and this law is to be created, or posited, by humans in political
society acting in accordance with their human sciences offering ‘truths’ of the
human condition.
Let us jump ahead of our story. How does the post-modern perspective impact?
The current attack on truth, and the realisation of the pragmatic contingency of
science, means that the judgments of this new rule of positive law (law, that is,
which is laid down by humans for the guidance of other humans) encounters a
realm of mystery as the absolute ontological foundation. Although classical
criminology argued it found its truth in utility as the reasoning of nature, we now
see that ultimately the full workings of the mind, of the soul are not knowable to
man. Law can only work at a different level, a level of practical rationality. Law
can work on its own species of intentionality; legal intention. This is the intention
to commit an illegal act as it is laid down in the definition of the crime. It is not that
real subjects do not have motives, desires, real human needs, it is simply that these
are irrelevant to the legal investigation.
What does this foundation of mystery entail?
Suppose that, once we reject God, life becomes unknowable in its totality. Suppose
that the relationship between human bodies (the organic material from which we
modern humans are formed) and external nature (the world of earth and material
things, gravity, strains, events and social things) is constructed in a way which is
inherently opaque to human analysis. What if human knowledge can never
encompass reality? What if reality ultimately remains a mystery? How can a
legitimate social order be constructed? On what basis can ‘society’, conceived as
created by humans, be built?
The legal methodology is to ‘legislate’, to lay down... to command. In Legislators
and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals, Zygmunt Bauman
(1987) argues that while the enlightenment has entrenched itself upon our collective
memory as a powerful drive to bring knowledge to the people, to restore clear
sight to those blinded by superstition, to give wisdom to the ignorant, to pave the
way for progress, in reality the substance amounted to the drive to legislate, organise,
and regulate, rather than disseminate knowledge. The 17th century threw up a
crisis of government both on a issue of epistemological foundations (of the
legitimacy of government), and the practical problems of what to do with the
growing concentrations of masterless men in the expanding urban centres. The
philosophies preached solved this in the rationalisation of the state power, and the
82
socialisation of the subjects, in accordance with the idea of reasonableness and the
advancement of truth and knowledge.
Since this process of legislation took place over variable sets of truths and
knowledges the result was, however, that society must always be unstable, social
existence ambivalent, its categories never fixed and the full force of social effects
untraceable (Thus Bauman’s analysis of Modernity can lead to texts such as
Modernity and Ambivalence, 1991). Even if normative projects and knowledge
guide social construction and the fashioning of ourselves, society will always be
more than the effect of human projects – ‘ourselves’ and our relations – too mobile
for incorporation into a stable modern social structure that will be a full reflection
of our ambitions. If the ontology of existence is a mystery, each structure of
knowledge, each theory, each perspective, each project or design based thereon,
will capture only some formation, only some characteristic while consequently
releasing others, will encounter new resistances while thereon overcoming
previous ones – will engender new contingencies while subduing old ones.
How is modern society made if not as a reflection of underlying

natural laws of social evolution?
Partly social order is imagined. We dream or construct ideas which are then acted
upon and consequences follow. Real things are constructed out of imaginary ones.
However, while our ideas of how society is formed include the notion that society
is made by men – through interpretation of man’s hopes, fears and aspirations –
and thus not reducible to determinate natural laws – this notion co-exists with the
idea that we can come to know the basic underlying social structures, and social
laws of social evolution and define, thereby, the guiding principles of social
development in a series of law-like generalisations which we can then align ourselves
to (the naturalist paradigm). Reflexively, we realise that society is made by us, but
we cannot face up to the responsibility, and therefore dream that we are following
some master blue print laid down by nature (perhaps the writings of Karl Marx
provides the example par excellence).
This sets up an inescapable tension in writing: on the one hand, a critique of
existing forms of knowledge occurs which creates scepticism and a void of mystery
suitable for the writer to put forward new proposals, while, on the other hand, the
writer usually demands that the proposals he puts forward and couches in scientific
terms should gain acceptance. He claims to bring truth... while sometimes denying
that truth can be easily found.
In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Hans Blumenberg (1983) depicts
legitimacy problems as a consequence of the claim to carry out a radical break
with tradition, and the incongruity between this claim and the reality of history,
which must always rely upon the past. For Blumenberg the key principle of the
modern age is that of self-assertion, but this principle always operates within a
83
context. All schemes operate against earlier attempts, and set out an intellectual
field for other theories to operate in.
These tensions run through the writings of Beccaria, Bentham and Austin. Their
writings are concerned to lift the burden of rigid hierarchy and settled traditions
that defied and constrained the practical and passionate relations of people. The
new science of utilitarianism, for which Thomas Hobbes and David Hume provide
the foundations, is put forward with the claim that this can tie together the otherwise
disparate elements of social life. Their texts offer a twofold process of dissolution
and construction – the very weapons turned against the old intellectual structures
also provide the materials and methods for their substitution.
Consider our description of the basic problem of modernity as defined by
Nietzsche: the central dilemma is how to structure social existence after God’s
death. What was religion? Religion was a framework of thought which gave an
other-worldliness to the existential dilemma, it provided a body of proposition
answering the question of what reality was and a set of doctrines about how people
ought to live (existential questions concern not only the security of self-identity
but also how to relate to other human beings – ‘who am I?’ is a similar question to
‘who are they?’). That is, religion reconciled the personal within the framework of
the whole. People were called upon to live in a certain way as a direct result of a
structure of knowledge about the world being shaped in a particular way. In other
words the argument of how people ought to behave, or what we now might call
morality, was based on an ontology. It has become popular to argue that this
breaches a fundamental rule of modern logic, that is, that we cannot infer an ought
from an is. But this is somewhat misguided, since, when we actually look at the
religious structures of medieval Europe we find an intermingling of descriptive
and prescriptive ideas; we find that, in many ways, what was at stake were ideas or
concepts about the relationship of humans and the world; and how humans ought
to strive or build a coherent life. This striving was intimately tied up with
particular visions of reality and imperatives for action (MacIntyre, 1988).
A well-developed vision of the social and the personal must be a descriptive, as
well as a prescriptive, view of the people in society who will form the social life.
The central prescriptions of how people ought to be cannot be disentangled from
our understandings of social reality; our understandings of reality in turn give
energy to our desires to transform reality and change our contexts. To become a
fully articulated person in an existentially contented human society (surely the
central eschatological feature of the utopian project of modernity, and the redemptive
project of religious conceptions) we must achieve two goals. We may refer to one
as the harmony of social life, sometimes called community, and the other we may
call the satisfaction of our intellectual drives, sometimes called objectivity. By
community is here meant human association, where it would be is here meant
complete in and of itself, wanted for its own sake, as well as any conception of it
merely satisfying the personal wants of the individuals that make it up. Such a
utopian settlement would provide the foundation for a full understanding of the
value of association, and perhaps involve a heightened appreciation of the very
84
vulnerability of the human condition. Objectivity, in our context, represents the

understanding that the social order is, in a way, satisfactory; it satisfies our
intellectual digging into legitimacy and sources of foundations. It is satisfactory in
that it is not a fraud, or the result of the arbitrary imposition of interests or ideals.
It is not reducible to an image of violence, subjugation, superstition or oppression.
Let us ask again ‘what was the pre-modern naturalistic premise?’ Society was
perceived to have an eminent order of hierarchy and division and the maintenance
of this order was taken to satisfy the deepest practical and spiritual needs of the
collective and its individual members, the whole guaranteed by a particular
structure of power and rights or duties. Interpreted through philosophy and theory,
the desire of association underlying this resulting social order is put forward as a
true face of social community. What happens when this synthesis, this relationship
between community and objectivity, is rejected? When one denies the existence of
a natural structure of division and hierarchy? Surely it is no longer possible to
distinguish clearly between the two situations, and say, over here lies a social
order cleansed of force and fraud, over there the world of superstition, treachery
and violence. Both have the use of power, both have violence, both have suffering,
both can be criticised and justified... What is required? A new jurisprudence – a
new objectivity. What is the nature of this? Is it simply a different structure of
justification, a different structure of legitimation, a different structure of what
Foucault would call power? Objectivity is the goal, but all justifications are likely
to be controversial, precisely because there is no natural foundational background
picture to society on which to rely in formulating them. Thus, the escape from the
‘unnatural’ pre-modern naturalist paradise must itself require a new form of
narrative, a new form of structuring, and a new position whereby a narrative
depicting a new ‘natural form of order’ is put forward. Moreover, each new
justification once accepted will itself exhibit a pressure towards extensionality or
universality.
The modernist struggle against arbitrariness, against violence, against deception,
requires people to build a society that is less of a hostage to itself. A central
intellectual weapon is scepticism; a thoroughgoing sceptical methodology whereby
no central element of its arrangements must be left invisible, or immune to the
challenge of critical rationality. Scepticism and constructivism. How can the tension
be reconciled? How can a framework for social life be constructed if it is built in
the ruins of that which did not survive the sceptical challenge, remnants which we
know may not long survive further challenges? How can the void beneath human
existence be rendered as if it were of no consequence?
In the liberal tradition objectivity is achieved, not by holding fast to a given
substantive content and resolutely defending this in the face of all objections of
fraud or illusion, but, in a sense, by rendering the structure insubstantial, by
turning it increasingly into a structure of no contextual substance. This is a
realistic methodology insofar as it recognises that all hierarchies and visions have
self-destructed in modernity insofar as they demand a substantive content. In the
liberal vision of the structure of modern science, for example, that of Karl Popper,
85
we get a paradox: with modern science it is not that the foundations are ultimately
true, it is that the foundations are methodologically open to revision, ie the test of
falsification. Modern science does not rely upon a substantive content which is
absolutely true; it relies upon a methodology of testing, and a methodology of
building upon the experienced results of testing. The substantive content is
constantly revisable; it is the best we can do at this time. Similarly with the
constructed society. To the liberal the open society is preferable to any settled
ontology of justice. To say what the content of the just society would be, is to close
off the conversation, it would end liberal history.
Classical criminology talks the language of a ‘true’ science of man

and society, but actually creates a structure separate from nature; it
founds the social upon myth and politics
The writers of classicism reject tradition and religion in the name of science.
Beccaria (1963:96-97) claims to bring absolute truth. But ultimately their science
is not as powerful and truthful as they claimed, therefore their real foundations are
myths, stories, narratives which serve to give a foundation to replace the pre-modern
concepts of nature. But if a naturalist premise is rejected what happens to the idea
of community? Community becomes not a natural phenomena, but political in
character.
In his lectures delivered between 1828-30, John Austin (1832, 1873) the first
professor of law at London University, was specific. With modernity, social life
moves out of what he terms a ‘natural community’ to a ‘political community’ or a
‘political society’. At stake is a new form of objectivity for law and the justification
of government. Specifically we have a background image of social development
(the necessity for strong government to guide social development) and a social
science which will guide this government (ie utilitarianism). We deny any
unjustifiable or non-revisable relationship and structuring of power; we now premise
power on certain instrumental and other forms of legitimation. Certainly power is
still at stake, and this power will not exist in a vacuum devoid of social interests.
But in this context Austin is proposing a new ideal of objectivity – that of guidance
by truth rather than by social interests – to serve as the ideal for a positive
jurisprudence of political community. Of course, this attempt to make the power
and context of its exercise visible, and vulnerable, to knowledge claims cannot
escape the weakness of the political context. When one reads the detail of the work
of Caesar Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, we can see the way in
which the social theory of classical criminology over-turned a particular form of
naturalistic structuring. This sceptical and deconstructive work did not adopt an
empty naturalist position, on the contrary it strove to put forward a new form of
objectivity, and a new set of determinate social laws. The modernity of classical
criminology was to be knowledge-led and utilitarian. It was to turn its back upon
86
irrational emotionality and non-purposeful ritual. All factors of social life were to
become calculable, rule bound, and efficient.
The need for objectivity and professionalism
What was the reality of criminal justice procedure that classicism faced? In
Inventing Criminology: essays on the rise of ‘Homo Criminalis’, Piers Beirne
(1993) opens his chapter on Beccaria’s work with the events surrounding the
execution of Jean Calas. Jean’s son, Mark Anthony, the eldest son of a reasonably
prosperous cloth merchant, had been found dead on the 13 October 1761 at his
father’s shop. He had died of strangulation, the only suspects were those members
of the household present at the time of his death. It included his father, his English
mother, a younger brother, a servant woman and a guest who happened to be the
son of a prominent protestant lawyer. Each was arrested, imprisoned and charged
with the murder. At first the Calas family claimed that Mark Anthony had been
murdered, probably because they wished to escape the public humiliation that
would have befallen the kin of a successful suicide when the body was dragged
naked through the streets before being hanged by the neck. Soon, however, the
family admitted that he had committed suicide as he had often threatened to do.
The judges of the Toulouse Parliament disregarded this and convicted Jean Calas
of the murder of his son, the motivation was presumed to be the anguish of the
son’s conversion to Catholicism. The criminal procedure had involved gruesome
torture during which he had however, maintained his innocence, and he was
executed on 18 March 1762. The sentence of execution required that he be
dressed:
‘... in a chemise with head and feet bare, would be taken in a cart from the palace
prison to the Cathedral, there kneeling in front of the main door, holding in his hands
a torch of yellow wax weighing two pounds, he must make an amende honorable
asking pardon of God of the King and of justice. Then the executioner to take him in
the cart to the palace of St Georges where upon a scaffold his arms legs thighs and
loins are to be broken and crushed. Finally the prisoner should be placed upon a
wheel with a space turned to the sky alive and in pain and repent for his said crimes
and misdeeds, all the while imploring God for his life, thereby to serve as an example
and to instil terror in the wicked.’ (Beirne 1993:11-12)
Beirne concentrates upon the reaction of Voltaire who wrote on 29 March 1762 to
a friend distraught at the way the fanatical city of Toulouse had glorified Mark
Anthony as the martyr, and a catholic one at that:
‘For the love of God, render as horrible as you can the fanaticism which would have
it that the son had been hanged by his father, or which has caused an innocent man to
be placed on a wheel by 8 of the King’s counsellors.’ (Ibid: 12)
It was clear to Voltaire that Jean Calas had been the victim of religious
persecution. No witnesses had been called to the trial or orally examined, no
advocate was provided for the accused, the evidence of guilt was purely
87
circumstantial, the proceedings, although lawful, were a mockery and gruesome

and he was convicted by eight judges with five dissenting. Voltaire urged his friend
to complain loudly about the horrible events in Toulouse, and began a campaign
for the reversal of the conviction giving one of the most famous battle cries of the
French enlightenment, Ecrasez l’infame! In a short book published in 1763
Voltaire protests a strong belief in the executed man’s innocence. He argued that it
was impossible for Jean Callas, an old man of 68, suffering from illness, to have
strangled and hanged his young and very powerful 28 year old son. Moreover, the
whole procedure of the case was deemed unjust; Calas had been condemned by
eight votes with five abstaining, but the extreme gravity of the crime, infanticide
with its horrible punishment, should demand a unanimous verdict. Furthermore,
with such an extraordinary crime, the evidence should be obvious and clearly
perceptible to everyone, since a guilty verdict leads to death. If there is doubt it
ought to mean that the death sentence is not carried out. The first copies of
Beccaria’s work On Crimes and Punishment appeared in Italy two years after the
execution in 1764.
This work occupies a hallowed place in the history of criminology. Beirne is
undoubtedly correct in arguing that it has been grossly misunderstood and
misrepresented, whilst On Crimes and Punishment is usually read as a treatise for
a metaphysics of a free willed rationally acting individual, who can be punished
for a mistake in his rational calculations, for breaching his rational obligations,
Beirne identifies the scientific approach of Beccaria in On Crimes and
Punishment as heavily influenced by the early ‘sciences of man’ of the Scottish
enlightenment, in particular by Hutcheson and Hume. This emerging science of
man provides the background synthesis for the texts of classical criminology,
for Beccaria, and for those who applied him, such as Bentham and Austin. It is
this science which provides the touchstone of utilitarianism and certain
narratives of social evolution. Law is the tool of the sovereign; the image of law
Austin gave was of ‘the command of the sovereign backed by threats and
habitually obeyed’ (John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence, 1832). But we
unnecessarily reduce this concept if we mistake it for a mere empirical reflection
of the fact of hierarchical social power, instead the ethos of the writing is to
position power within a ‘legal-rational’ framework. Specifically, law was to be the
instrument of rational government.
What is rational government?
We are still searching and this is the name of the modern game. In the hands of the
classicists there were two themes. One concerned the need to stabilise society, the
other the need to create a template which would allow real progress to occur.
88
The need to stabilise potential chaos
In the classical criminology of Beccaria, Bentham and Austin we give up power to

a strong sovereign to rule over society. The father figure for this is the intellectual
work of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes understood the problem as one of building over
the void of a world in perpetual flux. Order must be created to ‘restrain what was
natural.’ The issue was how to frame a template so that the commands would
become accepted by the populace.
Certainly criminal justice was in dire need of rationalisation. In Britain the
period 1688 to l820 saw a rise in capital statutes from 50 to 200 and the enforcement
of the criminal law attracted an ambiguous response – an irrational law invited
resistance. Britain was the hanging country of Europe. Although it had one of the
lowest rates of violent crime in Europe, and with Russia and Sweden having reduced
their public executions to about a dozen a year by 1786, in 1788 London saw 15
executions on a single day! The average length of the criminal trial took eight and
a half minutes (Gatrell, 1994). Although sometimes a festive occasion, often the
execution was simply bungled (the condemned urinated and defecated, the hangman
was sometimes drunk, the victim’s neck usually didn’t break, and the offender
strangled slowly to death). The populace were sickening of the sight. Further, most
of the crimes were property offences. The penal operation of law need legitimising.
As society became more urbanised and industrialised, less ruled by custom and
locality, class warfare threatened to break out. As Douglas Hay (1975) put it in
Albion’s Fatal Tree:
‘... the ideology of the ruling oligarchy, which places a supreme value on property,
finds its visible and material embodiment above all in the ideology and practice of the
law. Tyburn Tree, as William Blake well understood, stood at the heart of this ideology;
and its ceremonies were at the heart of popular culture also.’
Change was slow. In 1869, Nicholas Ogarev, a Russian exile who had come to
England seeking a more enlightened and rational society, wrote a letter to his
mistress, Mary Sutherland, about the execution of a would-be suicide in London.
‘A man was hanged who had cut his throat, but who had been brought back to
life. The doctor had warned them that it was impossible to hang him as the throat
would burst open and he would breathe through his aperture. They did not listen
to his advice and hanged their man. The wound in the neck immediately opened
and the man came back to life again although he was hanged. It took time to
convene the aldermen to decide the question of what was to be done. At length the
aldermen assembled and bound up the neck below the wound until he died. Oh
my Mary, what a crazy society and what a stupid civilisation.’ (Quoted in Jacoby;
1985:134)
Scholars as far apart as Radzinowicz and Foucault have catalogued ‘the end of the
spectacle’, wherein the power which displayed itself via the ceremony of public
punishment was replaced by the prison (M Foucault,1979, Discipline and Punish,
and Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood,1986, A history.., Vol 4, ‘Grappling for
Control’, pp 343-353). It appears safer to accept a thesis of gradual development
89
rather than a sudden transformation. Pieter Spierenburg, in The Spectacle of

Suffering: Executions and the evolution of repression: from a pre-industrial
metropolis to the European experience, sets out to demonstrate that:
‘Foucault’s picture of one system quickly replacing another is actually far from
historical reality. The infliction of pain and the public character of punishments did
not disappear overnight. Both elements slowly retreated in a long, drawn-out process
over several centuries.’ (1984: viii.)
This change undermined ‘theatrical’ penality which had ‘echoed a long tradition
of public punishment’, and which Bentham described as ‘an imposing
commentary – a sensible and speaking image of the law’, wherein the power of the
sovereign was expressly tied to the truth of law and the truth behind law (the right
to rule).
The normal criticisms of classicism which commentators concentrate upon are
that it set out an unworkable code, and that it ignored social inequalities and diverse
environmental backgrounds in operating an ‘ideal’ philosophic justice at odds with
social reality. Vold implicitly uses Weber’s formal/substantive topology in echoing
the positivist response:
‘... puzzling questions about the reasons for or causes of behaviour, the uncertainties
of motives and intentions... were ignored for the sake of administrative uniformity.
This was the classical conception of justice – an exact scale of punishments for equal
acts without reference to the individual involved or the special circumstances in which
the crime was committed.’ (1978:26)
Radzinowicz, aligns himself with a sophisticated version of the narrative of
humanitarian progress:
‘... the rigidity of the classical school on the Continent of Europe made it almost
impossible to develop constructive and imaginative penal measures... because they
would have conflicted with the principle that punishment must be clearly defined in
advance and strictly proportionate to the offence.’ (1966:123)
By contrast the authors of The New Criminology point out the contradictory tensions
within Beccaria’s work in both proposing the notion of equality and also defending
the possession of property. The democratic stress of early utilitarianism is seen as
nothing more than the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie, and social contract theory
as ideologically part of their protection against feudal interference; ideology which
bore little relation to middle class practice:
‘... a system of classical justice of this order could only operate in a society where
property was distributed equally... Such distribution was never contemplated.’ (Taylor,
Walton and Young, 1973:6)
But the critics have been outflanked by history. They wrote in a time when positivism
was thought to have replaced classicism. Classicism has not only survived, it has
strengthened in recent years. We need a deeper understanding, to acknowledge
that modernity has many layers, many differing forces.
In their texts the writers declared their modernism: Beccaria determines his text
90
as the rhetorical break between theology, politics, and the application of

punishment – a move from practical action as political service to administrative
action as obedience to rational performance. My subsidiary thesis here is simple:
Matza overstates the case when he argues that ‘positive criminology achieved the
almost impossible, the study of crime separate from the contemplation of the
state’, and sees the positive criminologist as the technician of the state (in
Delinquency and Drift, 1963, and Becoming Deviant, 1969) for the break was
already present in Beccaria. Henceforth, the subject of criminal justice will be the
objects of ‘the legal system’, and discussion conducted within the boundary of
‘legal doctrine’ and developments of that discourse. Additionally, the opinion that
classical criminology is concerned with the mediation of power between the state
and the individual criminal, while positive criminology neglects the question of
power, overlooks the degree to which Beccaria consciously designs an instrument
of crime control. Thus the distinction future analysers draw, for example in
juvenile justice between welfare and justice or the use made of Packer’s (1968)
two models of criminal justice, the crime control and the due process, are
overstated and misconceptions. A detailed reading of Beccaria, only done in
outline here, leaves no doubt that due process is part of crime control. The
elements of ‘due process’ help to secure the legitimacy and authority of the
criminal justice system. Due process considerations are not created merely for
crime control, since they are themselves reflections of moral and political values
in the wider social order, but their appearance in criminal justice is not
contradictory to the control function. They enable the discourse of justice to be
confined within the procedural confines.
The results of the constructionist project: the creation of hybrids

such as ‘rights’
The view of law as a crucial instrument of the rational creation of modernity is

central to the authors we identify as representing classical criminology. Bentham
is clear as to the fruits of government:
‘We know what it is for men to live without government, for we see instances of such
a way of life – we see it in many savage nations, or rather races of mankind; for
instance, among the savages of New South Wales, whose way of living is so well
known to us; no habit of obedience, and thence no government – no government, and
thence no laws – no laws, and thence no such things as rights – no security – no
property; – liberty, as against regular control, the control of laws and government –
perfect; but as against all irregular control, the mandates of stronger individuals, none.
In this state, at a time earlier than the commencement of history – in this same state,
judging from analogy, we, the inhabitants of the part of the globe we call Europe,
were; – no government, consequently no rights: no rights, consequently no property –
no legal security – no legal liberty: security not more than belongs to beasts – forecast
and sense of insecurity keener – consequently in point of happiness below the level of
the brutal race.’ (Fragment on Government)
91
But while the writers of classical criminology declared that they were merely
being truthful to a new science of human nature and the underlying structure of the
world, we can now see that rights, obligations, duties, property, liberty, and the
predictability of social interactions are not natural things. They depend upon
certain understandings, certain narratives, certain discursive structures (such as
Bills of Rights or accepted interpretations of the constitution), and they cannot
exist outside of society (as Hobbes knew so well, they are internal to ‘civil
society’). But they are not entirely social, or a mere issue of discourse. They are
real, but they refuse to be simply objective entities residing in nature, instead they
cry out their social existence; they are formed and impacted via discourse but exist
outside of it; they are created by the collective, but used against the collective.
Such entities are constructed, but they cannot be reduced to a pure social
dimension because this dimension is actually populated by objects brought about
in its construction.
People get terribly confused by the ability of positive law to create social objects.
Sometimes bizarre statements are made such as talk of ‘natural rights’. Of course
there is no such thing as a natural right. As Bentham observed, concerned as he
was to talk correctly, to claim such an ontology is sheer ‘nonsense on stilts’. But
that does not mean that to claim such rights is mere rhetoric. It is rhetoric, it is to
enter into a discursive battle, but results follow. A social arrangement may be
constructed – reliances created, patterns of behaviour follow and expectations are
aroused. The creations of law are real, but not natural in the traditional sense. No
wonder people get confused. After all, is it our fault that the networks spanning
and interweaving the nature – society/culture complex are simultaneously real
(and thus we have a tendency to think of this ontology as if it were like nature),
narrated (and thus we have a tendency to perceive them as entities of discourse, of
culture), and collective (such as truly social entities ought to be)? Modernity is full
of hybrids. Entities which span the natural and the social world. Entities which
exist, to some degree, independently of both the non-human existence and security
of nature, and also the political epistemology of society. And intellectuals,
philosophers, sociologists, lawyers (at least in their jurisprudential forms) work on
translating the meaning of these hybrids, and purifying the variety of claims made
about them. But we live with these hybrids, they make us modern.
92
CHAPTER FIVE
READING THE TEXTS OF CLASSICAL CRIMINOLOGY:

BEYOND MERE COMMAND INTO SYSTEMATIC
LEGITIMATION?
‘The autonomy an individual can enjoy does not... consist in rebelling against
nature – such a revolt being futile and fruitless, whether attempted against the
forces of the material world or those of the social world. To be autonomous
means, for the human being, to understand the necessities he has to bow to and
accept them with full knowledge of the facts. Nothing that we do can make the
laws of things other than what they are, but we free ourselves of them in thinking
them; that is, in making them ours by thought. This is what gives democracy a
moral superiority. Because it is a system based on reflection, it allows the
citizen to accept the laws of the country with more intelligence and thus less
passively. Because there is a constant flow of communication between
themselves and the state, the state is for individuals no longer like an exterior
force that imparts a wholly mechanic impetus to them... The role of the state,
in fact, is not to express and sum up the unreflective thought of the mass of the
people but to superimpose on this unreflective thought a more considered
thought, which therefore cannot be other then different.’ (Emile Durkheim,
[1898] 1900:91-2)
In the above passage Durkheim emphasises the democratic force of the legal order
relies on the implicit acceptance by the populace that the legal order reflects the
natural order of things. Social cohesion cannot be founded on the impersonal
rationality of law alone: it needs a ‘mystical’ support of legitimation; it needs a
social psychology in which the state is imbued with a force over and above any
mere show of violence. This is a dilemma for a pure theory of modern law: legal
positivism, the belief that law is simply the law, and that the concept of law has no
necessary connection with morality, is logical but inhuman; it cannot offer an
imagination of law that would bind us together in any way. Hence the legal order
needs to imbue itself with a cultural force. But does this cultural force need to be
consistent? Need it amount to some overall coherent world view; some regime of
virtue as Alisdair MacIntyre (1981) believes we need – while he argues our current
situation is incoherent? Do we require a range of philosophers to interpret our
legal system so that it is seen to be a coherent and morally principled universe of
reason?
Why should a workable legal order require principled consistency?
Note the liberal idea of legal regulation: legal regulation can lay down certain
rules of the social game leaving you free to get on with the self-interested tasks of
being the producer and consumer of goods, contracting for gain etc. The legal
order works to provide a measure of predictability and consistency: it provides the
form of contract, property relations and so forth. But it is only the framework:
within it forms civil society with all its contradictions, its compromises and its
human selves (divided between roles – father, insurance salesman, captain of the
93
village cricket team, creditor, debtor, keen collector of...). The liberal civil society
can operate with a different range of pressures and rewards than would be allowed
if a unified structure existed wherein the legal order was one aspect of fully
penetrating and coherent social morality; moreover, civil society allows the legal
order to form into a legal system.
What is the nature of the criminal justice system?
Law books frequently use the word ‘system’ and are nearly always imprecise with
it. There is a very vague reference in legal studies to a variety of subject headings
such as ‘The English Legal System’ or the ‘Criminal Justice System’ or ‘The Penal
System’. But the vocabulary is sadly lacking in precision. It is rare to find any
analysis of the notions of system or legal or criminal, instead, in referring to the
Criminal Justice System they appear to merely accept some form of common sense
understanding of what counts as the elements constituting such a ‘system’. Recently,
legal theory has begun to take on board systems theory in the notion of law as an
autopoietic system (a self-regulating system, see the work of Gunther Teubner,
1987, 1989, 1993). Such systems analysis appears apt for the post-modern condition:
it defuses the debate between conflict/Marxist/radical approaches to law, and the
consensus model. Instead law is studied as one of the general sub-systems of the
social system, with particular system requirements and effects; we can then
investigate whether it is fully autonomous or relatively autonomous of the overall
social system, without the seeming messiness of political ideology (thus we may
see this development in conservative or enlightening terms, depending on one’s
political ideology!). What happens when we look at criminal justice as a system?
We identify certain things:
• That the criminal justice system is not a system, but a sub-system of the legal
system and the overall social system.
The conditions required for the existence of social sub-systems are:
(i) a distinct, specific and specialised social activity; objectives corresponding
to this activity, specific and classifiable that can be labelled; situations
determined by the relation between activity (social agents or subjects;
groups and individuals) and objectives, so as to constitute an indissoluble
whole;
(ii) organisations and institutions justifying one another at state level, or at the
level of another state-sponsored institution; the institutions make use of
the organisations to shape social activity, and the development of a
competent bureaucracy which is hierarchically structured;
(iii) texts (forming a corpus) that ensure the communication of activity, the
participation of its organising actions, the sway and authority of the
corresponding institutions; these texts may be organised into codes, or
they may consist in the reports of binding decisions to structure hierarchy
94
Reading the texts of classical criminology
(ie in which legal techniques of interpretation serve to identify and uncover

such entities as ratio decidendi, obiter dictum, the rules of statutory
interpretation), documents, treatises, manuals, guides, or the illustrations
and literature of publicity, from which the explicit corpus and code may
be analytically deduced; such analyses, when successful, reveal and define
the appropriate terms by which the system communicates and refers back
to itself it’s success.
• That the system can take on board a range of activities depending upon the
success of its textual identification; ie the systematic acceptance of the entity
being correctly described as a crime, the acceptance of policy directives (for
example, policing priorities).
• For successful system functioning, the social activity, the institutional
configuration, and the internal communication, need to be in a series of feedback
loops. The autopoietic nature of system development lies in the relations between
self-observation, self-constitution, and self-reproduction. Once legal
communication on the fundamental distinctions (the illegal -legal, crime – non-
crime, process of guilt finding – sentencing) has been differentiated from general
social communication, they can become self-referential and be discussed in
terms of legal categories. Norms for its own operation, structures, processes,
boundaries, attitudes and activities are established. When these norms are broken
(as, for example, under prohibition when the laws against alcohol were not
correctly enforced and a vast underworld was thereby encouraged into existence)
the system may understand that either corrective measures (the rooting out of
‘corruption’) or withdrawal (the ceasing of the prohibitive policy on alcohol),
are required.
Legal practice is a formalised, specialised activity, the object of manuals and codes
of practice – it is also a body of social rituals, a site of tensions.
Sub-systems are the result of a sort of nucleus of significance favouring a certain
sphere of social space, so that it acquires powers of attraction and repulsion. The
legal sub-system gains autopoieticity in denying its political nature. Strictly
speaking, it is not political: the trick is that while its creation is political, its
operationality depends upon the continual self-understanding that what it is doing
is specifically legal. However, of course, the flow of legal communication (courts,
writing, commentaries, preparation of manuals, decisions on the creation of new
laws) depends upon a range of tactics (hermeneutics, rhetoric, symbolism,
signification, irony, metaphor, syllogisms) which are in a sense, necessarily political
in that they cannot be reduced to a strictly closed formalism.
It matters to the operation of the Criminal Justice System that it can achieve a
high degree of autopoieticity; this demarcates it from the political sphere – its
decision-making processes are not deemed as political. In the political sphere is
found those matters that can properly be debated and about which we can form
and test our opinions; matters that require judgment; and about which it is correct
95
to say that we seek to persuade each other through public argument. We avoid the
political by various suppositions. One important effect is that:
‘... we do not, for example, debate about matters where there are clear decision
procedures for determining whether they are true or false, for example, mathematical
truths or even empirical claims which can be settled by the appeal to facts.’ (Richard
J Bernstein, 1986:252)
The criminal justice system can operate safely in a society full of conflict and
social contradictions and retain the attributes of formal rationality through
defining the types of argument that can take place in the legal court room. It
achieves a ‘cognitive transparency’, or clear identification of the discursive
objects which can be allowed into discussion. One key success of the classical
reforms was the creation of a ‘tariff system’, where a table of sentences matched to
offences by length and severity were in turn linked to the gravity of the offence.
Logically, this also required a defining and ranking of offences in strict order, and
this, preferably, required the creation of a comprehensive criminal code. A
discourse which serves the purpose of system effectivity, and system legality, can
then be established: the correct judgment is that made by a properly authorised
official operating within an institutional framework, applying the organisational
power in accordance with the correct norms (Hans Kelsen 1967, was perhaps the
greatest jurisprudential writer to bring out this essential feature of autopoietic
development) and orientating him/herself by the communicative process of
correct language and textual reference.
This is the nature of our present situation: our criminal justice systems operate
a rationality bequeathed by the success of the classical writers to found the legal
dogmatics of a self-referential structure. We can see this better in investigating
more fully the texts of Beccaria and John Austin.
Reading classicism I: The construction of Beccaria’s text
Beccaria’s text is built upon the work of others; its methodology is to grasp the
narratives already accepted as images of the human condition, and to inter-play
them to create the new social space of a ‘rational penology’. Beccaria joined in the
train of the new, more modest, sciences of man.
First he provides a narrative history to position the present. Beccaria utilises the
‘fiction’ of a social contract which he claims as an historical act (whereby
independent and isolated men, weary of living in a continual state of war,
sacrificed a part of their liberty so they might enjoy the rest of it in peace and
safety). This is in turn linked to an ontological doctrine (namely, that man’s
rampant individualist nature ensured that every man was willing to put in the
public fund only the least possible proportion, ‘no more than suffices to induce the
others to defend it. The aggregate of these least possible portions constitutes the
right to punish; all that exceeds this is abuse and not justice; it is fact but by no
96
means right’). The necessity of punishment is presented as empirically based on

the nature of man’s position, and governed by man’s reason for its legitimation.
Punishment was in the class of ‘tangible motives’ required ‘to prevent the despotic
spirit, which is in every man, from plunging the laws of society into its original
chaos’ (1963:11-13). In a universe which was not moral neither could the
multitude be naturally moral; men could not be left to socially co-exist. The
paradox of crime was that it was both rational and irrational. It was rational for an
individual to choose to commit a crime – he may well have his reasons, which
Beccaria acknowledged were possibly political – and yet crime was a social
irrationality. The irrationality of crime stems from its contravening the rationality
of the social contract. Man’s selfish rationality has identified subjection to the
power which the social contract grants as the most beneficial mode of social
existence, and the rational choice of an individual to choose criminal behaviour, ie
behaviour outside the terms of the contract, is to choose the irrationality of
behaviour beyond the social contract. It is an irrationality to be constrained by a
fully rational crime control mechanism.
The criminal justice system could pacify the arbitrary and disruptive influences
of social life, and provide the social engineering required for progress. It is a
systematisation of penology rather than some simple humanisation we are offered.
As Thorsten Sellin (1977) labelled it, Beccaria’s replacement of capital punishment
with penal servitude was a punishment worse than death: a living death. Penal
servitude, and the associated repeated public sighting of the prisoner, is a rational
advance, since with regard to the deterrent effect of punishment Beccaria argued
that it is not the intensity of punishment that has the greatest effect on the human
spirit, but its duration; for our sensibility is more easily, and more permanently,
affected by slight but repeated impressions than by a powerful, but momentary,
action. The death penalty can only create an impression which, for all its immediate
force, men soon forget, but:
‘... in a free and peaceful government the impressions should be frequent rather than
strong... The death penalty becomes for the majority a spectacle and for others an
object of compassion mixed with disdain: these two sentiments rather than the
salutary fear which the laws pretend to inspire occupy the spirits of the spectators.’
(1963:47)
Furthermore, this right to control is fundamental to orderly political structure and
its continuance is a crucial social task. It is, of course, also a political task – but we
are not led to see it as such. Instead the operation of the penal machine is depicted
as a technology of the social – something to be discussed as a matter of efficiency;
and on its own terms, not those of politics.
The neo-classical revival of just-desserts, and rational choice theory, have
relied upon the technique of deterrence laid down in classicism. Beccaria espouses
his version of the penal spectacle as able to deter any potential justification the
populace may have in breaking a law they consider creates or reinforces an
unjustifiable situation. The penal equation reinforces the economic and social
97
structure under which the majority live, and which the offender views as ‘fatal to
the majority’. Beccaria uses a materialist early science of human nature in
discussing the idea of ‘motive’, and thereby considers the rationality of thieves or
assassins as calculable: the offender(s) are those individuals ‘who find no motive
weighty enough to keep them from violating the laws, except the gallows or the
wheel’. Although they cannot give a clear account of their motives this ‘does not
make them any the less operative’. It is not that Beccaria refuses to understand the
predicament of the offender, but the social discourse of politics and desire are not
legally recognised terms of communication. Beccaria recognises that the
offender may have an understandable set of motives for his crime, but this is of
no legal consequence. Beccaria presents the thought process of an offender as
asking:
‘What are these laws that I am supposed to respect, that place such a great distance
between me and the rich man? He refuses me the penny I ask of him and, as an
excuse, tells me to sweat at work he knows nothing about. Who made these laws?
Rich and powerful men who have never deigned to visit the squalid huts of the poor,
who have never had to share a crust of mouldy bread amid the innocent cries of
hungry children and the tears of a wife. Let us break these bonds, fatal to the majority
and only useful to a few indolent tyrants; let us attack the injustice at its source. I will
return to my natural state of independence; I shall at least for a little time live free and
happy with the fruits of my courage and industry. The day will perhaps come for my
sorrow and repentance, but it will be brief, and for a single day of suffering I shall
have many years of liberty and of pleasures. As King over a few, I will correct the
mistakes of fortune and will see these tyrants grow pale and tremble in the presence
of one whom with an insulting flourish of pride they used to dismiss to a lower level
than their horses and dogs.’
Moreover, there are narratives of the common life which help the offender deny
the certain pain he or she will suffer.
Then religion presents itself to the mind of the abusive wretch and, promising him an
easy repentance and an almost certain eternity of happiness, does much to diminish
for him the horrors of the ultimate tragedy.
Therefore it is vital to create narratives and images which will present themselves
to the mind of the potential offender so that the urge to crime will be controlled.
But he who foresees a great number of years, or even a whole lifetime to be spent in
servitude and pain, in sight of his fellow citizens with whom he lives in freedom and
friendship, slave of the laws which once afforded him protection, makes a useful
comparison of all this with the uncertainty of the result of his crimes, and the brevity
of the time in which he would enjoy their fruits. The perpetual example of those
whom he actually sees the victims of their own carelessness makes a much stronger
impression upon him than the spectacle of a punishment that hardens more than it
corrects him. (1963:49-50).
For Beccaria it is important to separate the administration of law from the political
question of the content or style of law. The narrative participation of individuals in
an ongoing social contract united men under the authority of the sovereign. In the
substantive institutions which took the name of justice, neither the people nor the
98
judges were empowered to interfere by continually making, or altering law; or

have discretionary power to choose penal measures. Judges were not to be allowed
discretion: only the sovereign was so entitled as he was ‘the legitimate depository
of the actual wills of all’.
It is vital to set out a clear cut and easily understood discourse on the criminal
code and the respective roles and duties of each legal officer. Beccaria argues that:
‘there is nothing more dangerous than the popular axiom that it is necessary to
consult the spirit of the laws... Our understandings and all our ideas have a reciprocal
connection; the more complicated they are, the more numerous must be the ways that
lead to them, and depart from them. Each man has his own point of view, and, at each
different time, a different one. Thus the ‘spirit’ of the law would be the product of a
judge’s good or bad logic, of his good or bad digestion; it would depend on the
violence of his passions, on the weakness of the accused, on the judge’s connections
with him, and on all those minute factors that alter the appearances of an object in the
fluctuating mind of man.’ (1963:14-16)
Subjectivism is acknowledged and constrained. The identification of the harm of
crime also needs to be developed into a systematic form:
‘... the measure of punishments is not the sensibility of the criminal, but the public
injury... equality of punishments can only be extrinsic, since in reality the effect on
each individual is diverse... And who does not know that external formalities take the
place of reason for the credulous and admiring populace?’ (Ibid: 70)
Henceforth the self-understanding of the system is to occur only through a language
beknown to the system: ‘legal dogmatics’.
We are told of the chaos that not accepting the Criminal Justice System would
result in. Beccaria follows the lead of Hobbes and places individual men in the
state of nature in a chaotic state - man needs a common reference point to orientate
himself and his relations with his fellows but can find none in his understanding of
nature. His need for survival, his need to escape death as long as possible, demands
a rational organisation and the construction of a minimum society (For Hobbes,
whose discussion Beccaria follows, see Leviathan, Penguin Edition, Part 1,
particularly Chapter 13). For Hobbes, certain qualities lead man to form society,
namely:
‘The passions that incline men to Peace, are Feare [sic] of Death; Desire of such
things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain
them.’ (p.188)
Man has a desperate need to escape from the chaos of the natural condition, and
the result is the political Leviathan. The naked irrational flow of power is
incorporated and rationalised in the creation of a nexus of political power,
sovereign power - the overcoming of natural terror by submission to legitimate
power:
‘Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where there is no Law there is no
Injustice.’ (Ibid: 188)
These background conditions (or assumptions) concerning key ‘facts’ of social
99
existence demonstrate the need for, and legitimate, a mechanism of control. The
operation of this mechanism can become an organisational concern taking a set of
operative conditions and debates as its own. The social is safe within the confines
of that regime of law, safe within a containment, a subjection to that political
creation. Key principles which structure the criminal justice organisation, notably
the need for a direct linkage of penality to offence, flow from empirical
observation on the nature of the human condition. Specifically, no man will give
other than what is the minimum to sustain co-existence. Hobbes sums up his
deductions of the laws of nature in the maxim ‘do not do that to another, which
thou wouldest not have done to thyself’ (Ibid: 21).
Once accepted the system can display a formal rationality, and set out its
principles of decision-making, which ensure that when these are followed we
believe the decision was just. The system does not have to offer any social justice,
only the stylised form of reciprocity which gives rise to stable expectations. Man
does not need any idea of the ‘good’ society to constitute civil society out of the
state of nature. Beccaria holds that man does not need to come out of himself and
participate substantively in a common realm. He may rest in essentially solitary
existence - but, if imposed upon he can impose back. Paradoxically, although the
sovereign is to embody the ‘common will’ the principle does not draw the
substantive thoughts of the individual into the common will - on the contrary it
specifies that man will regard himself as the stranger to/of all others and they to/of
him. And in such strangeness all are equal. Each is thus the abstract equal of all
others; and in that abstraction equality reigns over any ‘fact’ of their difference.
The legitimacy of the rule of law is posited as the necessary creation of, or
rational reflection on; the empirical operation of the world. Empirically, Hobbes
states, all men are equal in the face of death, and the power of any is not sufficient
to disallow the potentiality of death at the hands of any other. Additionally, the
empirical result of individualism is that men must judge themselves as equal, not
because of a natural ordering of telos made visible to all, but because in the
absence of such, none will accept being unequal to others. Thus, because of the
absence of a common point of reference, an equality (abstract) in law must be
accepted; moreover, it is recognised that it must be contrary to the facts but the
facts also determine that we must act as if it was not! Leo Strauss (1953) analyses
at length this transition. For Strauss the dilemma was clear:
‘Reason is impotent because reason or humanity have no cosmic support: the universe
is unintelligible, and nature ‘dissociates’ men. But the very fact that the universe is
unintelligible permits reason to rest satisfied with its free constructs, to establish
through its constructs an Archimedean basis of operations, and to anticipate an
unlimited progress in its conquest of nature.’ (1953:201)
Consider the context for this control. We have stressed the breakdown of the
surveillance of the pre-modern. Bauman (1987) asks where Hobbes got the ideas
and imagery for his dreaded state of nature thesis? He suggests Hobbes found
them in the social reality he saw around him. Beccaria is specific:
100
‘What man of any sensibility can keep from shuddering when he sees thousands of
poor wretches driven by a misery either intended or tolerated by laws (which have
always favoured the few and outraged the many) to a desperate return to the original
state of nature – when he sees them accused of impossible crimes, fabricated by timid
ignorance, or found guilty of nothing other than being true to their own principles,
and sees them lacerated with meditated formality and slow torture by men gifted with
the same senses, and consequently the same passions?’ (1963:43)
The state of nature was caused by man’s irrational and unjustified social structures,
it was up to man to develop a new and rational social ordering. Modernity can be
built on systematic structures.
Beccaria’s thesis, finally, is a rhetorical testament to progress. It is a vindication
of the progressive potentiality of modernity, and a celebration of the decision to
peruse truth. The first epoch was the formation of the great societies of men
organised around the ‘false divinities’ of ‘primitive errors’. Now is the second
epoch:
‘... where truth, after progressing slowly at first and then rapidly, sits at last as a
companion to monarchs on their thrones and enjoys a cult and altar in the parliaments
of republics.’ (1963:96-7)
Under the influence of Beccaria’s pen we shall move beyond those present laws
which contain ‘the dregs of utterly barbarous centuries’, we ‘directors of the public
welfare’, and we shall create a sight that will lie before our eyes illuminated in the
peaceful splendour of progress. This transfer of a whole structural scheme of
aesthetic, theoretical, technical, and moral progress within a collective idea of unified
history, presupposes that man sets himself as the only one in charge of this totality,
that he supposes himself to be the one that ‘makes history’; but he makes history
progressively under the guidance of ‘proper knowledges’. It is only then that he
finds it possible to deduce the movement of history from a proper self-understanding
of the rational subject. The future can become the consequence of our actions in
this present, and these are moved by our present understanding of reality. Thus the
‘plea’ of Beccaria, ‘not to demonstrate what the law is, but rather to incite men to
make it what the author thinks it ought to be’ (1963: xviii), is to use the law to
constitute a new society.
With both Hobbes, Beccaria, Bentham and Austin, we avoid the question of the
actual substantive content to equality in the social - that question, the social critique
of the liberal equality of modernity, can but come later – reaching a particularly
critical conception with Marx and his own modern measure of commonalty, namely,
‘the complete social theory’. But in Hobbes and Beccaria, it is the absence of any
reference, except the philosophic ‘experience’ of the state of nature, which drives
us to see posited law as ‘the order of things’ and to achieve a new regime of
‘objectivity’. Equality (of Being, of Rights), is thus posited as an unreflexive axiom
of judgment.
The criminal justice system can take on the characteristics of an autopoietic
system - the law must be internally ordered by reason, since it is such reason and
logical form which ensure laws operation, its objectivity. Law is rational and formal,
101
to be applied in the social, its policy aspects discussed and changed in the political.
The role of the judge is to reflect what the law is. The inheritors of the criminal law
can look back upon Beccaria – and the ‘rights’ approach, which through its Kantian
forms later develops into the ‘due process’ defence of the institutions of criminal
justice – and thus blind themselves to what Beccaria achieved; an instrument
designed for control, which legitimatises itself to mediate between the open power
of the sovereign and the latent power of the subject; above all, a criminal justice
system.
The success of classicism enables ‘crime’ to spread

Let us be clear about the complexity of the ‘functions’ achieved by this part of the
philosophical birth of modernity. The emphasis upon control, explicit in classical
criminology, should not blind us to the constructivist aspects. The rule of law allows
diversity and progress; it creates ‘crime’ as a central foundational conception for
that modernity. Crime, as a concept and the implicit range of responses of dealing
with crime, for example, ‘philosophies of punishment’, are then notions to be utilised
in the constructionist project of modernity. One hidden curriculum of classicism is
not so much to devise a mechanism to control and, in time, eradicate crime, but to
assert that ‘crime’ and its associated conceptual apparatus are central to modernity.
The implications of this are clear:
Firstly, crime overwhelms ‘non-crime’. As modernity spreads, aspects of social
interaction which involve ‘harm’ become questioned in the form – ‘can this be
fitted into the rational scheme of criminal jurisprudence?’
Secondly, crime becomes the technique of ‘formal social control’, displacing
alternative mechanisms – the result is a concentration of functional power in the
hands of professional criminal justice personnel. A power which is legitimated
according to conceptions of specific role performance. Modern criminal justice
organisations are, thus, not only a technique of ensuring formal social control but
also products of the type of social control being aimed at in modernity.
By contrast Donald Black outlines how much ‘crime’ is actually not an affront
to societies’ morality but:
‘... quite the opposite. Far from being an intentional violation of a prohibition, much
crime is moralistic and involves the pursuit of justice. It is a mode of conflict
management, possibly a form of punishment, even capital punishment. Viewed in
relation to law, it is self-help. To the degree that it defines or responds to the conduct
of someone else – the victim – as deviant, crime is social control.’ (1984:1)
The impact of state control over ‘crime’ thus robs ‘traditional self help’ of its
meaning and makes problematic ‘modern self help’; the ability of individuals or
groups to respond in certain social participatory ways is taken away by the state.
Modern legality is ‘governmental social control’. Black leads to the conclusion
that the reality of much crime, for instance, inner city ‘drug wars’, and self help
actions, is that:
102
‘... in modern society the state has only theoretically achieved a monopoly over the
legitimate use of violence. In reality, violence flourishes (particularly in modern
America), and most of it involves ordinary citizens who seemingly view their conduct
as a perfectly legitimate exercise of social control.’ (Ibid: 13)
Thirdly, the ‘freedom’ of crime, ie the metaphysics of rational choice, and the
imposition of key elements of social judgment on the constitution of the social self
of individuals after the act (and thus the encouragement to think in a criminal
fashion) spreads. When modernity declares its ‘right’ to autonomy, to the ‘liberal’
freedom of individualism, it also declares the right to crime’, that its citizens have
a ‘right’ to be criminal and thus a ‘right’ to be punished.
Fourthly, to ensure the freedom of crime as a concept, punishments are required
to become ‘modern’ – too harsh a punishment interferes with the acceptability of
‘crime’ as the natural form of modernity. That is to say, that as well as any
‘functional’ fit between the demands of social structure and the type of penality
experienced in punishment (see Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1968 etc) the practical
experiencing of the system must not be incongruous with the cultural and narrative
sensibilities of that social structure.
Reading classicism II: John Austin and the role of knowledge
Our question here is simple: What guides the Law? Classical Criminology saw the
science of utility as providing the engine of rational social change. John Austin is
popular in jurisprudence courses where he is inevitably read in a simple form. A
neglected aspect of Austin is his complete faith in the role of secure knowledge of
social reality and the underlying ‘natural’ laws of the world. This is not so much
natural law in the religious sense, although he has carefully turned God’s will into
the principle of utility, but confidence in the ability of the new scientific approach
to uncover the real features of the operating and determining structures of the
world.
Austin is clearly of the view that modern societies are constructions of human
endeavour, they are the instruments of politics. The relationships which exist
between individuals in modernity are essentially both political and individualistic;
thus politics is to be a matter of technique. Austin certainly sides with technology
and control against emancipation. The goal of society is the happiness of the
individuals who make it up:
‘When I speak of the public good, or of the general good, I mean the aggregate
enjoyments of the single or individual persons who compose the public or general...
the good of mankind, is the aggregate of the pleasures which are respectively enjoyed
by the individuals who constitute the human race...’ (1862:161).
This is to be guided by knowledge of the truths of the human condition: ‘the neglect
of plain and palpable truths is the source of most of the errors with which the
world is infested’ (Ibid: 161).
103
Having established positive law as the proper province of jurisprudence Austin

in Lectures III and IV sets out a defence of the principle of utility (the proximate
test of law and the technique for policy making in social administration) and on
understanding of the goal of political organisation, the common good.
His first claim is that men are fallible, human beings simply cannot alone
master the truth of the human condition; submission to authority, testimony, and
trust are inescapable. Even in an ideal system of law and morality, exactly attuned
to the principle of utility, although the rules may be known, the rationale behind
them could not be known in its entirety. Moreover, while we accept that in science
the role of experts is to investigate, analyse and disseminate their findings, and we,
the public should ‘commonly trust the conclusions which we take upon authority’,
and this trust, this deference to authority is ‘perfectly rational’, no such structure
exists within ethics. The sciences related to ethics (legislation, politics, and
political economy) are in a state of confusion, in large part because those who
have investigated ethics have not adopted the scientific attitude of impartiality, and
‘therefore have differed in their results’. This dooms the multitude, who have not
the time nor the resources to adopt a fully critical and inquiring attitude to the
evidence, to the mercy of opinion. Concomitantly, much of the legal and moral
structures currently in place ‘rest upon brute custom and not manly reason’, and
there are many obstacles to the diffusion and advancement of ethical truth. At the
time of his jurisprudential writings Austin was, however, optimistic that a proper
science of ethics could establish itself and overcome these obstacles. In time,
while profound knowledge would be confined to the few who were experts, the
multiple could grasp the leading principles, and ‘if imbued with these principles,
and were practised in the art of applying them, they would be docile to the voice of
reason, and armed against sophistry and error’. The consequences of such a
diffusion of ethical truth would be a drastic reduction in social strife, and a proper
understanding of the nature of social co-operation. Austin gives the example of the
institution of private property, demanded by utility, but about which many
‘pernicious prejudices’ exist.
‘To the ignorant poor, the inequality which inevitably follows the beneficent institution
of property is necessarily invidious. That they who toil and produce should fare scantily,
whilst others, who “delve not nor spin” batten on the fruits of labour, seems, to the
jaundiced eyes of the poor and the ignorant, a monstrous state of things: an arrangement
upheld by the few at the cost of the many, and flatly inconsistent with the benevolent
purposes of Providence.’ (All quotes, Ibid: 131-2)
This prejudice has many effects. It creates many of the crimes which have poverty
as their immediate cause, but which really come out of a misunderstanding of
what is socially possible. Crucially it blinds the people to the real cause of their
sufferings, and the only real remedies available. ‘Want and labour spring from the
niggardliness of nature, and not from the inequality which is consequent on the
institution of property.’ Austin claims the condition of man on earth demands the
institution of private property, and the crucial mechanism of capital is a direct
104
consequence of property. Although the poor are used by capital, necessarily

parting with their labour and presently ‘condemned’ to ‘incessant drudgery’,
Austin recognises the co-dependency which the process engenders: ‘In effect,
though not in law, the labourers are co-proprietors with the capitalists who hire
their labour’.
Austin then makes a remarkable claim: in effect, he states, that if the poor come
to understand the principles of political economy they can change the nature of
their position and bargaining strength, and thereby force a dramatic betterment of
their condition. Again it is Austin’s absolute certainty in the force of a truth which
allows this: ‘In the true principle of population, detected by the sagacity of Mr
Malthus, they must look for the cause and the remedy of their penury and excessive
toil.’ Using their knowledge they would break their ‘sordid subjection to the arbitrary
rule of a few’, they would understand that attacks on property are actually attacks
on the institutions which create accumulation, they would see they are actually
deeply interested in the security of property, and ‘if they adjusted their numbers to
the demand for their labour, they would share abundantly, with their employers, in
the blessings of that useful institution’.
Austin is certain ‘that there is no particular uncertainty in the subject or matter
of those sciences’; the difficulties are external, in the attitudes of those who have
studied them, progress is assured if they would pursue truth ‘with obstinate
application and with due indifference’ (quotes, Ibid: 131-33).
What of today? We can see that much of the point of the writings of
postmodernism, and legal scholars, such as those of the Critical Legal Studies
movement, lie in the rather banal fact that things have not worked out as Austin
expected or hoped. The disinterested pursuit of knowledge has not resulted in a
structure of coherent and settled truths. Instead, perspectivism, relativism, and
subjectivism reign. The confidence in underlying natural laws of social and human
development has long since vanished. Law cannot claim its legitimacy as simply
bringing out the underlying functionalities and structures of social interaction.
Note: Critical Legal Studies writers, such as Roberto Unger (1987), have a concept
for the Austin style confidence in an underlying natural order which the law is to
reflect – they call this ‘objectivism’.
Austin’s confidence in the Truth of An Essay on the Principle of Population,
which Malthus placed as the foundation of political economy is instructive. Partly
as a response to the optimistic reading of the necessity for human progress which
Condorcet and Godwin had put forward, Malthus injected the pessimistic
contention that population, if unchecked, increases geometrically, while food
supplies increase arithmetically, with predictably disastrous consequences.
Malthus’ ‘scientific’ achievement in uncovering one of the basic laws that govern
human society was not seen as theory, but a truth which necessarily must guide
policy. As Malthus put it: ‘I see no way by which man can escape from the weight
of this law which pervades all animated nature’. Malthus attacked by use of this
principle all utopian, radical and grand, social engineering projects; limited and
105
piecemeal reform was the only realistic course. Furthermore, the law must align
itself with the underlying law of social development; nothing must be in place
which would encourage the poor to breed. If the legal structure contained any
provisions which improved the condition of the poor it would simply result in their
producing more children, and a corresponding reduction in wealth creation. Legal
enactments were not to be prohibitive of choice, but designed to make clear the
negative consequences of certain choices. To discourage the poor from producing
children in conditions where they could not guarantee their support, a law should
be made declaring that no child born from future marriages would be eligible for
poor relief. Thus: if any man chose to marry, without a prospect of being able to
support a family, while he should have the most perfect liberty to do so, to the
resulting consequences of poverty they must, however, be left. ‘To the punishment
therefore of nature he should be left, the punishment of want... He should be
taught that the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, had doomed him and his
family to suffer for disobeying their repeated admonitions.’ This is presented as
not the punishment of the politically powerful, but of the operation of natural
social laws, the positive law enacted by the political state is only the mediatory
instrument. Moreover, no provision can be made for abandoned or illegitimate
children: ‘If the parents desert their child, they ought to be made answerable for
the crime. The infant is, comparatively speaking, of little value to society, as others
will immediately supply its place.’ Malthus is equally hostile to any notion of
inherent rights, even, as the following passage suggests, any talk of a right to a
social existence.
‘A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from
his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour,
has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be
where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to
be gone, and will execute her own orders’ (quotes from Malthus in Arblaster,
1984:246).
Strict adherence to the principles of political economy soon lead to British
liberalism’s greatest ‘massacre’ – the condemning of one and a half million Irish
to starvation in the late 1840s, when the British government refused to intervene in
the famine caused by the failure of the potato harvest, although Ireland was actually
exporting food while the poor starved. It also led to the cruelty of the new poor law
(Arblaster, 1984:254-259). The plight of the poor was determined by the laws of
political economy – it was nothing to do with the law, said the ‘liberals’, and the
taking of food by the starving was simple theft. Observing this, Marx was
unimpressed – the state, that body which Austin so clearly thought could use the
law as the instrument of rational government, was nothing but a committee to
manage the affairs of the capitalist class.
106
After the destruction of the classicist faith in utility what guides the
law?
There are two lines of enquiry in answering this. One is to trace the development
of law as autonomous, to understand the systems effect and the autopoietic ability
of legal sub-systems. Another, is to trace how utilitarianism developed under the
influence of John Stuart Mill (1962 [1861]) who offered a reconciliation of
utilitarianism as a general framework for the rationality of legal engineering, with
a liberty or harm principle, whereby strict limits were placed on the scope of the
law to interfere with individual activities. Mill moved utilitarianism away from the
simple mathematics of units of pleasure, onto the idea of maximising social
happiness by extending the ability of the population to follow their individual
preferences. This preference utilitarianism would mean that the aim of the society
should be to maximise the number of options available to the individual. From this
point of view as long as liberty and diversity is being promoted then legal regulation
is progressive.
Jurists hold that legal regulation, by its nature, seems to imply

obedience; why?
Sociologists have tended to be sceptical of a fundamental concern of liberal

jurisprudence, namely, that the idea of the rule of law involves the normative
acceptance that a degree of obligation is inherent in the idea of rule-bound activity.
In the early part of this century the great Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen (1967) saw
legality in terms of a structure of oughts; law was one particular kind of normative
bind. Within the Anglo-American tradition the high point of this view was found
in the work of the Oxford liberal jurisprudent H L A Hart (1961).
H L A Hart: the critique of classicism in Austin and the response of

the civilised man
In a modern classic The Concept of Law (1961), H L A Hart talked of the concept
of law as a system of primary and secondary rules which could not be reduced to
ideas of power or commands. Hart constructed his text upon a critique of Austin’s
theory of law as an instrument of command, power and obedience. Hart actually
constructs a model which is not faithful to Austin, but is remarkably like a model
of pure classicism; in fact remarkably like the conservative neo-classical response
to crime of recent years.
Specifically, Hart denies that one can see law in terms of threats alone. The
legal (normative) structure of a society is said to be distinguished by a ‘critical
reflective attitude’. Legal phenomena can only be adequately understood through
the attitudes human beings take towards their behaviour. The internal point of
107
view, characteristic of rule bound practices, is manifested in demands for conformity,

criticism of deviation, acceptance of the legitimacy of criticism, and distinctive
kinds of justification for action expressed in ‘ought’ language.
This is radically different from the control emphasis of classicism. Although
we accept that using the law in some sense makes certain behaviour obligatory, we
are asked not to see law as an instrument of control and thus capable of analysis in
terms of certain probabilities, patterns and predictions of behaviour; nor to weigh
up the impact of legal prohibition on the motives of the potential offender. Instead
we are to give primacy to an internal attitude of critical reflective acceptance. Hart
rejects the imperative conception of law: modern law is a matter of rules not
imperatives. Modern law is not a system wherein the will of the politically powerful
is expressed and backed up by threats, but it is a interacting structure of rules, in
which the attitude of critical acceptance grants a feeling of obligation to play by
the rules of the social practices thus organised.
Hart is clear that rules contain an internal and external perspective. Some people
do not share the internal attitude, thus Hart points to an irreducible tension:
‘At any given moment the life of any society which lives by rules, legal or not, is
likely to consist in a tension between those who, on the one hand, accept and voluntarily
cooperate in maintaining the rules, and those who, on the other hand, reject the rules
and attend to them only from the external point of view as a sign of possible punishment.
One of the difficulties facing any legal theory anxious to do justice to the complexity
of the facts is to remember the presence of both these points of view and not to define
one of them out of existence. Perhaps all our criticisms of the predictive theory of
obligation may be best summarised as the accusation that this is what it does to the
internal aspect of obligatory rules.’ (1961:88)
We are a long way from the climate of classical criminology. We appear to have
undergone the social journey that Kant desired when he declared that a man who
obeyed the law out of fear or calculation was a mere animal. Kant looked forward
to the day when social order and personal attitudes would coincide, when the law
would be purely self-applicable. Hart seems to declare that we have become these
civilised men. His theory declares that the power and sanction-based image –
where a man only behaves as he does for fear of the consequences imposed by
some commander - is unacceptable. The command theory fails to allow for the
finer feelings of the modern individual, the internal aspect. Modern civilised
people act out of acceptance, their voluntary acceptance of the rules of the game,
of the institutional framework of society. No coercion is needed, there is no need
for threats or force. Law is the internalised acceptance of rules by civilised people.
Hart indicates that there will always be a minority of others, those who do not
possess this internal point of view - outsiders who ‘reject the rules and attend to
them only from the external point of view as a sign of possible punishment’.
Society is torn by the tension between the two. But, Hart explains, one need not
fear:
‘Though such a society may exhibit the tension, already described, between those
who accept the rules and those who reject the rules except where fear of social pressure
108
induces them to conform, it is plain that the latter cannot be more than a minority, if
so loosely organised a society of persons, approximately equal in physical strength, is
to endure: for otherwise those who reject the rules would have too little social pressure
to fear (especially lawyers and officials) – or, as Austin would have it – obedience
through threats, enforced by the sovereign. Or, as others would have it, through a
minority class enforcing their will on the majority.’ (1961:89)
Hart is not alone, most liberal writers appear to assume an obligation to obey the
law. As Ted Honderich put it in an article entitled ‘Violence for Equality’ in Enquiries
in Political Philosophy.
‘All of us save some true anarchists have the conviction that the members of a society
have some obligation if the society is at all tolerable which is to say that it has risen
above barbarism, ancient or modern. Many things are not to be done for a reason
having to do with the fact that they are illegal as distinct from other reasons which
might also exist. It is thought by some that this obligation to keep to the laws is at its
strongest with respect to the laws prohibiting violence.’ (104)
Further on he states:
‘Political obligation is obviously a kind of moral obligation although not the most
familiar kind. The idea is that the subjects of governments, or some governments, are
under some moral obligation to give up all courses of action which are made illegal.
There is a moral restraint or prohibition on subjects with respect to these courses of
action which are prohibited by the law of the state.’ (106)
On arguments for a sort of natural, intuitive understanding of obligation to obey
law, Iredell Jenkins writes:
‘Why should, and do we, have an obligation to obey the law? I believe that the only
answer is that we just do. As in the case above we are simply made that way; we are
social creatures so we are responsive to our fellow creatures; we accept the terms of
social life. We accommodate ourselves to the provisions that are necessary to preserve
the social fabric.’ (Social Order and the Limits of Law: 196)
Modern writers are ambivalent about using the metaphor of a social contract but
for David Lyons:
‘This argument maintains that each and every one of us is party to an agreement
either of the rest of us or with those who rule. We have pledged ourselves to obey the
law and our pledge binds us. Moreover, it binds us unconditionally: nothing done by
the law or by those in power can possibly nullify our agreement. For if the contract
can be nullified by, say, outrageously unjust requirements or prohibitions then the
contract does not necessarily bind us.’ (1984:211)
But David Lyons does not even find this argument of obligation through contract
convincing from the point of view of those who have taken part in the elections.
For Lyons:
‘[such an idea] is incredible, not just because the contract must be constructed as
unconditional but more simply because few of us have ever been parties to such an
agreement. We have never literally pledged ourselves to obey the law. If we had not
done so then we cannot we bound by such a pledge.’ (Ibid: 211)
109
Iredell Jenkins highlights the more organic, or living relationship that exists between
the state and subjects, seeing society as a political community:
‘I think that it is this lived relationship that we have with our fellow creatures and
hence with our society and hence again with the government that is the agent of our
society and hence finally with the legal system that is the instrument of the government;
that is the real source of the obligations that we feel and acknowledge to obey law. We
should, and do, feel this obligation because we have lived on certain terms with our
society and so with its governments and its legal system.’ (Social Order and the Limits
of Law: 199)
For conservative philosophers such as Ted Honderich: ‘We have a natural duty to
support and advance the institutions in our societies. We have a natural duty to
obey the law and to refrain from violence’ (Inquires into Philosophy: 137).
Yet philosophy cannot explain why we should expect obedience to the law. It
has no thesis on how Hart’s internal attitude is created. Nor can it guide us in
processes to ensure that the numbers with the external attitude remain small. Modern
philosophers, such as Simmonds (1979) and Lyons (1984), have argued that
individuals should approach the law pragmatically rather than working on the basis
of any automatic presumption that they should obey. Lyons seems to give us a
picture of legal systems as being full of moral problems, fallible, and, for Lyons,
law must earn respect.
Without faith in utilitarianism, and devoid of a natural law system,

how can the positive law earn respect?
Much of the debate in this area has been conducted in the terrain of abstract political
philosophy, or moral philosophy and many people feel frustrated with this. Smith
(1990) for instance, argued that the whole debate was so ensconced in sterile
academia that we should move any emphasis away from philosophical questions
of why people ought to obey the law to the questions of:
‘... when they ought to obey, when not, and what sort of government they should be
expected to tolerate, or not.’ (1990:867)
Perhaps a simple answer is that criminological writings have never really addressed
this question. Traditional criminology appeared to assume that obedience was
normal. But what is at stake here? Is it some sort of voluntary commitment to act
in accordance with the law, on condition that the society provide social goods and
measures of success? Most citizens of contemporary societies have never entered
into any explicit promise. It is only infrequently that oaths of obedience have been
taken, normally by immigrants or certain ranks of civil servants.
What are these tacit or implied promises to obey? It once was popular – for
example, in the work of John Lock in the 16th century – to imply a promise to
obey from the continued residence of the individual in a society. That has been
replaced today by a more popular version in a promise to abide in the democratic
110
process and keying into the law-making process via voting. Certain modern
philosophers, such as Singer (1973), argue with an analogy of the law of estoppel;
in voting one’s voluntary behaviour encourages others to believe that one consents
to the decision which will come out of this process and that one will abide by the
outcomes. Having voted, the citizen is estopped from arguing that he has not given
his consent when the government embarks upon any particular policy which he
does not agree with. To vote, and yet refuse to be bound by the result, is not only
unfair upon those who participate in good faith, it can also lead to the breakdown
of democracy as the whole decision making procedure falls apart. But this version
of consent theory seems to rely upon the empirical reality of promissorial obligation.
What happens to those who do not vote?
Fishkin pointed out in his work, Democracy & Deliberation (1991) that the
crisis of legitimacy facing contemporary liberal democratic regimes is precisely
linked to the whole position of non-participation. Non-participation occurs in
various forms; in its most obvious form there is simple non-voting, but even the
amount of participation which voting engenders is small. Fishkin finds very
problematic the whole idea of informed majorities participating and consenting to
the structure of legal regulation. John Kenneth Galbraith’s (1992) argument in The
Culture of Contentment is premised upon the notion that half the population of the
US does not vote in presidential elections, fewer still in congressional elections –
implying that the whole philosophical notion of participatory consent is simply
empirically invalid. Moreover, even if the philosophical concept of consent could
be rendered meaningful, to vote does not imply a pledge of obedience to the
regulative and distributive structure of the law. The content of the promise could
vary immensely. It could amount to a stance of justified disobedience, or that the
participant’s consent not to break the law is merely for selfish reasons, or personal
convenience, indeed for motives such as we impute to a crime. The normal
distinction between a civil disobedient and a criminal is that the criminal acts out
of selfishness, whereas the civil disobedient is disobeying the law in a principled
stance on behalf of the society or his or her idea of society.
But if we were to hold, as has sometimes been argued (Robert Dahl for instance,
in the 1960s, popularised the notion of a supermarket theory of democracy), an
individualist utilitarian theory of democracy, where participation in the democratic
process is linked with the understanding that certain social goods are flowing to
the individual, what gives coherence to the totality? Why, if the goods do not come
back to an individual, is the individual obligated to play his or her part at all?
Could not even the act of voting, upon this analogy, be said to imply that if the
structure does not give the individual the goods he/she wants then he/she can feel
him/herself free to simply take them, even if that is a selfish act, because the very
process of voting is itself selfish? Why should the citizen who feels himself or
herself systematically excluded feel any sense of gratitude or respect towards the
government and the legal order or his fellow citizens, who appear to be gaining
from the order of things? Why should he or she feel any sense of fair play towards
his or her fellow citizens?
111
The combination of utilitarianism and liberalism appears to offer an argument

that where a legal structure is simply morally neutral, or neutral between particular
social groups, and sets out the rules of the social game, the obligation to play the
game relies upon the notion that the whole structure benefits us; and that when this
structure benefits everyone there is a moral obligation to obey in order to preserve
common security, or you are bound to express your gratitude for the structure by
obeying the rules. In recent years Soper (1985) has argued that since government
and law-making are necessary to human well-being, people should respect the
good faith efforts of those in authority in their bid to rule, and the most important
way of showing this respect is by accepting the prima facie obligation to obey the
laws. This is a form of fair play argument; the obligation to obey seems to rely
upon the notion that the procedures for the distribution of the benefits and burdens
of the structure of social co-operation are reasonably fair. But must this fair play
apply on both the general, or abstract, and particular levels? As H L A Hart argued:
‘... when a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus
restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to these restrictions when required,
have a right to a similar submission from those who have benefitted by their
submission.’ (1955:185)
But do not all these arguments seem to hark back to the image of small scale
locality? Consider these conceptions of fair play, gratitude and respect. Do they
not ring true when we consider social life as a matter of reciprocity, or as a matter
of what you might call, communities? But do they fit the abstract conception of the
modern nation? What exactly is it that people are obliged to obey out of their
abstract identity as a citizen in radically divided societies? What happens if we can
argue that in our late-modern, or post-modern times, there are many citizens who
receive comparatively few benefits; what happens to this idea of fair play as being
the basis of the sweeping obligation to obey? Santos (1977) in looking at the
disaffected citizens of the Brazilian shanty towns, points to the fact that they have
little obligation to obey the official, what they call, asphalt laws of the Brazilian
state. Indeed, the whole of his article relates to how, according to the state, the
entire residency was illegal and they had simply devised their own unofficial legal
system. In Galbraith’s The Culture of Contentment, the complacency of the
majority class in late-modern society is reflected in a growing underclass which is
being systematically excluded and ignored by the complacent, contented majority.
What is it that the underclass can be said to owe gratitude and moral obligation
towards? How is the system in substance fair towards them? If fair play does not
apply to them how can any general obligation to obey the law bind them?
Another argument may, however, be simply pragmatic necessity. Society needs
certain rules to exist. Without these rules being enforced the whole structure would
collapse. Tonore (1981) argues that duty arises out of necessity.
In the same way as the duties of care and responsibilities arise because of
proximity to those in need, citizenship entails that the state counts upon one to
obey. The state is in a non-voluntary position of having to care for its citizens out
112
of necessity, but in order to perform this duty the state needs a reciprocal
obedience. Furthermore, if the state is committed to extract promises of obedience
from alien residents it chooses to associate with, or allow into its domain, it must
have at least as much right to the co-operation of natural citizens it is forced to
associate with. And there are certain variations which hark back to the Aristotelian
notion. For example, the jurisprudential writings of John Finnis (1980) seem to
advocate a natural duty to obey. According to Finnis, individuals have a duty to
promote ‘the common good’ and ‘human flourishing’, which, in turn, generates a
duty to obey state laws, since these are the natural means of promoting universal
human goods such as knowledge and play. Similar, to the argument from fair play,
reciprocity is ensured, the state has its obligations while the subjects have theirs.
But what if the state denies responsibility? What if it radically ‘privatises’ social
space?
Conclusion: the dialectic of systems and selves
The dialectic which extends from the basis of the writings of Beccaria, Bentham
and Austin onwards is simple: coercion is necessary to stabilise the chaos of the
early modern social order but in the normative project of modernity coercion is not
the secret of the relationship of law and society. As Austin put it, an educated
populace is of greater benefit to the enlightened legislator than an army of
policemen. And the construction of civil society? The 18th century empiricist
approach of Edmund Burke was clear:
‘Manners are more important than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws
depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are
what vex and soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarise or refine us...
They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they
add morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.’ (Quoted in Eagleton,
1990:42)
What creates the living constitution of civil society in modern societies? We will
go on to describe the influence of locality, of urbanity in later chapters, we have
argued that the stability of the legal order is one aspect, but a crucial factor lies in
attitude, in behaviour. It is not just that (as Spinoza put it) human nature will not
submit to unlimited coercion, but rather, there needs to be an interactive balance
between the structures of power as visualised through the judicial apparatus of the
state and the expectations and behaviour of the subjects/citizens. Call it hegemony
(in keeping with the Marxist tradition), call it legitimacy (Weber), call it consent
(communicative theory), call it the internal normative attitude (Kelsen and H L A
Hart), all may point to various procedures, the social order needs more than a
criminal justice system which obeys its own autopoietic structure, it needs more
than a rational, clear-cut code capable of easy administration: it needs a combination
of external rules and a population whose modes of behaviour and expectations are
compatible with the rules. To be effective, to operate without stifling society, law
113
must combine with the aesthetics of social conduct (what we call ‘culture’). The
rule of law requires moral subjects; it requires socialised subjects – a civilised
society requires a particular form of social self. The person of Hart’s Concept of
Law, the ideal subject of late-modernity, is not the calculating subject of the neo-
classical rational man, but a civilised individual. We must ask how did this individual
come about and what of our present? Does the return of ‘the need to fear
punishment’ rhetoric; does the return to a war on crime mentality; does the return
to a mind-set harking back to the early modern classical emphasis on calculation
and control through the manipulation of the external aspect of rules, reflect a
situation where the onset of post-modernism has created a decivilising movement
which renders necessary an uncivilised response? Or is this understanding of the
need for civilised selves existing in a humane civil society a theme that the onset of
the neo-classical movement appears to overlook – perhaps at our expense? Is the
present rush to Law and Order politics actually a reversal of modernity? A rush to
justice that may destroy justice?
114
CHAPTER SIX
CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM I: THE SEARCH

FOR THE CRIMINAL MAN, OR THE PROBLEM OF
THE DUCK
If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... then it is
a duck. (Traditional proverb)
‘[Criminals are characterised by] human deformities and monstrosities,
physically illshapen, weak and sickly with irregular features, they bear a sinister,
ignoble, and furtive expression. They have an unbalanced and distorted cranium,
and are of a low level of intelligence, apparently devoid of the nobler sentiments;
with a depraved if not utter absence of moral sense or conscience.’ (Boies,
1893, quoted in Garland, 1985:194)
Introduction to criminological positivism
Until interest in classical criminology revived recently, scientific criminology was

assumed to have begun with a series of late 19th century writings inspired by an
Italian Doctor, Lombroso. Today, he is widely credited with having drawn up the
scientific manifesto reorientating criminology away from its connection with
crime and the rational administration of a judicial mechanism, towards studying
the criminal and the conditions which created the criminal. Lombroso was not
alone – there has been, and still is, a vast network of scholars and research projects
dedicated to reducing the problem of crime to the problem of the criminal.
Although an individualist orientation has been a major tendency in positivism, its
desire to escape legal categories is epistemological: how does one create a science
which avoids taking as its object of analysis something that another discipline, ie
the criminal law, has been responsible for defining? Moreover, the ideology of the
criminal law appeared to institutionalise a purely abstract or formal self, rather
than deal with real people exhibiting real characteristics. Criminological
positivism wanted to define the limits of its intellectual horizons for itself, and
thus argued at its inception that the solution to understanding the problem of crime
was to study the criminal and the factors which constitute him... but who or what
or where is the criminal? A widely accepted solution has been the methodology
our opening proverb outlines.
Thus positivism has sought to identify the criminal by the externally observable
characteristics of those individuals who are found where the criminal lives, ie to
analyse the individuals found in prisons, in probation departments, on community
service, in geographical localities of high crime rates. Thus positivism accepted
the result of a series of labelling processes: it took for granted the fact that because
a person had been labelled a criminal by a series of processes, and had contributed
115
in a major way to being so labelled by some action or omission (again perhaps

because of a variety of motives), then either investigating his constitution, or the
forces that pushed him into the situation, would reveal the secret to the nature of
the criminal.
From the vantage point of the 1990s to read the work of the late 19th century
writers we call positivists is to encounter an array of strange assertations and bizzare
characters, one often wonders how they could have thought what they wrote. The
story is sometimes told of the students of a famous entomology professor who
glued the head of one bug onto the body of a second bug and added the wings of a
third, took their creation to the professor and asked him what it was. He looked
puzzled for a time, then brightened considerably. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I believe I have
seen one of these before. Tell me, did it hum when you found it?’ ‘Oh yes,’ the
students replied, ‘it hummed quite loudly.’ ‘Well then,’ their professor replied, ‘it
must be a humbug.’
Criminological positivism has taken a lot of humbugs seriously, but in a sense it
has not taken them seriously enough. For a criminal is in a real sense a hybrid. The
criminal cannot exist in non-social nature – criminality an existential condition
only known to human society. One cannot be born a criminal, it is an achieved
status.
Crime is a social entity. Our account of classical criminology and the rule of
law, outlined how law creates a structure of rules and clear cut demarcations
which can fit (efficiently or not) over a diverse social body. We argued that the
notion of crime is a fundamental feature of modernity. Crime is neither natural,
in the sense that there is simply some objective phenomena out there which will
always be a crime irrespective of culture, nor is it fully relativist, since if we
accept crime as a harm; it is a reality like the objects of the natural world.
However, in the 19th century a range of writers came to argue that law was
irrelevant, redundant, that it did not offer real social guidance and social
protection, and that progress was to be achieved by a thoroughgoing naturalist
premise. All activities were to be treated as events occurring in the material
world and were to be understood and dealt with in the same way as the natural
scientist dealt with physical substances. A new spirit, or mode, of relating to the
problems of the social world was offered; it was named ‘positivism’ early in the
19th century by the French social thinker, August Comte:
‘The true positive spirit consists in substituting the study of invariable laws of
phenomena for that of their so-called causes whether proximate or primary.’ (A General
View of Positivism, 1848)
For Comte (1974) human history revealed a Law of Three Stages of intellectual
development:
• the theological or fictive stage – characterised by religion;
• the metaphysical or abstract – characterised by the products of philosophy and
law;
• the scientific or positive stage – this was currently developing and was
116
Criminological Positivism I
characterised by a clear cut distinction between science and morals, of visualised

‘moral’ or social problems as capable of being understood and solved by
applying the methodologies used in the physical (or natural) sciences.
Observation, experimentation, and the quantification of data, would reveal the
structures causing the entities or behaviour we wished to explain. The question
to be asked was ‘how did this come about?’, rather than ‘why did it come
about?’ This knowledge would give us a whole new dimension of power and
provide the foundation for social progress.
Intellectual revolution or a narrowing of concerns?
For most of criminology’s history Comte’s view of progress was accepted; it was
common to speak of an intellectual revolution occurring from Beccaria to Lombroso
(this is the sort of phrase used in such texts as Vold and Bernard’s Theoretical
Criminology (1958, 1978, 1986) wherein a scientific approach was held to replace
the perspectives of religion, philosophy and metaphysics. Although this is how the
early positivists saw it themselves, if is a gross simplification. We have seen that
classical criminology was actually a reflection of the new sciences of man put
forward by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume among others. A full account of the
epistemology of criminology and criminal justice is outside the province of this
text, suffice to claim that there has been a problem of the foundation or the limits
of study1.
The growing empiricist science of man provided a critique of the social contract
theory which Beccaria assumed as the basis of social order, and re-orientated the
focus of study away from questions depicting a hypothetical origin to society and
the ideal social order, onto an empirically orientated inquiry. The question of social
order was viewed as something knowable and reducible to laws of social evolution.
Man could take charge of social development by combining a sociological interest
in social-cultural development, with an anthropological interest in the structure of
human nature.
The essential presupposition for positivism is the belief that ultimately science
can disclose the objective reality of the social and natural world. As Michael
Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi state in a recent work Positive Criminology:
‘... certainly one feature of positive criminology has always been its belief in an
objective external reality capable of measurement. Public disclosure of the understood
reality, the procedures used for its measurement, and frequent independent replication
are essential tenets of this perspective.’ (1987:19)
Rephrased in terms of the representational ability of language, positivism seems to
insist that language consists of humanly created symbols which reference,
1 Even while enagaging in empirical observation the question of how the entities observed came to
be in the condition in which they were found must implicitly, at least, be part of a general theory.
117
symbolise or name (and so may communicate reality, more or less complicatedly,

and be capable of correct and clear usage) the things that humans wish to talk
about. Furthermore, that there exists some natural, non-contingent, structure and
hierarchy of these things which exist independent of human cognition, thereby
providing an immanent natural order or picture of reality which science is
uncovering. Positivism finds truth when science uncovers the natural structures of
division and hierarchy which underpin the good, the normal, the ‘natural’ order of
things.
The current pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty (1979) has referred to this
belief as ‘the mirror of nature’ premise. Science aims to provide verifiably accurate
(albeit through some complicated structure of methodology and abstractions)
representations of the reality out there which we come to understand through a
mirror effect.
The mirror of nature idea assumes that since we have specific words and concepts
these refer to natural entities, or things, which fit into a certain place in the rightful,
or natural, order of social life. Thus, the word ‘crime’ implies a crime is an
empirically verifiable event; the word ‘criminal’, leads us to assume there is a
category of people who can be positively identified through some procedure as
naturally criminal; the word criminality leads us to assume there is some stable
propensity of individuals. An early positivist trap: since we use the word criminals
to refer to those adjudged guilty of crimes, in order to investigate the characteristics
of criminals the early positivists simply went to the prisons and other segregative
facilities, and sought to measure the bodies and brains of the inmates as if this
would give scientific data. The positivist approach does not seem to ask how the
state of affairs they are using as the basis of their data comes into being. Gottfredson
and Hirschi put this problem slightly differently: early positivism did not create a
reflexive awareness of the nature of crime as part of a general theory, instead it
was:
‘... a “science” much concerned with allocating “findings” to its constituent disciplines
and not so much concerned with understanding nature...
The biological positivists did not have a conception of crime derived from a
general theory of behaviour. They were therefore forced to accept the criminals
provided them by the state: ‘A criminal is a man who violates laws decreed by
the State to regulate the relations between its citizens’ (Ferraro 1972 [1911]:
3). Crimes were then merely acts in violation of the law. The biological
positivist’s problem seemed simple enough. All one had to do was locate the
differences among people that produce differences in their tendencies to commit
acts in violation of the law.
Absent a conception of crime, the positivist has no choice but to elaborate types of
offenders. These typologies may be based on the frequency of offending, the seriousness
of the offence, the object of the offense, the characteristics of the offender, or the
nature of the prior and subsequent offences, but whatever their dimensions, they lead
to complication rather than simplicity, to confusion rather than clarity... Absent a
concept of crime, the positivist method leads ineluctably to typologising without end.’
(1990:49-50)
118
A great deal of effort and research time went into the construction of typologies
and correlated information. Positivism ensured a fetish for classification,
typologising, and counting. A M Guerry, for example, devoted abundant energy to
statistics on crime and suicide. By 1832 he had amassed 85,564 individual case
reports on suicides, each with a guess at motives, and between 1832 and 1864 he
analysed 21,132 cases of persons accused of attempted or successful murder, while
constructing a typology of 4,478 classes of motives. Although the classification
systems were in part a necessary attempt to deal with the sheer weight of numbers
of the entities which could be included in the developing, rather open-ended field
of study, it is a mysterious exercise reading these works entering what appears a
dream-world. One can be easily reminded of a typology which Foucault read in a
work of Borges, and which served as the instigating event to his writing The Order
of Things. The typology was from ‘a certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is
written that:
‘... animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present
classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off
look like flies.’ (Quoted in Foucault, 1970: xv)
Foucault asked both, how could they think that? and why is it that we could not
think that?
Even with current studies one sometimes shares Foucault’s bewilderment at
typologies. Take Wille (1974) for example, who grouped murderers into ten types:
(1) depressives, (2) psychotics, (3) murderers with organic brain dysfunction, (4)
psychopaths, (5) passive-aggressive individuals, (6) alcoholics, (7) hysterical
personalities, (8) child killers, (9) mentally retarded murderers, and (10) murderers
who kill for sexual satisfaction.
In contrast, Guttmacher (1973) suggests six categories of murderers: (1)
‘average’ murderers free from prominent psychopathology but lacking societal
values, (2) sociopaths desiring revenge on the population at large for
maltreatment during childhood, (3) alcoholics who kill their wives over fear of
losing them, (4) murderers avenging a lover’s loss of interest, (5) schizophrenics
responding to hallucinations and delusions, and (6) sadists who kill to achieve
sexual pleasure.
The positive approach has come up with numerous classification systems. They
come out of descriptions of offenders’ backgrounds and description of the form
their acts of murder took. It is as if the analyist is expecting the world to reveal its
structures and messages without the need for meaningful interpretation.
The scientific status of the vast works done under the positive spirit is deeply
questioned by a naive approach to the dependent variable, namely, that the
criminal law produces the label crime which is then applied to the individuals
positivists have studied. The dominant assumption of positivism has been that of
119
some underlying process of natural cause which a science can uncover.

Breakthroughs were constantly being announced requiring new research – but it is
difficult to see how the research and the hybrid nature of crime were actually
connected. For example, during this century some have placed great hopes in
endocrinology as the science which could tell us the influence of the ductless
glands and hormones; an abnormally low or high concentration of hormones was
thought to affect the personality through effecting the brain. Podolsky relates that
several psychiatrists at Sing Sing Prison analysed the blood samples of the inmates
attempting to see whether specific crimes were related to specific hormonal
imbalances.
‘It was found that in cases of robbery and burglary the prisoners usually lacked
pituitrin and parathyrin in their bodily chemistry. In criminal actions involving grand
larceny there was lack of parathyrin and pituitrin, but there was an increase in
thyroxin and thymus hormones. In petty larceny there was a lack of parathyrin and
pituitrin but an increase in thymus secretion. Murderers usually had a decrease in the
amount of parathyrin, but there was an abnormal increase in thymus, adrenalin, and
thyroxin.
Further studies revealed that in fraud there was an increase in thyroxin but a decrease
in pituitrin and parathyrin. In forgery there was too much thyroxin and thymus and
too little parathyrin. Rapists were found to have an overwhelming supply of thyroxin
and estrogens and too little pituitrin. Those prisoners who had been sentenced for
assault and battery were found to have too much adrenalin, too much thyroxin and too
little pituitrin and the estragon.’ (1955:678)
While classical criminology appeared to accept that all people could commit crime
depending upon the circumstances, positivist criminology tried to categorise,
differentiate, and typologise. What would this information provide? Note two early
points:
• The distinction between causal factors and correlations Even if crime was
some sort of unitary phenomenon capable of being thought of similar to a
disease (the basic metaphor which a great deal of positivism appeared to use),
it does not follow that the conditions, factors, ‘facts’, discovered cause the
event; they may be merely accidental or themselves the result of other factors,
such as class position, access to resources, etc.
• The strength of the positivist enterprise depends upon the truth of the original
suppositions.
Alasdair MacIntyre (1981:92) recalls that Charles II once invited members of the
Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish
alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out
that it did not. As John Tuky once put it: ‘You can always get a precise answer to
the wrong question.’
In the late 19th century Nietzsche was already calling positivism a superficial
approach to knowledge. What happens is that ‘man’ as a moral entity ceases to be
a unit of study: instead it is some naturalist combination, such as the chemicals of
120
the brain, or the electric conductibility of the body, which provides the foundation.
A gap appears between man as a moral unit capable of being held responsible for
his/her actions, and man as a mere genetic/chemical/behavioural entity, or man as
the weak object of social structure, for which the language of responsibility is
inappropriate. As Podolsky (1955:675) put it: ‘Life, in the final analysis is a series
of chemical reactions’. What this form of empirical analysis appears to offer
however, is the possibility of making law-like generalisations which can give those
who can use the knowledge the power to predict and therefore control future events.
This is clear from the structure of texts; in reading older criminology textbooks the
next chapters after the various chapters on positivism, are normally on prediction
studies (or, indeed, whole books, eg S and E Glueck, 1959).
A caveat for understanding the term positivism in criminology. The term
positivism does not simply denote individualist approaches. It also has a wide
sociological use as is apparent in looking at criminal statistics. However, the
individualist version of positive criminology is characterised by the search to
discover, within the composition of the individual, the causes of criminal and
delinquent behaviour. The scientific method is used to differentiate offenders from
non-offenders on a variety of characteristics. The method of positive criminology
assumes that there are identifiable factors that make people act as they do
(determinism) and that the variability to be explained is associated with the
variability in the causal agents (differentiation).
In ideal form positivism side-steps the issue of criminal justice... it substitutes
concerns for social justice, social protection and social management. It does not
need a crime for its power to operate since crime is only a symptom, an outward
sign of a pathology. You do not need a trial and representation by lawyers, due
process is not involved: instead you require a hearing by a committee of social
scientific experts.
Modernity, construction and the social control perspective
Positivism offers another form of social control to that of the criminal law. Scholars
are divided as to whether the 19th century, when positivism gathered in strength,
was facing a social control crisis or not. Certainly, the 19th century saw a huge
emphasis upon developing control, with commentators becoming confused by the
apparent rise in crime figures and the development of police forces. By the end of
the century, however, ambivalence reigned. To some, Britain appeared to be a
more peaceful and controlled society than at any time since the enlightenment.
This may have contributed to a change in emphasis from seeing the offender as an
individual being held responsible for mistakes in rational calculation or control, to
seeing the offender as someone subjected to forces beyond his or her control,
either stemming from individual or constitutional factors, or social forces which
determined his or her conduct. This is a duality: if we can understand the forces
121
which cause criminality we can build a secure social order by removing these
causes, if we can locate the causes of crime then the good society can be built that
does not have these factors. This is to be a controlled process. If we have imposed
order over the wilderness we can set it free.
To Radzinowicz and Hood (1986), the Victorian Britain in the late 1890s had
become relatively successful in containing crime; the transition to an industrialised
urban existence had been brought under control, and the structure of modern
policing and criminal statistics were largely in place. Other commentators, such as
David Garland in Punishment and Welfare (1985), have depicted Britain as
experiencing a crisis of penality. For Garland, the pretensions of the Victorian
social control strategy, based on the liberal notion of the minimal use of the state,
and a framework of the rule of law with its presupposition of the responsible
individual, were breaking down. For Garland:
‘... the Victorian penal system was constructed around the categories of a strict legalism
(individual responsibility, the free and equal subject, legalism, a classical criminality
of reason, etc) and directed at a particular social class... Penality was... one element
within a generalised disciplinary strategy involving a number of institutions, ideologies
and diverse practices... the tenets of this strategy... were grounded in an individualistic
and hierarchical form of social organisation dominated by the property-owning classes.’
(1985:53)
The cost was the political alienation of a considerable sector of the population.
The strategy relied upon the underlying epistemological belief in the ideology of
laissez-faire individualism and the free market, with the social reality of a
disorganised and powerless repressed class. However, both of these tenets were
subjected to revision in the 1890s. Capitalist economic forms moved into a larger
scale of semi-monopoly capital, and the working class became organised around
unions and other forms of struggle. The organisation of society became a ‘social
question’, with ideas on the enlarged role and functions for the state, and the idea
of conscious planning and organisation of the society. For Garland penality
needed a new form of legitimation; it found it in the critique of classicism and the
setting up of a ‘mission for criminology’. Garland quotes Wilson in 1908:
‘When a criminal is caught... his case should be sifted from before the time when he
saw daylight. The questions to settle are:
Who are you?
How are you?
Why are you?
What are you?’
(Quoted Garland, 1985:88)
The variability of crime was turned into a practicable object, namely criminality,
which could be the subject of a positivist study and the object of a practical policy.
As a social problem criminality could possibly be reformed, extinguished, or
prevented.
122
There was, however, no one master-logic to the interconnection between the

development of criminological ideology, penality and the changing form of
modernity. From the constructive point of view the idea of the welfare-state
provision was to engage the state in order to create for the ordinary people (who
only had an abstract freedom but no real positive freedom) the conditions for
greater advance and freedom. But this was done at the same time as normalising
procedures were installed, conditions of supervision and identification of the
norms of proper behaviour. Moreover the image of the delinquent and the
criminal was functional in dividing the working class from itself. Criminology
began the search for the typologies and differentiations of individuals, the
search for the objectivity of criminality that portrayed the criminal as other than
the normal. Furthermore, there developed in the late 19th century a specific
relationship of the development of the new forms of criminological knowledge
and the institutions of punishment, particularly the prison. Garland argued that
the emergence of the individualistically orientated positivist criminology owed
much of its emergence to the institution of the prison. Hence there became a
specific link between future analysis of the prison and knowledge(s) which sought
to answer the question of what the offender was. The development of a specific
body of knowledge on the institution of punishment was, thereby, compromised.
As Ruggles-Brise put it: ‘... la science penitentiary develops gradually into the
science of the discovery of the causes of crime – the science of criminology’
(1925, quoted in Garland, 1985:82).
The developing penology was limited in the questions and theoretical
frameworks it could pose for the institutions of punishment. It simply could not
pose the issue of criminalisation (as Durkheim had hinted) in terms of culturally
specific patterns of labelling. Instead of seeing the processed offender (the person
in prison) as the end result of an interactive process of labelling and behaviour, of
a process wherein the power to punish was central, of a process wherein the
institutional arrangements were partly responsible for the end product, the offender
was treated as if his own constitution (or the constitution of his immediate
environment) was deviant. For Garland the study of the institutions was constrained
by the two concepts of criminology, those of individualism and differentiation;
traditional penology’s understanding of penal institutions was thus how best to put
these concepts into institutional reality.
To some extent Garland’s position in Punishment and Welfare neglects the
rationalisation of government inherent in the writings of Bentham and Austin,
overstates the feeling of crisis, and neglects the complementary nature of legality
and the creation of normalcy. The argument here is simple, it is not that positivism
represents an advance over legality – as the writers of criminological positivism
themselves claimed at the time – or that positivism is required because a system of
legality which is fully in place is breaking down, but that legality needs positivism
in a complementary fashion for it to develop. Moreover, as it functioned, positivism
123
was inconceivable without legality. A rational legality means that the investigator
can turn his attention to the subjects of this legality as if legality did not impose
itself. He can expect the normalcy of law abiding behaviour, and become surprised
by illegal activity. It is only in this way that the law of Austin (the command of
political superiors to political inferiors – the law of command and subjection) can
become the rules of Hart (the law of normative expectation – the feeling of the
citizen of being under an obligation). But if the knowledges of positivism became
knowledges which served to civilise man, they began with the assumption that the
criminal was less than human.
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)
Lombroso, who graduated from the same university as Beccaria exactly 100 years
later, once referred to himself as ‘a slave to facts’. Most commentators read
Lombroso as applying the biological ideas of the immediate post-Darwin era to
the study of the criminal; specifically applying the concept of atavism and the
principles of evolution to depict criminals as biological ‘throwbacks’ to a
primitive, or ‘atavistic,’ stage of evolution. For Lombroso (1911) criminals could
be distinguished from non-criminals by the presence of physical anomalies that
represented a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of person.
Between 1859-1863, while serving as an army physician, Lombroso examined
approximately 3,000 soldiers in a search to locate the causes of several diseases in
mental and physical deficiencies. He was to apply this methodology to search for
the causes of crime, ie an investigation of the physical constitution of the offender.
This is, perhaps, empiricist epistemology at its purest: by observation and careful
measurement the physical features which constitute the criminal will become
known. In a famous passage Lombroso relates a moment of enlightenment when,
as a prison Doctor, he was conducting a post-mortem examination of a particularly
famous inmate by the name of Vilella. He observed a depression in the interior
back part of his skull that he called the ‘median occipital fossa’, and which he
recognised as a characteristic found in inferior animals.
‘This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to
see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the
nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the
ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were
explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent
superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-
shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain,
extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the
irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in
the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.’ (Quoted,
Wolfgang, 1960:184)
124
Consequently, Lombroso conducted thousands of post-mortem examinations and

anthropometric studies of prison inmates and non-criminals. He concluded that
the criminal existed, in the natural order of things, as a lower form of human
evolution than the average man, with very distinct physical and mental
characteristics (see editions of L’Uomo delinquente, first published in 1876).
Lombroso constructed a four-fold classification:
• born criminals, those with true atavistic features;
• insane criminals, including idiots, imbeciles, and paranoiacs as well as epileptics
and alcoholics;
• occasional criminals or criminaloids, whose crimes were explained largely by
opportunity; and
• criminals of passion who commit crime because of honour, love or anger. They
were propelled by a (temporary) irresistible force.
Later, additional categories gave some allowance for the influence of social factors
and he speculated somewhat as to the interaction of genetic and environmental
influences (thus providing, to some extent, a precursor to modern socio-biological
schemes). Although he went some way to developing a multiple factor approach,
he never seems to have moved from the foundation that the true or born criminal
was responsible for a large amount of criminal behaviour.
Shortly after his death, Lombroso’s work was subjected to intensive scrutiny
by Charles Goring who published The English Convict (1913). Goring had
employed an expert statistician to administer the computations concerning the
physical differences between criminals and non-criminals, but after eight years
of research and comparing some 3,000 English convicts with various control
groups, Goring concluded that there was no absolute differences between
criminals and non-criminals except for stature and body weight. Goring
concluded ‘that there is no such thing as an anthropological type of criminal’,
but added:
‘... it appears to be an equally indisputable fact that there is a physical, mental, and
moral type of normal person who tends to be convicted of crime.’ (1913:173)
Thus, while Goring concluded that this was no evidence that criminals were
biologically inferior, he found differences in rates of alcoholism, epilepsy, and
sexual behaviour as well as inferior intelligence. While he heavily criticised the
specificity of Lombroso’s work he called for more detailed research. We have,
therefore, a refutation of the specificality of Lombroso’s theory, but an acceptance
of the direction of research. This is the search for knowledge which desperately
needs a highly articulated general theory to tie the information together, or to
distinguish important variables from the unimportant, but this does not normally
happen. Instead, the criminal – like the duck – is simply assumed to be a product
of some underlying natural order of things.
125
Raffaele Garofalo (1852-1934)
Adopting an early sociological perspective, Baron Raffaele Garofalo attempted a

definition of crime in positivistic terms which distinguished between ‘natural
crimes’, to which Garofalo attached great importance, and ‘police crimes’, a residual
category of lesser importance. ‘Natural crimes’ are those which violate two basic
‘altruistic sentiments’, pity (revulsion against the voluntary infliction of suffering
on others) and probity (respect for the property rights of others). ‘Police offences’
are behaviours which do not offend these altruistic sentiments but are nonetheless
called ‘criminal’ by law. Natural crimes were important both for being more serious,
and because the category itself provided a unifying principle, connecting the
criminal law and natural social processes.
In Criminology (1885: English translation 1914) Garofalo criticised Lombroso’s
theories as inadequate as an explanation for the ‘natural crimes’ of ‘true criminals’;
although he concluded that criminals have ‘regressive characteristics’ indicating a
‘lower degree of advancement’. True criminals lacked the basic altruistic sentiments
and were thus ill-suited for society. They were, in short, an evolutionary mismatch,
and the solution to this evolutionary problem is elimination:
‘In this way, the social power will effect an artificial selection similar to that which
nature effects by the death of individuals inassimilable to the particular conditions of
the environment in which they are born or to which they have been removed. Herein
the state will be simply following the example of nature.’ (1914:219-220)
While the classical theorists saw the symbolic value of punishments as offering a
means of deterring crime in the general population, Garofalo’s emphasis on
Darwinian reasoning saw society as a natural body that must adapt to the
environment and be protected against crime. Social protection was crucial, and
adopting a positivist perspective meant that classical ideas, such as the ideology of
moral responsibility and the proportionality of the punishment to the crime, were
redundant. The actions of the true criminals indicted their inability to live according
to the basic human sentiments necessary in the society, and their elimination served
to protect society; for the lesser criminal, incapacitation – by life imprisonment or
transportation – would suffice. The society ruled over the individual, and the
individual represented just a cell of the social body which could be removed without
much loss.
Enrico Ferri (1856-1929)
Ferri’s work always emphasised the interaction of social, economic and political
factors which contributed to crime, but all of which worked at an individual level,
on the predispositions of the person. In Ferri’s Criminal Sociology crime was ‘the
effect of multiple causes’ that include anthropological, physical, and social factors.
Such factors produced criminals who were classified as:
126
• born or instinctive;
• insane;
• passional;
• occasional;
• habitual.
The positive ‘science of criminality and of social defence against it’ was easy to
distinguish from the classical tradition.
‘The science of crimes and punishments was formerly a doctrinal exposition of the
syllogisms brought forth by the sole force of logical fantasy. Our School has made
it a science of positive observation, which, based on anthropology, psychology, and
criminal statistics as well as on criminal law and studies relative to imprisonment,
becomes the synthetic science to which I myself gave the name “criminal
sociology” ’.
Positivism displays an ambiguous relationship between knowledge and politics.
Positivism should, epistemologically, be the weakest form of knowledge claim.
Positivist knowledge is only as good as the methodology which gives rise to it,
and it does not claim some overriding general theory; but while positivism
claims to be value free and apolitical, we often see in application, as with Ferri
(or Marxism), a structure whereby it is claimed that this knowledge is the ‘truth’
which must therefore be applied and the strength of this claim silences moral-
political debate. After all if one is committed to truth how can one can argue
with the truth that Le Bon, for example, demonstrates, that men’s brains are
larger than women’s, and civilised brains are larger than those of savages? At
root is a dispute about the epistemological criteria which should demarcate good
science from poor or pseudo-science. The 19th century still awaited Karl
Popper’s (1968) replacement of the criteria of verification for distinguishing
good scientific methodology (held in the 19th century), by the criteria of
openness to falsification. For early positivism it was thought that to be scientific
was to be in possession of the truth, or at least part of the truth. Although
contemporary positivism is, or should be, more modest, the link between ‘facts’
and politics can prove particularly ambivalent. For most of his life Ferri was a
committed Marxist and was a member of Parliament for many years; he actually
lost a professorship because of his Marxist leanings. But if Lombroso was a
slave to facts, Ferri was in awe of the principle of determinism and attempted to
merge Marxian and Darwinian principles into conclusions that today seem
highly dubious:
‘The Marxian doctrine of historical materialism... according to which the economic
conditions... determine... both the moral sentiments and the political and legal
institutions of the same group, is profoundly true. It is the fundamental law of positivist
sociology. Yet I think that this theory should be supplemented by admitting in the first
place that the economic conditions of each people are in turn the natural resultant of
its racial energies.’ (1917:118)
127
Throughout his life Ferri attempted to integrate his positive science with political
change – he believed wholly in modernity as a constructivist project. The various
attempts to change the penal code were rejected because they constituted too great
a change from classical legal reasoning. Disappointed in socialism Ferri turned to
fascism as the system most likely to implement the type of reforms he thought
necessary. Thorsten Sellin once said that fascism appealed to Ferri because it
affirmed the primacy of the state’s authority over the individual, and constrained
the excessive individualism he had often criticised.
Early criminological positivism and the rule of law
In the eyes of the early positivists, the classical approach assumed the equality of
mankind. But this was contrary to the facts.
As W Douglas Morrison (1895) put it in the introduction to the English version
of The Female Offender by Caesar Lombroso:
‘The laws assume that the criminal is living under the same set of conditions as the
ordinary man. They are framed and administered on this hypothesis; and they fail in
their operation because this hypothesis is fundamentally false. It may safely be accepted
that the ordinary man – that is to say, the man who habitually lives under ordinary
social and biological conditions – is on certain occasions deterred from entertaining
certain kinds of anti-social ideas by an apprehension that the practice of them will be
followed by public indignation and public punishment... But is it a fact that the criminal
population is composed of ordinary men?
On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that vast numbers of the criminal
population do not live under ordinary social or biological conditions. It is indeed a
certainty that a high percentage of them live under anomalous biological or social
conditions. And it is these anomalous conditions acting upon the offender either
independently or, as is more often the case, in combination which make him what he
is... (vii - ix)
A patient suffering from an attack of typhoid fever cannot be subjected to the
same regimen, to the same dietary, to the same exercise as another person in the
enjoyment of ordinary health. The regimen to which the patient is subjected must be
suited to the anomalous condition in which he happens to be placed. Criminal codes
to be effective must act upon precisely the same principle.’ (ix)
Consider the crime rate of women, which was considerably lower than that of
men. Why was there not an abundance of the criminal type among women?
According to Lombroso:
‘[a] very potent factor has been sexual selection. [Early] man not only refused to
marry a deformed female but ate her, while, on the other hand, preserving for his
enjoyment the handsome woman who gratified his peculiar instincts. In those days he
was the stronger, and choice rested with him.’ (Ibid: 109)
Most women offenders fell into the occasional offender category. The hope for
reform stems from recognising, typologising and differentiating the respective
128
individuals and groups. For example, while Durkheim may search for the causes
of suicide in sociological fluctuations, for Lombroso:
‘Suicide for love has certainly a physiological root, being the effect of an elective
affinity strengthened by the reproductive organs and the peculiar repugnance to
separation induced by these molecules of the organism.’ (p 180) ‘Of course it is
almost always the woman who conceives the suicide and carries it out with most
resolution.’ (p 281)
The constant intersection of biology, politics and history (or at least images of
each) which characterised late 19th century writing have not disappeared. In this
century it produced somewhat extreme examples in the work of Hooton and Sheldon
and was clearly influential upon the Gleucks.
A E Hooton
In the late 1930s A E Hooton, a physical anthropologist at Harvard, drew uncritically

upon the Lombrosian theory of biological premonitions to combine biological and
psychological variables. Hooton was precise:
‘... whatever the crime may be, it ordinarily arises from a deteriorated organism.’
Hooton simply brought the theory to a set of data (again persons already selected
out by the system and labelled as criminals) with little critical appraisal, and
attempted to find as much information to strengthen it, rather than attempt to find
weaknesses on falsification points. Hooton took physical measurements of 4,212
white prisoners from correctional institutions in Massachusetts and seven other
states and compared these to measurements from 313 civilians from Massachusetts
and Tennessee. His work stands as a prime example of bad science. Not only can
we address a range of usual positivist qualifiers to it, for example, inadequate and
non-comparable control groups, assuming causation rather than mere correlation
for the factors observed, inferring biological inferiority from features which may
just as well have demonstrated biological superiority (nowhere does he specify
what inferiority or superiority amounts to!), but the connections between his
assumptions, his methodologies, his data and his solutions all appear to be thought
out before his work was undertaken. He believed in biological inferiority and set
out to demonstrate it:
‘Criminals as a group represent an aggregate of sociologically and biologically
inferior individuals... Marked deficiency in gross bodily dimensions and in head and
face diameters are unequivocal assertions of undergrowth and poor physical
development.
Low foreheads, high perched nasal roots, nasal bridges and tips varying to extremes
of breadth and narrowness, excesses of nasal deflection, compressed faces and narrow
jaws fit well into the general picture of constitutional inferiority. The very small ears
with submedium roll of helix, prominent antihelix and frequent Darwin’s point, hint
at degeneracy...... smaller size, inferior weight and poorer body build, his smaller
129
head, straighter hair, absolutely shorter and relatively broader face, with prominent
but short and often snubbed nose, narrow jaws, small and relatively broad ears.
There can be no doubt of the inferior status of the criminal both in physical and
sociological characteristics. The poorer and weaker specimens tend to be selected for
antisocial careers and for ultimate incarceration. The dregs of every population mixed
and pure are poured into the prison sink.
Criminals are organically inferior. Crime is the resultant of the impact of
environment upon low grade organisms.. It follows that the elimination of the crime
can be effected only by the extirpation of the physically, mentally and morally unfit or
by their complete segregation in a socially aseptic environment.’
Since the processes of inferiority and selection caused the development of crime,
the solution Hooton proposed was the segregation of the criminal population into
a self-contained area with closed inbreeding. He believed this could set into motion
processes of selective struggle which may raise the level of the person above that
of criminal inferiority. Purity of contacts must, however, be maintained! No
politicians, criminologists or uplifters allowed near!
‘[Governments] should expropriate some very considerable tract of desirable land
and establish a reservation for permanent occupation by paroled delinquents. Such a
reservation should have its frontiers closed under supervision... Emigrants from prison
into such a reservation should be kept there permanently. I am rather inclined to
believe that in a generation or two some of these penal reservations might develop
into such prosperous and progressive areas that the inhabitants would be unwilling to
receive more colonists from the jails. If natural selection were allowed to operate in
such a society, it might work out its own salvation. It would, however, be quite essential
to keep out extraneous politicians, criminologists and uplifters.’ (E A Hooton, The
American Criminal, An Anthropological Study, 1939; Crime and the Man, 1939,
quotes in Tappan, 1960, 87-88)
Ironically, Hooton’s lack of a criterion of ‘biological inferiority’, or a systematic
general theory connecting this condition to crime, meant that even contemporary
commentators could reverse his findings. Ashley Montagu applied biological
standards used in physical anthropology for defining advanced, primitive, and
indifferent human characteristics, to claim that Hooton’s criminal series
showed:
‘... only 4 per cent of primitive, 15.8 of indifferent and the astonishing amount of 49.5
per cent of advanced characters, more frequently than the noncriminal population.
Therefore we can see that Hooton’s findings actually make his criminal series a
considerably more advanced group biologically than his non-criminal series.’
(1941:51)
W H Sheldon
Sheldon’s (1942) theory linked body-build and personality. Sheldon (1940, 1942)
described three basic body types, or somatotypes, based upon in-depth study of
five regions of the body:
130
• head, face, neck;

• arms, shoulder, hands;
• thoracic trunk;
• abdominal trunk;
• thigh, calf, and feet.
Nude photographs are taken front and back and we can distinguish (or at least
Sheldon could, few other scholars appeared able to understand exactly how!):
• the broad and muscular mesomorph;
• the thin and bony ectomorph; and
• the large and heavy endomorph.
Some individuals are ‘pure’ types, while others are hybrids incorporating elements
from two, or even three, builds in their physique. Sheldon further suggested that
each body-build is characterised by a particular type of personality: the mesomorph
is an adventurous, aggressive person; the ectomorph a restrained, introverted
individual; the endomorph a sociable, outgoing character. Each individual will
display a mixture of these personality traits according to his or her own particular
somatotype. Moreover, Sheldon even managed to make three temperamental
patterns corresponding to the three models:
‘Viscerotonia or Oral type: displays a tendency towards relaxation, conviviality, and
gluttony for food, company, and affection or social support; Somatotonia or Urethral
type: displays tendency for assertiveness, physical adventurousness, energetic, love
of domination and power, courage, aggressiveness;
Cerebretonia or Anal type: displays a tendency towards restraint, love of privacy,
overintensity, apprehensiveness, secretiveness, emotional restraint,
hypersensitivity.’
Tables are constructed, graphs are drawn – life becomes reducible to quantities. In
an amazing text Sheldon (Varieties of Delinquent Youth, 1949) sets out the
photographs and somatotypes of a sample of almost 200 males from a private
treatment unit, and gives a humorous and sometimes irreverent prognosis for each
one. He is so scathing of one that he predicts that only two possibilities are open
for his life-direction: serious criminality or to become the President of the United
States! Sheldon argued that delinquents were characterised by a preponderance of
mesomorphs, some indication of endomorphy, and a marked lack of ectomorphs.
Sheldon concluded this pattern differed from that found in non-criminal populations,
demonstrating that there were differences in the physiques of delinquent and non-
delinquent males. Sheldon also drew attention to a significant delinquent type he
termed ‘Dionysian’, individuals characterised by exuberant, extravertive, non-
inhibited and predatory qualities. Sheldon was impressed by the amount of time
and effort the boys often put into predation, ie the pursuit of sex and petty crimes.
He argued that the persistently criminal boy was expressing a Dionysian reaction
which was almost as much part of his constitutional design as the way he walks.
For Sheldon the level of persistent predation displayed could not have been achieved
131
without a strong temperamental predisposition toward predation. The vast variety

of crime is twisted and fitted into various typologies, and dubious connections are
drawn from a variety of sources. For example, tensions from the sona and gut
cause the type of antidisciplinary religious outlooks which characterised the later
stages of the Roman Empire and present day Freudian psychoanalysts! Both the
boys in the sample and the then current crop of American Businessmen were
predominantly Dionysian!
While Sheldon translated the complexity of individuality into a mathematical
formula (he came to refer to his subjects by their somatotype scores, for
example, 7-1-7, or 2-7-1), his text also reveals an empathic understanding at
odds with such mathematical fetishism. This is clear from his discussion of two
groups of boys:
‘These boys were on the whole having a good time... The youngsters must be judged
against their own standards and criteria, if they are to be judged at all. They were
doing pretty well at finding a way of life that served their own purposes, and they had
fun, probably more fun than average or ordinary people have. They were more
interesting than ordinary people are. If they are to be compared, individual for
individual, with the social work profession that with manifest bewilderment was trying
to ride herd on them, I think the boys had the better of it...
The youngsters seemed to be more realistically aware of the essentially predatory
philosophy underlying the social structure than were those who had been – and still
are – attempting to re-educate these youngsters away from such a philosophy. I
many times had the feeling, in talking with the boys, that I was in a false position.
I felt sometimes like the envoy of a dishonestly predatory enterprise sent to decoy
and trap into a kind of slavery those free spirits who had thus far managed to elude
the snare...
They saw human society in a truer light and were more truly engaged with life
than were most of their elders who were professedly engaged in dealing with
‘delinquency’ but in fact were concerned mainly with their own security and
righteousness.’ (1949:827-828)
The Gluecks (1950; 1956) matched 500 officially labelled offenders and 500
controls by age, IQ, race and area of residence. They found twice as many
mesomorphs and less then half as many ectomorphs among the offenders. Cortes
and Gatti (1972) also appeared to support Sheldon in finding that officially defined
delinquent populations have more mesomorphs than would be expected. However,
other studies, such as McCandless et al (1972), which failed to find any correlation
between either convicted or self-reported offending and body build in 177 adolescent
males randomly selected from 500 boys aged 15-17 at a training school, are less
supportive. In reviewing the literature, Rees (1973) argued that while some studies
had found a correlation, the overall conclusion was that no link between body-
build and crime had been established. But, even today, this does not deter those
who are desperate to reinstate constitutional factors. In their huge survey, Wilson
and Herrnstein (1985) devote several pages to reproducing diagrams and
photography used by Sheldon, and conclude that ‘wherever it has been examined,
criminals on the average differ in physique from the population at large. They tend
to be more mesomorphic (muscular) and less ectomorphic (linear)’. They add that
132
where it has been assessed the ‘masculine’ configuration called andromorphy also
characterises the average criminal (1985:89).
The whole enterprise smacks of a preference for tasty ducks.
The legacy of positivism: disentangling the mess
Constitutional positivism has resulted in much crass criminology. Consider

genetic transmission and the issue of eugenics. In pure form, a theory of crime
based solely upon genetic transmission would hold that crime is a direct product
of heredity – a criminal is born not made. We have seen that Lombroso originally
argued that criminals were the product of a genetic constitution unlike that found
in the non-criminal population. However, Lombroso gradually broadened the
range of causal factors, first through the notion of ‘indirect heredity’, whereby
criminality could be acquired through contact with other ‘degenerates’, such as
insane people or alcoholics, and later with environmental conditions, such as poor
education. Lombroso came to argue that about one-third of offenders were born
criminals but the remainder had to be accounted for by some other means of
explanation.
The recent approach of sociobiology has tried to link social behaviour with
genetic transmission and some proponents have looked towards a ‘criminal gene’
which sets into play the propensity for criminal activity. In Born to Crime: the
genetic causes of criminal behaviour (1984) Lawrence Taylor argues that in the
future we will routinely use genetic screening and genetic surgery, and that a ‘bit
of cut-and-sew work’ could be employed to correct ‘genetic abnormality that is
likely to manifest itself in future violent conduct’ (1984:154). It is, however, difficult
to prove any genetic propensity to violence, let alone explain how this causes
crime. As Gottfredson and Hirschi state, biological positivism cannot trace the
complicated line from genes to the range of complex behaviour which can fall
under the label of crime. Such positivism seems to impliedly equate aggression or
violence with criminality, but this may only be one factor involved in some
situations.
The attempt to locate proof of genetic transmission for criminality has focused
on three populations – the family, twins, and adoptees.
Family studies
The family has been treated as if it was a stable entity and studied to examine
whether the processes within a criminal family differ in functioning from non-
criminal families, and to estimate the degree of similarity between the behaviour
of the offender and their biological relatives. Longitudinal research has gathered
much data concerning the family backgrounds of offenders (Farrington et al (1986);
West (1982); Offord (1982)). Family studies rely upon the position that since
biological relatives share varying degrees of genetic constitution (the closer the
133
biological relationship, the greater the genetic similarity), if criminality is inherited,

criminal families will reproduce criminality in their children. From Lombroso
onwards a common theme has been the idea that offenders come from families
with a criminal history (Dugdale (1910); Estabrook (1916)). Recent studies, for
instance Osborn and West (1979), found that about 40% of the sons of criminal
fathers were criminal themselves, compared with a figure of 13% for sons of non-
criminal fathers. In reviewing this evidence Hurwitz and Christianson (1983)
distance themselves from the claim that crime is inherited; instead of causal proof,
all we can discuss are correlations.
Note: the finding of an empirical correlation, for example, between two variables
– family criminality and offspring criminality, does not prove that a causal
relationship exists between those two variables. Instead a third variable, perhaps
environmental rather than genetic, may be an important factor in the offending of
both parents and their children. The shared genes do not cause the high correlations
in the offending records of family members, but the fact that all the family members
had poor schooling, or inadequate diets, or were unemployed, or lived in the same
city area, or were of the same social class. The ‘under-the-roof’ culture, that is the
range of social and psychological factors within the family environment map
influences the adoption of criminal values, behaviour, and so on. From the positivist
perspective, greater control of variables is required which would allow the effects
of either heredity or environment to be controlled, so that the effect of the other
can be accurately assessed. The study of twins is a traditional methodology, which
goes some way in this direction.
Twin studies
There are two different types of twins. Identical, or Monozygotic (MZ), twins
develop from the splitting of a single egg at the time of conception and so share
exactly the same genetic constitution. Fraternal, or Disygotic (DZ), twins develop
from two different fertilised eggs and are therefore no more alike than any other
pair of siblings, sharing about 50% of their genetic constitution. The key point of
demonstration is a rather large assumption namely that if the two members of a
twin pair experience the same environment, then any major differences between
members of a pair may be due to genetic variation. As MZ twins have identical
genes then it would be predicted that their behaviour would show greater
concordance than that of DZ twins. (Concordance can be seen as the degree to
which related pairs of subjects within a study population display the same
behaviour. Expressed as a percentage, a 50% concordance would indicate that in
half of the total sample each member of a twin pair showed the same target
behaviour, a 75% rate that three-quarters of the twin pairs showed the same
behaviour, and so on.) The twin study method has been widely used in seeking to
determine the influence of heredity in, for example, intelligence, and also in
disturbances such as alcoholism, depression, and schizophrenia.
From the clearly titled Crime as Destiny by the Austrian physician Johannes
134
Lange (1929) there was little doubt of the aims of these studies. Indeed, MZ twins
generally showed a much higher degree of concordance than DZ twins for criminal
behaviour; the seven studies in Table 1 up to and including 1941 show a mean
concordance rate of 75% for MZ twins compared to a mean 24% for DZ twins.
However, extremely small sample sizes, dubious methodologies of samples, and
the suspect determination of whether the paring is really D2 or M2 make the process
questionable.
Technological advances, such as fingerprints, blood typing, and serum protein
analysis increased the certitude of, at least, the type of twins studied. The result
was a decrease in concordance, the five studies in Table 1 reported from 1961
onwards show a mean concordance of 48% for MZ twins, compared to 20% for
DZ twins.
Table 1 Summary of twin study data
MZ Twins DZ Twins
No of % No of %
pairs concordant pairs concordant
Lange (1929) 13 77 17 12
Legras (1932) 4 100 5 0
Rosanoff et al (1934) 37 68 60 10
Kranz (1936) 31 65 43 53
Stumpfl (1936) 18 61 19 37
Borgstrom (1939) 4 75 5 40
Rosanoff et al (1941) 45 78 27 18
Yoshimasu (1961) 28 61 18 11
Yoshimasu (1965) 28 50 26 0
Hayashi (1967) 15 73 5 60
Dalgaard and Kringlen
(1976) 31 26 54 15
Christianson (1977) 85 32 147 12
Table 1 Summary of twin study data
For sympathetic commentators, the results are impressive Taylor (1984 25-49)
concludes that ‘nature’s own laboratory teaches us that much of human behaviour
– including criminal behaviour is caused by genetic factors’. However, it is extremely
difficult to distinguish the effect of social environment from how genetics ‘causes’
the complex phenomenon of a social hybrid.
135
Adoptees
An alternative strategy to the use of twins is to study children separated from their
parents and raised in another family. The study of adopted children offers a means
to do this, and several large scale studies have been carried out. Mednick,
Gabrielli, and Hutchings (1984), for example, analysed 14,427 male and female
adoptees and their biological parents (all the non-familial adoptions in Denmark
between 1924 and 1947). Certain interesting correlations were produced, but
considering all the social variables, and the effects of the Second World War, it is
difficult to see the value of the information. Trasler, in addition, warns of the
impossibility of the methodology to cover social and political factors in the
process: ‘this area is a methodological minefield because of the complex and
unexplicit policies of adoption and fostering agencies’ (1987:190).
Other constitutional studies

Other studies have examined dietary factors such as levels of protein, carbohydrate,
and sugar in relation to criminal behaviour (Schoenthaler and Doraz 1983). Yet
further studies have focused upon the effects of hormonal influences (Rada (1983)),
allergic reactions (Mawson and Jacobs (1978)), food additives (Hawley and Buckley
(1974)), and lead pollution (David et al (1976)).
Another line of research has concentrated upon neurophysiological
correlates of criminal behaviour. The typical strategy in this research is to
compare the neurophysiological functioning of so-called criminal and non-
criminal groups. The measure of functioning is usually made via the
electroencephalogram (EEG), an instrument which records the electrical
activity of the cortex. The EEG can be used to detect unusual patterns of activity,
or to search for some type of neurological dysfunction. Historically, abnormal
EEG has been associated with unusual crimes such as murder by the insane (D
Hill and Pond (1952)). A number of studies, however, have failed to show any
long-term correlation between abnormal EEG and future behaviour (Loomis et
al (1967)). Similarly, while some studies have linked EEG abnormality with
violence (D Williams (1969)), others have failed to replicate this finding (Moyer
(1976)) or, indeed, to show any relationship at all between EEG and delinquency
(Hsu et al (1985)).
While some of the more unusual conditions, such as brain lesions, may explain
why, in some extreme individual cases, the individual came to be in trouble with
social control agencies, the case for a general biological theory of crime is
intellectually suspect. This does not deter its practitioners, who claim the problem
can be rectified with a better data base, and note that serious biochemical research
has only been undertaken in this field for about a decade, and improvements in
statistical sampling or the technologies of measurement, for example, precise
neurological measurement or the use of the EEG; which is acknowledged to be
problematic in terms of providing objective information.
136
By contrast, Gottfredson and Hirschi are scathing:

‘... improvements in statistics, measurement, and sampling by themselves cannot
overcome problems inherent in biological positivism. More than 100 years after
Lombroso initiated this line of inquiry, the major contribution of biological research
would appear to be that data suggesting that biological variables may be correlated
with crime. Unfortunately, this evidence is often so suspect that scholars friendly to
the idea of biological causation are left wondering why this discipline has so much
trouble contributing ‘acceptable’ facts to the field of criminology.
The reasons for the absence of influence from biology are not hard to find. The
discipline proceeds without a concept of crime and without a concept of criminality...
the history of XYY chromosome research tells a similar story: extraordinary effort
expended to document the possible existence of a small effect, the significance of
which is unclear even to those pursuing it.’ (1990:62)
There are, however, several scholars who still pursue this work, and constitutional
theories of crime have not been totally rejected. At one level they influence the
common sense perceptions of criminal justice personnel. Feldman (1977)
suggests that certain aspects of physical appearance, including body-build, can be
instrumental in attracting police attention or influencing sentencing decisions.
With certain stereotypical images of criminals in use (Bull (1982); Box, S (1983);
A G Goldstein et al (1984)), then those individuals who match the stereotype may
be being over-selected from the criminal population. As well as this ‘selection
effect’, Feldman suggests various other ways in which bodybuild might be related
to crime: the muscular individual may be more likely to be invited by peers to
participate in criminal acts; or certain body-builds may be more likely to be
successful at crime.
Humans are a mind-body-environment complex, thus genetic potential may
contribute to difficulties with learning, education, and socialisation, and so be a
factor in the processes which create social and individual resources. This influences
life chances and decision-making, and affects the various pathways of life. The
arrogant mistake of constitutional theories is to stress the role of inherent biological
factors of body-build and, as we shall see, the psychological construct of personality,
at the expense of social factors, in the claim that these inquiries can force nature to
reveal the ‘cause’. But nature is neither so simple, nor so blatant.
137
138
CHAPTER SEVEN
CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM II:

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE POSITIVISATION OF
THE SOUL
‘It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect.
On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around,
on, within the body by the functioning of a power... on those one supervises,
trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized,
over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their
lives.’ (Michel Foucault, quoted in Rose, 1990: v)
Positivism, learning and psychology
Once it was common to talk of humans possessing a soul; the positivist approach
reduced this to a matter of mental hygiene. In this chapter we shall look at three
influential theories which focused on the psychology of the subject, and his/her
learning ability; those of Bowlby, Eysenck, and Sutherland. Each theory
concentrates on what may be seen as different sites in a chain of processes; the
journey through the pathways of everyday life. The chapter concludes by looking
at the notion of the psychopath.
A note of warning: psychological studies, like the search for constitutional
factors, appear to presume that law abiding behaviour is the normal state of affairs.
A lot of the early studies simply assume a consensus by all normal people that the
law reflects their interests; therefore to breach the law is abnormal behaviour.
Contemporary studies attempt to escape from this naivete by drawing a distinction
between crime and criminality. For contemporary positivist scholars such as Wilson
and Herrnstein (1985), or Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), the key to modern
criminology is to explain criminality. The presumption is that properly socialised
individuals, or properly controlled individuals (individuals who exercise proper
levels of self-control), would not commit crime. Throughout their work the search
is for the flaw in the person, in his constitution or genetic inheritance, that makes
socialisation more difficult. The lack of socialisation creates a condition of
criminality, or propensity to commit crime.
One example is intelligence. It is argued by positivist psychologists that there is
a direct link between low intelligence and crime. How is this?
Typical IQ tests consist of two sub-groups of tests, one involving verbal skills,
such as word knowledge, verbally coded information, and verbal reasoning, and
the other non-verbal, for example, assembling objects and completing pictures.
There is little doubt that IQ tests measure something substantial; demonstrating a
high cognitive ability to score at a series of tests. There is little doubt that high IQ
scores predict high academic capability and the capacity to learn tasks and skills.
139
Some tests have been absurd (for example, one test used on South African Blacks
in the 1920s, asked candidates to complete certain pictures, one of which was of a
missing net in a tennis match. It was little wonder that individuals who had never
witnessed a tennis match in their life failed to score highly!) Relating IQ scores to
criminality is a project laden with pit falls.
The first studies seeking to locate any relationship between IQ scores and
criminal involvement were conducted in the early part of this century (for
example, Goddard (1914, 1921)) and argued for a strong relationship between
criminal activity and low intelligence. Over time a disparity in testing between
convicted offenders and ‘normal’ citizens of around 8 IQ points has remained
stable (Hirschi and Hindelang (1977)). It may be that this disparity is partly a
result of various factors, notably:
• Officially designated offenders come largely from the least well-off socio and
economic groups and members of these groups - perhaps for a variety of
environmental conditions early in life - have lower than average tested IQ;
hence class needs to be controlled to gain better accuracy. To avoid arguments
that the social conditions of early child development may be causal of low IQ
scores, Murray and Herrnstein (1994), in The Bell Curve, imply that low IQ
may be the reason for both their membership of the lower classes and criminal
involvement.
• Some commentators have suggested that the less intelligent may be more likely
to be caught. Low intelligence may affect both the selection of the type of
offence and the methodology. However, West and Farrington (1977) found the
relationship between intelligence and crime remained when crime was measured
by self-report studies.
• It has been suggested that low intelligence may result in the accused agreeing
with police suggestions and thus easier to convict. Gath (1972) found that
juveniles with IQ scores over 115 were less likely to be caught, and if convicted,
less likely to be sent to institutions thereby avoiding their labelling and
criminogenic effects.
How is it suggested that low IQ can lead to greater criminal involvement? Hirschi
and Hindelang (1977), writing from a social control theory perspective (see Chapter
Eight), suggest that low verbal IQ results in poor school performance leading to
negative attitudes to school and to success through legal channels. The individual
then drops out of school and does not attain reasonable employment. Delinquent
activity then results. Other constitutionally minded commentators suggest that anti-
social behaviour preceded school problems, and that similar background factors
may be responsible for both conditions: ie low IQ and anti-social behaviour.
Labelling theorists (see Chapter Fourteen) infer that original problems may lead to
the individual perceiving him or herself as stupid, and therefore not trying fully at
the tests. Conversely, teachers may respond to the results of IQ scores, and encourage
high scorers while downgrading low scorers. All of these suggestions are
controversial.
140
Criminological Positivism II
Quay suggests that low IQ can interact with child rearing practices:
‘In the early years lower IQ makes a child vulnerable to poor parenting and even
makes poor parenting more likely. The probability of this increases if the IQ deficit is
accompanied by a fussy or a difficult temperament, motor overreactivity and poor
inhibitory control. All of these combine in the early onset of troublesome behaviour.
The affected child is now at a double disadvantage when he enters school. He has
both less intellectual ability, particularly in the verbal spheres, to cope with academic
problems and he has oppositional and aggressive behavioural problems alienating to
teachers and peers... both are likely to lead to school failure... which reinforces more
conduct-disordered behaviour... All of these factors and others (eg, deviant parental
and peer models) interact to produce behaviour which is legally prescribed.’
(1987:114)
Quay’s argument is interactional, ie it postulates that low IQ can have a role in a
complex series of interactions and feed-back processes. Many of the earlier (and
still influential) approaches are not so subtle. For example, Wilson and Herrnstein
(1985), who place discussion of IQ in their chapter on constitutional approaches
suggesting it is largely inherited (most biologists believe that IQ differences are
almost entirely environmental and the result of training, stimulation and possibly
diet), imply that low IQ causes difficulties in socialisation. For them an
undersocialised individual has a criminal propensity since he or she has less internal
prohibitions against committing a crime. In a remarkable assertion they use this as
a partial explanation for the low crime rates of Japan. Wilson and Herrnstein state
simply:
‘The average Japanese score is about 110, well above that for any country for which
data are available [they footnote a study by Lynn]. It is certainly above the American
average, which is set at 100 for the test on which the Japanese score 110. Japan
therefore has a smaller fraction of its population in the range of scores between 60
and 100, the range at highest risk for criminal behaviour... a society’s willingness to
rely on internalised values depends, inversely, on how large a segment of the population
will fail to learn them. The segment in Japan is much smaller than that in America.’
(1985:456)
This turns a whole set of highly contestable contentions into what looks like accepted
wisdom. Conversely:
• The study referred to by Lynn appeared in Nature in 1982 and was subjected to
withering attack by Stevenson and Azuma in the same journal in 1983. Lynn
had used a small sample of the children of well-off Japanese and compared
this with a much larger and scientifically representative sample of American
children. There is actually little methodologically sound evidence of a substantial
difference between Japanese children and American.
• To assert that a lower section of the Japanese population have low IQ’s and this
means that the Japanese are more easily socialised into internal prohibitions
against lawbreaking, assumes that the law has a similar role in the socio-cultural
environment of both countries.
141
When we observe the social world what we see is partially created, provided by
structure, by human conceptual thought. Crime is a creation of conceptual thought.
To assert a direct link between psychological profiles and criminality needs
explaining in some general theory. Instead Wilson and Herrnstein offer little in the
way of a general theory and repeat the mistake of positivism in attributing the
causes of crime from the study of those officially designated as ‘criminals’ or, as
they state at the beginning of their chapter: ‘people who break the law are often
psychologically atypical’ (1985:173). This is a common methodology: take a sample
of individuals who have come to your attention for delinquency, or having been
convicted for crime, and analyse their background and mind-set. We see a direct
link between the clinic, an institution designed to deal with troublesome people,
and the creation of positivist knowledges purporting to explain the psychological
functioning of these persons.
Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation and crime
The creation of Bowlby’s thesis is a good example of the close linkage between
positivism and the clinic. His thesis arose from his experience with 44 juvenile
thieves referred to his child guidance clinic from 1936 to 1939 (Bowlby 1944;
1946). After comparing this group of children with a matched group of non-
delinquent children, also referred to the clinic, Bowlby grew convinced of a
demonstrable link between early separation from the mother and juvenile theft.
Thirty nine per cent of the delinquent children had experienced complete
separation from their mothers for six months or more in the first five years of
their life; but only 5% of the non-delinquent group had a similar experience.
While later studies failed to provide such clear evidence (Bowlby et al (1956)),
Bowldy was already convinced (1951) that early maternal deprivation was
causally related to anti-social behaviour. Two ideas provided the foundation: (i) a
warm, close, and unbroken relationship between child and mother (or
permanent mother substitute) is essential for mental health; (ii) separation and
rejection from and by the mother accounts for most of the more intractable cases
of delinquency (Bowlby (1949, 1951); Bowlby and Salter-Ainsworth (1965)).
As Bowlby put it:
‘Essential for mental health is that a child should experience a warm, intimate, and
continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which
both find satisfaction and enjoyment...
Maternal separateness and parental rejection are believed together to account for a
majority of the more intractable cases [of delinquency].’ (1949:37)
Bowlby’s theory appeared to offer dramatic new possibilities for establishing mental
hygiene. Instead of focusing upon evidencing psychoses and incarceration in a
segregative institution, preventative action in the community could be undertaken.
142
If the precise nature of troubles in childhood and their later effects could be
established, then techniques for early intervention could be developed.
Bowlby was given an international stage for his ideas when asked to prepare
the report for the WHO on the needs of homeless children. Bowlby (1951) not
only restated his views on maternal deprivation but developed these in a package
of ideas on the connection between mental health, childhood, the social
consequences of maternal deprivation, the tasks of government and the role of
specialist expertise. In short, the task of creating a good population meant it should
be the responsibility of government to supervise and regulate the relations between
mother and child.
There have been many criticisms of Bowlby’s theory. One line concerns the
experimental methodology operating in the two major empirical studies. Both
Patricia Morgan (1975) and Feldman (1977) highlight serious flaws, including the
unrepresentative nature of the samples, poor control group matching, and unreliable
methods of assessment. The theory itself has also been criticised (see Hall Williams
(1981)). Wootton (1959) specifically pointed out the absence of evidence that the
damage from separation is irreversible, and that in any event the type of delinquent
with which Bowlby was concerned forms only a small minority of the total
delinquent population. In his defence sympathetic commentators caution that
Bowlby never made the more extravagant claims for his results that some of this
critics have suggested he did.
Bowlby’s theories gave rise to a body of research which investigated the effects
of maternal deprivation on childhood development. The basic idea was extended
to account for a range of childhood disorders; to generate policies for the
treatment of the effects of deprivation, and to reinforce government policies
designed to strengthen the role of the nuclear family, or support the solo mother
(Bowlby (1979); Rutter (1972, 1981); Sluckin et al (1983)). A provocative and
emotive concept - the broken home - had been created and there were many parties
interested in writing its effects (Grygier et al (1970); Little (1965)). Certain
findings indicated that a broken home played some part in the development of
delinquent behaviour; other factors, such as family tension and levels of violence
within an ‘unbroken’ family may have even greater effect. Longitudinal studies
have shown that the important family influences are much more complex than
simply maternal deprivation alone (West (1982)). A Clarke and A Clarke (1976)
place the broken home idea into one of the ‘myths’ surrounding early childhood
experience, arguing that the real issue is the quality of upbringing. In the US the
Gluecks preferred the idea of ‘under-the-roof culture’, specifying that the moral
and emotional conditions of the youth’s home had more effect upon behaviour
and attitudes than maternal deprivation. The broken home concept operates as a
very strong popular or ‘lay’ explanation of criminal involvement (Furnham and
Henderson (1983); Hollin and Howells (1987)). Perhaps what is at stake is both
more simple and yet deeper than the idea of material deprivation: namely that
family experiences and the quality of life enjoyed during a person’s early years
143
create strong social and personal resources for the individual to use in his/her
future life paths. While the right’s view of the family appears to focus almost
exclusively upon control - hence the broken home reduces the family’s traditional
capacity to discipline and punish children - the experience of family life is a
contributing process in the creation of an active and positive self-hood. If crime is
essentially an intersubjective phenomenon - a relationship between offender and
victim - the quality of intersubjective experiences in early life can be expected to
impact upon later perceptions of social relationships. Further, those children
whose socialisation has imparted them with a range of social skills will be better
able to negotiate the complicated pathways of late-modern life than those with low
social skills; those with a confident and secure sense of self-worth better able to
withstand the stresses and disorientating effects of late-modern urban culture. (For
an overview of families and children see Currie (1985:ch 6).)
What is a problem family? What is the well adjusted family? In reading the
literature on family studies one is tempted to argue that perhaps it is not a static
conception but an attitude. An attitude in which the ‘family’ accepts responsibility
for managing the relationships within it and forms a consensual partnership with
social expertise. The modern family accepts the responsibility for managing itself
according to the norms of proper conduct; the ideal modern family produces
individuals of high self-control. But can individuals vary in constitutional propensity
or ability to learn self-control? The ability of the individual to control his/her own
stimuli was a latent theme of the best known of the British positivist psychological
theories, that of Hans Eysenck.
Eysenck’s theory of crime
Eysenck’s control-orientated theory incorporates biological, social, and individual

factors into a master language which is inscribable, calculable, easily understandable
and offers treatment potential. Through genetic endowment individuals are born
with slightly different cortical and autonomic nervous systems which affect their
ability to learn from, or, more properly, to condition to, environmental stimuli. An
individual’s personality is defined by the individual’s behaviour, which is influenced
by both biological and social factors.
Eysenck’s theory derives from his work conducted during World War II on
soldiers referred to the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital. Eysenck claimed the neuroses
exhibited were not so much illnesses as a simple failure to adapt to army routine
and discipline. Eysenck went beyond the parameters of medicine and gained his
data from combining the techniques of questionnaires and drafting scales, with
small scale studies into humour, levels of aspiration, irritability and the rigidity
with which his patients held views.
Eysenck conceptualised personality in terms of a two-dimensional space along
two axes, introversion-extraversion (E) and neuroticism (N); later work (HJ
144
Eysenck and SBG Eysenck (1968)) described a third dimension, psychoticism

(P). Each of these dimensions is conceived as a continuum, with individuals
located through their test scores. Extraversion runs from high (extravert) to low
(introvert); similarly neuroticism runs from high (neurotic) to low (stable); as also
does psychoticism.
The extravert is cortically under-aroused and therefore is continually seeking
stimulation to maintain cortical arousal at an optimal level: thus the extravert is
impulsive and seeks excitement. The introvert is cortically over-aroused and
therefore tries to avoid stimulation to keep arousal levels down to a comfortable,
optimal level: introverts are therefore characterised by a quiet, reserved demeanour.
A key idea is that of learning via conditioning: using the behavioural learning by
Pavlovian conditioning or association rather than operant conditioning leads us to
expect extraverts to condition less efficiently than introverts. Neuroticism,
sometimes called emotionality, is argued to be related to the functioning of the
autonomic nervous system (ANS). Individuals at the high extreme of this continuum
are characterised by a very labile ANS, which causes strong reactions to any
unpleasant or painful stimuli: High N individuals display moody, anxious behaviour.
Low N individuals have a very stable ANS and so display calm, even-tempered
behaviour even when under stress. As with E, N is also linked with conditionability:
High N leads to poor conditioning because of the vitiating effects of anxiety; Low
N leads to efficient conditioning. As assessed by psychometric tests, each individual
scores on both E and N; therefore their position on these two dimensions of
personality can be plotted.
Tables can be constructed which locate various individuals according to their
cortical capabilities. We can, ideally, plot an individual’s learning ease and
socialisation potential. As conditionability is related to levels of E and N, stable
introverts (Low N – Low E) will condition best; stable extraverts (Low N – High
E) and neurotic introverts (High N – Low E) will be at some mid-point; while
neurotic extraverts (High N – High E) will condition least well.
Not all features of the thoughts, attitudes, and sentiments of people can be so
easily reduced. Eysench has difficulty in specifying what exactly the third
personality dimension, psychoticism (P), refers to. Although he claims a genetic
basis for P, he has been unable to describe any biological basis in detail (HJ Eysenck
and SBG Eysenck (1968; 1976)). The target seems obvious: the psychopath (SBG
Eysenck and HJ Eysenck (1972)). Operationally, the P scale attempts to assess
attributes such as preference for solitude, a lack of feeling for others, sensation-
seeking, tough-mindedness, and aggression. However often he refines and revises
it (SBG Eysenck et al (1985)), it is still difficult to see what exactly, if anything,
the P scale is measuring (Howarth (1986)).
Eysenck has published widely on his theory of the relationship between
personality and crime laying out the basic theme that criminality and antisocial
conduct are positively and causally related to high psychoticism, high extraversion,
and high neuroticism. Extraverts and possibly persons high on the psychoticism
145
scale, have biologically determined low degrees of arousal and arousability and
seek behaviours (risk taking, sensation seeking, impulsivity and so forth) that
increase the cortical level of arousal to a more acceptable amount. This behaviour
is not necessarily anti-social, it may occur through participation in sports, adventures
and other arousal-producing activities. But neuroticism-anxiety acts as a drive that
combines with learned behaviour patterns based on the biological foundation in
such a way as to increase the anti-social behaviour produced by the P and E
personality traits.
From this perspective the conscience is a biologically influenced phenomena.
Pro-social conduct has to be learned by the growing child, and this learning is
accomplished through a process of Pavlovian conditioning. Pro-social conduct is
praised, anti-social conduct is punished by peers, parents, teachers and others.
Through a constant repetition of such reinforcements, the ‘conscience’ becomes
established as a conditioned response, leading to pro-social and altruistic behaviour.
As introverts form conditioned responses of this type more readily than extraverts,
they are more easily socialised through Pavlovian conditioning and hence are less
likely to indulge in anti-social activities.
We can see how the theory ties together biological material and the
environment through the medium of the individual. Each individual develops a
particular conscience and this is the result of a set of conditioned emotional
responses to environmental events associated with anti-social behaviour. For
example, the child who misbehaves incurs parental wrath; the fear and pain this
brings is associated with the antisocial act, and through this conditioning process
the child becomes socialised. The speed and efficiency of social conditioning will
mainly depend upon the individual’s inherited biological personality in terms of E
and N. As the High E-High N combination leads to poor conditionability then
such individuals will be least likely to learn social control and therefore, it is
predicted, will be over-represented in offender populations. Conversely Low E-
Low N would lead to effective socialisation, so that these individuals would be
predicted to be under represented in offender groups. The remaining two
combinations, High E-Low N and Low E-High N, fall at some intermediate level
and so would be expected in both offender and non-offender groups. The third
personality dimension, P, is also argued to be strongly related to offending,
particularly with crimes which involve hostility towards other people. Eysenck
suggests that persons with strong anti-social inclinations will have high P, high E,
and high N scores. Eysenck controls for the heterogeneity of crime, there are
politically motivated crimes, impulsive crimes, crimes committed by the
intellectually disadvantaged, and so on, by his notion of antisocialness.
In spite of the fact, or perhaps because of it, he wrote at a time of increasing
dissatisfaction with ideas of rehabilitation and the growth of labelling theory,
Eysenck’s theory of crime attracted considerable attention and led to a great deal
of empirical research (for example, Bartol (1980); H J Eysenck (1977); Feldman
(1977); Powell (1977)). In effect Eysenck had laid claim to found an independent
146
profession of clinical psychology and there were many to seize the possibility.
Using the terms of investigation that Eysenck laid down, investigators support the
contention that offenders will score highly on P, and the majority of studies show
that offender samples score highly on N. The data is mixed for E: some studies
reported high E scores as predicted in offender samples, others found no
difference between offender and non-offender samples, and a small number of
studies reported lower scores in offender groups. The general pattern for P, E, and
N is similar with both young and adult offender groups. In seeking to account for
the discrepant findings for E, SBG Eysenck and HJ Eysenck (1971) suggested that
E might be split into two subscales, sociability and impulsiveness, with only the
latter related to offending. A study by SBG Eysenck and McGurk (1980)
confirmed that an offender sample scored higher than a non-offender sample on
impulsiveness, with no difference between the two samples on a measure of
sociability.
These investigations essentially replicated Eysenck’s work, with the majority
of studies examining the so-called personality traits singly, rather than in
combination; few studies attempted to control for the type of crime. Crime was
treated as a single naturalist phenomena. Even on the conditions laid down by
Eysenck, the methodology was often suspect, since Eysenck’s argument concerned
the combined effects of different personality traits and the concept of ‘antisocial
crimes’.
Eysenck himself finds fault with many of the early studies:
‘Many of the studies were carried out before the hypothesis was put forward and used
questionnaires and inventories less than ideally suited for the purpose and sometimes
only tangentially relevant. Control groups were not always carefully selected; some
investigators, for instance, have used the ubiquitous student groups as controls which
is inadmissible. There was often failure to control for dissimulation through the use
of lie scales. Where lie scales were introduced, sometimes very high levels of
dissimulation were recorded, but this information was used in the interpretation of
the data. The fact that criminals are not a homogeneous group was disregarded; different
investigators have studied different populations, specialising in different types of crime.’
(Eysenck and Gudjonsson, 1989:57)
Some studies which appeared to live up to Eysenck’s criteria, such as two studies
by Allsopp and Feldman (1975; 1976), suggested that the key lay in the combination
of P, E, and N.
Hindelang and Weiss (1972) roughly supported a relationship between
personality type and nature of offence; the High E-High N cluster was
associated with general deviancy (behaviour such as petty theft and vandalism),
but not with major theft and aggression. SBG Eysenck et al (1977) asserted that
‘con men’ showed lower P scores than other groups, with property and violent
offender groups displaying lower N scores; no variation was found on the E scale.
McEwan and Knowles (1984) however, could not find any large relationship
between the types of offences committed and personality clusters in their study.
McEwan (1983) created various subgroups finding the highest conviction
147
records were among the subgroup with a high score. Eysenck constructed an
entire conceptual scheme and frame of reference. To test his theory scholars had
to work within his definitions, including that of crime. Hopes were, for a time at
least, high.
Sympathetic commentators, such as Feldman (1977), predicted that the
Eysenckian personality dimensions were likely to be influential in building a
scientific explanation of criminal behaviour. Some of the interest appears to have
decreased, and, although Eysenck has remained convinced of the potential to
create a fully scientific criminology, he has become more modest regarding his
theory. He has become more conscious of the nature of crime as a process and
acknowledges that the theory cannot predict criminal involvement for all
offenders. Further, some critics argue that the foundational base of the theory, the
link between classical conditioning and socialisation, simply could not be
established satisfactorily (Raine and Venables (1981)). Others have contended that
there are an array of personality traits other than those defined by Eysenck, for
example, McGurk (1978); McGurk et al (1981); McGurk and McGurk (1979).
Furthermore, why accept a trait theory of personality? Is this not only one of a
number of ways of conceptualising ‘personality’? (Phares (1984)). And one which
has come under fierce attack and is almost discredited. Rose summarises the
enterprise in the following terms.
‘Eysenck’s theory is an attempt to depict a psychological activity in such a way that
biological, environmental, and psychological factors are reduced into a form
suitable for integrating the theory into mainstream criminology. It also afforded the
promise of treatment. Eysenck produced... a way of understanding and treating
conduct that did not require reference to the hidden depths of the soul. It remained
at the level of the problem itself – the discrepancy between the behaviour produced
and the behaviour desired. But as important, it was an analysis that did not require
reference to organic malfunction, for we were not dealing with illness but with the
contingent mis-shaping of a psychology that was not sick, by means of process that
were themselves normal. Hence psychologists could make a claim to clinical
expertise that was apparently neither a threat to nor subordinate to medicine...
Behavioural therapy would allow psychologists themselves to have a say in the
questions, and to claim exclusive capacities to carry out treatment.’ (Rose,
1990:234)
Doubts can be placed on the ethics and humanity of behavioural ‘treatment’
techniques (see the classic film Clockwork Orange). In general critics claim this
line of reasoning offers a psychology of social adaptation concerned with the overt
conduct of individuals, rather than with their subjective experiences and motivations.
Furthermore, the treatment offered is criticised as actually the shaping of conduct
towards ends required by the dominant power structure.
This functionalist and consensual identification of the legal structure of
society as deserving of obligation is clear in Eysenck’s latest and most general
pronouncements on crime and society. While asking for a more behaviourist,
and individually focused, system of punishment/treatment, Eysenck argues that
148
a sea-change in attitudes, and child-rearing practices is called for to combat

crime:
‘Crime... is essentially a function of the ethos of the society in which we live; it
reflects the practices of positive and negative reinforcement, of reward and
punishment, of teaching and conditioning, which are prevalent, and these in turn
are mirrored and reflected by the types of films we see, television programs we
watch, books and newspapers we read, and teaching and example we receive at
school.
If parents do not insist on decent and moral behaviour in their children; if schools
do not maintain discipline, and even preach rebellion and resistance to authority; if
criminals and vice generally are constantly portrayed in a positive fashion in films
and on television; and if even the representatives of organised religion fail to speak up
for obedience to the law and fail to condemn terrorism – then clearly the task of
enforcing law and order will be the more difficult, and will possibly become impossible.
Add to this the leniency of punishment so often preached by those who erroneously
assume that it is society rather than the individual who is guilty of criminal conduct,
and we have a situation where anything that can be done directly to improve the rule
of law can only be a palliative. The permissive society is earning the rewards it
deserves...’ (Eysenck and Gudjonsson, 1989:255)
Eysenck’s theory appears to demand a fully integrated sociological, biological
and environmental thesis on crime. Let us be clear, however, of the role that Eysenck
sees for the interaction of psychological, genetic and constitutional factors:
‘Psychological factors in criminality relate to genetic and constitutional causes and
to personality and other sources of individual differences. This does not mean that
some people are destined to commit crimes. Criminal behaviour as such is not
innate. What is inherited are certain peculiarities of the brain and nervous system
that interact with certain environmental factors and thereby increase the likelihood
that a given person will act in a particular antisocial manner in a given situation.’
(Ibid: 247)
Although, therefore, he acknowledges that criminal behaviour is at the end of a
long process, his image of the process is rather individualist and positivist.
‘Much criminal behaviour can be construed as the end product of a chain of process.
The first stage consists of the desire for certain goods or outlets. Most commonly, this
involves a desire for material goods, status among peers, excitement, sexual
gratification, and the relief of anger and hostility. Second, illegal and socially
disapproved methods are chosen as acceptable means for satisfying these needs and
desires. The reasons for this may be manyfold. They may involve faulty learning and
inadequate moral development, the tendency to respond to stress in a particular way,
and distorted attitudes and attributions. The third and final stage involves a number of
situational and opportunity factors, where the criminal is the outcome of a decision-
making process involving perceptions of benefits and costs at any one point of time.’
(Ibid: 248)
The work of Edwin Sutherland suggested a sociological method in which otherwise
socially disapproved methods for achieving desires are chosen; in a particular
learning theory he called differential association.
149
Edwin Sutherland and the theory of differential association
At the end of the 19th century the French scholar Gabriel Tarde (1912) proposed
that patterns of delinquency and crime are learned in much the same manner as
any occupation, primarily through imitation of, and association with, others. Bad
company was a central theme of 19th century accounts. Edwin H Sutherland
(1939) whose work can be loosely placed in the tradition of the Chicago-school
along with W I Thomas, Robert Park, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, was to
offer a more sophisticated version, arguing that criminal behaviour is learned
through associations established with those who violate society’s norms. The
cultural learning process involves not only the actual techniques of crime, but also
the motives, drive, attitudes, and rationalisations favourable to the commission of
anti-social acts (Sutherland and Cressey (1978)). Sutherland argues that there is
no possibility of a person deterministically participating in criminal behaviour by
inheritance, since all patterns of behaviour for humans only make sense in a
cultural environment. All behaviour is assimilated from the surrounding culture.
Criminal behaviour is learned behaviour, as is so-called normal law-abiding
behaviour. It is learned through interaction with other persons, usually within
intimate personal groups. A process approach is evident. A criminal identity and
career results from a long series of experiences, but a single experience may cause
a dramatic change in life. We are given the picture of life courses and vital turning
points:
‘A boy who is arrested and convicted is thereby publicly defined as a criminal.
Thereafter his associations with lawful people are restricted and he is thrown into
association with other delinquents. On the other hand, a person who is consistently
criminal is not defined as law-abiding by a single lawful act. Every person is expected
to be law-abiding, and lawful behaviour is taken for granted because the lawful culture
is dominant, more extensive and more pervasive than the criminal culture.’
(Criminology, 3rd ed, 1939:6)
The theory of differential association was postulated in positivist terms: a person
becomes delinquent because of the presence of an excess of definitions favourable
to violations of the law, over definitions unfavourable to violations of the law.
However, differential association emphasised the variable character of each
person’s exposure to definitions favourable and unfavourable to conduct in
violation of the law. At the time, Sutherland had a fierce antipathy for psychiatry
and was determined to espouse the ability of sociology to explain human action
(Gaylord and Galliher (1988)). The theory is expressly sociological and the
learning process is seen in determinist terms coming from social conditions and
contacts outside the individual.
Most textbooks on criminology use Sutherland’s 1947 formulation of
differential association, but his original version is in some ways more interesting.
In his textbook (1939) 3rd ed, first edition published in 1924, Sutherland’s theory
asserts that:
150
• The processes which result in systematic criminal behaviour are fundamentally

the same in form as the processes which result in systematic lawful behaviour.
• Systematic criminal behaviour is learned in intimate association with those
who commit crimes.
• Differentiation association is the specific causal process in the development of
systematic criminal behaviour.
• The chance that a person will participate in systematic criminal behaviour is
determined roughly by the frequency and consistency (duration and intensity)
of his contacts with patterns of criminal behaviour.
• Individual differences among people in respect to personal characteristics or
social situations cause crime only in so far as they affect differential association
or frequency and consistency of contacts with criminal patterns.
• Cultural conflict is the underlying cause of differential association and therefore
of systematic criminal behaviour.
• Social disorganisation is the basic cause of systematic criminal behaviour.
There are elements which overlap and which are almost tautological in the above
propositions (for example, Sutherland amplified on the second point by saying:
‘since criminal behaviour is thus developed in association with criminals it means
that crime is the cause of crime’). The important considerations which are in this
original formulation, and which have been rather neglected in the subsequent
interpretation of Sutherland’s theory, is the presence of cultural conflict and social
disorganisation. Influenced by his friendship with Thorsten Sellin, Sutherland
considered cultural conflict as the most visible symptom of the social disorganisation
which characterised modern society. His theory was originally concerned with
how an individual was to experience this and how certain courses of action flowed
from the dominant forms of communication.
Sutherland sought to construct a purely sociological theory, but others have
seen his theory as able to be incorporated into psychological paradigms. Ronald
Akers (1977) highjacked the learning process of differential association theory by
integrating it with Skinner’s (1953) operant theory of behaviour thus making the
theory compatible with behavioural and social learning formulations. This version
was even more deterministic and positivist than Sutherland’s own sociology. It
was, however, the deterministic trend in Sutherland’s formulation which allowed
this appropriation.
The theory has been most influential. Many american commentators, for
example James F Short (1957), conducted studies that were generally
supportive. Short, however argued that delinquency was more strongly linked to
the intensity, than either frequency, duration, or priority, of the association. In a
subsequent replication study, Harwin Voss (1964) built on this arguing that
individuals who associated with delinquent friends engaged in significantly
more delinquent behaviour than individuals whose contact with delinquent
peers was minimal. Enyon and Reckless (1961) argued companionship with
151
anti-social peers often preceded the onset of both self-reported and officially
recorded delinquency.
Taken literally, and positivistically, Sutherland’s formulations on differential
association predict specialisation in criminal and delinquent behaviour based on
the associations one makes. But both longitudinal analyses of criminal violence
(for example, Farrington (1982); Wolfgang et al (1972)) and research on
‘delinquent career-lines (for example, Smith, Smith and Noma (1984)) have not
found specialisation in general, thus indicating a more common underlying
process.
Differential association theory has been one of the top three theories of American
criminology (with strain and social control). It has stimulated much research on
the issue of peer groups.
In their analysis of juvenile delinquency rates across the social classes Reiss
and Rhodes (1964) sought to identify the role of differential association. The boys
in their sample selected friends who were as delinquent or law-abiding as they
were; However, this varied according to social class, with working-class male youths
demonstrating a clear differential association effect for both serious and less serious
offences, with middle-class youths displaying a differential association effect for
less serious crimes but not for more serious ones. Reiss and Rhodes were unable to
demonstrate that delinquents learn specific criminal techniques within the context
of peer relationships.
Robins, West, and Herjanic (1975) linked delinquency to sibling delinquency,
and Johnson (1979) reports that boys who claim delinquent friends are more likely
to engage in criminality than boys who claim no delinquent companions. In their
longitudinal study West and Farrington (1977) demonstrated that the antisocial
activities of friends and associates predicted delinquent behaviour on the part of a
group of young Londoners. Clinard and Abbott (1973), conducting trans-national
research, found data largely congruent with Sutherland’s ideas on differential
association in the experiences of developing countries.
Sutherland saw differential association as a process, rather than a static
phenomena – this has spawned different models attempting to explain exactly how
the process of differential association operates. Charles R Tittle, Mary Jean Burke,
and Ellen F Jackson (1986) argued that differential association worked indirectly
by way of a learned symbolic context (ie the motivation to engage in crime) rather
than directly through imitation or modelling. In a second study they argued that
the importance of peer associations mainly stemmed from the fact that they elevated
criminal motivation and not because they taught attitudes and rationalisations
consistent with deviance.
Some scholars have attempted to develop predictive indices. Combining
elements from Sutherland’s differential association theory with Becker’s (1963)
early work on marijuana use, James D Orcutt (1987) sought to predict marijuana
use in college students, given certain motivational and associational conditions.
Students with positive, neutral, and negative definitions of marijuana usage were
152
asked to estimate how many of their four closest friends smoked marijuana at least
once a month. The results indicated that students with negative definitions of
marijuana usage tended to avoid marijuana, regardless of how many friends were
semi-regular users, while those with positive definitions of marijuana usage were
liable to smoke marijuana themselves if at least one of their four closest friends
was also a semi-regular user. In the group with neutral attitudes toward marijuana
usage, personal usage was virtually zero if none of the four closest friends were
users of this substance, but rose to one in four in cases in which one friend was a
semi-regular, and one in two if two or more friends were semi-regular users. This
is roughly in line with Sutherland’s contention that a person will engage in an
illegal act if he, or she, is exposed to an excess of definitions favourable to
violating that particular law or social rule.
Differential association has proved extremely stimulating to American
criminology. Its critics have referred to a rather loose formulation, and its positivist
emphasis. Common arguments against it include:
• It cannot explain why delinquents and criminals take advice from delinquent
peers and associates, rather than from non-criminal family members and
classmates (Wilson & Herrnstein (1985)).
• It seems blind to the problem of the loner, and the fact that many serious,
recidivistic offenders have never integrated well into groups, delinquent or
otherwise, and so have had less of an opportunity for differential association
than better adjusted adolescents (Hirschi (1969)).
• Researchers have often overlooked the possibility that delinquent associations
may be a result, rather than cause, of an early delinquent life orientation.
• Cressey (1960) believed that critical aspects of the theory were untestable,
although the results of several recent studies appear to hint that the theory is
much more amenable to examination than was once thought (compare Orcutt
(1987); Tittle et al (1986)).
• The theory assumes a consensus as to what lawful and deviant behaviour and
values are. Sutherland certainly never deeply questioned the dominant value
structure of American society. Although he saw cultural conflict and social
disorganisation as important, he believed in the social structure as largely
progressive. The issues of differential rewards and punishments did not feature
strongly in his work. Even in his most famous work, White Collar Crime (1949),
which set out the abuses of professional businessmen, no criticism of the
American capitalist system was evidenced.
A rather neglected theme of Sutherland’s was communication. Sutherland had
said that learning, interaction and communication were the processes around
which a theory of criminal behaviour should be developed. This could take us into
the terrain of culture and the subjective meaning of actions, techniques for
avoiding others interpretation of one’s actions and the consequences. Remember
Sutherland’s original formulation included the themes of culture conflict and
153
social disorganisation. We have already mentioned that he was clearly influenced

at the time by his friendship, and working relationship with Thorsten Sellin who
wrote Culture Conflict and Crime in 1938. The genesis of that text was as follows:
in the late 1930s Sutherland and Sellin had been appointed members of a
committee of the Social Sciences research Council to organise a report on a central
problem in criminology. Culture conflict was their theme and although the final
report was written by Sellin, Sutherland was influential. Sellin writes that
Sutherland’s theory of differential association may even have been Sutherland’s
attempt to tell him where he had gone wrong! Whatever the truth, Sutherland
wrote to Sellin shortly before Culture Conflict and Crime was published giving
the following discussion:
‘It seems to me that the relatively low rate [of crime] of the large [immigrant]
colonies is due to “isolation” from conflicting patterns. They live their own life in the
midst of an American city almost as in their home community. Consequently, they
have few conflicts. Conflicts must grow out of cultural contacts. Moreover, the
family and the neighbourhood in such situations work together consistently in the
direction of control of the individual member, while in the smaller [immigrant]
groups, there may be no such harmony between the patterns of these two primary
groups, and consequently there may be a high delinquency rate. In other words, it
seems to me that the cultural conflict should be regarded as taking the form of such
divergences between the smaller groups as well as in the larger national groups. The
probable conflict of cultures does not consist merely in the fact that the law of one
group says thus-and-this, while the law of the other group says so-and-so. Rather
more important I believe is the fact that the informal codes differ on hundreds of other
things, thus undermining the legal codes of both groups.’ (Quoted in Gaylord and
Galliher, 1988:129)
In recent years John Braithwaite has tried to develop a communication based theory
of punishment in Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989). Braithwaith suggests
that the key to crime control is a process of shaming the offender within a cultural
commitment to reintegration.
Braithwaite focuses on White Collar crime as an area where this would have
great effect, but asserts that there is a general process applicable to all crime.
Sutherland had been the pioneer:
‘The data which are at hand suggests that white collar crime has its genesis in the
same general processes as other criminal behaviour, namely, differential association...
Businessmen are not only in contact with definitions which are favourable to white
collar crime but they are also isolated from and protected against definitions which
are unfavourable to such crime... As a part of the process of learning practical business,
a young man with idealism and thoughtfulness for others is inducted into white collar
crime... He learns specific techniques for violating the law, together with definition of
situations in which these techniques may be used. Also, he develops a general ideology...
“we are not in business for our health”, “business is business”, or “no business was
ever built on the beatitudes”.’ (1949:239-140)
154
The prevalence of white collar crime demonstrated the normalcy of

crime
Neither biology, economic deprivation, psychological imbalance or the broken

home appealed as the likely starting point for the explanation of crime perpetrated
by the economically powerful. Differential association, however, gained strength
as a general explanation by its ability to look at this area far removed from the
usual subject matter for criminology in the same way as with crimes of the
economically powerless. Yet, here there may have been a bias, for Sutherland, as
the majority of criminologists have done, offered the most ‘normal of the theories’
as the explanation of crime committed by the most normal of people, the
capitalists themselves. By contrast, the idea of the psychopath appeared to provide
an opposite location: the site of the pure criminal. For Eysenck:
‘... the psychopath presents the riddle of delinquency in a particularly pure form, and
if we could solve this riddle in relation to the psychopath, we might have a very
powerful weapon to use on the problem of delinquency in general.’ (1977:55)
The extreme criminal: the idea of the psychopath
The psychopath is the supreme image of the dangerous criminal – a figure of such
coldness and inhuman modes of thought that he defies normal learning processes
and social bonds. The popular film Silence of the Lambs contained both an anti-
hero psychopath (acted by Anthony Hopkins), and an evil psychopath. The
concept of psychopathy is both open-ended and ambiguous. Currently it is used
interchangeably with anti-social personality disorders, to refer to a severe disorder
of personality, of emotional adjustment, or maturation, whereby a person behaves
in an extreme manner, either violently or in a bizarre, heterodox, way, and has
gross inability to relate to others in what is regarded as the normal fashion. In
particular he or she has great difficulties in initiating, developing and sustaining a
non-destructive and rewarding social and emotional relationship. The condition is
regarded as persistent and intractable to classic forms of medical and psychiatric
treatment; for instance analytical or supportive psychotherapy, behaviour therapy
and physical methods.
In a recent review, Dolan and Coid (1993) argue that the ‘untreatability of
psychopaths’ may, in part, result from the professionals’ inadequate assessment in
the first place, followed by an inability to develop, describe, research and adequately
demonstrate, the efficacy of treatment strategies (1993:267).
It has been argued that while psychopathy may exist in a setting of
subnormality and mental illness, it also exists as a clinical entity apart from
these conditions and without organic brain lesion. Herschel Prins distinguishes
pseudo-psychopathy (due to established brain damage, etc) from essential
psychopathy.
155
Psychopathy is seen in people who have not learned to relate, and in whom
persistent attempts to relate have led to a worsening, a destruction of any ability to
relate in accepted emotional and social terms. Reactions of others – anger, disgust,
over-sympathy, over-mothering – perpetuate and worsen the condition; as the person
develops from childhood into adolescence and adulthood the condition becomes
fixed and eventually obdurate to treatment.
The concept is highly controversial, almost everyone agrees that the term
psychopath, or psychopathy, is unsatisfactory. It is imprecise as a medical diagnosis;
it has variable legal significance, and it expresses more the emotional state of the
user, namely exasperated hopelessness, tinctured with anger and even contempt
than an entity precisely captured by the ‘science’. Barbara Wootton claimed that
the concept of the psychopath was, in fact, par excellence, and without shame or
qualification, the model of the circular process by which mental abnormality is
inferred from anti-social behaviour while anti-social behaviour is explained by
mental abnormality (1959:250).
On the other hand, many practitioners argue that the term refers to some
phenomena, although what exactly it is, and what the limits are, is not easily
ascertainable. In American the term sociopath is used, which is free from many of
the emotional connotations attached to psychopath, but is no more precise. In its
1975 review the Butler Committee accepted the practice whereby clinicians use a
diagnostic term ‘personality disorder’, followed by a description of the predominant
features in the individual comprising the ‘disorder’.
Special provision currently exists in the UK for detaining patients in secure
hospitals under the 1983 Mental Health Act because of their ‘persistent disorder or
disability of mind (whether or not including significant impairment of intelligence)
which results in abnormally aggressive or severely irresponsible conduct’ (MHA,
s 1(2)). Hamilton (1985; 1990) estimates that this form of legal categorisation is
responsible for around 25% of the patients in the English maximum-security
hospitals. However, when diagnostic tests were given to patients, a large discrepancy
was found between the clinician-led characteristics which are looked for in defining
the psychopath.
The clinician-led form of definition appears to the critics to be circular;
psychopathology becomes defined by the characteristics which clinicians in practice
use in cases of doubt. Cleckley listed various characteristics of the psychopath
derived from practice. The World Health Organisation depicts the condition as
coming to attention, because of a gross disparity between the behaviour and
prevailing social norms, and characterises the condition by:
• callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack of capacity for empathy;
• gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms,
rules and obligations;
• incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;
156
• very low tolerance to frustration, and a low threshold for discharge of aggression,
including violence;
• incapacity to experience guilt, and to profit from experience, particularly
punishment;
• marked proneness to blame others, or to offer plausible rationalisations for the
behaviour bringing the subject into conflict with society;
• persistent irritability. (Quoted in Dolan and Coid, 1990:14.)
We face a paradox: the term is not popular and the condition, if it exists, is not a
well defined phenomena. But, pragmatically, it seems to refer to a condition or
problem of the mental functioning of the individual which is accepted as real. The
terminology seems to cover a severe personality disorder which shows itself in a
variety of attitudinal, emotional, and inter-personal behavioural problems. As a
matter of empirical differentiation certain factors are often relied upon which may
or may not be present in individual cases:
• Periods of emotional and social deprivation in infancy and childhood. Here
Bowlby has been relied upon, while McCord and McCord (1964) suggested
lack of affection and severe parental rejection were primary factors. The
longitudinal study of Robins (1966) correlated a series of early experiences:
early referral to a child guidance clinic for theft or aggression, a history of
truancy, lying, non-compliance, no signs of guilt or remorse, general
irresponsibility regarding school and family routines. Other factors included
little or no parental discipline and anti-social behaviour by the father which
also is present in a wider range of later problems.
• Long periods spent in institutions, resulting perhaps from the need to control a
difficult or unmanageable child or adolescent, leading to ambiguity in the
forming and development of relationships.
• A highly exaggerated need for reassurance of identity, sexuality, sanity and
existence (‘I don’t feel me’).
• A misdirection of aggressive drives seen in offences of arson, burglary and
assault.
• A misdirection of sexual drives, seen in offences of rape, sexual assaults,
deviancy and exposure.
• A marked feeling of unworthiness, uselessness, lacking in value as a person
underlies the extreme behaviour.
• An appearance of coldness and lack of feeling. A dissociation at the time of
committing extreme violence, murder or rape.
• A dehumanisation and, at times, feelings of internal elation during the process
of hostage holding, wounding, feelings of all-powerfulness, with lack of ability
to relate to the victim or to the police.
• Almost total lack of judgment in behaviour, even though the person is of
normal intelligence and is not suffering from any psychotic or organic
157
illness. This lack of judgment is the result of inability to perceive his own
needs and the needs and responses of others, and is interpreted as a lack of
conscience.
• A low level of anxiety which is uncovered in treatment. It is apparent that the
person prevents the anxiety coming into consciousness by more and more
repetitive acting out. A typical sequence of events is taking and driving away a
car, a police chase, accident, arrest, court case and subsequent imprisonment,
fight, wrist slashing, drugs, drink and unawareness of the social pressure of his
peers, the police, his parents, his wife.
• Impulsivity. He reacts to inappropriate social stimuli by impulsive behaviour
which he rationalises from his own primitive needs. It is in this phase that,
when examined either by the judiciary, the police or psychiatrists, he is observed
to have no remorse.
• Lack of response to ordinary learning methods, to early childhood punishments,
and to the isolation, confinement and deprivation of over-exaggerated bodily
needs, that may be necessary for his management and containment, but which
reinforce his feelings of unworthiness and isolation. Cleckley (1976), in The
Mask of Sanity, argued that the psychopath is unable to learn from experience.
• Lack of trust in extreme cases is almost complete, but particularly during periods
of crisis leading to, or during the commission of a crime.
• Lack of social skills. Inability to use the telephone; to apply for a job; deficiencies
in social relationships; inability to organise and enter into an outing or a social
evening. These people cover up this deficiency by taking drugs, becoming
drunk and prevent themselves facing their social deficiencies by causing a
diversion, such as picking a fight.
The aetiology of psychopathology?
The term psychopath developed from an 18th and 19th century idea of moral
imbeciles suffering from an ‘illness of morality’. In this century, many practitioners
have sought constitutional and environmental components in the definitive
conditions, but exploration of heredity pre-disposition, chromosomes, organic
underlying causes, lesions in the temporal or frontal lobe, have yielded little help
in diagnosis, prevention or treatment. In most cases no definite hereditary
predisposition or organic lesion is seen. An ‘immature’ electroencephalogram shows
a variable and ill defined pattern, but there is no correlation between presence or
degree of violent behaviour and EEG patterns. Perhaps this is part of the fascination
of the psychopath; a figure who will not, or cannot, play the games of normal
social interaction and experience fellow feeling towards humans, but for whom no
organic cause can be found.
158
If this is not a ‘moral disorder’ then there must be a treatment?
The psychopath defies conventional therapeutic treatment, since this relies on an

implicit commitment between physician and the patient based on trust and good
faith, but this person cannot enter into such a commitment because of a lack of
ability to trust. Impulsiveness and lack of judgment prevent his attending clinics,
taking medicines (the effects of which are dubious), or entering into a classic
psychotherapeutic relationship. Supervising the person during treatment is also a
problem since his impulsive acting out behaviour will be accentuated during any
process of change in treatment. This person is intractable to treatment by
psychoanalysis, supportive psychotherapy, and physical methods; in conventional
hospital treatment regimes he disrupts the treatment of other patients and staff
management and has to be expelled. These settings appear to offer him the
opportunity to act out his distorted methods of relating, and actually intensify his
pattern of behaviour. The therapeutic community directly designed for the treatment
of personality behaviour disorders attempts to allow him to grow; experiment with
emotional and social relationships and so develop an awareness of himself and his
behaviour in relation to others. In Britain a therapeutic community system for the
treatment of behaviour disorders was set up by Maxwell Jones at the Henderson
Hospital in the 1950s, and developed in England at HMP Grendon Underwood
and HMP Wormwood Scrubs Annex, and in Scotland at the (recently closed)
Barlinnie Special Unit.
The original idea was to place emphasis on the individual’s responsibility for
his behaviour, while providing a milieu to allow him to examine his emotional
needs, the emotional needs of others, his effect on the feelings and behaviour of
others, and their effect upon him; to allow him to form and reform, thus readjust to
others and explore and correct his faulty mechanisms of relating. He thus tests out
the boundaries of both the institutional structure and others in relationship to his
own emotional needs and behaviour. Permissiveness, accompanied by boundary
drawing, enable him to grow and establish a less faulty and destructive method of
operating.
Such ‘communities’, as they have evolved in the various locations, have taken
on special characterises and changing clients. Attempts have been made to evaluate
the treatment regime at Grendon in terms of change, growth and reduction of
destructive behaviour. The goals of the regime have been: the prevention of
repetitive, escalating, extremely violent behaviour patterns; improvement in social
and emotional methods of operating; ability to form satisfactory, deeper relationships
in a domestic setting; understanding and directing of sexual and aggressive drives
in a non-destructive manner; growth and development in the patient’s feeling of
his own worth; finding and developing aspects of his personality that are of value
to himself and others. In coming to an appreciation of the needs of others he is able
to reinforce a poorly developed conscience, a sense of his own responsibility, to
develop social and emotional skills, an appreciation of regret and remorse in a
159
caring environment. At the same time, he is protected from his own destructive
impulses but contained predominantly by pressure from his peers.
What sort of regimes do the penal systems of England, Wales and

Scotland use?
The best example is the Grendon Treatment Regime. Grendon is made up of six
therapeutic communities, and an Assessment Unit. Each of these communities
consist of inmates, prison officers, psychiatrists, a psychologist and a probation
officer or social worker. The underlying philosophy is that a person is
considered to be responsible for his behaviour. He must have some degree of
self-motivation for change. His aim is to become aware of his behaviour, and
how this is regulated by his emotions/feelings, and how these two affect his
relationships: this is seen as a combination of behaviour and feelings leading to
relationships.
Therefore the task is to develop and correct social skills by involvement in
the community, and to self-consciously examine and bring about an alteration in
life style. Importantly, the ideology is that the person is in treatment in the
community. He is not sick, being treated by a doctor and nurses, but, a person
allowing himself to share in the support, examination, confrontation by his peers
of his whole life situation. The orientation is positive, aiming to develop and
enhance those positive qualities he may possess and so produce some feeling of
self-worth.
Ideally, psychopharmacology is not used in the treatment methods no
psychotropic drugs nor night sedation. (Drugs for medical conditions are of course
prescribed as required, eg penicillin.)
There are two main operating assumptions:
• A person is considered responsible for his behaviour and he and the
community have resources to control this behaviour without the protection
of medication.
• In the intensive treatment he must be aware of his feelings relating to his
behaviour and how this affects his interpersonal relationships. This perception
is dulled or altered by medication. There are (a) group meetings involving staff
and men with community meetings, small group meetings, encounter groups,
role-playing groups, psychodrama – with audio visual aids, work groups,
discharge groups, operatic groups, family groups, committee meetings,
transactional analysis, areas of decision making, management and control
groups using therapeutic community principles such as democratisation,
boundaries and limit drawing, role mobility, communication. The community
or wing meeting is the central point of the treatment.
160
Evaluation of the treatment effects of Grendon
There have been various studies concerning the recidivism rates after treatment at
Grendon. George (1971) following 263 subjects for two years found 59% have
committed a crime in that period, but of those who had stayed in the Institution for
more than one year the figure was 40%; Newton (1971) following 377 for two
years found 58% for those who had stayed less than one year, and 50% for those
who had stayed more than one year; Gunn et al (1978) following 61 for two years
found 70%; Robertson and Gunn following the same 61 for 10 years found 92%;
Cullen (1992) following 214 for two years found those who had stayed less than
18 months 40%, but only 20% for those who had stayed more then 18 months,
Genders and Player noted that the population of Grendon had changed. Gunn’s
subjects were younger and were on shorter sentences, whereas Cullen’s subjects
had more often committed crimes related to violence and sexual victimisation.
Recidivism rates were in general lower for those who had stayed longer in
treatment.
Gunn et al (1978) argued that evaluation of treatment regimes in terms of
reconviction rate was not valid, since reconviction depended upon a myriad of
personal, environmental and situational factors, many of which the prison
psychiatrist cannot be expected to influence. In all the main areas that were measured
– psychiatric state, symptomatology, personality, attitudes to authority figures and
self – large changes were recorded between the first and subsequent assessments.
They also showed significant reduction in neurotic symptoms, anxiety, tension
and depression. Using methods involving semantic differentials, several areas of
therapeutic significance emerged.
There was a rise in the esteem or ‘myself element’ and a fall in the unrealistically
high estimation of psychiatrists. Changes show the men gained, increased in self-
confidence and worth. It was found that the results reflected the orientation of the
Grendon therapeutic regime with its primary emphasis laid on the people’s own
ability to help themselves.
What is to be made of the psychopath concept? It too often seems to be used as
a catch-all concept to incorporate those individuals who appear extremely anti-
social and for whom no appropriate medical terminology can be found. But why
should anti-social behaviour, even of an extreme nature, presuppose psychopathy
or a psychopathic personality?
The Mental Health Act which includes the concept of psychopathic disorders
as a mental disorder and which still keeps this in amended form, has been mainly
unsatisfactory in providing treatment for this group of people.
There is a conflict between the needs of treatment, the rights of the individual
and the safety of the public. The individuals concerned are not invariably dangerous.
They may be potentially dangerous, but other factors play a very important part
such as social situation, marriage, housing and drinking habits. Careful evaluation
is required in each case and at regular short intervals. Doctors refute the criticism
161
by some sociologists that they are neither curing nor caring but simply acting as
agents, sometimes repressively, of social control.
Psychosurgery, or the destruction of brain tissues, can reduce aggressive drives
and violent behaviour, although these techniques are very imprecise and are
irreversible. They have been used in the past for treatment of impulsive aggression,
but are not in use today in most countries. The film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest demonstrated popular revulsion against the possibility of turning a ‘normal’
person into a human cabbage. Because of their irreversible nature such techniques
pose serious ethical problems and patients must be aware of the direct and side
effects of the treatment, and enter into it voluntarily.
Numerous sociologists, philosophers, and writers have expressed the fear that
if the authorities or the medical profession take away a person’s aggressive drives
they leave him unable to protect himself from the aggression of society or his
peers in the open situation (see Burgess’ Clockwork Orange). We have, perhaps, a
dispute between the pretensions of experts to control from the outside by behavioural
modification, or by providing internalised knowledges and skills for the individual
to learn self-knowledge and self-control. Whereas constitutional theories appeared
to trace a direct line from a supposed genetic inheritance of aggressive tendencies
and crime, the aim of psychotherapy is not to defuse aggression, but to enable a
patient to use his drives in a non-violent non-impulsive manner. Steps should be
taken in each case to enable the patient to understand his new situation and be
aware of areas of vulnerability to be avoided.
Psychopathology and interactive communication
An interesting avenue for investigation came accidentally out of a study conducted

by Widom (1976) to gauge the ability of individuals labelled as psychopaths to
perform certain cognitive tasks. Playing a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, primary
psychopaths functioned just as well as the male nurses used as controls. When a
person also judged a primary psychopath played with another person judged a
primary psychopath they cooperated well. Teams of persons judged to be secondary
psychopaths preformed less well. None of the psychopaths were, however, playing
with a person adjudged to be normal; when this occurred cooperation lessened.
This study reinforces the issue that the psychopath may be acting on the basis of
his perception of the ‘other’. Howells (1983) specifically argues that persons
adjudged to be psychopathic, attribute negative intentions to other people. They
interact with others on the presumption that others are the source of negative actions
rather than positive occurrences, and, instead of waiting for the inevitable, they get
the blow in first.
In actual social interactions this becomes a self-fulfilling prediction. As
Rime, Bonvy, and Rouillon (1978) describe those individuals labelled
psychopaths they observed, the psychopath displays an ‘over-intrusive social
presentation’. By comparison with the controls they observed, those labelled as
162
psychopaths leaned forward more, and looked more at the person they were
interacting with in conversation, while smiling less. Their intense self-
presentation resulted in a ‘spontaneous attitude of retreat’ by the others, who
drew back from the interaction. Thus, the others actually appeared to the
psychopath to be hostile.
The knowledges of psychology: tools of control in modernity?
Psychology presents a variety of tools and knowledges: methods of awareness

(which strive to make a self visible to the person), algorithms of interaction (whose
work is to make human relations calculable), narratives of feeling (which instruct
us how to understand the mechanisms we have for identifying and valuing the
things which stimulate our emotions) to direct the awareness which is itself aroused.
The aim of these knowledges and methodologies is to visualise the healthy, and
get rid of pathological aspects. The task is to change anxiety into excitement through
techniques of self-reflection and self-examination, and thereby to ensure that we
become a reflexive self, more able to redirect our forces. Thus we can learn processes
of control over ourselves which the behavioural manipulators claim they can exercise
from without.
What is at stake with this interaction of knowledge, psychotherapy (of various
kinds) and social life? Perhaps Rose sums it up:
‘In each of these fields, and others that could be identified, what is at stake is a
reciprocal relationship between elaboration of a body of knowledge and practice and
the production of the self itself, as the terrain upon which our relationship with one
another and with our bodies, habits, propensities, and pleasures is to be understood.
No doubt one would be wise not to overstate the constitutive powers of
psychotherapeutic discourse and practice. Their potency derives from their confluence
with a whole political rationality and governmental technology of the self. But none
the less it is important to recognise that what is at issue in these therapeutic technologies
of knowledge and power – no longer sex, not even pathology, but our autonomous
selves.’ (Rose, 1990:245)
We can be highly suspicious of positivist psychology, after all are humans really
reducible to behavioural complexes? From one point of view, of course, we are,
we are the thinking animal... but we are more... we are the animal that uses logos,
language, and cultural weapons. Psychology can provide another array of tools.
These tools can control us, render us powerless if we wish, but they can also be
tools whereby we can learn to recognise and simulate the mental technologies of
creative adjustment. Psychology offers us instruction in an additional vocabulary
for describing and accounting for the pains of our lives, and for dealing with others
in the social interaction that life inescapably is about. It provides a range of
discourses which are both authoritarian disciplines, justified in modernity by
reference to scientific methodology, but can also become popular, available,
recognisable to each of us. These knowledges can translate our complexes and
163
fears into less threatening shapes, and enable us to articulate forms of being that
we come to recognise as part of our ontology. They also offer us hints of the forces
impinging upon ourselves. We learn a language and a technique, a process which
makes us governable, and yet offers us the possibilities of governing ourselves.
This reflects the dialectics of modernity: control and autonomy, responsibility and
inclusivity, civilisation and citizenship.
164
CHAPTER EIGHT
CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM III: STATISTICS,

QUANTIFYING THE MORAL HEALTH OF
SOCIETY AND CALCULATING NATURE’S LAWS
‘In following attentively the regular march of nature in the development of

plants and animals we are compelled to believe in the analogue that the influence
of laws should be extended to the human species.’ (Quetelet, 1826).
‘We can assess how perfected a science has become by how much or how little
it is based on calculation.’ (Quetelet, 1828)
‘I cannot repeat too often, to all men who sincerely desire the well-being and
honour of their kind, and who would blush to consider a few francs more or
less paid to the treasury as equivalent to a few heads more or less submitted to
the axe of the executioner, that there is a budget which we pay with a frightful
regularity – it is that of prisons, chains, and the scaffold: it is that which, above
all, we ought to endeavour to abate.’ (Quetelet, 1842)
The positivist approach has strong connections with statistical analysis. As

outlined in the writings of its originators, such as August Comte in the 1830s
positivism was to be a form of social mechanics or social physics. For Comte,
positivism denoted not just a methodology, but a whole new and progressive frame
of reference to relate to the world; a framework which would bring progressive
government and serve as the foundation for a modern social order. We have
already noted how Comte gave a narrative history of the world in three stages, but
we may ask: Is this positivism actually a radical advance over the assumptions of
the classical school?
The resolution of chance and the chaos of the natural state
Hobbes’ Leviathan is not simply a text of political philosophy, but a text of the
foundations of modern social theory. Hobbes offers a simple ontological
message: beneath the appearance of order, nature is actually disorientating;
nature is full of contingencies; nature is a state of flux, a constant process of
becoming and appropriation. When Hobbes tells us that civil society is what we
formed by our creation of, and submission to, political power, he is also telling
us that what we are today is what we have made ourselves. The foundations of
our nature, the core of our ‘self’, the foundation of social order, is not stability,
but process.
If this sounds familiar it is because this is announced as the radical post-modern
message thought to mean the end of social theory. Today we no longer believe in
some prince (Machiavelli), or some general will (Rousseau), or some all powerful
Sovereign (Hobbes), who will impart meaning to our social life and enforce
solidarity. The post-modern age wonders at what there is in common that might
165
serve as the touch stone to grant unity to social life, and ensure progress. The
thesis advanced in the present text is that there is actually nothing radically new in
the post-modern message about nature; early modernity faced this issue. Except,
early modernity did not learn to live without God, it tended to transfer God’s will
into a belief in a natural order, and the image of society as a functioning whole –
this was as much a dream, a solace, as our earlier creation of God. Post-modernism
is the refusal to continue with that dream. We are too much aware of our history to
keep up the dream... or are we?
How did early modernity create the dream of natural order and functionality?
We have already investigated the writings of the classical school in Beccaria,
Bentham and John Austin and how they used ideas of a new science of man,
narratives of progress and faith in utilitarianism to ensure an overall synthesis of
social life and history to position their analytical projects. Theirs was not a theoretical
project without solace.
For example, consider John Austin’s rule bound utilitarianism.
Austin (1832: Lecture III) argues that the world operates according to the will
of God. We moderns wish to be happy; happiness is the goal of individual and
social life. We can understand how to organise the happy society through
observing the functional operations of the natural world, made visible by the
science of positivism, and calculable through the moral science of utilitarianism.
In effect God becomes a geometer, or more specifically, the enlightenment has
persuaded Austin that the reason underlying the world’s operation is
fundamentally mathematical; hence, human welfare and security depend upon our
obedience to the rule-like, or axiomatic nature, of mathematical thinking. For
Austin, God has bequeathed an understandable nature, and the combination of
positivism and utilitarianism tells us what is the nature of things, and how they
ought to be organised. If we wish to avoid unnecessary suffering we do not have a
choice. In Lecture XXIII Austin (1873) specifies the coercion involved in truth,
political philosophy and the prison. While we may have a choice as to whether or
not we will obey, certain consequences follow. The underlying truths of the world,
political power, prison walls – which all are general contexts we find ourselves in
– require involuntary participation.
In this system the happiness of human society will depend upon uncovering the
rules, or laws, of the underlying natural order. The happiness of the individual
rests upon the connection between his moral being and his rewards, as guaranteed
to the Christian pre-modern by God and now to the modern by the fruits of rational
government. For the early utilitarian, human judgment (the rightness or
wrongness of individual acts and decisions) is possible because nature is
purposive. The fact that nature is accessible in terms of functions, rules and laws,
gives us our faith in progress, enables us to understand the necessity for our social
duty, and ensures we put up with the inequalities of the social order; inequalities,
which Austin impresses upon us, are functionally required.
166
Criminological Positivism III
The battle for sociology: a moral science or a statistical science?
Although Durkheim held the first Chair in Sociology anywhere in the world,
Auguste Comte is usually credited with founding the discipline of sociology. In
his recent book, Inventing Criminology: essays on the rise of ‘Hone Criminalis’,
Piers Beirne (1993), claims, however, that the real foundation was laid by the
analyses which the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet made in the name of a
statistical science of mankind.
Comte resisted such a statistical orientation and, having seen his original
suggestions of ‘social mechanics’ or ‘social physics’ used by Quetelet, he coined
the name ‘sociology’ to avoid being restricted into seeking regularities and
probabilities. Quetelet was, however, the better politician. He organised a world
statistical congress and was influential in starting various statistical societies.
Quetelet triumphed over Comte: sociology became obsessed with statistics, and to
this day perhaps the dominant theme of sociological theory takes it as axiomatic
that sociology is searching for social laws, and that these will be cast in a statistical
form.
Durkheim took this up, in part at least. Sociology was to be a science investigating
social facts (or moral phenomenon), based on the sheer regularity and stability of
quantitative social facts which could be ascertained by correlating statistics of
social events, such as economic production, with statistics for activities, such as
crime or suicide, which otherwise may have been thought of as psychological in
cause. Thus:
‘... social phenomena could no longer be deemed to be the product of fortuitous
combinations, arbitrary acts of will, or local and chance circumstances. Their generality
attests to their essential dependence on general causes which, everywhere that they
are present, produce their effects... Where for a long time there has been perceived
only isolated actions, lacking any links, there was found to be a system of definite
laws. This was already expressed in the title of the book in which Quetelet expounded
the basic principles of the statistics of morality. ‘(Durkheim and Fauconnet, 1903,
quoted in Beirne, 1993:97)
At the centre of Quetelet’s legacy was the idea of the ‘average man’ (homme
moyen). ‘If the average man were ascertained for one nation, he would represent
the type of that nation. If he could be ascertained according to the mass of men, he
would present the type of the human species’ (1831, quoted, Beirne, 1993:77-78);
Crime was, he thought, a factor of derivations from the normal, possibly derived
from biological defects: ‘a pestilential germ... contagious... (sometimes) hereditary’;
on a factor ‘of the milieu in which man finds himself’ (both quotes, Beirne, 1993:90).
Quetelet implicitly identifies the average man as the person who (although he
may have propensities to deviate keeps them under control) is law abiding, in good
physical and psychological health. A man who exhibits:
‘... rational and temperate habits, more regulated passions... foresight, as manifested
by investment in savings’ banks, assurance societies and the different institutions
which encourage foresight.’ (1842: quoted, Beirne, 1993:89)
167
The average man stood for the mainstream of the civilising process, the proper
citizen of modernity. The deviant was his opponent and both the deviant and the
social and constitutional forces which caused deviancy ought to be removed:
‘... the practical outcome of Quetelet’s criminology was the application of his binary
opposition of normality and deviance to the domain of penality... Quetelet urged that
governments identify the causes of crime in order to reduce or, if possible, eliminate
the frequency of crime. Since the number (of crimes) cannot diminish without the
causes which induce them undergoing previous modification, it is the province of
legislators to ascertain these causes, and to remove them as far as possible.’ (Bairne
1993:90-1)
Crime is not a function of activity and censure, but a natural phenomenon. It has a
place in the natural order of things only because we have not succeeded in organising
social forces in harmony. Our aim should be to remove deviations:
‘The more do “deviations from the average disappear... the more, consequently, do
we tend to approach that which is beautiful, that which is good”.’ (Beirne, 1993:92)
We need a full cataloguing of ‘moral statistics’ to observe normal behaviour and to
gauge the moral health of our society. The present official statistics stem from this
attempt.
Criminal statistics
One of the main reasons for the concern with crime today is the dramatic increase
in recorded crime over the last 30 years. Our primary measure of this is the official
criminal statistics, and we should not lose sight of the fact that concern with crime
has a long history with both Plato (in ancient Athens) and Beccaria commenting
on increases. Paul Wiles (1971) points out that writers such as Petty and Gaunt
hoped, as early as the 17th century, that proper statistics would be crucial in the
making of policy decisions and in judging the moral health of the nation. Beccaria
and Bentham advocated that criminal statistics be centrally correlated and used as
a political barometer ‘furnishing data for the legislator to work on’. Quite what
they measure is problematic. Downes and Rock (1988) reflect a strong current in
modern criminological thinking when they state that the official statistics are a
better reflection of social attitudes towards crime and criminals, than they are a
measure of actual criminal behaviour.
The problem of criminal statistics
Official statistics are a social construction which we cannot treat as truly reflective
of the type or level of crime that occurs in society. We can speak of ‘the dark figure
of crime’, or use the analogy of the official statistics as an iceberg, where what is
revealed is a fraction of the actual events capable of being called crime. The actual
168
proportion of crime the dark figure represents is difficult to calculate, but it is the
majority for many crimes. The official statistics are the product of a long social
process, with a series of gates both into and out of the process, and various decision
making opportunities.
Problems in the compilation of official statistics
• They record a socially constructed concept, ie crime.

We must first acknowledge that crime is itself a socially constructed concept,
and that the definition of crime as behaviour punishable by the criminal law, is
fraught with difficulties. For example:
(i) Criminal laws are not fixed in all societies. The substantive activity covered
by the criminal law varies across time, and between different cultures.
(ii) Research shows that the criminalisation of conduct and activities has been
influenced by power, class conflicts, and moral enterprenuership.
(iii) The pace of modern social and technological change leads to an increase
in criminalisation as part of legal regulation. New technology gives cars,
televisions, computers, designer drugs, etc. all of which have sets of
regulations passed to govern their use.
Therefore, although the official criminal statistics are expected to reflect the
level of crime in the society the very definition of what constitutes a crime is
variable. Crimes do not have an ontological necessity but a construction that
changes across time and place.
• Crimes need reporting. A large number of crimes are not reported to the police
for a variety of reasons.
(i) The victim may be unaware that a crime has been committed, for example
if the victim is a large corporation or where there are a number of victims,
none of whom have been affected in an immediately visible way. The
victim may participate in the illegal activity consensually for example drug
use or prostitution.
(ii) The victim may be unable to report the crime for a variety of reasons. For
instance a threat has been received.
(iii) The victim may consider that the offence is too trivial to report. The British
Crime Survey consistently reveals that a majority of victims feel this way
about many events capable of being reported.
(iv) The victim may not want to get involved in the time consuming activity of
reporting.
(v) The victim may be unsure of the consequences of reporting, and fear that
the consequences outweigh the harm caused; for example, in sexual crime
the victim may be afraid of the stigma, and the ordeal of court appearances.
169
(vi) The victim may know the offender and may not want to see him or her
punished.
(vii) The victim may have no faith in the criminal justice system.
(viii) The victim may be afraid of publicity surrounding the crime, and may not
wish attention drawn to him or herself.
(ix) The victim may wish to deal with the matter himself.
(x) The victim may find his or her property returned before he reports it as
stolen.
• Some crimes are more likely to be reported than others. Murder is a good
example; the victims are normally reported as missing, and discovered bodies
appear always to be reported. Property crimes show an increasing tendency to
be reported, as this is a prerequisite for insurance claims. The British Crime
Survey estimates that in 1972, 78% of burglary was reported, whereas in 1987,
90% was reported. Thus we can see that whilst the actual number of offences
may increase by x percentage, the reported percentage may increase by a factor
of x.
• Police practices in recording crime. The police have a statutory obligation to
record crime on the following conditions:
(i) where sufficient evidence exists that a crime has actually been
committed;
(ii) the case is sufficiently serious to warrant police attention and be
recorded.
These criteria allow much discretion between police areas and police forces.
The procedural rules for recording crimes are governed by internal regulations,
and these can lead to discrepancies between forces. Different police forces
may have different techniques for logging phone calls onto crime complaint
forms, and this may affect their respective crime figures. Home Office compiling
can also be open to different interpretations. In some circumstances this may
result in several offences being counted as only one event. Alternatively, when
an offender is known as a hard case for example, some police officers may
well load-on offences. Another problem is that once an offence has been
classified, then it may not be altered every-time it transpires that the offender is
only convicted of a lesser offence.
Studies reveal that individual police officers use their discretion in deciding
which crimes to record. As Cicourel (1968) observed with juvenile justice many
offences are a ‘matter of negotiation’; the recording of burglary or robbery
could be flexibly negotiated. Other commentators have noted that the police
record large numbers of crimes, many of which are not recorded in the criminal
statistics, unless they are brought to court; additionally the police are not the
only agency exercising supervision over areas which may be classified as crimes.
Tax evasion is often policed by Inland Revenue, and smuggling is the province
of Customs and Excise.
170
• The uses of criminal statistics. Hall Williams (1981) argues the benefits of
official statistics for the following reasons:
(i) They are freely available.
(ii) They have already been processed in an accessible fashion.
(iii) They are published relatively soon after the period to which they
relate.
(iv) They may be a useful starting point for further work, for example the
official statistics are at least an indication of the size, nature and locality of
the crime problem.
(v) Wallace suggests that the official statistics can provide a useful insight
into crime and criminologists can use them if they accept safeguards, and
interpret them in the light of their knowledge as to their creation.
(vi) They can highlight patterns and trends.
In summary: although as a whole the official statistics are unreliable as a

measure of absolute trends and patterns, if seen as an indication, and properly
interpreted, they may be used profitably by criminologists and they may have
a range of potential uses which may not yet have been fully explored. However,
it is possible to draw many false conclusions from the official statistics and
many myths about the extent and nature of crime have begun in this way.
Historically, the reliance upon the official criminal statistics in constructing
positivist sociological theories has led criminologists to concentrate almost
solely upon street crimes, and the activities of working class males, partly
because these are the activities and offenders traditionally represented in the
criminal statistics.
Attempts to mitigate the failings of the official statistics
Self report studies

In these studies the subjects are asked whether they have committed any particular
kind of offence, and they record a different level of activity to that of the official
figures. However, they have a number of problems such as those documented by
Williams (1994).
Problems of validity
How sure can we be that the subjects are telling the truth?
• Subjects may forget crimes they have committed, or rationalise their
activities.
171
• The sample may not be representative of the population as a whole. Many of

the early self-report studies were carried out on adolescents in particular
students. Thus, even from this limited group, the individuals who had dropped
out of ‘the course, who were not present on the day, may have had an important
contribution to make that was missed’.
• It is difficult to compare the studies, as many used rather individualistic
methodologies.
Victim or crime surveys

Victim or crime surveys are not new, however, they became popular in the 1960s
in the US as a result of growing concern with the reliability of the official statistics.
It has been suggested that the victimisation studies shed a great deal of light on
matters not reported and on discrepancies between the reports of crime, and the
figures recorded by the police. These surveys may also ask questions about police
behaviour, and the attitude of the respondents to police practices. They can also
provide information as to why victims have not reported crime, and highlight which
offences are more likely to be reported. Crime surveys have therefore become a
very valuable tool.
Problems of crime surveys
• They cannot give a true picture of crimes which do not have any clearly
identifiable victims, such as pollution.
• They have limited information concerning serious offences.
• Corporate crimes are difficult to cover.
• Feminists have been critical of the survey of methodology noting that the assaults
which women receive are underestimated, since they are often unprepared to
report them to the interviewer as their assailant may be in the same room at the
time of the interview.
• Victims forget about crime.
• Victims may not know that they have been victimised.
• They may invent offences to impress the interviewer.
• They omit offences to speed up the process.
• Evidence has revealed that many respondents are quite ready to define certain
events as not crime which could actually be called crimes.
Therefore inaccuracies are inevitable. There are several additional methods of
gaining information and competing perspectives in the field of criminology. Among
them are:
172
• Anthropological methods
Originally used for the study of other ‘ethnic groups’, this is now applied to the
investigation of life styles and attitudes in modern city life. These include joining
a group, or watching their behaviour, and making observations about it over a
period of time.
• Snowballing
• Case study of deviant biography
The deviant biography offers an in-depth detailed biography. It yields
information from a course of interviews, or personal knowledge, which can be
considered in a leisurely manner. It is useful information for trying to understand
the development of individual life styles and important decision opportunities;
but can be self-serving and biased.
• Participant observation
This involves the active collaboration of the sociologist. It involves the
sociologist moving in person amidst the social group and environment to be
understood. It has a long tradition, in particular with the University of Chicago,
stemming from the 1920s where the head of the sociological department, Robert
Park, stated that there was a difference between knowledge about, and
acquaintance with, phenomenon. Participant observation attempts to reach into
the experience and empathise with the subjects being viewed. The problems
with participant observation involve:
(i) maintaining the balance between being a member of the group, and yet
being able to objectively comment on it.
(ii) not everyone can gain entry into the ‘deviant world’, it is often difficult to
arrange.
The contemporary problem of reflexivity and criminal statistics – do

we need a science of interpretation?
Official statistics in Criminal Justice provide a wealth of valuable information,

including data on punishment systems, and the individuals who undergo
punishment. However, contrary to the hopes of their originators, we cannot work
out from the official statistics whether our contemporary societies are in the grip
of a crisis threatening their very survival, or whether the increase in social goods,
the spread of opportunity, a decrease of tolerance towards violence, and the
increasing use of formal agencies (ie the police) to deal with troublesome
situations, gives us record high rates of crime in the midst of personal security.
Politicians seize upon the official statistics to declare the need for a war on crime,
and argue that crime is threatening the very fabric of modern society. In an effort
to achieve this, legislation is provided which aims to deter the image of the rational
173
calculator. In the US the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ (whereby life sentences
without possibility of parole are imposed on offenders convicted of a third violent
crime) legislation, if enforced, would halt all non-criminal court cases (due to the
increase in contested trials) and create a record number of individuals in prison. As
Diana Gordon (1991) defines it, we witness a Justice Juggernaut: fighting street
crime, controlling citizens gaining in momentum to deal with a situation the
reality of which we do not truly know. Furthermore, criminological research on
penology specifies that the measures taken are most likely to be counter-
productive and result in greater rates of criminal involvement. Ironically we now
find our security threatened as much by the fear of crime and reaction to the
perceived crisis, caused in part by the media reporting of the official statistics, than
actual crime. Individuals who have the least rate of victimisation fear crime the
most. We have so many figures, we turn from collecting them to asking what does
it all mean? Our pursuit of a moral barometer produces an ambiguous instrument.
What was meant to be an instrument of security ends up causing insecurity. (For
qualifications on the present official statistics see The Economist, 15 October
1994.)
How did we get to the point where statistics dominate criminological

discourse?
Historically, this dramatic increase in our use of numbers results, at least in part,
from industrialisation and the influx of people from the country into the town; it
was aided by the advance in sophistication of the government armies of the
Napoleonic era. These vast armies entailed an echelon of quartermasters keeping
track of how much was needed to feed, arm and equip units scattered throughout
Europe, Egypt and the East. Accurate information proved as valuable as the weapons
of war.
What sense can be made of the proliferation of numbers? To what extent do we
need a computer to determine the meaning of social life? Do statistical forms of
information provide appropriate images for theorising? The statistic is a
quantification of social life. Such quantification is permissible on the basis of the
identification of a domain of objects by way of their properties. Queletet, but not
Durkheim, appears to have believed that crime was a deviation from the average
state of being. In other words crime was a natural phenomenon, an ontology which
was pre-methodologically given, and able to be quantified, rendered into figures
by the simple act of observation and cataloguing. Whereas for Durkheim, crime
was an act of censure, and thus crime was still natural, a truly moral or social
interactive phenomena, ie act of man’s reactions to events. What is the effect upon
quantification? If the naturalness of crime is not some natural essentialist ontological
state, but only a relational state of being, in other words, if recorded crime is not a
reflection of some external reality oblivious to human action, but a reflection of
process, then our attempts to make something meaningful out of these figures
174
depend, not on the figures, but our capacity to see how the elements fit together.
The question ‘how much crime is there?’ is reconstructed into ‘what does it mean
for these figures to be produced?’ Or ‘What does it mean for these figures to
exist?’
Charles Lindblom (1990) argues that one result of this dominant approach in
the social sciences is that human beings have been robbed of their capacity to
understand their situation. This ‘professional impairment’ has occurred as a result
of the translation of social life into the language of the calculable, the rigorous; the
coherence of mathematical formula is produced at the expense of insight into the
contexts of action, and the meaning or characteristics of social situations as the
actors perceive them.
Perhaps two key examples are the reduction by criminological positivism of
two of the most fertile bodies of American criminological theorising, anomie (or
strain theory) and control theory, into a mass of sterile theorising. In both cases
positivism has picked up these theoretical outlooks and applied them in the hope
of finding quantifiable social laws which impel actors, in other words, flows of
social forces which cause crime. The idea that we may be setting out interpretative
ideas for social conditions which provide contexts and conditions, to which actors
respond in variable and partially unique ways, is under-developed in the mainstream
criminological approaches.
Strain theory
Durkheim sought to create a sociology capable of understanding the processes

and effects of the transition from tradition-bound societies to modernity. In
conditions of dramatic transformation a state of normlessness or anomie was
engendered, a term that serves as the foundation for Robert Merton’s (1938; 1957)
strain theory of criminal behaviour. Merton’s theory is one of the disjuncture
between the goals, or desires, the dominant culture of a society instills in its
members, and the socially accepted means of attaining them.
It is reasoned that if a person is thwarted in his or her efforts to realise these
goals legitimately, he or she may attempt to achieve them via a variety of illegal
manoeuvres. Lower social class individuals, frustrated by their inability to
participate in the economic rewards of the wider society, are said to redirect their
energies into criminal activity as a way of obtaining these rewards (Merton, 1938;
1968:185ff).
• Success, measured by the amount of money and material possessions, is a
strong value in American culture.
• Everyone is encouraged to believe that, like every other person, he has a
right to be successful, and that by trying his best he will certainly achieve his
goals.
• Nevertheless, because of social conditions and economic realities, not everyone,
175
or every group, possesses the required means to succeed; hence, anomie and
crime.
For Merton the dominant theme of American culture was the emphasis on
monetary success, but this placed strains on individuals differentially located in
the social structure. The American dream emphasis two images – one of
monetary success, and the second of the possibility of social ascent for all
members – while the social structure only allows the image to be a reality for a
few. Different individuals experience strain differently depending on their
location in the social structure; these different pressures typically produce
various sorts of outcome.
The key term used was anomie, taken from Durkheim but with changes:
‘Anomie is... conceived as a breakdown in the cultural structure, occurring particularly
when there is an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the
socially structured capabilities of members of the group to act in accord with them. In
this conception, cultural values may help to produce behaviour which is at odds with
the mandates of the values themselves.
On this view, the social structure strains the cultural values, making action to
accord with them readily possible for those occupying certain statuses within the
society, and difficult or impossible for others. The social structure acts either as a
barrier, or as an open door, to the acting out of cultural mandates. When the cultural
and the social structure are mal-integrated, the first calling for behaviour and attitudes
which the second precludes, there is a strain toward the breakdown of the norms;
towards “normlessness” ’ (1968:216-17).
Merton proposed a typology of adaptation which is often represented in one of the
most famous tables in criminology:
Mode of adaptation Culture goals Institutional means

I. Conformity + +
II. Innovation + -
III. Ritualism - +
IV. Retreatism - -
V. Rebellion +/- +/-
The last four of these are seen as deviant adaptations. Most of the activity labelled
crime in America comes from the innovation response. American culture stresses
the goal of material success for everyone, but the actual social structure does not
provide legitimate means to achieve this. As a consequence individuals feel strain
and resort to illegitimate means, ie crime, to achieve the cultural goal. Individuals
who cannot achieve the cultural goal, but have been so strongly socialised into
following only legitimate methods that they cling to these in a ritualistic way and
sublimate the original aims, adopt the response of ritualism. For Merton this is a
typically lower middle class adaptation, and was the result of a coincidence of
176
strict socialisation and opportunities. It is the perspective of the frightened

employee, the zealously conformist bureaucrat in the teller’s cage of the private
banking enterprise, or in the front office of the public works enterprise.
Retreatism, by contrast, involves rejection of both goals and means-withdrawal
from the social race altogether. The retreatist is in the society, but not of it. He has
so strictly internalised notions of the legitimacy of certain means that he cannot
innovate, but, lacking the opportunity to use legitimate means, he escapes from
moral conflict by renouncing both means and goals. Into this category Merton
places psychotics, aurists, pariahs, outcasts, vagrants, vagabonds, tramps, chronic
drunkards and drug addicts. Rebellion involved not merely the negative rejection
of social goals and means by the retreatist, but a positive attempt to replace them
with another set seen as morally superior. Rebels endeavour to introduce a social
structure in which the cultural standards of success would be sharply modified,
and provision made for a closer correspondence between merit, effort and reward.
For Merton, as for Durkheim, those labelled a rebel, revolutionary, non-
conformist, heretic or renegade in an earlier time may become the cultural hero of
today.
Strain theory has been read to hold a stable and optimistic view of human nature;
man is basically a conforming being who only violates society’s laws, norms, and
rules after the disjunction between goals and means becomes so great, that he
finds the only way he can achieve these goals is through illegal channels. Man is
basically good, but the arrangements of the social structure create stress, strain,
and eventually crime is engaged in to alleviate this tension. Since it is the fact that
legitimate opportunities are unevenly distributed throughout a society which
explains the presence of a strong link between crime and social class (Merton
[1938] 1957), changing the opportunity structure should reduce crime. In discussing
the foundations of strain theory, Merton maintains that a greater emphasis on goals
than the means used in attaining them and a restriction of legitimate opportunities
available to portions of the population are necessary conditions in the development
of a sense of anomie and strain, which in turn contributes to society’s crime
problems.
The ideas of strain and anomie appear of fundamental importance. However,
the sociology which took up these themes largely constructed tests of a barren and
sterile positivism in the name of empirical investigations. The search was for
statistical laws, or correlations, between class position and delinquent activity. Many
of these studies have yielded results which were seen as largely inconsistent with
Merton’s original hypothesis. Generalisations were made, predictions attempted
with data sets which assumed generality. Research used general indices – on social
class, inequality, and the effect of dropping out of school, for instance – which
were not sub-divided enough to get micro pictures, and too general to avoid
ambiguity. The results obtained largely called into question many of the tenets
supposedly espoused by strain theorists. The results of many of the earlier research
studies on social class and crime were consistent with the supposition that more
persons from lower than higher socioeconomic backgrounds engaged in various
177
forms of illegal activity (see Reiss and Rhodes, 1961). More recently conducted
investigations, however, particularly those in which self-report data have been
utilised, show the relationship between social class and crime to be slight, if not
insignificant (see Tittle, Villemez, and Smith, 1978), although controversy continues
to surround the proposed association between social class and crime (see
Braithwaite, 1981). It is argued that research on income inequality, while ultimately
inconclusive, is surprising in light of Merton’s structural expectations (see Messner,
1982; Stack, 1983). In addition, studies on school and crime suggest that dropping
out of school normally leads to increased rather than decreased (as it was thought
strain theory would predict) levels of antisocial conduct (see Shavit and Rattner,
1988; Thornberry, Moore and Christenson, 1985).
Some positivist studies have resulted in support of Merton’s theory, Brennan
and Huizinga (1975), for example, found that youth perceptions of limited
opportunity, anomie, peer pressure, and negative labelling, accounted for 31% of
the variance in the frequency of self-reported acts of delinquency in 730
adolescents. Cernkovich and Giordano (1979) argued that while male and female
delinquents expressed a greater sense of blocked opportunity than male and
female non-delinquents, this variable explained only 10% of the variance in
delinquent behaviour. In an effort to examine the primary tenets of strain theory
directly, Stack (1983) compared the reported rates of homicide and property
crime, with the Paglin-Gini index of income inequality for all 50 US states. A
multiple regression analysis of these data revealed that income inequality was
associated with homicide, but not property crime. Stack reports further that a
preliminary analysis of data collected on 29 nations yielded similar results. Some
commentators argue that this finding presents problems for strain theory since
Merton appears to argue that income inequality should lead to increased levels of
economically oriented crime. But all this seems to work with a rather static model
of society and of the communication effects of culture. We shall look at culture in
Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, but here we can ask why is it thought that class or
income can be measured in such a way that the effect of cultural messages are the
same for all the members of a grouping? We know in life it simply is not the case.
Even if we can group together a substantial body of persons into a category, the
amount of contingency and diversity in life (in the receipt of cultural messages),
means that any prediction which does not account for various sub-groupings and
is loosely formulated is dubious.
Consider the way in which Merton phrased his scheme:
‘It will be remembered that we have considered the emphasis on monetary success as
one dominant theme in American culture... The theory holds that any extreme
emphasis upon achievement... will attenuate conformity to the institutional norms
governing behaviour designed to achieve the particular form of ‘success’... It is the
conflict between the cultural goals and the availability of using institutional means –
whatever the character of the goals – which produces a strain toward anomie.’
(1968:220)
178
Theorists and researchers critical of strain theory argue that this model suffers
from redundancy to the extent that goal commitment, in the absence of differential
means to goal attainment, may account for a person’s involvement in criminal
activity (Johnson, 1979; Kornhauser, 1978). Hirschi (1969) claimed to demonstrate
that commitment to conventional aims was sufficient to explain criminal
involvement, and that additional factors, such as those adhered to by strain theorists,
were largely superfluous to the crime-goal relationship.
Listen to some of the criticisms:
• problems with its empirical validity;
• it is regarded as too general and imprecise (Bahr, 1979);
• it does not account for the criminality of persons growing up in middle-
class homes (Elliott & Voss, 1974), this appears to be in contradiction to
the second complaint and is simply not sustainable. As Box (1983) has
demonstrated, anomie is a good theory to use to analyse white collar crime!
(What was Micheal Milken, the founder of Junk Bonds, if not a great
criminal innovator?);
• it overlooks important individual differences in behaviour (Wilson and
Herrnstein, 1985);
• the original formulation placed individuals into box-like slots on a pin-ball
machine;
• it is claimed to be unsuccessful in explaining why most working-class youth
never resort to crime, or why many delinquents abandon the criminal way of
life by the time they enter adulthood (Hirschi, 1969);
• contrary to the predictions of strain theory, high aspirations in working-class
youth tend to correlate inversely with later delinquency (Elliott & Voss, 1974;
Hirschi, 1969);
• while there is some support for Merton’s contention that most Americans share
middle-class goals (Erlanger, 1980), there is other research that disputes this
basic premise of strain theory (Kitsuse and Dietrick, 1959; Lemert, 1972).
What has been the usual form of response? To try to integrate it with other
models of criminal behaviour. This is to be expected, and welcomed, and has
spawned a tradition specifically addressing particular forms of sub-cultural
effects (see Chapter Twelve). Cloward and Ohlin (1960) tried to integrate strain
theory with Sutherland’s differential association approach, by arguing that the
effects of strain will not operate unless one also has the opportunity to learn
from delinquent peers. Later Elliott and Voss (1974) argued their support for the
differential association component of the model, but rejected the strain/anomie
aspect. Using a vast data base on youth behaviour, Elliott, Ageton, and Canter
(1979) tried to combine strain theory with Hirschi’s (1969) social control
theory, a move many thought was combining polar opposites. The results were
inconclusive.
179
What can we make of this?
Commentators have argued that because these large scale statistical investigations
do not come up with specific correlations capable of generalisation then the theory
has no creditability! In other words positivist scholars claim we cannot use the
theory as a form of hermeneutics – we can only speak in terms of anomie if we can
create some gigantic mathematical formula out of it.
Let us ask what we want from a theory. If the answer is an aid in understanding
aspects of our predicament, to understanding features of modernity, then the
judgment that a theory is enlightening is not to be judged on the condition that we
can create arithmetical or quasi-mathematical measuring of all the steps involved
in the understanding. What is the project criminology? Is it to try to play a part in
the construction process? If so why should the desire to make theories count in
that process be limited to theories that involve counting?
But there is another set of criticism aimed at Merton (and at Sutherland and the
work of the Chicago School). It comes from writers on the right, for example
Wilson and Herrnstein (1985), who assert that these ‘perspectives were the
product of sociological thought that tends to draw attention away from individual
differences toward social categories’. Additionally, the right criticises these
theories because the authors experienced ‘reformist impulses that led them,
implicitly or explicitly, to explain social problems by reference to those factors
that are, or appear to be, susceptible to planned change’. But perhaps the greatest
sin was mixing categories. Merton, it appears, has made the sin of believing that
evil may flow from good.
‘Whereas an older generation of criminologists, of which the Gluecks were very
much a part, thought that evil causes evil (for example, bad families produce bad
children), many members of the new generation were attracted to the idea that
‘good’ often causes evil (for example, that the desire for achievement, or the
decisions of police and judges, will cause people to break the law). This view was
most clearly suggested by Merton: a cardinal American virtue, “ambition”,
promotes a cardinal American vice, “deviant behaviour”.’ (all quotes, Wilson and
Herrnstein, 1985:215)
Each objection requires interpretation:
• Any theory must have a starting point, a set of presumptions upon which a
logical structure is built. Theories seek truth, but must operate through
conceptual schemes. Each conceptual scheme must be founded on a set of
assumptions. (This is why it is very difficult to integrate social theories, since
successful integration can only be achieved if the founding assumptions are
translatable). Whereas sociology presumes that large scale social forces are
crucial, Wilson and Herrnstein start from the assumption of methodological
individualism. However, every act of analysis must be from a prior synthesis
(albeit unarticulated) – is it the case that Wilson and Herrnstein prefer some
underlying natural order with individuals constitutionally genetically endowed,
180
rather than asking the question: by what social processes are individuals
constituted?
• The argument regarding social reform is an argument concerned with the
concept of modernity. Is modern society a normative project? A result of man’s
conscious and unconscious efforts, of planned consequences and unintended
consequences, of a mixture of planning and chance, but for which man must
take responsibility? Or is some underlying structural-functional development
in play, and man should not attempt to take charge? Should man absolve himself
from social responsibility for the social?
• Note the interconnection of these two issues. A policy of locating
responsibility on to the subject and the near institutions (for example, the
family) will appeal, when we fail to recognise the ontology of social forces
over which we ought to take some control, if we specify the primacy of
methodological individualism.
• The mixing of good and evil is exactly the point which stems from Durkheim,
not only in the idea of unintended consequences, but additionally, though the
idea of irony. It is not just that, for Merton, ambition may have the consequence
of being a criminogenic factor, that innovating may lead to either Jesus Christ
or Micheal Melkin – the founder of ‘Junk Bonds’ and convicted of massive
white collar crime – (in his original article Merton specifically addressed the
question of White Collar crime), but that a process of ironic consequences
and contingencies may be involved. Thus, the same ontological subject (an
American) may become a criminal, or a successful businessman, depending
on where the accident of birth had located him in the social structure, and the
set of contingent factors which may determine which adaption he adopts.
There is nothing predetermined, there is nothing of a natural constitution
which will a priori determine this outcome before social process are negotiated
through. This seems to offend constitutional theorists like Wilson and
Herrnstein. Their, sometimes not-so-subtle, agenda is to refute the possibility
of social projects.
For most of this century the societies of the modern west, the societies of middle
modernity, appeared relatively peaceful. Externally there were wars which badly
affected the second decade, and whose impact led onto the Second World War.
Capitalism nearly collapsed – first in Britain after the First World War, then in the
US in the 1930s, it was saved by massive government intervention into the
economy and the market (ie capitalism was saved by what appeared its enemy,
aspects of socialist economics). It seemed a social structure, that following
Lefebvre ([1971]; 1984), we can call the bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption (and increasingly monopoly controlled production), was being set in
place. It appeared to many that the good society was being formed; a place where
human beings could become satisfied. Intellectuals today are notoriously difficult
to appease, but for most of this century society was deemed to have a functional
coherence (both the Marxist and the liberal agreed on this). Books were written
181
stressing the functions of the nuclear family, the functions of this and that...
everything was functional, even those things that were not, which were
dysfunctional and so proved the point even more! Of course we now can see –
using Popper’s analysis of science – that functionalism was the worst form of
crass theorising (it is impossible to logically disprove if you accept its tenets!). But
if you believe it, then it imposes a secular religion upon you (seen clearly in
Marxism but also with its liberal adherents). The function of production was to
provide those goods which would satisfy human needs. This was very clear in
Marxist social policy, but was also fundamental to the liberal – except that the
liberal could not specify through collective-decision making what the appropriate
needs were – this had to be left to the market to sort out on the basis of responding
to aggregations of individual preferences.
All this makes sense if human beings have ascertainable needs and these are
apparent from the nature of humans as a generic species. But what is the case if
humans do not have a basic fundamental nature with a set of natural needs, but
instead consist of embodied interactional sites of desires and aspirations? What
happens if the coherence of human nature depends upon the interaction of body
and culture?
Merton’s theory offers a specific interpretation of a particular set of public
images of the social. We can understand the desire for money as a desire for the
medium of exchange through which a more varied set of existential desires can
be satisfied (or at least played with). Reflexively, we can understand the state of
society in which the desire for material success is the dominant cultural goal as
an indication of a crucial steering mechanism of social development. Merton’s
theory occupies a particular level of generality. It is not specifically located as a
sub-section of some total social theory such as Marxism, but rather asked questions
at a level some called ‘middle range’ theory. Ian Taylor (1994) includes Merton’s
theory in his discussion of ‘the political economy’ of crime; reading Merton as
intending to offer a critique of the effects of the major cultural message of
American society – a message which ranges across all the class structure. Most
of the studies that have (mis)applied Merton have been empirical studies with
limited theoretical ambitions.
What has happened to Merton? What can we take from him? It can be argued
that the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, and the placement of class
via location vis à vis production, has grown into, and largely been supplemented
by, a much greater fluidity of social status based on consumption power. No only
has desire been unleashed in late-modernity as never before, but social stratification
is complex and based increasingly on social resources and consumption power.
The existential nature of late modern life (the multiple flows of images and
communications passing through the self) has rendered the static nature of the
Mertonian choices unbelievable. But this does not mean that the basic idea is false
– indeed it appears to have even more power when we return to aspects of the
original Durkheimean formulation.
182
Consider Nietzsche’s attempt to probe beneath the desire for money: Nietzsche
argues that when the value of an item is determined by its market exchange rate, in
other words what the person who will consume it is willing to pay, then the ability
to consume is the public display of one’s power. Thus the desire for money is only
the superficial signification of the will for power:
‘The means employed by the lust for power have changed, but the same volcano
continues to glow, the impatience and the immoderate love to demand their sacrifice:
and what one formerly did “for the sake of God” one now does for the sake of money,
that is to say, for the sake of that which now gives the highest feeling of power and
good conscience’ (Daybreak: Aph: 204).
Power is not a simple need, it is a deeply interpretative want.
Social control theory
American sociology, largely through the work of Travis Hirschi (1969), took up a
reading of Durkheim’s ideas combined with the assumption of classical criminology
that a tendency to crime is normal in any human being, to argue that criminal
behaviour results from a failure of conventional social groups (family, school, pro-
social peers) to bind or bond with the individual. To maintain social order society
must teach the individual not to offend. We are born with a natural proclivity to
violate the rules of society, thus delinquency is a logical consequence of one’s
failure to develop internalised prohibitions against lawbreaking behaviour.
‘Delinquency is not caused by beliefs that require delinquency but is rather made
possible by the absence of (effective) beliefs that forbid delinquency.’ (Hirschi,
1969:198)
Hirschi’s theory focuses on how conformity is achieved; his is not a theory of
motivation but of constraint. While it culminates in the thesis of self-control which
we have been working to understand, from his original 1969 work, we can see that
although allowing for external sources of social control, Hirschi stresses the role
of internal controls in directing social behaviour.
Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory of criminal behaviour was developed
around four key concepts and several important institutions. The concepts are those
of attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief, while the institutions are
those of the family, the school and the peer group. They combine in that:
‘Positive feelings toward controlling institutions and persons in authority are the first
line of social control. Withdrawal of favourable sentiments toward such institutions
and persons at the same time neutralises their moral force.’ (1969:127)
Attachment denotes the strength of any ties that may exist between the individual
and primary agents of socialisation, such as parents, teachers, and community
leaders. Thus, it is a measure of the degree to which law-abiding persons serve as
a source of positive reinforcement for the individual. Commitment involves an
183
Commitment involves an investment in conformity or conventional behaviour,

and a consideration of future goals that are incompatible with a delinquent
lifestyle. Involvement is a measure of one’s propensity to participate in
conventional activities, and directs the individual toward socially valued success.
The more time one spends in conventional activities, the less opportunity one will
have to engage in illegal behaviour. Belief denotes acceptance of the moral
validity of societal norms, and reflects the strength of one’s conventional attitude.
Hirschi’s work is positivist in that each of these elements is meant to be capable of
empirical measurement and quantification. In his original formulation he did not
specify how these four elements might interact, but was content to hypothesise a
relationship between attachment and commitment, attachment and belief, and
commitment and involvement. Delinquency was associated with weak
attachments to conventional institutions and modes of conduct.
Hirschi (1969) tested his social control theory by administering a questionnaire
to a group of 4,000 high school students. He found a meaningful connection between
self-reported delinquency and poor attachment to one’s parents, and support for
the validity of each of the four key elements (ie attachment, commitment,
involvement, belief). He has provided fertile ground for many other studies. For
example, Michael Hindelang (1973) observed a negative correlation between
delinquency and each of Hirschi’s key elements, only differing from Hirschi in
that, while Hirschi found a negative relationship between peer attachment and
delinquency, Hindelang recorded a positive association. Hindelang argued that
Hirschi’s theory requires a greater elaboration in terms of peer attachment since
divergent outcomes will likely result from attachment to conventional rather than
unconventional peers.
Hirschi’s social control theory spanned a vast literature on juvenile offenders,
mostly supportive (see Austin, 1977; Bahr, 1979; Jensen and Eve, 1976; Johnson,
1979; Poole and Regoli, 1979; Rankin, 1977). There has been less specification
for how the theory accounted for adult offences.
These studies appear to make a good effort at reducing family attachment into
a calculable entity. An example is Wiatrowski, Griswold, and Roberts (1981) who
performed a multivariate path analysis of longitudinal data collected on 2,213
Michigan high school students. After controlling for ability, social class, and school
performance, Wiatrowski et al, found general support for social control theory,
although they redesigned key elements of the theory of social control to help
mathematical operationality. Whereas attachment to parents, involvement with
conventional activities, and belief in moral validity of the existing social structure
were all part of the multivariate solution, commitment tended to drop out of the
analysis (possibly because of redundancy or low reliability), and several factors
overlooked by Hirschi (eg dating, school attachment) worked their way into the
equation. This is fairly typical: the basic idea of the social control model receives
general empirical support, but the theoretical entities behind the data get somewhat
modified and refined.
184
The desire to typologise and analyse particular variables, and link these with
specific types of crime is also strong. For instance, Jill Rosenbaum (1987) used
self-report data from the Seattle Youth Study (Hindelang, Hirschi & Weiss, 1981)
to group subjects by offence category (violent behaviour, property crimes, drug
offences) and correlate to offence type. She argued that social control theory
successfully accounted for drug offences, but did only a fair job in accounting for
property crimes and a poor job in accounting for violent behaviour. We then have
to fit the nature of violence into positivism.
There have been numerous attempts to integrate social control with other
theoretical perspectives. Hence, several recent research studies show that dropping
out of school is normally accompanied by increased, rather than decreased, levels
of subsequent criminality (Bachman and O’Malley, 1978; Polk, Adler, Bazemore,
Blake, Cordray, Coventry, Galvin and Temple, 1981; Shavit and Rattner, 1988;
Thornberry et al, 1985), a relationship that falls more in line with social control
theory than the strain model. But why should they be seen as mutually exclusive?
Stephen Cernkovich (1978) found support for both the strain and social control
models in a self-report study of 412 male high school students and noted that the
combined effect of these two theories accounted for more variance than did either
model separately.
We can go around in circles weaving a merry dance. In an analysis of data from
the Richmond Youth Project, Gary Jensen (1972) concluded that control theory
was supported, over differential association as an explanation of delinquent patterns
of behaviour, but when Matsueda (1982) reanalysed the same data he came to an
opposite conclusion! While Thompson, Mitchell, and Dodder (1984) report that
their findings, on family attachment, peer associations, and delinquency are also
more congruent with differential association than social control conceptualisations,
Amdur (1989) finds fault with how the variables in this study were measured.
With a study with greater attention to the concepts of investigation, John Hepburn
(1976) discerned greater support for social control theory, than Sutherland’s
differential association perspective in a sample of 139 mid-Western males ages 14
to 17. Using a series of partial correlations to test these two theories, Hepburn
determined that delinquent definitions (eg level of personal restraint, and willingness
to engage in law-breaking behaviour) preceded delinquent associations. Poole and
Regoli (1979) also ascertained support for the social control formulation on peer
influence and crime: Adolescents with weak parental support were more susceptible
to negative peer influence, while strong parental support served to insulate
adolescents from the effects of anti-social peers.
Social control theory draws upon the insights of classicism while trying to
create a positivist language. It is one sided, in that it does not address the issue of
socio-cultural and socio-structural sources of motivations to offend. It works with
an image of human nature that implies that crime is the inevitable result of lack of
proper controls. Hirschi is guilty of adopting a manipulative view of family
relationships (for example, the young person who has a part-time job is less able to
be controlled by his or her parents, since they no longer have sole control of the
185
purse strings). How can bonds be captured in positivist language? Again it appears
to over-predict: a substantial proportion of poorly bonded persons do not develop
delinquent patterns of adjustment (Elliott et al, 1979). Hirschi has also been
criticised for not specifying how bonds are severed, broken, or fail to form in the
first place (Colvin and Pauly, 1983). Additionally, Colvin and Pauly take Hirschi
to task for adopting a largely dichotomous approach (strong-weak) to an issue
(bonding) that seems to vary along several dimensions, qualitative as well as
quantitative, and for minimising the significance of the socialising agent in the
actual bonding process. At least, in his attempts to bring in individualist features –
unlike Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) who argue that some individual differences
exert a direct influence on crime and delinquency – Hirschi considers the impact
of individual differences (eg intelligence, temperament), to have an indirect effect
(via bonding).
The interaction of socialisation and control, or restraint, is a vital aspect of
the dialectics of modernity. But, as Hirschi’s formulation has been taken up by
American sociology, the information being created is so capable of correction
and methodological qualification, that we are in danger of being lost in mindless
information games. Some criminologists, who apparently always wanted to be
professors in mathematics departments, find social control theory difficult to
use; while it is generalisable, suggestive of ideas and reasonably well
substantiated from an empirical standpoint, they see it as lacking in precision
and operationality in terms of reducing its suppositions to clear mathematical
quantities.
But a workable control theory can be achieved that does not surrender to the
numbers fetish. Friday and Hade’s (1976) explanation of delinquency in
industrialised societies, for example, combines theories of modernisation, urbanity
and social integration.
They argue that conformity will be greatest among youth drawn into intermeshed
role relationships across five institutional spheres: kin, neighbourhood or
community, school, work and peers. The more that activities and time are dispersed
across the five spheres, the more likely a youth is to avoid delinquent behaviour;
and the greater the proportion of youth in a society are so immersed, the lower the
rate of youth crime. Youth who are involved in one or other sphere to the exclusion
of the others, are more likely to deviate than integrated youth, because intimacy in
many spheres promotes commitment to societal values and norms by exposing the
youth to larger numbers of conforming definitions, and by imbuing him or her
with a sense of being part of the whole. No one sphere, can become too important,
because the other spheres counterbalance.
Further, Friday and Hage contend that the degree of social integration so
conceived is affected by the level of modernisation and urbanisation. The more
modernised and urbanised a society, the more are youth isolated from active
participation excluded from at least some of the five institutional spheres, due to
extension of the period of training for adult roles. Most modern youth spend no
time and have no involvement in the institutional sphere of work; partly as a
186
result of that, they are limited to kin and community relationships. Since youth
must rely upon role relationships in school and among peers, they are inherently
less constrained by overlapping role relationships, and they are more subject to
peer pressures for fun and status seeking, which often involve deviant or
criminal behaviour. Hence, the greater the modernisation and urbanisation, the
less the overall integration of youth, and the freer they are to commit criminal
acts.
What are we to make of these ‘control theories’?
The first thing that strikes one located in Europe and not in America reading this
tradition of work is how American and narrowly focused all this is. When a
European criminologist thinks of control, his or her thoughts are located at the
level of the nation state, or the depiction of gender, or the construction of a power/
knowledge spiral. Today it is virtually impossible to talk of control in Europe
without immersing oneself in the traditions of Nietzsche and Weber, via their
modern interpreter Michel Foucault, the demands of the social structure, via a
reading of Marx or Durkheim, or the whole structuralism debate occasioned by
structural anthropology.
The big problem European intellectuals have tried to cope with, is how to relate
the actions of individuals and groups to the level of state-societies, in such a way
that the nature of nationwide organised practices and restrictions become apparent.
The problems of the individual vis-à-vis control are the generalisable forms of
control of the capitalist nation state, or the socialist state, the liberal state, the
utilitarian (panoptician) state, and so forth. They may not have been able successfully
to make the connections but that was how the question was framed (see The New
Criminology, Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973 for example).
American intellectuals, on the other hand, do not conceive of control on the
level of the nation state, but as a function of the relation between the individual
and his immediate surroundings, the urban district, the family, the peer group, the
school. To the European, American writing in this area has seemed
microsociological, while to the American, the European writings have appeared to
be really politics. The reason perhaps is that the writings of the European scholar
are always a process of arguing against an earlier form of social structure and
control, so that a new form can be constructed, while the American counterpart is
writing in the context of the image of constructing over the frontier. So much as
the European is afraid of the ancien regime, and the revival of a totalitarian state,
the American is disputing the merits of radical liberalism and civic republicanism.
The American sociology which operated at a higher level, such as Robert
Merton’s middle range theories, and Talcott Parsons (arrived at a theory of
modern societies as functional systems, themselves differentiated into
functionally related structures of sub-systems), substituted some other conception
for the state.
187
What is the impact of post-modernism? Surprisingly, we have to adopt a lot of

American theorising, since the post-modern condition is one that demands
theorising beyond the level of the nation state. If we have to take from a large
basket of different perspectives, this is not a measure of failure, but a reflection of
the diverse and conflicting ways it is possible to interpret social existence. In
doing so, however, we need to face up to the conditions of late-modernity. We do
not need to simply discard positivism, but to create a form of rationality
sufficiently powerful to do justice to the human constitution, and sufficiently
precise to enable us to engage in our projects, without destroying its objects of
analysis. The aim of positivism was to come to a secure knowledge of what is, but
with humanity the purpose of knowing what we are, cannot be distinguished from
the task of knowing how to be. That is to say, that the social sciences cannot
shuffle off the task of being moral sciences by adopting the guise of mathematics.
For, in the rush to busy ourselves counting, we must always be in the business of
working out what counts. Accepting, of course, we do not want to lose ourselves to
the impersonal power of bureaucracy.
188
CHAPTER NINE
POSITIVISM AND THE DREAM OF

ORGANISED MODERNITY
‘Another consequence of the development of bio-power was the growing

importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical
system of the law. Law cannot help but be armed, and its arm, par excellence,
is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last resort, with that
absolute menace. The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task
is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms...
Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchise, rather than
display itself in its murderous splendour; it does not have to draw the line that
separates the enemies of the sovereign from its obedient subjects; it effects
distributions around the norm. I do not mean to say that the law fades into the
background or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that
the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is
increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical,
administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A
normalising society is the historical outcomes of a technology of power centred
on life.’ (Michel Foucault, 1980:144)
Criminology and the dream of organised modernity
Positive criminology surrounded itself with a meta-narrative of reason, progress,

and humanitarian reform. From the late 19th century until the advent of labelling
theory in the 1970s, major text books claimed modern criminal justice institutions
were an orderly, functional and rational evolutionary advance over the pre-modern
(for example Barnes and Teeters, 1951). While the pre-modern person was viewed
as born into a locality of status and custom, constrained by ritual and barbaric
punishments, the modern individual inhabited the practices of a rationalised and
knowledge-led, bureaucratic modernity.
As late-modernity took stock of itself, writers declared this was not only bad
anthropology (full of the eurocentric emphasis and false in its depicting of the pre-
modern), but bad sociology (in that the assumption of orderly laws of social
development cannot be sustained), self-defeating in terms of social control (in that
it down-played all methods of settling disputes by compensation, restitution,
mediation, and ritual symbolism), and possibly anti-communitarian (in that it took
important process of social control and organisation out of the hands of the
locality) – bureaucracy and positivism became subjected to a variety of attacks.
Instead of the development of modernity being a unilinear development of
reason, progress, humanitarianism and civilisation, modernity was seen to be a
complicated structure of various forms of social control. Several themes are worth
mentioning:
189
• the development of social distance;

• the development of bureaucracy and its linkage with knowledges of
disciplinisation;
• the dialectical processes of civilisation.
Social distance
The pre-modern person was embedded into locality. Socialised by ritual and
custom, he could recognise friend from foe in the identities of neighbour and
stranger, or in the uniforms of status. The central feature of modernity, without
which the whole system of a common body of laws and criminal labels could not
be possible, is the development of the modern state and organised bureaucracy. As
opposed to small scale societies, which are sometimes referred to as stateless or
Acephalus, modern society sees a transformation in the process and rituals for
dealing with troublesome situations and mechanisms of socialisation within the
social body. It is this development which organisationally creates the structures
involving the labelling of certain persons and activities as ‘criminal’. Michalowski
(1981) identifies stateless societies as characterised more by order and
cooperation than by chaos and competition. They display little stratification in
terms of differential access to material goods and political power and are small
economically cooperative and relatively equalitarian societies with simple
technology and divisions of labour based mainly upon age and sex. These
societies lack rulers or governments with the power to command, direct and
correct the behaviour of others.
Such anthropological accounts describe the pre-modern state of nature in
opposing terms to the narratives which Liberal writers of the Enlightenment, such
as Thomas Hobbes, relied upon. Against Hobbes’ assumption that humans are
essentially autonomous, self-interested creatures, whose egoistic pursuits need to
be formally restrained to avoid chaos and anarchy, the anthropological picture of
acephalus societies suggests that the tribal forms of life achieved the opposite
outcome through effective forms of interaction and socialisation.
We have seen how in defining the spirit of positivism, August Comte presented
modernity as the age where power was led by positive knowledge. Modernity was
to be the rule of scientific expertise. In large part, the image of bureaucratic
managerial expertise has become a deeply embedded cultural icon of modernity. It
offered a new form of social control – control based not on embedment but social
distance.
This theme was central to Nietzsche, who argued that modern values and
intellectual horizons were formed under a pathos of distance whereby modern
man, the individual, begins his ascent into an open world; as an individual or
member of a group he demands a modernity capable of embodying his own plans
and projects in the natural and social world. He disdains the techniques and values
of the past in favour of those he calls modern. However, modernity is not without
190
Positivism and the dream of organised modernity
its rituals of social control. Although dressed up in terms of rational advance,

formal social control in modernity appears to be characterised by a history of
ritualistic exclusion. The offender is not reconciled with victim or the victim’s kin.
Such a structure of reconciliation would place a great deal of power over crime
and deviance at a local level. However modernity is characterised by such power
being given to the state and criminal justice operating as a function of state
bureaucracies.
As modernity advanced, criminal justice and welfare systems developed concrete
institutions and their staff to deal with crime, offenders and deviants – but what
comes first? Are mad and criminal individuals simply thrown up and correctly
recognised and then sent to a special institution, an asylum or a prison? Or do
prisons and asylums come into existence and demand clients?
The major commentators, for example, Scull (1976, 1979) Rotham (1971, 1980)
and Foucault (1965, 1973, 1976) are divided on many issues, but all agree that
with the processes of industrialisation and division of labour:
‘The community acquired an ethical power of segregation which permitted it to eject,
as into another world, all forms of social uselessness.’ (Foucault, 1965:58)
Foucault argues that institutions demand clients, and as the control and subsequent
elimination of leprosy began emptying the royally endowed charity leprosariums
in Europe in the 14th and 17th centuries, by the 17th and 18th centuries these
institutions were being filled with an assortment of socially unwanted people: the
poor, the insane, the criminal, the destitute through physical impairments, and the
orphaned. The institutions took in the various populations and only with the 19th
century came the classifying and segregation of the unwanted into different and
specialised institutions as we know it today.
Foucault highlights one aspect of a complicated process, however, this isolation
and exclusion of the deviant came to be conducted under the legitimacy of legal
rational forms of discourse. Authorised legal exclusion of individuals is a
fundamental feature of formal modern law. Administered by fulltime agents of the
state, legal regulation and specialised diagnosis by recognised social scientific
experts has come to be the enforcing mechanism of the power of centralised
authority.
The advanced division of labour means that decisions made about the members
of the lowest classes, the labouring working class, the social residue (the classes of
people from which most of the traditional offenders come from), are made by
professionals (lawyers, judges, probation officers, doctors, psychiatrists, prison
governors, parole boards) using specialised techniques. The behaviour of the person
becomes institutionally criminalised or pathologised (medicalised). The criminal
became the subject of generalisable knowledge and rules, rather than local
knowledge about his or her particular environment and conditions. This process
has intensified in recent years with the introduction of sentencing guidelines and
tables which indicate the disposition that particular crimes should receive: the result?
191
The individual is not looked at as a spatially located social network. As the

Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie has recently put it:
‘A political decision to eliminate concern for the social background of the
defendant involves much more than making these characteristics inappropriate for
decision on pain. By the same token, the offender is to a large extent excluded as a
person. There is no point in exposing a social background, childhood dreams,
defeats – perhaps mixed with some glimmer from happy days - social life, all those
small things which are essential to a perception of the other as a full human being.
With the Sentencing Manual and its prime outcome, the Sentencing Table, crime is
standardised as Offence Levels, a person’s life as Criminal History Points, and
decisions on the delivery of pain are reduced to finding the points where two lines
merge.’ (1993:138)
These rituals of reordering declare they are non-rituals – thus the rituals of dealing
with troublesome situations are limited in their flexibility and lose any prospect
for the reconciliation of the conflicting parties. The advent of the sentencing manual
is the logical conclusion of a procedure that cannot involve diversity unless diversity
is written into the rules of the game. Formal legal rationality implies usually
predictability, certainty and uniformity of outcome. Furthermore, in dealing with
the trouble maker the legal institution strips the conflicting parties of the power to
manage the conflict and converts each group into a labelled entity, ie an offender
and a victim, and the system operates according to the meanings invested with
these labels. Nils Christie (1977) has termed this the theft of conflicts from the
people by the state.
Howard Becker (1963) argued that under the criminal justice methodologies of
modern societies, the troublesome individual becomes defined as an offender or
criminal, and is symbolically forced outside the normal life of the social group. In
these processes he is singled out rather than reconciled to the social body; he is
ritualistically converted into an ‘outsider’. Problems and troublesome situations
become labelled as offences, and opened to management not as human indices of
trouble inside the social body, but as criminal acts which are outside the normal.
The discourse of crime symbolically reflects the notion that crimes are invasions
of the social body rather than eventualities from within. One effect is that the
modern structures of formal social control actually prevent members giving attention
to troublesome situations which require social measures, but draws attention onto
those individuals who have committed offences and who can be excluded. Such
individuals become labelled as criminals and are seen as the trouble. Whereas the
reordering rituals of pre-modern societies attend to situations of trouble and attempt
to reconcile the parties involved, modern societies may give less attention to the
situations of trouble, attending instead to the troublemaker, thus burdening that
individual with blame and becomes, drawn into the necessity to exclude or
incapacitate him or her. Usage of the whole criminal offender mentality may thereby
lessen our ability to face up to and deal with the very troublesome situations out of
which the people we so label emerge.
192
The effect of the criminal label and procedure of treatment/punishment may

reduce the binds of the social networks in which the individual was located and
which constrained and sheltered him (thus informally controlling and preventing
crime); thus increasing the likelihood of offending in the future. The growth of
formal systems of control may reduce informal or localised control.
Moreover, the continuation of troublesome situations in the face of the failure
of the rituals to successfully control such behaviour may lead to a progressive
weakening of confidence in institutions and rituals. This in turn may lead to demands
for greater methods of exclusion focused on the criminal. Crime thus demands
more criminal justice and crime control measures, which creates more criminal
labels which feeds back into more criminal acts, which in turn stimulates a demand
for more criminal justice and crime control measures.
Some commentators, such as Malcolm Specter (1981) and Luke Hulseman
(1986), argue that the concept of crime has become too foundational in our modern
methods of thinking about troublesome people. Spector reminds us that there are a
number of other methods of social disapproval and control such as concepts of
tort, sin, disease and the development of streamlined civil procedures.
In early modernity a crucial ‘job’ of law was to ensure predictability in social
relations, the positive spirit sought to render the foundations of a now-unpredictable
social world largely understandable and thus controllable. The task was to create
an edifice of knowledge bases and scientific laws to control the conditions wherein
man found himself; however, as Weber warned, the danger was that man may
himself soon become only one item in the overall package to be controlled, or
exterminated if he remained opaque to analysis. If man was only to be known by
the methodologies of science and placed in the categories of bureaucracy, a new
form of tyranny may be formed – we tend to associate the mention of the horrors
of mass tyranny with the names of Hitler or Stalin, but Weber was pointing to a
feature intimate to modernity itself.
The development of bureaucracy and the knowledges of

disciplinisation
Under the influence of Weber and Nietzsche, criminologists in the 1970s came to
look for power in other forms than as expressed through law. Sociology had been
stressing the reality of bureaucratic power, and criminology came to realise that
positivism was implicated in the disciplining of the human subject. The French
social theorist Michel Foucault defined positivism as part of a new kind of power
which emerged in the 19th century which he called biopolitics, based around the
idea of the norm. The law of the classical criminologist, the ‘juridical system of
law’, becomes complemented by a power which provides the structure and
organises, administers, and constitutes activities and forms of social life, an essential
regulatory mechanism:
193
There are two modes or sites for techniques of regulation.

‘First, the disciplines offer a “anatomo-politics of the human body” and centre on
the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimisation of its capabilities, the extortion
of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into
systems of efficient and economic controls.’ (Foucault, 1980:144)
‘Second, regulation occurs at a more general level of a “bio-politics of the
population” and centres on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of
life and serving as the basis of the biological process: propagation, births and mortality,
the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can
cause these to vary.’ (Ibid: 139-140)
Foucault thereby asks us to reflexively consider the status of the positivist discourses
on the body and the depiction of the other as dangerous or degenerate. Naturalist
views of the body are implicated in the repeated attempts made by the dominant in
society to justify their position with reference to the supposed inferior biological
make-up of the dominated. Consider who have been the outsiders of modernity,
the others who have not shared in its rewards: there are three major groups, the
mob, women and the ethnically other.
Some commentators have traced the growing fear of the body’s irrationality to
the protestant reformation which stressed personal piety, individual judgments,
self-control and self-scrutiny. Winthrop Jordan notes that contacts with others
from overseas were useful to Englishmen in the 18th and 19th centuries as social
mirrors wherein by observing ‘savages’ the Englishmen could see attributes
which they suspected in themselves but of which they could not speak. As the
body became one among the other entities in the world as a site for observation,
instead of openly confronting and talking about the fears and concerns of the
flesh, the dominant white male dealt with his collective anxiety by projecting them
onto the bodies of women and blacks. Women’s bodies were thus inherently
unstable, a source of temptation which threatened to corrupt the rationality of the
white male existence. Their legitimate role was to reproduce a healthy race fit for
domestic and colonial rule. The uncivilised bodies of blacks represented
unsuppressed urges and irrational powers constituting physically powerful but
uncontrolled sexual beings which represented a threat to the moral order of
Western civilisation. This was most visible in greatly exaggerated reports of the
sexual appetites of black men and the size of the African penis. The early
evolutionary ideas postulated a close evolutional relationship between the African
and the ape. James Walvin (1982) relates how for much of the 17th and 18th
centuries it was commonly believed that sexual intercourse took place between
Africans and apes.
Some of the ideas concerning black bodies may come out of the need for
ideologies to legitimate the experience of imperialist domination and slavery but it
is quite likely that ideas of ‘white’ and ‘black’ predated imperial domination and
were fitted onto the experience of contact. For Jordan:
‘White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness,
beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil.’ (1982:44)
194
Clearly such distinctions aided the legitimation of colonisation and slavery. From
its beginnings, the European slave trade produced a discourse which portrayed
African men and women as savages who were ugly, violent and lascivious. When
attacked in the 18th century the slave trade was defended partly through
defining the African in terms of their otherness from European culture –
whereas the European male was civilised and rational, Africa was a pre-social
locality, exhibiting a state of nature which was inherently incapable of self-
government, in large part due to the unrestrained biological drives of its
primitive peoples. The growing empirical sciences purported to identify the
reasons why blacks were constitutionally inferior. As Paul Broca, explained using
craniometry:
‘A prognathous [forward jutting] face, more or less black colour of the skin, woolly
hair and intellectual and social inferiority are often associated, while more or less
white skin, straight hair and an orthognathous [straight] face are the ordinary
equipment of the highest groups in the human species... A group with black skin...
has never been able to raise itself spontaneously to civilisation.’ (Quoted in Gould,
1981:83-4)
The condition of the black body and its potential for physical labour and breeding
defined its worth in exchange in slave trading. It also justified many of the para-
judicial punishments which post-dated emancipation. In the lynching of blacks
between 1885 and 1900 (which was mostly done in public with high prices being
paid for choice seats and often special trains being laid on to transport white families
from some distance away) rape was only asserted in one third of all cases, however,
the justification used in all cases included protecting white women from the bestial
black male (Carby, 1987). In many lynchings the final act was castration, for which
a member of the public often paid a special price to perform.
It is tempting to believe that we have escaped from these beliefs – but consider
what roles are offered to black actors or the presentation of the black body in
magazines and soft-porn (as well as hard porn). In mostly white pornography the
occasional black is both allowed and reduced to his or her extreme sexuality.
In contemporary America while 50% of men convicted of murder involving
rape in the Southern states are white, over 90% of men executed for this offence
are black. Most of these were accused of the rape of white women, while Staples
(1982) maintained that as of the early 1980s no white male had ever been executed
for raping a black woman.
The imagery of the black body varies between races. In Mrinalini Sinha’s
(1987) analysis of the ideology of British imperialism in late 19th century Bengal,
Bengali men were defined as effeminate. This questioned masculinity made them
unfit to share political and administrative power. Early or child marriage was
evidence of unrestrained sexual desire, and these early sexual experiences
corrupted the moral fibre making Bengali’s incapable of exercising rational
restraint in other areas.
The negative construction of black bodies has made them targets for various
forms of moral panics. Restrictive health criteria were introduced as part of
195
immigration controls in 1905 legitimated on the basis of fears of degeneration of

the British race.
Various groups have been so associated. In the 1870s and 1880s Jewish
refugees from mainland Europe were considered less civilised, unclean and
immoral while in the 1950s blacks took on labels the Irish and Jews had taken in
the 19th century. West indians, in particular, were seen as carefree, low-living,
immoral, disorderly colonial peoples. Whereas in the 1850s Irish immigrants were
considered as particularly dangerous, in the 1950s their arrival was officially
hardly noticed despite the fact that they outnumbered immigrants from the New
Commonwealth.
The visualisation of the body provided a way out of one of the great practical
problems for early liberal modernity. The implications of liberal philosophy
appeared to be for universality and inclusivity. For example, liberal modernity
espoused universal, inalienable and equal rights. How then could the real world of
male domination over women be maintained?
The simple answer, as Laqueur (1987:19) puts it was to postulate ‘a biology of
incommensurability’. A naturalist interpretation of women’s bodies justified the
inequalities in gender relations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus by
investigating the body we could see the very basis for the division in human
identity and social demarcation of role and rewards. Specifically science
demonstrated their unstable bodies and fragile minds. To be a woman was to
possess a mind and a body unable to withstand the rigours of mental work, and
unsuitable for major calculations. The lesson to be drawn from the investigation of
women’s bodies was that they were fitted by nature for the production and care of
children and thus should be restricted to the important task of socialising and
moralising the children.
Arguments by women to be included in the mainstream of modernity could be
easily disposed of through science. Gustave Le Bon after measuring the huge total
of 13 skulls felt able to conclude that women:
‘... represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to
children and savages than to an adult, civilised man... A desire to give them the same
education, and, as a consequence to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous
chimera.’ (Quoted in Gould, 1981:104-5)
Furthermore, overtaxing the brain of women would interfere with their reproductive
ability. Moreover, the periodic disturbances which menstruation imposed on
women meant they were unsuited for any role which required consistency of
orientation.
Positivism thus helped determine the meaning of the liberal constitution; it gave
substance to the transformation of early, or liberal modernity, into middle or
organised modernity. It helped demarcate those fit to be insiders and those who, by
‘nature’, must be outsiders. Michel Foucault linked the rise of positivism to the
concept of governmentality, which covers a new form of political rationality which
sees the task of ruling as the calculated supervision and maximisation of the forces
196
of society, the dynamics of the population; the guidance and regulation of the
health and performance of the population, its wealth, health, longevity, its capacity
to wage wars and to engage in labour and so forth. As an object of rule, population
requires knowledge of the numbers of subjects, their ages, their longevity, their
sicknesses and types of death, their pleasures, their desires, their habits and vices,
their rates of reproduction.
As modernity develops the authorities have new tasks for which the law is
unsuitable, these are tasks of maximising the forces of the population and the
individuals within it. The questions become how to minimise their troubles, how
to organise them in the most efficacious manner. Law does not need to know fully
about subjects in order to prohibit activities, but to govern rationally the concerns
of subjects it is necessary to know them; to understand their state, to recognise
their preferences – to recognise who the subjects of your government are. To govern
rationally a territory, a population requires that you know this territory, this
population. A certain social geography is required:
‘To govern a population one needs to isolate it as a sector of reality, to identify certain
characteristics and processes proper to it, to make its features notable, speakable,
writable, to account for them according to certain explanatory schemes. Government
thus depends upon the production, circulation, organisation, and authoritisation of
truths that incarnate what is to be governed, which make it thinkable, calculable, and
practicable.’ (Rose, 1990:6)
Such knowledges need to be transcribable. The phenomenon to be investigated
needs to be translated into information which can be recorded, transcribed onto
paper, computer disks, made into diagrams, tables, and, above all else, recorded in
numbers.
Governing the population came to mean creating a bourgeois

citizenship
In Legislators and Interpreters (1987) Bauman’s thesis of development in modernity

was two-fold. The project of the enlightenment was simultaneously geared to
reorganising the state around the function of planning, designing and managing
the reproduction of social order and towards creating an entirely new, and
consciously designed, social mechanism of disciplining action, aimed at regulating
and regularising the socially relevant life of the subjects of the teaching and
managing state.
Two themes shine through Bauman’s work:
• the destruction of localised forms of life which are then reconstructed in light
of the new disciplines – a process which inevitably involves the intellectual
constructing images of normalcy etc;
• the social structural aspect where the construction of the modern state and civil
society requires a form of subject (citizen) to be (un)consciously created.
197
Bauman describes the ferocity of the fear and assault on popular customs and
local cultures in the name of the domestication of les classes dangereuses. For
Bauman, as for Nietzsche, the modern subject, the citizen of the new state and its
intellectual discourse of law and rationality, was secured through a brutal violence
(the punishments of the ancient regime and their transformation into the reasoning
of the reformatory prison). The intellectuals applied supposedly neutral scientific
knowledge to reshape the ideas of the proper functioning of social objects and the
relations between social orders and behaviour.
Positivism depicted the illiterate and unwashed masses as uncivilised. This
continued a tendency clearly apparent in Beccaria’s text (1764) where he identified
the past with ignorance and barbarism. Local customs, for example, the weight
given to the concept of honour with its duels and the violence of the penalties
openly and publicly celebrated, were to be overcome. The masses seemed to
epitomise all that was regressive, uneducated, irrational. Urbanisation and an
increasing division of labour created a splitting of social worlds, the powerful and
wealthy were withdrawing from participation in the festivals and activities of popular
culture. For Pick:
‘The lowest stratum was both a recognisable sector of the population and
simultaneously the destination of all individuals when forced into crowds.
Between culture and anarchy, safety and activist violence, there was only “a very
thin and precarious partition”. To enter the crowd was to regress, to return, to be
thrown back upon a certain non-individuality, the lowest common denominator
of a crowd of ancestors – a world of dangerous instincts and primitive memories.’
(1989:223)
The contrast with the upper middle class appeared to be between us and them,
between a man civilised and perfected and a brute and savage man. Lombroso was
clear ‘Why does the criminality of the rich take the form of cunning and that of the
poor violence?... The upper classes represent what is truly modern, while the lower
still belong in thought and feeling to a relatively distant past’ (quoted in Morris,
1976:84). Progress denoted the civilising of mankind. It required the investigation
of the man, knowledge and treatment. In part it was a struggle for authority; the
authority to determine knowledge, or the meaning of what was going on in social
life. The learned turned their backs upon their own participation in the practices
and manners of drunkenness, of petty crimes and festival orgies declaring such
actions deviant. For Bauman:
‘... the concept of civilisation entered learned discourse in the West as the name of a
conscious proselytising crusade waged by men of knowledge and aimed at extirpating
the vestiges of wild cultures – local, tradition-bound ways of life and patterns of
cohabitation. It denoted above all else a novel, activist stance taken toward social
processes previously left to their own resources, and a presence of concentrated social
powers sufficient to translate such a stance into effective practical measures. In its
specific form, the concept of civilisation also conveyed a choice of strategy for the
centralised management of social processes: it was to be a knowledge-led management,
and management aimed above all at the administration of individual minds and bodies.’
(1987:93)
198
Bauman sees the process of civilising of the subject as part of a choice of strategy
for the centralised management of social processes; it was also a consequence of
power, of domination. In the 18th century, Bagehot, for example, supports the idea
of ‘veritable progress’ by pointing to the ‘undeniable’ differences ‘by which a
village of English colonists is superior to a tribe of Austrialian native who roam
about them.’ The most marked difference, and therein proof of civilisation, progress
and superiority, is that the English ‘can beat the Australians in war when they like;
they can take from them anything they like, and kill any of them they choose’
(1956:151). By contrast Norbert Elias depicted the civilising process in a more
abstract social-structural and functional way; a dialectic of self and social order.
The dialectics of the civilising process
In a comprehensive set of work ranging over most of this century, Norbert Elias
(1939, 1991) has advanced a thesis that a ‘civilising process’ underlays modern,
capitalist-bourgeois society which is characterised by two interrelated processes
of unification.
The first of these involved the formation of a political centre. Following a long
struggle with resistant forces, primarily those protecting estate interests, the political
centre, which we call the (modern) state, succeeded in securing a monopoly on the
physical use of violence, the levying of taxes, and the generally valid promulgation
and implementation of norms. This process of monopolisation, borne, advanced,
and shaped by an expanding bureaucracy, subordinated all local and regional
authorities to a central authority. From autonomy sprang dependence. The internal
civilising of society was achieved, as Hobbes had already made clear, at the price
of a statist monopoly on violence and its demands.
Second, the macro-societal nationalisation of social violence was accompanied
by a micro-societal process that produced new patterns of psychic behaviour.
Corresponding to the large-scale process of monopolisation, a transformation
occurred within the logic of the individual psyche. An internal process of regulation
emerged, which can be described as a psychic form of structuralisation and
monopolisation. Traditional forms of spontaneity and immediacy were abolished;
a superego representing social norms and a disciplined and disciplining ego were
ceded a priority and placed above the id of drives. The individual now possessed
within himself a model of state monopoly, an ever-present psychic ruler.
In this view, the civilising process is an interlocking of processes, with the two
poles of the forceful construction of a statist monopoly on violence, and the
emergence of an apparatus for psychic discipline coordinated with it. Both of these
forms of unification are fundamentally ambivalent. Granting the nation-state the
monopoly on violence risks creating a super-powerful Leviathan demanding
constant demonstrations of respect in both word and deed; democracy does not
reduce this danger since it becomes a monopoly of those active enough to be
considered the majority. The monopoly on violence may permit the implementation
199
of one-sided interests, as long as they coincide with those of the monopoly. The
psychic self-disciplining of the individual, while resulting in a disciplining of
behaviour commensurate with the requirements of the external monopoly may
constantly demand sublimations and repressions.
This was recognised in a lesser tradition of the writings of the late 19th century.
There is a strong streak, for example, in the writings of Nietzsche and Freud, or in
the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, that cried out that man needed to be not more
controlled, but that he was pathologically over-controlled. This line of thought
cried out for discourses and methodologies of liberation, which enabled individuals
to grow beyond the levelling and standardising tendencies that much in the structure
of everyday life was imposing. Freudian analysis, for example, is a technique of
freedom which comes after freedom from tradition, from unchosen ties with others,
to demand a freedom from the contradictions within oneself. The knowledge of
the ‘self’ offers techniques of becoming free, of becoming the new self which will
enjoy modernity, namely the normal, well behaved citizen. As political subjection
gave way to political citizenship, the selves of the previously excluded, namely the
property-less, the working class, had to be constructed so as to fit the functionality
of the places on offer.
Thus the modern individual must be constructed to take his or her place in the
social order; but is this a process of civilisation or disciplinisation?
The civilised human being, a man possessed of a civilised mind-body complex,
which Norbert Elias refers to, must be distinguished from the positivist naturalised
forms or the disciplined self which Foucault feared the bureaucratic society
demanded. Elias tends to give a picture of function dependency; the emerging
modern personality is developed not as a consequence of some imposed pattern,
but as a consequence of the increasing differentiation of social patterns and
functions. The growing need for self-control is part of the self-steering mechanism
of individuals involving reflexivity, or self-scrutiny, and foresight. By contrast those
writers who adopt a perspective through the ideas of Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault
seek to identify the way in which the political power centre not only lays out
prohibitions for openly anti-social conduct, but quietly regulates the minutiae of
emotional states, ethics, and the management of personal conduct. They ask ‘how
is the integration, sequencing, and co-operation of subjects in networks of command
achieved?’ The answer appears as the complex of discipline and knowledge – if
the self is to be self-regulating then the conditions under which the self comes to
recognise his or her problems, understand the nature of its behaviour, and accept
certain solutions, is clearly a determining factor in the outcome. The pessimistic
legacy of Weber causes a suspicion of discipline behind the supposed welfare
tendencies of the late-modern state. Policing can be a subtle process; law
enforcement only the most prominent aspect.
In his lectures, Beccaria placed policing as a task of political economy
understanding the connection between the task of good government and the
production of industrious, able, obedient and disciplined subjects. Thomas Hobbes
had claimed that man was not fitted for society by nature, but by discipline. This
200
tradition places discipline as the central concept spanning political rule and the
arts of self-government. Discipline provides a way of organising social life according
to rational thought, exactitude, and supervision. It schooled a mode of personal
existence accepting the processes of self-scrutiny, self-evaluation and self-regulation
– but what criteria should be used and how narrow should this process be? At one
extreme we have John Stuart Mill desiring we become all as Socrates, while
Bentham was content for us to become happy chess pawns.1 Foucault warns of
1 Bentham hoped for discipline, routinisation and predictability as the outcome of his grandest
reform proposal of all: his Panopticon or Inspection House. This life-long project protected his
jurisprudence, integrating that jurisprudence with utility theory and making it a practical possibility.
This prison is based on the idea of panoptic gaze, ie continuous and concealed surveillance.
Bentham believed he had found the ‘Columbus Egg’ of politics (Panopticon: 66) and argued it
provided a technique with a multitude of purposes.
’Morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burdens
lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock, the guardian rock of the poor-laws not cut
but untied – all by a simple idea in architecture... No matter how different, or even opposite the
purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the
vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick,
instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education;
in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or
prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of corrections, or work-
houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools.’ (Panopticon: 39-40)
All these disciplinary institutions would share the regulated coding of human conduct in a restricted
space, continuously controlled by officials; a technology of division of space into separated parts,
partition of time into a routine, the detailed coding of human action of the inmates, and the use of
the panoptic gaze. The idea reflects the epistemological basis of the growing scientific approach;
that of control through transparency or ‘seeing without being seen’ (Ibid: 44). The Panopticon
provides a technology to reinforce the conscious intentions of power. Circular in shape, the cells
are located on the outer frame with the inspector’s lodge at the very centre of the circle; the area
in between is left open and all the inmates’ cells face the inspector’s lodge. The cell walls facing
the inspector’s lodge and the ones on the opposite side are made of glass, so that a guard situated
in the central lodge can easily control each and every one of the inmates, and by turning around
can capture all in his gaze. The inmates cannot see their overseer, since the walls of the inspector’s
lodge are darkened with blinds and screens. As well as the cells, the Panopticon accommodates a
chapel and a separate hospital department.
The panoptic gaze is ever present, penetrating every part of the cells and corridors of the
building; it follows the smallest movements of the inmate who is always within the gaze and
understands this. Even if the inspector’s lodge were left empty for some time, the inmate would
never be able to tell. The guards, additionally, needed to be constantly watched; the inspectors
lodge also watched the activities of all staff. Hence we have a hierarchy of continuous surveillance;
the institution itself is open to the general public and the inspection of a judge or governor. The
panopticon was to have no closed areas, no secrets, it was to be open to the inspection of the
world and, thereby, abuse of power was impossible. Is this the model of a hell, or of a perfect
organisation? And what of the effects upon the inmate? Bentham himself preempted the critical
question
‘whether the liberal spirit and energy of a free citizen would not be exchanged for the
mechanical discipline of a soldier, or the austerity of a monk? – and whether the result of this
high-wrought contrivance might not be constructing a set of machines under the similitude of
men?... Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines: so that they be happy ones,
I should not care.’ (Panopticon: 64)
After all, asked Bentham: ‘To how many hundred thousands of his Majesty’s honest subjects is
such luxury unknown!’ (Postscript: 119). All references to collected works.
201
images of the Brave New World, of being constantly watched, inspected, spied
upon, dressed in directions from above, indoctrinated, surveyed, taxed, controlled
in every action and every movement.
Modern democracy is dependent upon the existence of certain kinds of subjects
who do not require a continual external policing. The external constraint of police
was transformed into an internal constraint upon the conduct of the self, the
formation of subjects who were prepared to take responsibility for their actions
and for whom the ethic of discipline was part of their mental fabric.
There is a subtle dialectics in play: participation in the differentiated roles opening
up with modernity results in experiences and forms of self-scrutiny which create
the fully modern person, but only the fully modern person is deemed fit to participate
in these roles. In The Subjection of Women, written in the mid 19th century, John
Stuart Mill (1970) argued that we could not say that women were naturally fit only
for subordination because we know nothing of what they might become if the
principles of freedom and equality were extended to sexual relations and life
projects. Mill argued that individuals developed a sense of justice through
participation in as wide a range of public institutions as possible; confined to the
family – which the law allowed to exist as a sea of despotism – women could never
learn the social skills and thought processes participation in a full social and political
life required.
But participation, inclusivity, was not the phenomena that the positivist sciences
of criminology were engaged in. They were rather legitimating differentiation and
exclusivity. For much of the 19th century, and in this century, socialisation of the
lower classes was a question of learning one’s place in the order of things.2 In the
name of civilisation, of progress, of normalisation, the sciences of numbering, of
weighing, of measuring, strove to create the thoroughly naturalised society. It was
meant to be utopia, but... once the holocaust was witnessed, it looked like hell.
The reflexive questioning of civilisation
The holocaust is the crime of the century – it is the great problem for criminology.
A problem of such importance that it does not appear in any textbook. It poses an
issue of the deepest sensibility and epistemological structure: namely, was the evil
of that crime – the holocaust – caused by evil... or by good? Was the holocaust at
odds with modernity, or was it the logical consequence of fundamental features of
modernity? Is it an event which was a one-off crime... or is it latent within the
deepest structure of modern social constitutions? I suspect the latter part of these
questions. Perhaps the reason why the holocaust cannot find a mention in texts
such as Understanding Deviance (Downes and Rock, 1988) is because it is not
deviance – it is central to the process of modernisation.
2 This is Foucault’s image in Discipline and Punish; on a more everyday level the history of James
Walvin (1982) in A Child’s World: a social history of English Childhood 1800-1914, illustrates
how much socialisation was a matter of ‘knowing one’s place’.
202
The Jewish social theorist Hannah Arendt believed that the holocaust destroyed
the solance of any belief that evil must be motivated by evil and conducted by evil
people. Instead:
‘The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up
their mind to be either good or bad.’ (1971:438)
The reason was the weakness of individual human judgment in the face of reason,
in the face of the claims of organisation, in the face of the claims of the normal, in
the face of the claims for progress, in the face of the legitimation of our traditions.
Its effect was to destroy our belief in the right of our managerial rulers to think for
us. As she put it at the end of her preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951:
‘We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our
heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time
will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western tradition has finally come
to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we
live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into the
nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are
vain.’ (1951: Preface)
We no longer can take our civilisation for granted. Nor can we accept a unilinear
image of progress in human affairs.3 The criminal (albeit not prosecuted) atrocities
of the conflict in the ex-Yugoslavia or Rwanda are but the extreme of a whole
series of tribalisms the world experiences as the internal dispute within middle
modernity between Organised Capitalist Bureaucracy and Organised Socialist
Bureaucracy (a dispute sometimes called the Cold War) ends. Organised modernity
finds its sources of authority (particularly the nation-state) questioned, and its
knowledge bases subjected to the problem of multiple perspectives; our concern is
ambivalent. Against chaos, Hobbes and others laid the foundations for the making
of power – reason has spread power throughout modernity – but if we wish to
embrace pluralism to protect us from power, then what gives us enough reason,
enough meaning, to act in the face of late-modern power? Such is the post-modern
dilemma but, even before post-modernism became apparent, criminology was
implicated in the questioning of organised modernity in two forms: (i) the horror
at the crimes of obedience; and (ii) the critique of bureaucracy.
The impact of crimes of obedience and crimes of bureaucracy
The immediate post-Second World War Crime Tribunals felt the need to appeal to
pre-modern (pre-positive) images of natural law to undercut the defence of
bureaucratic legitimation (the defence of superior orders). The horror at the
Holocaust was different from the horror of the quantitatively greater numbers
involved in the slavery early modernity took a great deal of its wealth from, in that
3 Nor have we learnt, perhaps, how to internalise the concern to prevent major crimes.
203
it was the extreme example of the positivist reduction of social problems to matters
of technological calculation. Modernity had congratulated itself on the abolition
of slavery – surely the horrors of Nazism were the results of a few evil men? It
appears the depth of such crimes could not be so easily washed away. The holocaust
was the extreme of a range of positivist discourses which spoke of the need to take
scientific action to grapple with the (non)social problems of crime, imbecility,
feeblemindedness, the reproduction of the poor and the wretchedness of the lowest
strata of society.
The binding force of positivist ‘reason’

The holocaust lay at the end of the widespread dream of a purpose-designed
world devoid of troublesome deviants; a world where societal perfection was
achieved by the elimination of the ‘other’. In this solution, the plight of the
wretched and the miserable is ameliorated by the removal of the undeserving
wretched and miserable. For Zygmunt Bauman (1989, 1991: ch 1) the holocaust
is not at odds with the spirit of modernity, rather it is the pure form of the
normalising ambitions of the spirit of modernity. Once social order had been
reduced to the status of a technical problem, and the desirability of the rulers to
administer the necessary means had been granted, then its performance was a
matter of cool calculation of costs and benefits. National Socialism (and perhaps
the work of Stalin) held itself out as founded upon scientific methodology, and an
unflinchingly modern view of the world. In the late 19th century Ernst Hackel
declared that:
‘... by the indiscriminate destruction of all incorrigible criminals, not only would the
struggle for life among the better portions of mankind be made easier, but also an
advantageous artificial process of selection would be seen in practice, since the
possibility of transmitting the injurious qualities would be taken from those degenerate
outcasts.’ (Quoted in Bauman, 1991:31)
Once the quantity of bad genes was lessened due to the scientific policy of
physical destruction and reproductive regulation, the nation would benefit from a
‘lessening of court costs, prison costs, and expenses on behalf of the poor’. The
prospect of scientifically managing and eliminating defective human stock, the
science of eugenics (or the science of human heredity and the art of human
breeding), was universally debated. The final solution adopted in Germany was
merely the end point of ambitions inherent in the consciousness of modernity. As
Bauman sees it, it earned its terrifying fame not because of its uniqueness, but
because it was actually put into full practice. It was the extension of the fully
mobilised organisational resources and political power of the centralised modern
state. It was not an uncommon view, shared by many individuals around the world,
that the advent of city life, advances in food production and medicine had meant
the survival of the unfit. Why should the deviant, and/or the criminally-inclined,
be allowed to breed and spread the pool of weakened blood/genes?
204
In the US several states passed compulsory sterilisation statutes covering

young women in certain situations. Several due process objections were in time
raised. In 1927, Justice Holmes, speaking for the US Supreme Court in Buck v
Bell, laid these due process objections to rest and upheld sterilisation as falling
within the permissible constitutional dimensions. The case concerned Carrie Buck
who had been committed to a Virginia mental institution as mentally deficient.
Both her mother and her own illegitimate daughter were similarly feebleminded.
Under the state’s procedure for effecting sterilisation, it was determined that the
best interests of the patient and society would be served if Miss Buck was rendered
infertile. The Supreme Court addressed itself to the substantive question of
whether the state had the power to order the sterilisation of an individual’s power
of procreation. Without evaluating the scientific evidence, the court stated that it
could not, as a matter of law, override the determination of the legislature that
certain conditions are hereditary and inimical to the public welfare, nor could it
override the determination of the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals that the
petitioner possessed those inimical characteristics. The rationale was announced
by Justice Holmes:
‘In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the
Court, obviously we cannot say as a matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and
if they exist they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public
welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could
not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser
sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being
swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to
execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility,
society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The
principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the
Fallopian Tubes... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ Buck v Bell (1927)
274 US 200, 207
The structural features of crimes of obedience
The following section draws heavily upon the work of Kelman and Hamilton (1989)
on the issues of mass murder, highlighted by the holocaust and the 1968 My Lai
massacre in Vietnam, which they define as crimes of obedience. Their central
question is what explains sanctioned massacres?
The question is intensified because of the genocidal or near-genocidal nature of
the event and the fact that the activity is directed at a target that did not provoke the
violence through its own actions. The authors suggest it is an environment almost
totally devoid of the conditions that usually provide at least some degree of moral
justification for violence. Neither the reason for the violence nor its purpose is of
the kind that is normally considered justifiable.
While it may tell us something about the types of individuals most readily
recruited for participation, the search for constitutional factors – specifically
205
psychological dispositions within those who perpetrate these acts – does not yield
a satisfactory explanation. For example, to claim that the individuals are giving
bent to their strong sadistic impulses goes against the fact of no evidence that the
majority of those who participate in such killings are sadistically inclined, in fact
Arendt (1964) points out that the Nazis made a systematic effort to weed out all
those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. Some individuals can be
described as sadists and evil, but their existence does not explain the existence of
the concentration camps in which these individuals could give play to their sadistic
fantasies. The structure which gave them opportunities was buttressed by the
participation of large numbers of individuals to whom the label of sadist could not
be applied.
Eric Fromm (1941) had analysed the appeal of Nazism in terms of the prevalence
of sadomasochistic strivings, particularly among the German lower middle class.
Again such dispositions may present a certain state of readiness to participate in
sanctioned massacres when the opportunity arises, but cannot explain the major
motivating forces. Similarly, high levels of frustration within a population are
probably facilitators, rather than instigators, of sanctioned massacres, since there
does not seem to be a clear relationship between the societal level of frustration
and the occurrence of such violence.
What of an explanation in terms of an inordinately intense hatred toward those
against whom the violence is directed? Bauman (1991) notes how many who laid
the foundations were committed to the cool reason of science, and Kelman and
Hamilton relate that many of the active participants in the extermination of European
Jews, such as Adolf Eichmann (Arendt, 1964), did not feel any passionate hatred
of Jews. As for My Lie, they argue there is certainly no reason to believe that those
who planned and executed American policy in Vietnam felt a profound hatred of
the Vietnamese population, although deeply rooted racist attitudes may conceivably
have played a role.
Hatred and rage play a part in sanctioned massacres; perhaps in target selection.
There is a long history of profound hatred against such groups as the Jews in
Christian Europe, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Ibos in northern Nigeria,
which helps establish them as suitable victims. Hostility also plays an important
part at the point at which the killings are actually perpetrated (see our late discussion
on existentialism), even if the official planning and the bureaucratic preparations
that ultimately lead up to this point are carried out in a passionless and businesslike
atmosphere.
Hostility toward the target, historically rooted or induced by the situation,
contributes heavily toward the violence, but it does so largely by dehumanising the
victims rather than by motivating violence against them in the first place.
The authors redirect the question: the issue that really calls for psychological
analysis is why so many people are willing to formulate, participate in, and condone
policies that call for the mass killings of defenceless civilians. They argue it is
more instructive to look not at the motives for violence but at the conditions under
which the usual moral inhibitions against violence become weakened, and identify
206
three social processes that tend to create such conditions: authorisation, routinisation,
and dehumanisation.
Authorisation, is the process whereby the situation becomes so defined that the
individual is absolved of the responsibility to make personal moral choices.
Routinisation, is the process whereby the action becomes so organised that there is
no opportunity for raising moral questions. Dehumanisation, is the process whereby
the actors’ attitudes toward the target and toward themselves become so structured
that it is neither necessary nor possible for them to view the relationship in moral
terms.
Authorisation
Authorisation creates a situation in which the presence of authority – directly or
implicitly – upsets the moral principles that generally govern human relationships.
The legitimate authorities explicitly order, implicitly encourage, tacitly approve,
or at least permit, violence. The authorisation of such acts seems to convey an
automatic justification upon them stripping the individual of the feeling that
judgments or choices need to be made by him finally. Particularly when the actions
are explicitly ordered, a different kind of morality, linked to the duty to obey superior
orders, may take over.
A host of questions arise. Why should the situation strip individuals of the
obligation to decide for themselves? Why should the obligation to obey take over?
Under what conditions are individuals prepared to challenge the legitimacy of an
order on the grounds that the order itself is illegal, or that those giving it have
overstepped their authority, or that it stems from a policy that violates fundamental
social values? Regardless of the answers in particular instances, Kelman and
Hamilton believe the basic structure of a situation of legitimate authority requires
subordinates to respond in terms of their role obligations rather than their personal
preferences; they can openly disobey only by challenging the legitimacy of the
authority. An important corollary of the basic structure of the authority situation is
that actors often do not see themselves as personally responsible for the
consequences of their actions.
Perhaps another way of putting this is that authorisation prepares the context
for the event.
‘In the My Lai massacre, it is likely that the structure of the authority situation
contributed to the massive violence in both ways – that is, by conveying the message
that acts of violence against Vietnamese villagers were required, as well as the
message that such acts, even if not ordered, were permitted by the authorities in
charge. The actions at My Lai represented, at least in some respects, responses to
explicit or implicit orders. Lieutenant Calley indicated, by orders and by example,
that he wanted large numbers of villagers killed. Whether Calley himself had been
ordered by his superiors to “waste” the whole area, as he claimed, remains a matter of
controversy. Even if we assume, however, that he was not explicitly ordered to wipe
out the village, he had reason to believe that such actions were expected by his
superior officers. Indeed, the very nature of the war conveyed this expectation. The
principal measure of military success was the “body count” the number of enemy
207
soldiers killed and any Vietnamese killed by the US military was commonly defined
as a “Viet Cong”. Thus, it was not totally bizarre for Calley to believe that what he
was doing at My Lai was to increase his body count, as any good officer was expected
to do.’ (1989:17)
The military authorities implicitly condoned these types of actions by not only
failing to punish such acts in most cases, but by devisory strategies and tactics
based on the proposition that the civilian population of South Vietnam – whether
‘hostile’ or ‘friendly’ – was expendable. The policies of search-and-destroy
missions, the establishment of freeshooting zones, the use of antipersonnel
weapons, the bombing of entire villages if they were suspected of harbouring
guerrillas, the forced migration of masses of the rural population, and the
defoliation of vast forest areas helped legitimise acts of massive violence of the
kind occurring at My Lai.
Further the tactics of military training instills unquestioning obedience to superior
orders, no matter how destructive the actions these orders call for. Kelman and
Hamilton go further, conducting empirical research which showed that this
orientation of discipline may be rather widespread in the general population. The
disciplined subject may be prone too easily to follow authority.
Routinisation
Once the authorisation processes have created a situation in which people become
involved in an action without considering its implications and without really making
a decision, individuals are in a new psychological and social situation in which the
pressures to continue are powerful. Influences which may have caused moral
dilemmas now have less effect. Routinisation destroys the processes which
differentiate the strange from the normal, thus preventing the individuals involved
from confronting the true meaning of the events.
Dehumanisation
If authorisation processes override standard moral considerations, and
routinisation processes reduce the likelihood that such considerations will arise,
the strong inhibitions against murdering one’s fellow human beings are reduced
by stripping the victims of their human status. The victims are deprived of both (i)
identity, standing as independent, distinctive individuals, capable of making
choices and entitled to live their own lives-and community; and (ii) fellow
membership in an interconnected network of individuals who care for each other
and respect each other’s individuality and rights. Establishing a category which
defines out a particular group, overcomes certain of the moral restraints against
killing them.
Dehumanisation occurs to varying degrees; with sanctioned massacres an
extreme degree of dehumanisation is obvious, in so far that the killing is not in
response to hostile action, but because of the category to which they happen to
belong.
208
‘They are the victims of policies that regard their systematic destruction as a desirable
end or an acceptable means. Such extreme dehumanisation becomes possible when
the target group can readily be identified as a separate category of people who have
historically been stigmatised and excluded by the victimisers; often the victims belong
to a distinct racial, religious, ethnic, or political group regarded as inferior or sinister.
The traditions, the habits, the images, and the vocabularies for dehumanising such
groups are already well established and can be drawn upon when the groups are
selected for massacre. Labels help deprive the victims of identity and community, as
in the epithet “gooks” that was commonly used to refer to Vietnamese and other
Indochinese peoples.’ (1989:19)
The dynamics of the massacre event further increase the participants’ tendency to
dehumanise their victims; the participants in the bureaucratic apparatus increasingly
come to see their victims as bodies to be counted and entered into their reports, as
faceless figures that will determine their productivity rates and promotions. While
those who participate in the massacre directly are reinforced in their perception of
the victims as less than human by observing their very victimisation; the conditions
of their victimisation serve to justify their victimisation.
Alasdair MacIntyre and the critique of managerial expertise
In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) asked the question: are our
bureaucratic rulers justified or not? and gave a resounding no! MacIntyre sees
Weber and Nietzsche as providing the two great critiques of modernity. While
Marx in a sense, glorifies modernity (espousing an optimism in the power to
organise if in accordance with the correct social theory), Nietzsche warns of a herd
mentality and a radical splitting of the moral universe, while Weber
pessimistically gives the image of the bureaucratically organised world. For
MacIntyre, Weber’s analysis of legitimacy captures the spirit of organised
modernity in the claims to managerial efficiency which aspire to value neutrality
and manipulative ability. But while they do manipulate they are not value neutral.
We have formal rationality and substantive incoherence. Organisational
modernity rests on misconceptions.4
209
Is post-modernism the end of the dream of organised modernity?
MacIntyre wrote against the backdrop of a period which culminated in the 1970s;
an era of governmental social engineering. The 1980s were to prove radically
different. They were a time when many agreed with MacIntyre in his diagnosis –
bureaucracy was assailed from various quarters of the political spectrum – but
instead of a return to notions of community and the need to construct an all
encompassing image of social totalities and live a life of ‘virtue’, the official solution
4 In post-modernism we realise that nature is not so accessible to being set out in a structure of
laws offering generalisations and predictive powers as modernity believed. The social cannot be
represented in a simple structural-functional framework. How do we present ourselves to ourselves?
How do we find ourselves? For Rosen to speak of the human condition is already to grant that
human nature is inaccessible:
‘... our condition today is how we happen to find ourselves, the ‘way we live now’ rather than
the way in which we have deviated from how we ought to be living.’ (1980:221)
Science has dissolved any pretence to ‘natural’ existence. We require instead a more moral science,
a hermeneutics of interpretation of the human condition. As Nietzsche (paraphrasing Kant) said:
‘... we find in social order only what we have put there – social order is our creation’. When our
social sciences reveals the regularity of nature, sets out the location of deviants, the insane, the
normal, the well-balanced, within flows of determinism, this is not our science revealing the
truths of nature, but our methodologies presenting us with interpretations to make sense of the
world. As John Stuart Mill almost said, social life is natural, but at a distance from nature.
Let us be clear: this is not to say that science is wrong, this is the result of our science. Many
criminological texts refer to positivism as being the result of a world that Darwin had changed
forever; a world now subjected to the laws of natural selection, but Darwinism actually indicated
indeterminacy and uncertainty in nature.
It is a measure of the greatness of men that they are misunderstood, Darwin is a classic
example. Two points:
• Darwin did not ever use the image of the survival of the fittest. This Hobbesian imagery was read
into him by the Victorian evolutionist Spencer. Darwin rather referred to the struggle for existence.
• Darwin does not believe that evolution has a design. Rather he claims to refute teleology in
organic evolution. His argument involves particular mutations and the subsequent reproduction
of these if favourable environmental conditions are present. Genes that confer a reproductive
advantage will have their representation in the population increased, whereas: ‘...
thosewhoseconsequencesfor reproduction are relatively deleterious will begradually eliminated.
Through this mechanism of natural selection, working retroactively on populations of unique
individuals, and not through the implementation of a transcendental design, the challenges
presented to life by an ever-changing environment have been – and continue to be – met through
adaption as divers as they are ingenious.’ (Ingold, 1986:174)
Darwin was troubled by this. Ingold quotes from a letter he wrote shortly after the publication
of The Origin of Species wherein Darwin confessed of his inability to ‘think that world as we see
it is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design... I
am, and shall ever remain, in a hopeless muddle’ (quoted in Ingold, 1986:175).
We have a problem: how can we grant a creativity and assert the progress of human societies
without falling into teleological thinking? Put simply: how can we think of human development
as something more than a mere banging together of chemical and physical bits without going to
the other extreme of believing in some grand script of the drama of the cosmos that we are called
upon to discover and play our part in (as Marx and other appeared to believe)? One aspect is our
conception of ourselves: we believe that the successive peeling away of the skins of being human
must stop somewhere... there must be a foundational point where we stop digging and say ‘this is
it. This is the fundamental building block of being human’; we have yet to fully embrace the
existential message that human nature is a function of social-cultural development.
210
was to destroy governmental regulation and dissolve bureaucracy in favour of the

market.
Crime soared, but so, according to the official measurement of societal happiness,
ie the amount of consumerable goods, did success. As the market was deemed to
be the solution to the problem of organising society, the image of the criminal as a
rational calculator, deciding to engage in crime as and when an opportunity
presented itself, and seizing up the risks of detection and the possible punishment
costs, became official government policy in the US and Britain. Crime was no
longer to disappear with the task of organising the good society, but to be managed
by deterrent penal sanctions and an effective criminal justice process. The image
of the criminal was repositioned away from sociological positivist’s search for
deterministic social laws into the freedom of the abstract rational self. Of course
the self had to come from somewhere, but to escape from a general social theory
which implicated political economy or social structure, the self was the product of
the family. The criminal self was the self that a pathological (broken)family had
(mis)socialised.
The post-modern condition: life within the unorganised structures of

organised modernity?
The paradox of the post-modern condition is that we are surrounded by the

institutions of modernity, by large organisations, by the bureaucracy of the nation
state (and beyond, for example, The United Nations, European Union) but we
have lost faith in bureaucracy. We inhabit modernity but have lost faith in its
promises. Ideas of coherence become compromised. Writers from the Right, such
as James Q Wilson (1975, 1983 and with Herrnstein, 1985) stated their conclusions
clearly: it is impossible to think of crime as something which projects of improving
social conditions will have any effect upon. They argued that we have now improved
the conditions of the vast majority of people in the West beyond the consideration
of the elites of the 19th century but we have record levels of crime – therefore we
need to return to the precepts of classicism, to law and order and to strict punishment
systems. We have to emphasis control and hold the individual responsible for his
or her actions. The knowledges of positive criminology, which Foucault had seen
implicated in the developing structures of bureaucratic control, were now held to
be providing excuses for deviance. As bureaucracy was to be done away with so
was the aim enterprise of criminology to find the social causes of crime. Control of
crime was to be conducted without the leadership of criminology.
What are we to make of this? The context of late-modern or post-modern control
is the affluent society or what, quoting Galbraith, we have called life in the Culture
of Contentment. The basic needs of all are catered for yet crime advances... we
have created a science to talk of crime and to offer a technology of control yet it
seems powerless. Thus law and order returns, the symbolism of the law, the police,
211
target hardening, opportunity theory, life mediated by the institutions of modernity

and social distance yet radical communication technologies...
Concentrating on the historical forms or images of control may miss the real
form of social control in late modernity. Classical criminology gives us the route
of a state-led criminology. It points us towards a science of government in which
the state lays down rules, in which the state organises sanction patterns and specifies
certain forms of formal social control. We tend to think that social control has
therefore become formalised. The traditional reading of criminological positivism
complements and reinforces this – it offers the prospect of knowledge at the service
of the bureaucratic professionals. But social control has not become so reduced; it
is more a function of the hidden resources of every day life and the narrative forces
of the contemporary communication and consumer-orientated international society.
Social control in post-modernism: the seduced and the repressed
In Legislators and Interpreters, Bauman (1987) suggests that modernity has failed
to construct a thoroughly rationalised society. While early modernity asked for the
intellectuals to act as legislators, and middle modernity to provide the knowledge
for bureaucracy, the authorities are no longer looking for the counsel of intellectuals
and philosophers. There are philosophers desperately trying to offer the discourses
necessary to construct communities, but the rulers have turned away from any
gardening ambitions and bureaucracy (although paradoxically bureaucracy keeps
expanding) to the market. The result is a new dialectic of social control. On the one
side we have those who are tuned into the market who become seduced by its
items and messages; a group of people who are now effectively and efficiently
integrated through a new cluster of mechanisms of public relations, advertising,
desires and perceived needs, institutional and individual bargaining. Bauman
suggests opposed to these are the new poor, who are not really consumers since
their consumption does not matter much for the successful reproduction of capital
(they often consume low quality produce). They are not the core members of the
consumer society. We have two systems of control: seduction and repression.
Seduction is for the core members of the society, while on the other side we have
those who have to be disciplined by the combined action of repression, policing,
authority and normative regulation. Bauman suggests they are not part of the
‘cultural game’, even ‘if, stupidly, they think otherwise’, but this is the point, they
do think so. We cannot locate the offender in another (asocial)foundational
naturalism. The offender is demarcated in the process of action, in the committing
of a crime (in victimisation) and in labelling and in reaction to the events and
actions which he/she has taken.
The market provides the acid test of eligibility for membership of the late-
modern consumer society. The market appears thoroughly democratic – it ranks
people according to ability (IQ, for example) – and it reaches out to anyone who
would listen, and everybody is encouraged to listen. Which implies that potentially,
212
everybody is encouraged to listen or forced to hear and potentially, everybody is

seduced or seducible. But can satisfaction be achieved? Bauman believes the burden
falls most on those with lean resources. He quotes Jeremy Seabrook remembering
a young woman:
‘I think of Michelle. At fifteen her hair was one day red the next blonde, then jet-
black, then teased into Afro kinks and after that rattails, then plaited, and then
cropped so that it glistened close to the skull. She wore a nose-stud and then her
ears were pierced; in the bright feathers, rhinestones or ceramic or silver. Her lips
were scarlet, then purple, then black. Her face was ghost-white and then peach-
coloured, then bronze as if it were cast in metal. Pursued by dreams of flight, she
left home at sixteen to be with her boyfriend, who was twenty-six. If they took her
home, she said she would kill herself. “But I have always let you do what you
want”, her mother protested. “This is what I want”. At eighteen she returned to her
mother with two children, after she had been badly beaten by her man. She sat in
the bedroom which she had fled three years earlier; the faded photos of yesterday’s
pop stars still stared down from the walls. She said she felt a hundred years old. She
felt weary. She’d tried all that life could offer. Nothing else was left.’ (Quoted,
Bauman, 1987:181)
We are told that we are all members of consumer society, yet we are not equally
located structurally. This is a more complicated set of messages than Merton
(1938, 1957) envisaged, and difficult (for reasons we shall indicate) to feel secure
within. Bauman suggests that once seduced, Michelle and her ilk soon discover
that the goods they covet, apart from being attractive to everybody, bring
happiness only to some. Michelle can only guess this, since the only thing she
knows for sure is that she herself is not among those ‘some’. The consumer society
creates a circle of desire and the need to possess a commodity; but gaining the
commodity does not cause satisfaction – a continuous process or consumer game
is set in motion in which the game itself is the only reward, offering as it does the
ever renewed hope of winning. But to reap this kind of a reward, one must be able
to go on playing without end, so that hope is never allowed to die and defeat
always means losing a battle, not the war. Once you stop playing, the hope
disappears, and you know that you have lost, and that there will be no next stage at
which you win.
But we must play – how else can the materiality of life be provided in late-
modernity? What happens if one was not to play the game? Is seduction or
repression the only games in town? and in this context what is the true meaning of
crime?
Is crime a concept of universal application which, in empirical reality, is only
applied to those who evade seduction? Within such a division does the national
operation of criminal justice lose any sense of authenticity? But while we doubt,
while we may experience reflexive dilemmas, the power and authority we entrusted
to authority and bureaucracy continues to create more crime control. Crime control
becomes an industry (Christie, 1993) and a very realistic one.
And, currently, in moving against positivism, against bureaucracy, the dominant
strands of contemporary criminology claim we must be realistic. We must
213
acknowledge the reality of the crime we can see and experience, the reality of the
criminal self we can capture and punish. In this we are asked to renounce the large
scale constructivist aims of modernity, but the aim of criminology should not be to
allocate responsibility around a privatised self - it must be to acknowledge the
ambiguous relations between the self and the context. To do this we must move
therefore to the terrain that realist criminology (both of the Right and the Left)
asserts should be our foundation; that is we must analyse within the terrain of the
common life.
214
CHAPTER TEN
MORALITY, NORMALCY AND MODERNITY: THE

MORAL INTENSITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
‘The woman carrying her own coffin

Got on to the bus at 3.45 pm.
Nobody spoke. The driver punched her ticket
With a sour face. Not all Maoris are cheerful
And it was a wet day. When she sat down
I felt by radar under cape, suit girdle,
A sharp continual trembling of the womb.
Ah, yes – the coffin – it was large and black
Like a violin case. She held it by one handle
Against her knees. I wanted to say,
‘Madam, your death is showing’ – or else,
‘Don’t be sad; we’re all in this together’ –
But it didn’t seem right. Not there
With everyone behaving so well;
And she could have thought I was making a pass.
A big-boned woman, fortyish,
With a country look. After all, why shouldn’t
She carry her coffin wherever she liked
Democratically?
When she got off
At the Post Office corner, I was relieved
To see her saddle-up her own death and ride it
Like a great black stallion down Featherston Street.’
(James K Baxter, The Woman in the Bus, 1980:326)
Analyticism and the problem of contemporary criminology
Contemporary criminology is racked by multiple perspectives and etiological

scepticism – in response conservative scholars, such as James Q Wilson and
Herrenstein (1985), Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), and in related fields social
theorists, such as Charles Murray (1984, 1994), espouse two tactics: the use of
statistical analysis and the categories of everyday life. The official statistics are
used to determine the scale of the problem, and the analytical categories of everyday
life are taken as starting points to create theories which have intuitive appeal; we
are presented with theories of control and rational deterrence which the ordinary
man (including the ordinary politician asking for advice in the midst of law and
order politics) can relate to.
Conversely, for a public surrounded by the media’s constant parading of
criminal statistics and horror stories, the need to espouse a general social theory of
crime smacks of ivory tower irrelevancy or another form of do-gooder ‘social
215
liberalism’. Into this breach has stepped right realism. Right realism speaks the
language of popular dissatisfaction and popular anger, it is not some simple
pragmatic managerialism, but an appeal to the world view of the ordinary person
who understands that the others have lost the fear of punishment, that the criminal
justice system is loaded in favour of the criminal, that liberal lawyers get too many
criminals off, that the courts do not pass sufficiently stiff punishments, that
offenders do not receive their ‘just deserts’, and that criminology provides
justifications for crime, that the rehabilitative ethos merely provided excuses for
offenders (see, for example, Patricia Morgan, Delinquent Fantasies, 1978).
Alongside right realism we have a dry narrowly focused managerialism, exampled
by government bodies which sponsor research into the effect of steering car locks
and surveillance cameras.
The mundaneness of ordinary everyday life provides the common focus for the
institutional appeal of situational crime prevention, opportunity theory, rational
choice, and the move of Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) to relocate crime as a
mundane activity of the everyday life. What is the theoretical effect? Several
consequences, for example, follow from Gottfredson and Hirschi’s ‘general
theory’:
• Since most offenders share (along with others who are accident prone or liable
to addictions) a number of characteristics, of which the dominant one is low
self-control, it is pointless to go into analytical reductionism and create special
theories for different types of crime; by concentrating upon selfcontrol (a factor
which we have agreed is central to our modern understanding of ourselves as
moderns), we do not need to go into medium or macro-sociological theories in
a search for causal influences – at best these are secondary or minor influences,
at worst simply wrong and misleading;
• most criminal activity is ‘ordinary crime’, consisting of trivial and mundane
criminal acts. Throughout the text they compose images of ‘the typical or
standard burglary’, ‘the typical or standard robbery’, ‘the typical or standard
homicide’, which is drawn from the official criminal statistics. For example:
their picture of ‘the standard or ordinary embezzlement’ which is the core
case of white collar crime is ‘in the ordinary embezzlement a young man
recently hired steals money from his employer’s cash register or goods from
his store’. Thus they argue that embezzlement of large amounts of money by
older employees in positions of trust is a ‘rarity’. To someone who has been
following the Auditors reports on EU (EEC) fraud and the claims that billions
are defrauded in the Common Agriculture Policy and related matters, but
virtually no one is prosecuted, this smacks of a simple uncritical acceptance
of the official statistical picture. Put another way: their picture of typical
embezzlement is the picture of the type of employee who can easily be
apprehended and prosecuted. An employee with little power and little ability
to cover his or her tracks; in other words, the outcome of easily solvable
216
Morality, normalcy and modernity
crimes. By contrast the crimes of the powerful are able to be covered with
layers of complications and evidential ambiguity. But most reliable
assessments demonstrate there is no comparison in the amount of money and
long term social damage involved – in non-official analytical projects
calculating the amount of crime we are surrounded by, ordinary crime pales
into a lesser breed. In the Bhopal incident, for example, the death toll reached
6,400 plus with more than 100,000 poisoned. But in ordinary, everyday life
it is ‘ordinary’ crime that is feared and rendered the object for right realists
and contemporary governmental policy. After all, is not the fact that ordinary
everyday life appears so easy to understand the reason it can serve as the
foundation for analysis in the midst of this confusing world?
This intellectual endeavour of trust in the ordinary life amounts to an attempt to
resolve the ambivalence and ambiguity in the analytical treatment of existence by
recourse to our recognition of ourselves by intuition. While we have stressed the
special nature of a crime, it is neither a natural phenomenon in the sense that
natural crimes exist (before law crime does not exist), nor a object of radical
relativism (once enacted law defines certain things as crimes and this is a social
reality), the intuitions of everyday life appear to resolve any practical ambiguity.
In ordinary life intuitions work to add weight to a theory since we presume that
intuitions refer to natural essences rather than conceptual constructions. After all,
state realists, ask a victim of violence who or what he has been attacked by and the
response is not that ‘I was the victim of a conceptual entity, a social hybrid’, but
rather ‘it was a person, a real criminal, and the event was a crime, a real entity’.
The more a theory can appeal to the intuitions of the people it appears clear that
the theory is saying something meaningful about social life. Of course, Marxists
have had a traditional way of dealing with this – to rely upon the intuitions of
everyday life to support your theory is (i) to rely upon the classical unity of being
and thinking; and (ii) this unity is actually to believe in ideological constructions.
The belief patterns of everyday life are themselves the product of larger forces and
it is these that ultimately must be investigated if real understanding is to be
achieved. But to talk of the need to critique ideology, is understandably out of
fashion, and those who believe in basing social theory on the categories of
everyday life might reply: but did you yourself not want a human reduced to the
status of an automaton? Did you not demand that criminology treat its objects as
human beings? And is this not what we believers in the categories of everyday life
are doing? But can this turn to everyday life really offer any substantial theoretical
understanding? Or are we merely seduced into enjoying the theoretical game of
analysis? To answer this we must realise that the turn to ordinary everyday life was
the answer many philosophers – who had given up on the traditional task of
rationalism and empiricism to tell the essential story of the world – offered as
secure understanding.
217
H L A Hart: everyday life as the site of analysis
The methodological message of H L A Hart’s The Concept of Law (1961) was

simple: to fully appreciate the role of law in social life one should start with the
mundane and the ordinary. This work, called by the author ‘an essay in descriptive
sociology’, would never find its way onto any sociological course – whatever Hart
does in this text it is not sociology as the discipline is taught in university departments
bearing that name. Hart’s approach is rather the sociology of a barrister, the
sociology of the trained advocate who believes that no brief is beyond him or her.
Hart’s sociology makes no reference to Weber (though the whole work
presupposes Weber), nor Marx, or Nietzsche, or Durkheim (though the whole work
presupposes Durkheim). His position is disarmingly simple yet dynamically radical:
radical beyond the dreams perhaps of its author. Basically Hart asserts:
• social order is founded upon everyday life appearing natural to the normal
person;
• modern social order cannot survive on coercion from above, whatever the type
of social order it needs the acceptance of the populace, ie it must appear
legitimate;
• modern social formations are legal orders which use the idea of a rule to structure
social activity – social order is a rule bound set of practices; law a specific
form of rule;
• the laws that govern everyday behaviour are a set of rules emanating from the
state and the state is itself created by rules;
• thus, theories of society that put humans above the law (as Hart reads Austin)
are wrong, since the power that these humans exercise is a factor of law.
• law, therefore, is both the product of power, and the creator of power – law is
productive; it produces forms of social arrangements that can form the site of
power, yet this power also derives from law;
• everyday life is a set of games – we can never know what the overall purpose
of these games are;
• there is no way of telling what the purpose of life is – all we can provide with
certainty are negative assertions and basic truisms. Specifically, the legal order
is not the arrangements of a suicide club, rather survival is paramount. If we
were to ask what are the naturally basic things that the legal order has to do we
need to look at the basic facts of the human condition and construct laws which
fulfil the functional demands of enabling survival having regard to the structure
of the human predicament. When we look at the basic facts of the human
condition we discover that humans are vulnerable, that they are approximately
equal, that humans have limited altruism, that they exist in a world of limited
resources. Given these minimal conditions, certain understandings or rules,
such as the institution of property, or rules forbidding the taking of another’s
life, follow.
• to understand the reality of law and order one need only look to how normal
218
people in the practices of everyday life use legal phrases and related concepts,
such as the distinction between the phrase being obliged (which fits the non-
legal demand for something when the person is in fear of his or her life, such as
the demand a bank-robber makes of a bank-teller) and being under an obligation
(which fits a legal and legitimate demand, such as the demand for taxes which
a government makes of its citizens).
Hart’s work is the most widely read and widely criticised text in modern
jurisprudence. It is often dismissed as the product of a brief period of time when the
world looked to intellectuals as if it made sense, as if the entire world could be seen
as some gigantic structural-functional machine moving forwards in a progressive
and civilising fashion. The image of the world as some form of progressive natural
order has had as much appeal to certain modern intellectuals as God did to the pre-
modern. Both solved the same problems: it is impossible to know the ultimate answers
for both (how could a mere man know God’s mind?), the secret lay in looking at the
flow of everyday life and reading the message of God’s will, or the functionality of
the natural order revealed in them, and align oneself to those requirements. Hart
called this, the basic truth of the talk of natural law.
Hart’s jurisprudence suits the liberal idea of the rule of law. For Hart, the key
characteristic of law is that some form of behaviour (positive act or omission) is
made obligatory: coercion is fundamental to the idea of law, but this is not simply
a matter of the threat of violence. Public order cannot rest solely on the threat or
application of force by authorities. The coercion of a rule comes from the internal
attitude, it is a self-regarding attitude. Social life comprises a series of games: a
game is a rule bound practice. It is impossible to participate fully, to play the game
as one who wants to play it well, without knowing the rules since the rules give
structure to the game. Games are social activities, they require the majority of the
participants to play by the rules otherwise the game would collapse. Persons obey
the rules of a game only when the group they are playing with approve of those
who abide by the rules, and disapprove of those who violate them.
The continuance of the practice rests upon the majority of the participants having
an internal attitude, that is to say they wish to participate in the practice (ie they
train hard, they play hard, and they seek to be good at that game, hence they do not
cheat), it is vitally important for the officials to have the internal attitude (why
would the players play by the rules if the referee was open to deciding points by
taking bribes?).
The complexity of the mundane: the richness of everyday life
That we ‘get through’ our daily routines without too many problems is so obvious
that it is banal. It is this phenomenon that makes modern urban existence appear
‘natural’ and appear so ‘everyday’ it arouses no existential sense of bewilderment
or wonder.
219
But why is it that we consider everyday life natural? Consider everyday life in
London: to live in London is to live amidst diversity and plurality unheard of for
most of human existence. On an historical scale modern life is totally unnatural.
Little in our biological and social evolution up until the last 100 or so years could
have prepared us for the existential beingness of modern cities such as New York,
Los Angles or London.
Criminology repeatedly has asked the question ‘why do people offend?’ and
some of its quasi-philosophers have replied ‘because we are surprised by
misbehaviour’ (Nigel Walker, Behaviour and Misbehaviour). But surely the question
should not be why do some people not commit crime but why is there so little? Not
why are some people not able to cope with the pressures of modern city life but
how is anybody able to cope at all?
The tactic of right realism appears to ignore the macro-scale considerations, the
context of the development of modernity, which we have sought to locate
criminology within, so let us forget our previous chapters and ask naively ‘how
does this city existence hang together? Why do we trust the people we mix with?
Are they not mostly strangers? Why are we so civilised, so trustworthy, so well
behaved, so non-violent?’
Take one of my ‘typical or standard journeys’: I have various choices – car,
bicycle or public transport. When travelling into the city centre during the day I
normally do not drive, instead I leave my house and either walk to the tube station,
or, if its raining, or I’m feeling exceptionally lazy, I drive to the tube station leaving
the car there. I put my car radio in the boot, a safety precaution, but why do I
expect the car to be there when I return? Walking down the street I pass a mixture
of people of Asian, African and European descent, I might pass a Mosque, a
Synagogue, a Hindu Temple, a Catholic Church, perhaps even one of those Church
of England buildings that have not as yet been turned into yuppie flats. I wait at the
station before entering into a crowded carriage full of total strangers. Sometimes I
may come across someone I know but, even then, I don’t feel a rush of relief. It
doesn’t matter to my security that I may not meet a single familiar face of my
journey to work; I engage with a mass of strangers with what Anthony Giddens
has termed civic indifference. Even when (as increasingly happens) the tube remains
stationary in a tunnel for some time (perhaps even with dimmed lighting) no great
overwhelming existential fear arises. Nor, although, I live is an urban area sometimes
referred to as a ‘mixed inner city area’ do I fear walking home late at night from
the tube. How is this possible? What are the preconditions and stabilising factors
at work in this apparently mundane but, upon examination, evidentially artificial
way of living?
You may ask, is not this civil indifference just a phrase describing a non-caring,
non-interested relationship to other people? Milligram (1970) argued that urban
residents encounter so many different people and so many different sights, that
screening mechanisms are psychologically required to prevent ‘information
overload’. To control the otherwise extreme range of demands which might be
220
made of the individual ‘norms of noninvolvement’ develop which structure social

interaction. Urban residents deal with others in terms of roles, rather than as whole
individuals.
Consider the high level of interactive skills and self-control which is required
in another scene: an average tutorial/seminar class at the college where I teach
may contain individuals from four different continents, a variety of religious
affiliations, and be roughly balanced along gender lines. Consider the level of
socialisation into the personal skills of tolerance, or non-violence, which is actually
required to carry out a university seminar group.
A male fundamentalist Islamic student may have to listen to the opinion of a
female Jewish student. He is even expected by the seminar leader to take her opinion
seriously... and vice versa – all permeations are possible. Arguments are expected
to be conducted at the level of reasoned discourse – pride and honour are not
expected to lead to duels, to physical fights – is this not amazing?
Consider, also the immense problems of getting through the layers of complex
rituals and procedures which every day life demands. Take the finding of sexual
partners, which takes for the civilised human so much more time and effort than
any other species in the animal kingdom. Late modernity places the onus firmly
upon the individual. Although friends and family may make introductions, in the
modern west the individual is expected to do the finding and choosing for him or
herself. Students learn screening techniques and the different approach rituals
which the various locations of teaching room, cafe, bar, party and library
require. Messages, significations, body language, gossip from other quarters - all
must be scrutinised and interpreted – effort undertaken, rejection accepted,
alternatives arranged or the quality of interaction uplifted... Moreover we must
learn to tell when sexual desire turns into romantic love, and, if and when this
happens, a new set of rituals and interactions with families and the legal system
may be engaged in.
And we think we do it ourselves. Modernity tends towards an ideology of the
self as the creator of his or her own values and the designer of his or her own
destiny. We believe we control the important aspects of our lives. However,
complex webs of culture and social structure bind us. Even when we may think we
are free in our actions the reflexive knowledge projects of modernity soon turn our
freedoms, our self-determinations into illusion. We may think we have fallen in
love and rejoice; writing letters full of quotes from our favourite poets. Until we
read works such as Niklas Luhmann’s Love as Passion (which demonstrates how
the romantic ideal of togetherness is a functionally determined effect of modern
social structure); or Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (which shows how
modern sexual freedom is domination in another form – we are free but only to
enjoy ‘good’ sex, taught how to achieve satisfactory orgasms); or Anthony
Giddens’ The transformation of Intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern
societies (in which modern sexuality, which Giddens describes as ‘plastic’, is a
direct function of its technological freedom from reproduction – such
221
technological advancement results in the need for a radical democratisation in

sexuality and intimacy). Or we may sit opposite a Professor of Biology at a formal
Cambridge University dinner who informs us that we can have sex with a variety
of people, but can only successfully marry a person whose body odour is
compatible with our own!
What do we do? We go back to our poets.1 We refuse to believe it. If we really
did believe that our bodies, our language, the social structure, our class, our roles,
conditioned our thoughts and behaviour so completely that we were reduced to the
ontology of mere puppets or ciphers in a code, that we were just objects moved
around by social structure... why would we continue?
But the knowledge commitment of modernity tells us we ignore these discourse
which situate us at our peril. Of course, sociology tells us by way of consolation,
we can play at the roles. Erving Goffman (1974), a sociologist who specialises in
the prisons and little gaps between the big social structures of everyday life, tells
us that when we think we are escaping from roles we do not like we are merely
playing with other socially provided roles. The linguistic philosopher/social theorist
Wittgenstein (whom H L A Hart relies upon) said much the same thing in his work
of the 1950s when he said that our routines of everyday life were actually structured
language games. It is impossible to escape from language games, but this does not
mean we must be reduced to idiotic inactivity – we can keep adding to the games,
changing little bits, making new moves, demonstrating the contingency of social
life. Even Foucault, in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality, relented from
his image of the individual as the object of overlapping power forms, holding that
we can use the discourses of modernity to create space for self-expression and
active, creative, play.
When Marx said that society thought through us he did not mean that we have
no room for manoeuvre. What he meant was that there could never be a non-social
individual. The individual can only exist inside the social; the dialectic is inescapable
and the foundation for all thought, for all liberty. As he put it:
‘Human beings make their history themselves, but they do not so voluntarily, not
under circumstances of their own choosing, rather under immediately found, given
and transmitted circumstances.’ (Quoted in Wagner, 1994: xiii)
This is the key lesson of the sociological imagination: we, our freedoms, our modern
rituals, our ability to trust, the individuality that we pride so much, all are the
creations of modernity. They only exist inside a certain sets of social structures.
Our socialisation, our awareness of choice, our being, is largely the consequence
of the contingency of our locality. But how free are we? How predetermined are
we to simply act out a script written by our birth, our parents, their class, their
skills at socialisation, the level of love their marriage contained? How much can
1 Poets have, classically, been perceived as the enemy of rational scientists. Perhaps poets always
laughed at the pretensions of science to ‘explain everything’.
222
we escape from the past? How true is it to say that society is built upon the
foundations of common sense attitudes and expectations?
The narratives of civil society
Everyday life is a communicative space – disobeying the rules leaves one open to
criticism. Whatever the process it clearly relies upon sets of narratives of life. Let
us go back in time to early modernity, to the experiences of the Scottish Writer,
David Hume, and the German Philosopher, Immanuel Kant.
David Hume (1711-1776) and the foundation of experience
In The Treatise of Human Nature (1978) David Hume set out to found modernity
upon the security of the truth of human nature. If we were to understand the basic
nature of the human condition we could then build up the good and just society.
Ultimately, Hume argued, we need a conception of the self: our true knowledge of
the structure of the self will be the touchstone for securing modern society.
Hume is not alone in this desire, for example, if Liberalism is to be seen as
beginning with the work of Locke and Hobbes, both roughly labelled as empiricist,
its beginning placed great reliance upon a notion of the individual’s private
consciousness (a conception of the self) as the foundational basis upon which the
political entity of the autonomous individual could be fashioned. Thus, the
intellectual soul which Descartes discovers, through the introspective voyage of
sceptical doubting, as a self-contained ego of reason, is matched by the Hobbesian
conception of the self as the seat of desires and volition.
When, however, Hume sought a firm place to secure modernity upon, he was
disappointed, for the self was not stable. Hume could not even find a semblance of
a stable self through introspection:
‘... when I enter most intimately into what I call myself... I can never catch myself
other than the series of perceptions which are present at that time... the mind is a kind
of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-
pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations... there is
properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in difference.’ (1978:252-3)
What is the self? To what do we refer when we speak of a person’s self? For Hume
the self is only a creation of the facility of memory. A person’s memory organises
his or her experiences into patterns of beliefs and reactions, into patterns of
expectations and sets of trusts or fears. The memory allows the imagination to
shape a series of somewhat related perceptions into a unity and creates a fiction of
the self, by which means order can be made of otherwise chaotic presentations.
The fiction of the self is, thereby, a product of the memory, via the faculty of recall
and reflection on our past perceptions, which represents them as linked together
223
into a network of relationships. The memory, via this act of recall and fictional
creation, transforms a ‘bundle or collection of different perceptions’ into the fiction
which provides us with a notion, an idea, representing diverse perceptions into a
patterned entity which is the only possibility of continuous identity that exists.
What sort of presence does the self then have?
Although the belief in the self is a ‘natural belief’, and thus demanded by the
functioning of nature, the claim that it amounts to a real personal identity is a
‘confusion and mistake’ (Ibid: 254). Moreover, Hume states that the fiction of
the self has another function. For when we do not utilise this fiction ‘we are apt
to imagine something unknown and mysterious’. In other words the use of the
fiction of the self, and the reflexive acknowledgement that it is a fiction, saves us
from the trap of metaphysics; that is, from the enthusiasm of metaphysics. There
is no secure self; there is no-extra social self. The self is the product of the
everyday life experiences and it is given shape through the narratives of
everyday life.
Hume revealed that when we reflexively try to find the self we perceive a site of
interaction, a theatre, and not a structure. When we bore into the self, trying to
understand and control its aspects, we lose ourselves in an existential crisis – we
find no secure place from which to make correct decisions, which to keep as our
touchstone – we find ourselves hopelessly lost and despair of all activities and
have no criteria to differentiate good thoughts from bad, no criteria to differentiate
pleasure from vice. To retain our sanity we must return to the narratives of the
common life, to the flows of stories about what we are and should be. We, however,
gain a measure of freedom through adopting an attitude of mitigated scepticism
towards the various narrative which surround us and offer us directives. We must
live by stories; people carry stories which define for them their characteristics and
tell them what sort of person they are. But this does not mean we are to return to an
uncritical approach to these stories; we must free ourselves yet we recognise that
the purity of the naked self cannot exist. All social interaction occurs with people
who bring images and understandings to the interaction. Occasions and events
have narrative histories. Individuals are not simply pre-programmed computer bites
but subjects engaging in the practical activity of making their way through varying
life situations.
Immanuel Kant and the need to rely upon pure reason
Kant (who lived between 1724 and 1804) claimed that Hume woke him from his
dogmatic slumbers. How could man survive as a moral agent in a truly scientific
world? And if the self was a creation of the narratives of everyday life, what
happened to morality? Did moral obligations become subjective, or emotive;
simply a matter of conventions and reactions to events and scenes? Or worse, a
matter of mathematics, of a utilitarian calculation of the costs and benefits?
224
The developing physical sciences, which were premised upon the assumptions
of cause and effect, appeared to have the potential to destroy many of the
fundamental ethical and religious beliefs of the time. The physical sciences
worked on the assumption that everything that happened had a cause and the cause
determined the events that happened – therefore, once we knew the antecedent
conditions, what happened was the only thing that could have happened.
This led Kant to conclude that the physical sciences could completely explain
all the events in the natural or physical world; but when we are considering our
own conduct, in particular, our moral predicaments and decision making
processes, we believe that we (and everybody else) had alternative courses of
action in front of us. If we did not have this belief, how was any ascription of
responsibility possible? How could we either believe that we were responsible for
what we actually do, or that others were responsible for what they did? Thus it
seemed to Kant that certain fundamental beliefs and features of our everyday life,
of what Kant would call our practical rationality, were contradicted by the basic
presuppositions and structures of physical science; or what Kant would call
theoretical rationality. Let us put the question in another way. If all the
operations of the entities in our universe were governed by scientific laws, is
there really any room in such a universe for human beings operating as moral
creatures governed by free will? Concomitantly, where, in a universe able to be
understood by science and governed by scientific laws, did God fit?; God’s
existence appeared to be something apart from such a system. Kant believed that
previous thinkers who had considered this matter had fudged the issue by
downgrading the ambitions of the physical sciences. Traditionally, when it came
to a conflict between believing in science or believing in God, science lost out.
This position, however, was no longer tenable in the enlightenment context of
critical rationality.
Kant basically divided the world into two spheres of existence; crucial to this
division was the distinction made between what he called ‘things-in-themselves’
(or the world as it is ‘in itself’), and the world of ‘appearances’. The world that we
will experience and be able to understand through our sensory apparatus, the
world which we can come to observe, is a world of what Kant called
‘appearances’. This is the world that science can come to understand. But there is
another world which is knowable via the very fact of working through the
meaning of our moral convictions. Note here that Kant uses these moral
convictions, uses the very fact of our every day intuitions and expectations, as
presuppositions for a whole structure, a form of reality which is independent of
the empirical world of matter in motion governed by scientific laws. Thus we can
have two distinct sciences: the sciences of the Sein and those of the Sollen. On the
one hand, there is the world of appearances which the physical sciences and
principles of scientific structure provide the whole truth about (the sciences of the
Sein). On the other hand, there is the world of things-in-themselves, and in this
world we are able to use a whole set of human concepts, such as those of free-will,
of rational agency, of good and bad, of the soul; a range of concepts which
225
determine what one ‘ought’ morally to do. These series of ought propositions and
related concepts, do not reside in the world of appearances, but exist outside the
world of appearances, and they are unknowable to the sciences of the world of
appearances.
Criminology has been tormented by this division; criminal justice administration
has seen a great battle in perspectives between the presuppositions of the criminal
law, with its notions of free will, responsibility, and ascription of causality to the
offender so that we can blame him or her, and the structure of much of positive
criminological knowledge, which has sought to explain the offender’s actions
through his or her background, social position, biological and psychological
constitution, etc. We can get to a position where the human sciences, of which
criminology is a part, have implicitly said: ‘do not blame the offender, he or she
was not responsible for his or her actions, do not punish them but treat them, crime
is the same as a disease’. While the discourse of the criminal law says: ‘no, we
have to relate to offenders as independent, self-controlling responsible individuals
in charge of their own destiny’.
On which side was Kant? In fact the Kantian division allows us to make sense
of this whole debate. On the question of human action, and the types of causality
that we could use to explain this, Kant’s answer was to create two spheres of
knowledge. When the actions and choices of humans are regarded as events in the
spacial-temporal world, then they must be subject to the laws of empirical
necessity. When we begin, as independent observers, to explain human action, we
may trace the commission of crime to factors such as heredity, education and
environment. These are, however, so effective in our explanatory scheme as to
have made it impossible for the individual not to have acted in this way. We can do
no other, since assuming laws of nature we must conclude physical necessity, that
is the physical impossibility of doing other – theoretically we assume an
inevitability of action – otherwise our science cannot come up with the laws of
predictive generalisations we are committed to. If this is so then when we ascribe
a range of freedoms to a person’s actions, this is only the consequence of our lack
of information as to all the conditions, circumstances, factors and degrees of
influence that prevent us from a total knowledge of that person’s action – and
hence from predicting exactly what he or she would do in the circumstances.
However, Kant notes, that even in the light of this potentiality being realised,
we persist in holding a person responsible for his or her actions, and we join in the
general social practice of attaching an appropriate blame or reward.2 In our usage
of theoretical reason, we adopt a stance which has developed into the various roles
of criminologist, sociologist, psychologist and so forth, whilst in our role in civil
society where we attribute praise and blame, we consider the situation in the light
of ‘practical reason’. It is in this light that we hold moral feelings and legislate
2 Conversely, those who are thoroughgoing, such as B F Skinner, cannot speak any language of
praise or blame. Skinner acknowledges this, demanding that we move beyond dignity, humans
are nothing but conditioned animals.
226
laws, which have as their presupposition that people need not breach them. To pass
a law is to assume that people can do the prohibited activity; the law has no reason
for existence otherwise. In fact, we are saying that a person should not do certain
things, and if a person should not have done an action but actually did, then we are
saying that it must have been possible for him or her not to have done it. But, we,
as psychologists and so forth, have the potentiality to offer a complete explanation
in such a way for there to be simply nothing visible to us that could have enabled
the person to have refrained from the action. It is in this quandary that Kant
introduces a strange concept peculiar to human action. He calls this ‘another
causality’, that of ‘freedom’.
This is one example of what Kant termed ‘transcendental objects’. These are
objects that transcend experience and sensation based systems of description. The
criminologist who bases his or her approach upon the foundations of empiricism
will never be able to consider the operation of this ‘causality’. However, by the use
of transcendental objects, we may regard the offence in question (he uses an example
of lying) as completely undermined in relation to the person’s previous condition.
It is ‘as if the offender started off a series of effects completely by himself’. Kant
goes on to say that when we are faced with a situation where our theoretical reason
tells us empirical conditions have determined a persons actions, we may still
legitimately hold that person responsible and blame him or her. Thus we are justified
in holding a man responsible for his actions, even as we, as (future) criminologists,
can also say that ‘before ever they have happened, they are one and all predetermined
in the empirical character’. But how are we justified in this? Kant states:
‘... this blame is founded on a law of reason by which we regard the reason as the
cause which, independently of all the above mentioned empirical conditions, could
and should have determined the man’s actions in another way. We do not indeed
regard the causality of reason as something that merely accompanies the action, but
as something complete in itself, even if the sensible motives do not favour but even
oppose the action; the action is imputed to the man’s intelligible character and he is
wholly guilty now, in the very moment when he lies; therefore the reason was
wholly free, notwithstanding all the empirical conditions of the act, and the deed
has to be wholly imputed to this failure of reason.’ (Critique of Practical Reason,
A.555)
As well as the closed and determined grip that the empirical observer can hope to
identify there is always ‘another causality’ operative which can ensure a
different action; and this ‘another’ is of its nature not able to be located in any
spacial-temporal causal series. The ability to partake of this other realm of
causalities is, moreover, that aspect of human beings which makes them fit
subjects for moral praise and condemnation which accompany participation in
the linguistic and practical arrangements of our world. Furthermore, it is upon the
supposition of the operation of a person’s ‘will’, and the concepts associated with
it, that practical, free and rational life is possible. This rational, free life comes
from the interaction of the will with an a priori law essential to the operation of
morality. Kant held:
227
‘These categories of freedom – for we wish to call them this in contrast to the
theoretical concepts which are categories of nature – have a manifest advantage over
the latter. The latter categories are only forms of thought, which through universal
concepts designate, in an indefinite manner, objects in general for every intuition
possible to us. The categories of freedom, on the other hand, are elementary practical
concepts which determine the free faculty of choice. Though no intuition exactly
corresponding to this determination can be given to us, the free faculty of choice has
as its foundation a pure practical law a priori, and this cannot be said for any of the
concepts of the theoretical use of our cognitive faculty.’ (Critique of Practical
Reason)
These concepts are the foundation of practical life – they provide the foundation
of our reactions to others in our everyday existence. They present, however, a
terrible morass, for they are ‘beyond the limits’ of scientific reason. The scientific
attitude will try to render them nonsensical.
The problematic of being a modern and being moral
Thus we have the great problem for criminology of free will – that cornerstone
of the jurisprudence of the criminal law which early positivism found a
discredited metaphysical illusion. What is free will? Kant called it autonomy,
and appears to have recognised it as the capacity for moral self-direction. For
Kant this was linked to man’s independence from God, from society and from
nature, his ability to act rather than be acted upon, his intrinsic quality as a
supremely free agent who, when rid of dependence and oppression is clearly
able to see by virtue of his reason where his moral duty lies. But this is a huge
problem: specifically (i) what is the ontology of this moral agent?; and (ii) what
is the status of morality?
Ultimately, the ontology of the moral agent is beyond ontology. It resides in the
mystery of humanity. Kant needed to bring God back in to provide some foundation,
some entity which stood outside the coordinates of time and space, beyond those
things which science could tell us about.
And if we are not to base morality on some source of God’s will, or mere social
convention, then we have no other basis than to base morality on the foundation of
mystery. Most of modernist discourse on morality is Kant versus Hume in various
guises. Either we rely upon the source of morality in the narratives of the society
(and here I place both the Aristotelian tradition of reading moral duties from the
meanings internal to the set of localised practices of the political community, rather
than an appeal to abstract principles and the argument that morality is the observance
of the socially prescribed duties, either lawful or in convention, as simply the
different ends of the same continuum), or we have the argument for (abstract)
universality. Universality attacks all community sources of morality.
Communitarianism appears to set relativism against absolutism. From the time
when the Greeks feared the worldliness of the Sophists, people have feared that
228
pluralism and diversity must lead to moral confusion and a lack of moral regulation,
but is this so?
Perhaps Durkheim can help. One consequence of his analysis of the development
of modern forms of solidarity is that to be a modern person, surrounded by
complexity and differentiation, one has to be more moral than the pre-modern. It
is easy, very easy to believe in God or to live in a stable community when there is
only a limited stock of social knowledge: it is very difficult to live, as a moral
person, in modernity. A moral individualism requires an increase in moral intensity
and self-regard and self-questioning.
This argument is at the crux of the problem of law and order in late modernity.
For many commentators appear to believe that we live in amoral times, however,
are we not incredibly interested in being moral, in doing the right thing? And can
there be anything more moralistic than the concept of the self-sustaining
individual? The issue is rather does the demand to be a modern self, a self-
controlling, self-directing individual find the necessary resources in the narratives
of everyday life... or is he or she surrounded by a huge amount of moral discourse
that does not make sense. Many commentators, for example, Alisdair MacIntrye
(1981), argue the latter.
In After Virtue, MacIntrye gives a narrative of the fate of moral theory in
modernity. His argument is that while we are surrounded by a huge melange of
moral discourse it doesn’t make sense, there is a lot of moral noise but no coherence.
To use our picture from Hume, there are copious narratives telling us what we
ought to do, what morality demands, or that, conversely, we should listen to the
moral voice within, but it amounts to radical ambivalence. We are told that every
attempt to achieve an objective morality has failed, and we are left with our feelings
or emotivism. The problem is that we no longer distinguish between manipulative
and non-manipulative social arrangements. How can we understand our desires?
How can we rank our life projects? Will we not be at the mercy of every advertising
strategy, every new image of the good life? Must bureaucracy overwhelm life
functions because we can not decide things morally?
In MacIntyre’s narrative, we have opened up social life so that the self can
choose and enjoy a variety and heterogeneity of human goods, can discover the
free path to human flourishing, but our result in the late 20th century is that we
doom ourselves to moral impotence. We would like to shape our lives ourselves, to
make a glorious story of our existence, but we are denied a coherent moral language
by which to do so. We are also denied any notion of the achievement of a political
community as a common project. The danger is that the liberal individualist world
will lose any semblance of coherence and exhaust itself. A process of civil war and
a new Dark Age will ensue. Put into criminological terms: consider the arguments
of the right that faulty socialisation is the key to low self-control and criminality,
Macintyre asks, how can one educate and civilise human nature into virtue in a
culture in which human life is in danger of being torn apart by the conflict of too
many messages, so much relativism?
229
MacIntyre finds our societies have little moral resources to withstand the increase
in complexity and incoherence of our positions. For MacIntyre a new dark age is
already upon us, the post-modern condition is not one of freedom but radical
incoherence and instability. As a consequence of this collapse we inhabit social
distance and listen to incoherent appeals to common moral feelings which legitimate
using a technical rationality not tied to any overall view of social structure and
social purpose. MacIntyre, however, offers an analysis, a diagnosis; we may accept
it, but the solution, to retreat into small scale well organised, morally structured
communities, amounts to a privatisation of social space which offers no social
programme but dooms the others to more of the same. Indeed, as we survey the
world, the rise of ethnicity, of tribalism, of fundamental religions, of the demand
for moral absolutes, is legitimated on their own terms by the desire for moral
stability.
Born again communitarians are disillusioned with modernity, and seek to relocate
a post-modern moral self into the stable moral framework of cultural homogeneity.
Is this the only recourse? Do we witness a resurgence of medieval conditions? Has
modernity moved into a phase of intensified fragmentation and incommensurability?
Let us not overlook the scale of the problem which, to use Durkheim’s phraseology,
establishing a thoroughly modern everyday existence entailed, the task is to create
the conditions for a modern moral individualism.
Durkheim’s model of modernity restated
Focusing primarily upon the relative differentiation of roles, Durkheim held that
in a society characterised by what he termed ‘mechanical solidarity’, every person
does many different types of tasks. This society has only a low level of technology
and operates as a subsistence society. Little interchange of goods ensues. In a
stratified subsistence economy there is little differentiation in life style between
chief and lesser members. Modernity, however, benefits from role-differentiation
and specialisation which leads in turn to an increase in the exchange of products –
a society characterised by an advanced division of labour. A new form of social
cohesion is required, the framework of which Durkheim outlines as ‘organic
solidarity’.
Societies with marked role-differentiation have many more norms than do
societies with smaller amounts of it, for norms create roles, and the greater the
number of roles, the greater the number of norms. In such societies, roles become
more complicated and sophisticated, and hence the norms become more complicated
and sophisticated. Simpler societies have not only fewer norms, but less complicated
ones as well.
Durkheim believed that the law would reflect the system forms of integration.
He separates criminal juridical rules into ‘two great classes, according as they
have organised repressive sanction or only restitutive sanctions’ (1933:69). The
only common characteristic of all crimes is that they offend the ‘collective’ or
230
‘common conscience’ of the society, which he defined as ‘the totality of beliefs

and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society’, and which
formed a ‘determinate system which has its own life’. (Ibid: 79) The relative
strength of this reaction becomes a function of the solidarity of the collective
conscience.
The criminal law stems from the collective conscience:
‘... thus we see what type of social solidarity penal law symbolises. Everybody knows
that there is a social cohesion whose cause lies in a certain conformity of all particular
consciences to a common type which is none other than the psychic type of society...
the nature of the collective sentiments accounts for punishment... Moreover, we see
anew that the power of reaction which is given over to government functionaries,
once they have made their appearance, is only an emanation of what has been diffuse
in society since its birth [ie the collective conscience].’ (Ibid: 104-7)
While this view has been seen to be the basis for a whole tradition of ‘consensus’
views of law which provide a foundation for the relationship of law and society for
a large number of theorists, Durkheim does not suggest that there is some easy
consensus of norms and qualitative judgments in modern society. The determinist,
positivistic, framework which Durkheim gave in his early work on suicide and the
division of labour, where social control was explained largely in terms of external
constraints, ie by ‘social facts’, must be seen in conjunction with his developing
notion that social norms far from being mechanically imposed on the individual
by the actions of the surrounding society, came to be internalised in the personality
of social actors. This process of internalisation is a process whereby society came,
so to speak, to reside inside us, and thus became part of the individual’s psyche
through both informal and formal processes of socialisation. Thus the essence of
social control was increasingly the individual’s sense of moral obligation to obey
the rule – the voluntary acceptance of social duties – rather than in simple conformity
to outside pressures.
This process is extremely problematic in modernity since it depends on the
nature of the social structure and in particular the state of the division of labour.
Thus in societies with a minimum division of labour, ie pre-modernity, essentially
a similar process of socialisation is experienced by all. But in societies of advanced
division of labour, differential processes of socialisation are experienced. Therefore,
the collective conscience becomes more complex and abstract in modernity, and
Durkheim argued the sanctity of the individual would become the organising
principle of the penal system. Today we understand that law has not changed in its
penal element as Durkheim envisaged; ie that punishment has not become marked
by compensation, restitution and a leniency of sentencing. Indeed several empirical
studies have claimed exactly the opposite result. But let us remember Durkheim is
suggesting the law becomes less repressive as participation and interdependency
builds, what if sizable sectors of the population are not participating and are not
required by the others? For Durkheim modernity would encourage the feeling of
interdependence and a growing awareness of the need to respect the individuality
231
of others – forces of social division, the growth of an underclass, clearly render

problematic Durkheim’s description.
The task of moral socialisation in late-modernity: the example of

gender relations
To contemporary criminologists of the Right, faulty socialisation is a primary cause

of crime. For Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) low self-control is a product of bad
childbearing practices and the decline of familial institutions. But what is required
in late-modern socialisation and how does it differ from the demands made of
socialisation previously? Consider a central unit which the Right claim is in decline:
the institution of marriage.
Modern marriage is a site of flows and demands operating both as a site for
socialisation of offspring and for the personal and emotional fulfilment of its adults.
It is held out as the goal of romantic and intimate connection; it is a central site for
the operation of self control and maturation into a responsible parental figure. In
The transformation of intimacy, sexuality, love and eroticism in modern society,
Anthony Giddens (1992) provides an account of the modern sexual revolution,
which he analyses in terms of change in the generic distribution of sexuality. Late
modernity experiences the free floating disembodiment of sexuality, or what
Giddens calls plastic sexuality, that is sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to
reproduction. This allows the conditions for a radical democratisation of the personal
sphere. The drive for authenticity and emancipation works in this area to construct
the notion of the potentiality for a pure relationship, a relationship of sexual and
emotional quality, explosive in its potentiality and destructive of pre-existing forms
of gender hierarchy.
The notion of romantic love leads into the conception of a pure relationship.
Romantic love presupposes that durable emotional ties can be established with the
other on the basis of qualities intrinsic to that tie itself; the possibility of romantic
love is a necessary presupposition of the concept of a pure relationship. This is
aided by the technological changes, better contraceptive methods, which free
sexuality from the essential connection with pregnancy and death which
characterised the experience of sex for women. Plastic sexuality is de-centred
sexuality; a freedom from the needs of reproduction, a freedom which originated
in a tendency to limit the family size, but becomes transformed as a result of a
spread of modern conception and new reproductive technology which instead of
controlling the impact of sexuality emancipates sexuality. This new form of sexuality
is available to be used as part of the expression of, and indeed the creation of,
personality and becomes intrinsically bound up with the creation and reproduction
of the modern self. At the same time, at least in principle, plasticity transforms
sexuality from being something almost entirely wrapped up in the expression of
male power (what psychoanalysists call the rule of the phallus or the overwhelming
importance of the male sexual experience), into something which can be more
232
controlled and possessed by the woman. For Giddens modern society has a covert
emotional history, a history of the sexual pursuits of men kept separate from their
public selves. The sexual control of woman by men was much more than an
incidental feature of the creation of modern social life, but was a basic element of
social structure. Plastic sexuality, however, weakens the structural elements of male
domination – control declines. A rising tide of male violence towards women may
be a consequence since these processes help create a vortex or emotional abyss, in
which the demand is for the overcoming of the old structures of domination/
passivity, which the creation of new forms of communication between the sexes
which has not yet been built. For Giddens the transformation of intimacy has radical
possibilities and a range of dangers.
Giddens analyses a novel by Julian Barnes: Before She Met Me. This is a story
of the everyday life in late-modernity of one Graham Hendrick, an academic
historian who leaves his wife, and begins a relationship with another woman. The
change has ultimately tragic consequences. At the beginning of the novel, Graham
who is in his late 30s, has been married 15 years and fears that he is on the downhill
slope. At a relatively boring party, he meets Ann, an ex small-time film actress
who has become a fashion buyer. The meeting stirs in him barely remembered
feelings of hope and excitement: ‘he feels as if some long broken line of
communication to a self of 20 years ago had suddenly been restored’. He is ‘once
more capable of folly and idealism’. Soon a full blown affair is under way, he
leaves his wife and children and sets up house with Ann. The real crux of the novel
is Graham’s progressive and obsessive discovery of the lovers in Ann’s life before
he entered it. She hides little, but equally, provides no information unless Graham
asks for it directly. Graham becomes obsessed to uncover the full sexual details of
Ann’s past. He watches her cameo parts on the screen to see whether she will give
away anything by her glances. Through his research Graham discovers that his
best friend Jack, to whom he had even confided his problems with Ann’s life before
she met him, had been a lover of Ann several years before. Graham arranges to
meet his friend as if to continue his discussion but stabs the bewildered Jack,
repeatedly ‘between the heart and the genitals’. Graham puts a plaster on his finger,
settles down in the chair with the remnants of his cup of coffee that Jack had made
for him. At the same time Ann grows worried by Graham’s absence which is
stretched across the whole night, telephones the police and several hospitals and
searches through Graham’s desk to find any clue of his whereabouts. She unearths
evidence of Graham’s impulsive enquiries into her past and the fact that he has
found out about her relationship with Jack. The only sexual encounter she has
actively hidden from him. She goes to Jack’s flat and finds Graham there together
with Jack’s body. Without understanding why, she lets Graham calm her down and
tie her arms together with some washing line, Graham calculates that this procedure
will give him time enough to kill himself before she can dash to the telephone for
help. He then cuts his own throat, Ann, however, dives head-first through the glass
window screaming loudly. When the police arrive, Graham is dead and the
implication is that Ann also is dying.
233
What is the novel about? Probably not jealousy since when she reads through
the material that Graham has collected Ann concludes that ‘jealous was a word she
wouldn’t use of him’ – the important thing is that he could not handle her past.
What is the violence of the ending about? Giddens suggests that Graham’s violence
is a frustrated attempt at mastery. The secrets that Graham sought to discover in
Ann’s sexual history are bound up within non-conformity to what he expects of a
woman. Her past is incompatible to his ideal. The problem is an emotional, and
what you might call, resource, one. While he understands that it is absurd to expect
Ann to have organised her previous existence in preparation for meeting him, yet
her sexual independence, even at a time when he did not exist for her, is unacceptable
to such a degree that the end result is violent and destructive. Giddens reads the
novel as a mirror of the contemporary fluctuations and tensions engulfing sexuality,
equality, emancipation, the desire for romantic love and the desire for pure intimacy.
The male entering a true late-modern relationship would take for granted that it is
a common place empirical fact for a woman to have various lovers prior to his
arrival, perhaps even during a serious sexual involvement. Whilst in the past, such
a woman would have been either a prostitute or regarded as loose woman, and the
status of a virtuous woman attributed to those women for whom these facts did not
apply to. Today such a woman is to be regarded as normal. On the other hand, men
had been allowed or regarded as needing sexual variety for their own physical and
emotional health. This double standard allowed men to engage in multiple sexual
encounters before marriage and perhaps even after marriage. In the history of
divorce, a single act of adultery by a woman was an unpardonable breach, adultery
on the part of the husband was regrettable but understandable. But as later modernity
has thrown up increasing sexual equality, it has called upon both sexes to make
fundamental changes in their outlooks on behaviour towards and conceptions of
one another. The adjustments or demands on women are considerable, but so too
are those made of men, and how can traditional forms of socialisation provide men
with the tools to come to understand women? In this novel, Graham neither
understood his first wife nor, while feeling a great love for Ann, did his
understanding escape caricature. The research he does on her does not enable him
to know her as a self at all, instead he cannot escape characterising the behaviour
of his first wife and Ann through the traditional metaphors of woman as emotional,
physical creatures whose thought processes do not move along rational lines. While
he has compassion for them, and although he does not define his new wife as
being a loose woman (we note that when she had visited Jack after having married
Graham she firmly rejects any advances that Jack made to her), Graham cannot
free his mind from the idea, and from the reality of a threat that he feels from
activities which occurred before he was ‘in control’ of her.
In the novel we also see the contrast between the two marriages, the early
marriage is in many ways a more naturally given phenomenon based upon the
conventional division between housewife and male breadwinner. His first wife
Barbara, saw marriage as a state of affairs which was not a particularly rewarding
part of life and similar to a job that one does not particularly appreciate, but faithfully
234
carries out her duties. By contrast the marriage of Ann is a complex series of
interactions which have to be constantly negotiated and worked through, thus
Graham inhabits an existential position in the second marriage that was only barely
emerging at the time of his youth; a world of sexual negotiation, of relationships in
which conceptions, commitment and intimacy have come to predominate in a way
his own resources, as yet, have not equipped him for. The novel is about male
power, male disquiet, and male violence in a world undergoing profound
transformation. A world in which women no longer go along with male sexual
dominance, and where both sexes must cope with the implications of this change;
a world in which the personal life has become an open project creating new demands
and anxieties. The terrain of this project is always an interactive site between huge
forces. Male sexuality may have appeared unproblematic in the context of the
separate and unequal social circumstances concerning the gender structure of early
modernity which was the norm until recently. A range of social circumstances
concealed and constituted it:
• the domination of men over the public sphere;
• the double standard of sexual behaviour;
• the associated schism of women into pure (marriageable) and impure
(prostitutes, harlots, whores, concubines, witches);
• the understanding of gender differences as given by God, nature or biology;
• the problematising of women as opaque or irrational in their desires and actions;
• the sexual division of labour.
With these supports crumbling, we should expect male sexuality to become troubled
and often compulsive. Several commentators have referred to this as the late-modern
crisis of masculinity. And for men, to some extent welcoming the fact that women
have become more sexually available, and at least claiming in the long term they
want a partner who is intellectually and economically their equal, there is also the
obvious and deep-seated unease when faced with the reality of such considerations.
As the articles of our popular magazines narrate it, in reply they may claim that
women have lost the capacity for kindness, that women do not know how to
compromise any more, that women do not want to be wives any more, that they
want to have wives themselves. In article after article, in book after book, come
accounts of life situations in which men declare they want equality, but also make
statements which indicate that they are not fully aware of the implications of such
equality. Everyday requires a high reformability of social skills. Life is a series of
games with new rules and structures, games which require new sets of techniques
and skills. Late-modernity requires a richer process of socialisation than ever before
– a socialisation into a new self. But if the requirements have intensified, the locality
of this process has become more fragmented and insecure.
235
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LOCALITY AND CRIMINOLOGY: FROM THE

POLIS TO THE POST-MODERN CITY
‘The old European concept of politics as a sphere encompassing state and

society was carried on without interruption into the nineteenth century. On
this view, the economy of “the entire household”, a subsistence economy
based on agrarian and handicraft production and expanded through local
markets, forms the foundation for a comprehensive political order. Social
stratification and differential participation in (or exclusion from) political
power go hand in hand – the constitution of political authority integrates the
society as a whole. The conceptual framework no longer fits modern societies,
in which commodity exchange (organised under civil law) of the capitalist
economy has detached itself from the order of political rule. Through the
media of exchange value and power, two systems of action that are functionally
complementary have been differentiated out. The social system has been
separated from the political, a depoliticised economic society has been
separated from a bureaucratised state.’ (Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, 1987:37)
The paradox of city life: social distance, physical proximity
Cities embody a paradox of social geography in that they are full of strangers:
socially distant but physically close. We have left the polis far behind; modern
social life is urban and individualist. Modernity up-rooted populations, took
them out of their ritualised and ‘natural’ locality into the city and the nation
state.
In our familiarity and our modernity urban life may appear only too natural.
But urbanism terrified Rousseau in the 17th century, and this fear was strong in the
writers of the 19th century grappling to understand urban life and predict its
consequences. Take, for example, the German social theorist Tönnies who
constructed two opposing models of Community and Association (Gemeinschaft
und Gesellschaft). The growing urban life developed its own culture which was
radically opposed to the pre-modern one focused on the village and feudalism.
The pre-modern, or Gemeinschaft society, was founded on the living experiencing
of a notion of a settled order of nature which ran through the organisation of kinship,
neighbourhood and friendship.
‘The idea of a natural distribution, and of a sacred tradition which determines and
rests upon this natural distribution, dominate all realities of life and all corresponding
ideas of its right and necessary order, and how little significance and influence attach
to the concepts of exchange and purchase, of contract and regulations. The relationships
between the community and the feudal lords, and more especially that between the
community and its members, is based not on contracts, but, like those within the
family, upon understanding.’ (1955:67-8).
237
By comparison, modern life, that of the Gesellschaft, knows no underlying natural

order but founds itself on the idea of contract.
‘The theory of Gesellschaft deals with the artificial construction of an aggregate of
human beings which superficially resembles the Gemeinschaft in so far as the
individuals peacefully live and dwell together. However, in the Gemeinschaft they
remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas in the
Gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors. In the
Gesellschaft, as contrasted with the Gemeinschaft, we find no actions that can be
derived from an a priori and necessarily existing unity; no actions, therefore, which
manifest the will and the spirit of the unity even if performed by the individual; no
actions which, in so far as they are performed by the individual, take place on
behalf of those united with him. In the Gesellschaft such actions do not exist. On
the contrary, here everybody is by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition
of tension against all others. Their spheres of activity and power are sharply
separated, so that everybody refuses to everyone else contacts with, and admittance
to, his sphere; ie intrusions are regarded as hostile acts. Such a negative attitude
towards one another becomes the normal and always underlying relation of these
power endowed individuals and it characterises the Gesellschaft in the condition of
rest; nobody wants to grant and produce anything for another individual, nor will
he be inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it be not in exchange
for a gift or labour equivalent that he considers at least equal to what he has given.’
(1955:74).
The focus of attention changes, the community-society contrast specifies that the
social order is no longer founded on organic bonds, but on a process of calculation.
Whereas in small scale communities one is concerned with the maintenance of all
those local ties which strengthen bonds, which provide informal strength, control
and security, the modern looks outward into the world for exchange, gain and
profit.‘The whole country is nothing but a market in which to purchase and sell’
(1955:90).
Tönnies pin-points two processes: one, the change in physical locality, the other,
the change in the types of social relationships. Much of the writing on social control
has focused either upon a rural-urban contrast, or a contrast between informal and
formal social controls. For example Zarr writing of the development of cities in
Africa:
‘The effectiveness of tribe and family as agents of social control has always depended
upon the cohesiveness of the particular unit. In the urban areas, this cohesiveness
increasingly gives way to individualism and the vacuum created by the decline of the
family and tribal authority has only been filled by the impersonal sanctions of the
law.’ (1969:194)
Urban life involves a whole different set of existential questions (it is no coincidence
that the development of the existential philosophy comes about with life in large
urban settings). It is a contrast of moods, or perceptions, of the person to the
environment.
Georg Simmel applied Tönnies’ concepts in an 1903 essay The metropolis
and mental life. Simmel reflected the Weberian apprehension of modern mass
society and saw the individual as resisting becoming a mere clog. But such
238
Locality and criminology: from the polis to the post-modern city
resistance was itself the cause of numerous social problems; in resisting the
power of the large scale ‘socio-technological mechanism’, various pathologies
surfaced. To survive we adopt a disinterested or rational attitude. Urban life
robbed the self of familiar images. Images become involved in a rapid
telescoping where many unpredictable and unexpected spectacles impact upon
us. In this complex and increasingly pulsating world we need to develop rational
thought processes, rather than rely upon our habits to cope successfully. Life in
the city depends upon exchanging money, hence we reduce social relationships
to a medium of exchange. We learn to calculate the terms of social life; we
develop a blasé attitude to cope with the many varied experiences and
individuals we encounter; if we were to inquire, truthfully, into the concerns of
more than a select few, we would be destroyed by information overload – we
must keep the others at a mediated distance for the sake of our own self-balance.
But this means that meaningful communication becomes difficult; we create a
formal reserve which further estranges individuals from other members of urban
society. The individual is pushed, in exaggerated form, onto what he believes are
his own resources, and engages in a frantic search for the basis of an authentic
self-identity. To operate in the modern terrain the individual must be able to
understand and recognise its entities, must be able to expect certain outcomes,
and rely upon certain undertakings.
While the environment of the pre-modern lures us with its familiarity, it traps
us into frozen status and identifies as it locates us within its customs and its
status. By contrast modernity is to be the locality of freedom; therefore the
environment of the modern cannot appear so threatening that we are trapped
into inaction or hide ourselves behind our own fortresses. How does modernity
achieve this confidence in disembeddedness? The existential trick is that the
locality of modern life will be mastered and controlled, made predictable and
rational.
Crime links with fear, trust, and predictability
This is crucial since modernity puts into place a unique set of processes
concerning trust: we need to trust strangers since we operate in localities over
which we, as individuals, have little control. Modernity creates new forms of
risk (cf Giddens 1984) however, the risk, which is an ever present feature of
modernity, is rendered predictable, understandable. Crime offends against
existential security in that to be defrauded, to be the victim of assault or rape,
to buy an item relying upon assurances which then turn out to be lies... makes
the world a more threatening place.
Both the experience of crime, and the reported rates of crime may change our
relationship to locality. Consider what existential effect the following incident which
was reported to have occurred in the suburb of Briarcliff, New York, may have had
on the couple:
239
‘A young couple went to dinner one evening at a local restaurant, and returned to find
their car apparently stolen. After reporting it to the local police, they returned to their
home and the next morning were surprised to see the car in the driveway, with an
envelop on the windowshield.
“There was an emergency and we had to borrow the car”, the note read. “Please
excuse the inconvenience, but perhaps these two theatre tickets will make up for it.”
The couple surprised but pleased, told the police that their car had been returned, and
the next Saturday used the theatre tickets.
When they returned that night, they found that their house had been completely
looted.’ (Andelman, 1972:49)
How have writings, which we can describe as criminological, tackled the urban
question?
Telling the story of urban existence: I, the oral-ethnographic

efforts
The oral-ethnographic tradition attempts to communicate the human experience

and offer an understanding based vision of the human consequences of social
conditions, poverty and crime. Using direct observations, life histories, unpublished
documents and a range of first hand data sources, we are offered commentaries on
the effects of socio-economic change on the structure of social relations.
Frederick Engels
In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels (1845) used his own
impressions of Manchester (called by a character in Disraeli’s Coningsby ‘the
most wonderful city in Modern times’ and ‘the city of England’ which had come
to symbolise the achievement of capitalist industrialisation in all its grandeur and
grimness), together with contemporary accounts, pamphlets and newspapers, to
compile a radical and sensitive account of working class life. The themes of relative
deprivation and of crime as a rational reaction to the visible inequalities produced
by the industrial revolution, run through his account:
‘The worker lived in poverty and want and saw that other people were better off than
he was. The worker was not sufficiently intelligent to appreciate why he, of all people,
should be the one to suffer – for after all he contributed more to society than the idle
rich, and sheer necessity drove him to steal in spite of his traditional respect for
private property.’ (1845:242)
Crime was understandable resistance, often amounting to the desire for justice
against the powerful:
‘Acts of violence committed by the working classes against the bourgeoisie and their
henchmen are merely frank and undisguised retaliation for the thefts and treacheries
perpetrated by the middle classes against the workers.’ (1854:242)
Engels saw the growth of criminality not only among the deprived working class,
but also in the ‘surplus population’ of casual workers, what Marx called ‘the
240
lowest sediment’, and others termed ‘the residuum’. Engels saw the problem in
terms of a culture which had developed as a response to their social and physical
location:
‘Apart from over-indulgence in intoxicating liquors, the sexual immorality of many
English workers is one of their greatest failings. This too follows from the circumstances
in which this class of society is placed. The workers have been left to themselves
without the moral training necessary for the proper control of their sexual desires.
While burdening the workers with numerous hardships the middle classes have left
them only the pleasures of drink and sexual intercourse. The result is that the workers,
in order to get something out of life, are passionately devoted to these two pleasures
and indulge in them to excess and in the grossest fashion. If people are relegated to
the position of animals, they are left with the alternatives of revolting and sinking into
bestiality. If the demoralisation of the worker passes beyond a certain point then it is
just as natural that he will turn into a criminal... as inevitably as water turns into steam
at boiling point.’ (1845:144-5)
This has echoes in recent American writings on the underclass, and the accent
placed upon faulty training early in life is representative of the general control
perspective. Engels, however, is clearly putting this behaviour into a social context,
albeit with a reductionism to environmental determinism, which is missing from
much recent conservative writings (and subjected to strong criticism by Elliott
Currie (1985)).
Engels is not merely describing conditions but interpreting the plight of the
lower classes. In interpreting he brings his own values to the fore; his work is
deliberately a treatise against capitalism, and the absence of any concern with the
general welfare of society, or of social justice, on the part of the capitalists. The
weakness with his writing lies in the possibility that the immediacy and purity of
the experience of the subjects being communicated will be distorted and twisted
by the interpretation.
The surplus group (lumpen-proletariat or residuum) became of considerable
interest to social commentators of different persuasions, for example Charles Booth
and Henry Mayhew.
Henry Mayhew
Henry Mayhew’s (1812-1887) street biography appears as an early social ecology
approach to the study of crime, based on observation and description of the
social conditions of the developing urban centres. His four volume London Labour
and the London Poor offered vivid accounts of the expanding masses which
filled the growing cities of Victorian capitalism. Mayhew was ambivalent; while
he defined criminals as ‘those who will not work’ (the title of Vol 4), his
descriptions captured much of the reality of social deprivation which characterised
his times:
‘There are thousands of neglected children loitering about the low neighbourhoods of
the metropolis, and prowling about the streets, begging and stealing for their daily
bread. They are to be found in Westminster, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, St Giles, New
241
Cut, Lambeth, the Borough and other localities. Hundreds of them may be seen leaving
their parents’ homes and low lodging-houses every morning sallying forth in search
of food and plunder.’ (1862:273)
Beyond the descriptions of degradation that characterised this period, Mayhew
saw the weaknesses of the human self. The problem was seen in terms of defective
socialisation, or non-conformity ‘to civilised habits’ (Criminal Prisons of London,
1862:386) and the policy prescription was clear:
‘It is far easier to train the young in virtuous and industrious habits, than to
reform the grown-up felon who has become callous in crime, and it is besides
far more profitable to the state. To neglect them or inadequately to attend to
their welfare gives encouragement to the growth of this dangerous class.’
(1862:275)
The demand for reform flows both from fear and self-interest. It is a reaction
to the image of what this failure of socialisation could accomplish, but it also
reflects an assumption that a healthy individual is a individual capable of
exercising self-control and rational calculation. For Mayhew predictability
obedience and normal behaviour is more important than the individual thinking
about his situation. As with Bentham’s idea of the panopticon the task is to
make the behaviour of the lower classes conform to expectations. However,
we can see also the growth of a new ideal, implicitly at least, is an individual
capable of disciplining his impulses and planning his life. However, it was
clear to Mayhew that many individuals are by nature incapable of self-control
and self-motivation:
‘I am anxious that the public should no longer confound the honest, independent
working men, with the vagrant beggars and pilferers of the country; and that they
should see that the one class is as respectable and worthy, as the other is degraded and
vicious.’
Only 5% of these vagrants and pilferers were ‘deserving’; they were generally a
‘moral pestilence... a stream of vice and disease... a vast heap of social refuse’ – a
‘dangerous class’. Mayhew criticised the authorities for not taking steps to enable
them to practice trades, in his The Criminal Prisons of London he defined these
‘criminal tribes’ as ‘that portion of society who have not yet conformed to civilised
habits’. They did not rationally control the passions of their bodies or condition
themselves for the tasks of hard labour:
‘Still the question becomes – why do these folk not settle down to industrial pursuits
like the rest of the community?... It is a strange ethnological fact that, though many
have passed from the steady and regular habits of civilised life, few of those who have
once adopted the savage and nomadic form of existence abandon it, notwithstanding
its privations, its dangers, and its hardships. This appears to be due mainly to that love
of liberty, and that impatience under control, that is more or less common to all minds.
Some are more self-willed than others, and, therefore, more irritable under restraint;
and these generally rebel at the least opposition to their desires. It is curiously illustrative
of the truth of this point, that the greater number of criminals are found between the
ages of 15 and 25; that is to say, at that time of life when the will is newly developed,
242
and has not yet come to be guided and controlled by the dictates of reason. The
period, indeed, when human beings begin to assert themselves is the most trying time
for every form of government – whether it be parental, political or social; and those
indomitable natures who cannot or will not brook ruling, then become heedless of all
authority, and respect no law but their own.’ (1862:384)
Poor were of two classes, ‘wanderers’ and ‘settlers’; with ‘savagery’ inhering in
the former. He described them in terms we are familiar with from positivism:
‘... there is a greater development of the animal than of the intellectual or moral
nature of man, and that they are all more or less distinguished for their high cheek-
bones and protruding jaws – for their use of a slang language – for their lax ideas of
property – for their general improvidence – their repugnance to continuous labour –
their disregard of female honour – their love of cruelty – their pugnacity – and their
utter want of religion.’ (The Other Nation: 69)
Telling the story of urban existence: II, the ecological paradigm and
the attempt to develop a science of the city
The most famous tradition for analysing urban life in criminology flows from the
work of the University of Chicago department of sociology conducted from the
1920s onwards. Urban sociology developed when American sociologists sought
to evolve a scientific approach towards the problems of order in the modern city;
the city itself was the laboratory in which the empirical features of life unfolded.
Chicago at the time had the reputation of being the crime capital of the world
and professional crime and juvenile delinquency featured as important areas for
research alongside homelessness, suicide, drunkenness and vice. The University
of Chicago Sociology Department drew upon work being done by bio-ecologists
on the structure and development of plant associations and constructed a social
ecological approach.
As utilised in biology, the ecological approach highlighted a process whereby
vegetation and animal life adapts to the environment by distribution over a localised
area in an orderly pattern. This enables both adaptation to the environment, and
the attainment of complementary uses of habitat resources.
By analogy a similar process was envisaged in the city. The various sub-
populations were viewed as jostling for spatial positions that would provide them
with terrain to perform their diverse functions in a developing division of labour.
For Robert Park (1916) the city was:
‘... a great sorting and sifting mechanism, which, in ways that are not yet wholly
understood, infallibly selects out of the population as a whole the individuals best
suited to live in a particular region and a particular milieu.’ (1952:79)
The city presented so many images, so many processes... how could order be
constructed? Borrowing the formalism of scholars in the continental tradition, in
particular Simmel, the ‘Chicago School’ developed the earlier ideas of criminal
areas, contamination and the ‘social physics’ of the 19th century English observers
243
of urbanisation, into an approach where crime rates were seen as a result of variables
demonstrated in the physical environment of zones of the city.
A model was constructed wherein cities were portrayed as growing outwards in
a series of concentric zones from a centre, with each of the zones exhibiting
specialised activities and populations. The centre was a business and industrial
zone. Outside this was a zone of transition characterised by a high predominance
of substandard housing held for speculation in expectation of commercial and
industrial expansion. In this area the housing was undesirable, deteriorating and
cheap. It was also in close proximity to industry and business, housing slums of
primary immigrant settlements, the poor and dispossessed, and the vice business.
Zone three was characterised by secondary immigrant settlement and workingmen’s
homes, while zone four was the better residential area, and the fifth, and last, the
commuter zone. The work of University of Chicago Sociology Department was
added to by research conducted at Chicago’s Institute for Juvenile Research. There,
Shaw and McKay (1931, 1942) mapped out juvenile-court referral rates and found
that these correlated closely to the zones. Rates were highest in the inner-city or
core areas, and grew less as distance increased from the centre. They attributed
causal significance to the concept of ‘social disorganisation’, or disturbance of
‘the biotic balance and social equilibrium’; a condition found particularly in the
‘interstitial areas’ (areas in between the organised natural areas).
In time the general processes of invasion, dominance and succession, which
determined the concentric growth patterns of the city, were complemented by a
series of individual case studies portraying the actual conditions in which individuals
found themselves.
Four points:
• The ecological approach can become overly naturalistic and positivistic where
all the emphasis is placed on observable entities. Was social ecology a metaphor,
or did science demand the methodology of a ‘natural’ science be applied onto
the social environment? One practitioner defined it in 1925 as:
‘... the study of the spatial and temporal relations of human beings affected by the
selective, distributive and accommodative forces of the environment.’ (McKenzie, R
D 1925).
While Park appeared to go beyond any idea that the city was an artefact of
man’s making to imply the processes were beyond man’s conscious control.
As with most forms of positivism the task is two fold, first to draw up a set of
data, in this case the patterns of spacial distribution and movement, and second,
to use this to get to the underlying reality which is to be analysed through this
data. The data gives the clues as to the underlying processes, but if the data is
doubtful – and the Chicago School relied heavily on official police and court
statistics to measure delinquency in the differing areas – then so is the whole
set of forces which are claimed to underlie it (criticism was quick to surface:
for example Sophia Robinson in 1936 highlighted the weakness of relying
upon official statistics).
244
• This approach reduces the significance of social and cultural factors to the
geographical. Social ecology reconciled the apparent diversity of Chicago
life and deviance via the concept of social disorganisation. However: (i)
even the geographical approach was context specific. Various scholars
attempted to apply the concentric zone model in other countries but found
that the model presupposed the easy availability of land. In various countries
cities often developed over land already in heavy demand, thus different
patterns were observed; (ii) as the American sociologist David Matza was
later to point out, to place the cause of social disorder as social
disorganisation, and to locate this in terms of invasion and interstitial zones,
has the effect of making social diversity the product of social pathology –
it implies that there is some natural and normal formation of city life, and
that conflict and strife were a reflection of the competitive principle of
ecological progress. This introduces a value position as to what is the
desirable form of proper social life and thus contravenes the actual self-
image of social ecology’s value free empirical, scientific status. To locate
delinquency as caused by ‘transitional’ areas in the city where the normal
normative structure and socialisation practices had broken down, indicates
a background assumption of value consensus on social life which is
problematic. As critics such as Taylor et al, (The New Criminology, 1973:
iii) have pointed out, the social reality of the modern city cannot be reduced
to a series of observations on the spacial and physical level. Environmental
determinism down plays the range of institutional, political, cultural and
ideological factors involved and the complex interactions of intentional
actors involved in city planning.
• One legacy of the early Chicago school’s work is the techniques of information
gathering it employed. A whole methodological heritage developed. But in
lesser hands the linkages often took on moralistic overtones. While it seems
to reduce the city to a mechanical inventory for study, the other the lack of
comprehensive theory may allow the data to be used to blame particular
groups.
• Scholars in Britain tried to apply the Chicago model to British cities. The first
major work, by Terence Morris (1957) soon found the counterfactual effect of
council estates which were the site of high offending rates but located in the
outer rings. Morris indicated the crucial difference was the market freedom of
American cities and the effects of local authority housing policies in the different
areas of British cities. London grew as the coming together of various sites and
was heavily affected by transport decisions made by politically influenced
authorities. Perhaps the failure of the Chicago School model to universalise
destroys the idea that social processes are able easily to be viewed through
methodologies of the hard sciences! The science of the city saw the operation
of the city as part of a natural system obeying natural laws of evolution;
conversely, we cannot escape the reality that politics, big business, local
authorities, the dynamics of particular local 245 factors, all must be considered.
245
Moreover, these interact in ways which often cannot be predicted: for example,
corporate decisions to locate and invest may depend upon rumours of the
problems of the locality.
The Chicago School used a concept of social disorganisation to

explain the ecology of crime
Natural areas were classified by the dominant behaviour of their inhabitants. Local
communities were a coming together of diverse individuals (Chicago was
experiencing mass immigration), but a process of selection took place amongst
these individuals and the environment which produced a ‘biotic balance’ of
communities. Successive waves of immigration caused different types of housing,
living and working zones to appear with specific cultural and physical
characteristics. Diversity was selected out of the communities with each natural
area being symbiotic for particular types of behaviour.
In Delinquency Areas (1929), Shaw and McKay demonstrated consistent
differences in criminal activity between zones over an extended time, putting the
highest rates in the zone of transition. Deviance was a natural response to locational
and social factors in these zones.
‘Delinquency and criminal patterns arise and are transmitted socially just as any other
cultural and social pattern is transmitted. In time these delinquent patterns may become
dominant and shape the attitudes and behaviour of persons living in the area. Thus the
section becomes an area of delinquency.’ (Shaw et al, 1929:206)
The concept of ‘disorganisation’ provided the connection between types of
area and social behaviour. Thus, poor housing, squalid over-crowding, and
lack of community provisions in transitional areas were not seen directly as
the causal influences of delinquency, but operated through the breakdown of
inter-area social control. This notion of disorganisation has had a lasting impact
in presenting the constitution of the local urban environment as a criminological
factor.
What is a socially disorganised area? Shaw and McKay defined disorganisation
by means of certain features and processes. Quantifiable features were rates of
truancy, tuberculosis, infant mortality, mental disorder, economic dependency, adult
crime and juvenile delinquency. There dominant features and processes were
identified: the economic status of the community, the mobility of the community,
and its heterogeneity. By implication poverty, high mobility, and heterogeneity
lead to weak social control and high delinquency.
Social disorganisation can be criticised for being a class-relative reference point;
what is to define the socially organised?. The circularity or tautology of the argument
is apparent since deviance is defined in terms of disorganisation and disorganisation
is indexed by deviance. Kornhauser (1978:118-120) locates the problem in the
failure of social ecology theorists to be explicit about the causal structure of their
246
theories. She claims they would be on safer ground if they really meant that poverty,
heterogeneity and mobility cause social disorganisation, and that crime and
delinquency are correlated consequences.
But is social disorganisation quantifiable?
An alternative, more hermeneutical (ie interpretative) approach relies heavily
upon descriptive and oral recollections. These studies seek to explain the operation
of – ‘slum’ and ‘ghetto’ communities in terms of sets of meanings which are
internal to them. They seek to suspend the class-reference label of disorganised
in favour of drawing out what the forms of organisation internal to these
communities are. As we have seen, in early 19th century England Engels
correlated various reports in The Condition of the working class in England to
interpret crime as a rational reaction to relative deprivation. He developed accounts
of the deprived working classes, the ‘surplus population’ of casual workers, street
sweepers, beggars, prostitutes and peddlers, arguing that they were provoked by
their acute distress to wage an inarticulate form of warfare against the bourgeoisie.
While deviance was not, however, organised or effective class activity, it showed
the potentiality for developing such activity. Engels’ observations are not merely
empirical descriptions but are an exercise in normative interpretation; it is obvious
that aspects of 19th century city life offended his notions of social justice. His
recognition of the spatial dimensions of crime, and his relating this to the process
of economic development, also point to the role of economic determinants in
shaping the process of urbanism.
Henry Mayhew’s ‘street biographies’ (1882) contain a wealth of description as
to the occurrence of everyday deviance and crime – a normal occurrence in the
midst of London’s impoverished and decrepit living environments. He also relates
his fears of the transmission of deviant values between deprived children and the
adults who virtually school them in crime. Although the state of the economy, and
the lived in environment, appear as causal factors, Mayhew also concentrates upon
inadequate parental socialisation and control.
Charles Booth’s massive enquiry, which began in 1886, was based on the
notion that ‘the statistical method was needed to give bearings to the results of
personal observations and personal observation to give life to statistics’. His
treatise on Life and Labour of the People in London (1902-3), which runs to 17
volumes, places crime in a social, environmental and locational context making
deviance part of the life and work of both perpetrators and victims. Deviance is
seen as socially created rather than simply a pathological condition of individuals
alone.
Certain recent writers, such as Phillipson (1971) and Taylor et al, The New
Criminology (1973), have claimed that socially disorganised areas are actually
quite organised; in fact sociology, as a discipline, appears orientated to find an
underlying order in what appears diverse and disorientating. The ecological model
was criticised as giving a simplistic view of the slum or inner city as a breeding
ground for social problems; for depicting certain areas as places of unpredictability,
fear, tension and instability of social relations. The city, it is argued, is more than a
247
particular formation of physical environment which is pathological, decaying,

poorly serviced, squalid and insanitary. The Chicago School had added to the
apparent convergence of official rates of crime, illegitimacy, family instability,
mental illness and so forth claiming causal links. Their associations fitted in perfectly
with the assumptions of architectural determinism (thus slum clearance projects),
which in simple terms held that clearance of physical slums lead to the destruction
of social disorganisation. That policy can now be seen as a failure and the culture
of poverty theorists, such as Oscar Lewis (1959), who depicted a cultural orientation
of those living in poverty as characterised by an absence of social organisation
beyond the family, a tendency to authoritarianism, helplessness, dependency and
inferiority, can be seen as expressions of the over simplifications of such analyses.
Participant observation, conversely, has depicted the high degree of organisation
within the slum (eg Thrasher, 1929, and The Gang, 1937; Suttles, G The Social
Order of the Slum, 1968). Studies show that there are sets of social control effective
there (Whyte, Street Corner Society, 2 ed, 1955; Glazer and Moynihan, 1963).
There is little evidence that formal agencies of social control (namely, the police,
schools, welfare,) are any more effective on their own in middle class areas in
directing behaviour and structuring social organisation, but that in such areas these
agencies flow out of middle class cultural forms themselves and complement them.
However, the feelings of social or individual satisfaction, or frustration, are
problematically present in any area, and it is unfounded to deny their existence in
the ‘slum’.
This section has stressed the positivist and naturalist tendency of the
Chicago School, however, we should not neglect another feature, the attempt
to understand the lived reality of urban life. The young Edwin Sutherland,
teaching at the neighbouring University of Illinois at Chicago, and preparing
the first edition of his Criminology text book in 1924, says this of inner city
poverty:
‘Poverty in the modern city generally means segregation in low-rent sections, where
people are isolated from many of the cultural influences and forced into contact
with many of the degrading influences. Poverty generally means a low status, with
little to lose, little to respect, little to be proud of, little to sustain efforts to improve.
It generally means bad housing conditions, lack of sanitation in the vicinity, and
lack of attractive community institutions. It generally means both parents being
away from home for long hours, with the fatigue, lack of control of children, and
irritation that go with these. It generally means withdrawal of the child from school
at an early age and the beginning of mechanical labour, with weakening of the
home control, the development of anti-social grudges, and lack of cultural contacts.
Poverty, together with the display of wealth in shop-windows, streets, and picture
shows, generally means envy and hatred of the rich and the feeling of missing much
in life, because of the lack of satisfaction of the fundamental wishes. Poverty seldom
forces people to steal or become prostitutes in order to escape starvation. It produces
its effects most frequently on the attitudes, rather than on the organism. But it is
surprising how many poor people are not made delinquents, rather than how many
are made delinquents.’ (1924:169-170).
248
We should note the final two sentences: one criticism of the attempt to link poverty
or unemployment with crime has always been that the majority of the unemployed,
or working class, are not convicted for crime. If poverty causes crime, it is argued,
then we would expect all poor people to commit crime - this is nonsense, but often
said. As Sutherland is indicating, the link between crime and poverty (or
unemployment) is not simple, and the causes of crime are not unitary. Perceptions...
attitudes... bitterness... the reality of social bonds... the ability to achieve desires...
there are multiple effects of poverty that interact and produce a range of possible
combinations, so that prediction on the individual level is a different project to
grasping general tendencies. Sutherland argued that ‘the proper method of
explaining a process is by describing what is going on in that process rather than
by trying to relate something in the process to something outside the process’
(1926:62).
In subsequent years the Chicago School took a pluralist approach to the
ecological composition of the city and adopted a sympathetic observation of daily
life. The aim was to obtain policy orientated findings relevant to the perceived
needs of the local populations which would direct relevant social welfare planning.
The work of Howard Becker, such as Outsiders (1963), is a case in point. David
Matza (1969) was to call this a Neo-Chicagoan approach and labelled it
‘appreciation’ rather than ‘correctional’. However, even then their approach
remained largely within the uncontested context of a free market economy and a
capitalist-liberal political democracy. The world of everyday deviancy was
experienced and communicated; it was set into the wider geographical structure of
the city, but the structural flows which were deemed relevant were so tied to
ecological modelling, or the lived in context of everyday reality, that questions of
economic structure, or of a differential distribution of power in the national political
economic context, were never allowed to be raised as factors which constrained or
created daily city life. By contrast the study of everyday life should provide a
meeting point for various disciplines and aim for a combination of micro-, and
macro-, sociological forces. A city is a site of culture and existential concerns,
such as a consideration of the rational and the supposed irrational, of the strong
and the vulnerable, which permits the formalisation of concrete problems of
construction – ie how the social existence of modern human beings is produced,
its toing and froing from want to affluence, from appreciation to depreciation,
from celebration to crime.
Understanding urbanity: III, beyond the naturalist paradigm
Anthony Giddens (1989) argues that studying the modern city cannot be divorced
from considering the general social characteristics of societies, and the social
transformations brought about by the formation and development of capitalism.
Whereas in pre-capitalist society, the city was the centre of state power it only
hosted a limited range of productive and commercial operations; the vast majority
249
of the population were engaged in agrarian occupations. It was capitalism which

moved the population into the city, moreover, it did this, in the main, by developing
entirely new cities. Manchester, the site Engels observed, for instance, moved from
10,000 inhabitants in 1717, to 300,000 in 1851 when it was a manufacturing centre,
and more than 2,400,000 by the end of the 19th century.
With the driving force behind the growth of urbanity being capitalist
development, the traits of contemporary urbanism displayed the effects of
‘commodification’, the process where all entities in the social world come to be
perceived as goods, capable of being bought and sold in order to generate profit.
We can make sense of modern urbanism and the structuring of daily life within it
by seeing how space itself becomes commodified in capitalist societies. Modern
urbanity is marked by increasing alienability of land and housing (alienable means
that property can be transferred by some mode of payment). For example, the
policy of the 1925 English Property Law Legislation is precisely to simplify
conveyancing, the state guarantees registered title to increase the alienability of
land. This commodification is the mediation which ties together the physical milieu
and the productive system of capitalism. Giddens highlights three features:
• Capitalist urbanism becomes a created environment which dissolves previous
divisions between the city and countryside, replacing it with a distinction
between the ‘built environment’ and the environment of ‘open space’.
• In pre-capitalist societies human beings lived close to nature and many cultures
conceived of themselves as participating in the natural world. Capitalist societies
radically separate human life and nature, in the first instance in the capitalist
workplace, in which the technological factor sever human beings from the
influence of the soil, weather, or cycle of the seasons. The situating of the
workplace in an urban milieu of commodified space, moreover, strongly
reinforces this. The settings of our lives are almost wholly of human
manufacture.
• Therefore the very concept of urban sociology is problematic; the urban
environment is constituted as a built environment through a process in which
capitalist production, class conflict, and the state are intertwined. Perhaps what
is needed is a specie of intermediatory concepts, such as theories of housing
classes, which complement the ecological heritage with accounts of how city-
dwellers strive to influence decision making about the milieu in which they
live. The immediate context in which people live is housing markets, connected
to industrial and financial capital, on the one hand, and labour markets on the
other. Locating the distribution of urban neighbourhoods in the active struggles
of groups in housing markets emphasises factors of generalised importance in
the capitalist societies. Considering factors such as access to decision making
as to allocation of local authority housing, budgets, zoning priorities, political
conflict between local authorities and central government, leads us away from
any notion that the differentiation of city areas and housing types are a ‘natural
process’.
250
Can cities be controlled so that community can be created as a

livable urban space?
Many features of cities are the result of attempts to control the processes within
them and to create livable space. For example, Macintosh (1975:22-23) argues
that one reason the Concentric-zone effect the Chicago School discovered did
not hold for London, was the government sponsored roads through ‘rookeries’,
or urban areas characterised by high rates of offending, in order to disperse
offenders throughout the city. In the field of architecture and urban design the
modern dream was that planning and development could focus on large-scale,
city-wide, technologically rational and efficient urban zones, backed by
absolutely no frills architecture. Space is something to be shaped for social
purpose.
The physical composition of the city is also a message, a discourse. What is
being said to the recipient? What messages impact on the individual as he or she
travels around the city? Consider the symbolic poverty of certain areas and the
visible richness of others. Thus zones are not indicators of disorganisation and
organisation, but are significations of poverty and power, versus wealth and
powerlessness, or differential consumption power. The latest model BMW or Jaguar,
versus the rusting 10 year old Toyota.
Currently it is fashionable in the US and Britain to decry all that was done to
cities in the postwar reconstruction period of high modernism. Jane Jacobs (1961)
voiced a withering attack upon the modernist pretensions to rebuild cities in The
death and life of great American cities:
‘Low income projects that become worse centres of delinquency, vandalism and
general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle
income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation,
sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that
mitigate their inanity, or try to, with vapid vulgarity. Cultural centres that are unable
to support a good book-store. Civic centres that are avoided by everyone but bums,
who have fewer choices of loitering places than others. Commercial centres that are
lacklustre imitations of standardised suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades
that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that
eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of
cities.’ (Quoted in Harvey, 1989:71-2)
In England, Alice Coleman furthered this theme (see Utopia on Trial, 1985) and
applied the ecological approach to the problems of public sector housing (1988).
Coleman’s thesis was of strong environmental determinism. She appears to mistake
a correlation between bad design and anti-social behaviour with causation. Coleman
saw crime as a factor of anonymity, lack of surveillance and easy access and exit in
housing estates. Design changes could, therefore, radically reduce crime.
Specifically, there should be a halt to the building of public sector flats and stabilising
features should be incorporated into designs. Oscar Newman’s ideas of defensible
space should be considered and, for example, overhead walkways abolished; every
251
dwelling or block of flats should have its own enclosed garden area instead of
being surrounded by anonymous open space; a large scale programme to modify
existing estates should be undertaken.1
But we should not give prominence to physical space as if it were an independent
determinant factor. The implementation of Coleman’s ideas on several estates brought
varying results. In London, when walkways were removed from the Lisson Grove
estate, crime dropped by 50%; in the Lea View estate, after a range of design
modifications crime dropped dramatically; while on the Wigan House estate, there
was little change. Is the reduction of crime attributable solely to the change of physical
design, or are there a range of more subtle factors at work, including a change in the
mood and perceptions of residents on the estate? What is the effect of a changed
perception by residents that someone is doing something about the problems of the
estate? Can this lead to the residents exerting more restraining pressures?
This tendency to blame physical form for social ills is a kind of simplistic
environmental determinism that cannot be accepted in isolation. We should not
neglect the wider impact of what the much maligned planners of the large scale
estates were attempting to do in the post Second World War era. To a large extent
they had tried to create, not recreate, modern communities, and while some housing
projects were dismal failures, others were not, particularly when compared with
the slum conditions from which many of the people had come.
Locality as a site of social interaction
Modernist planning had sought to perfect the good model, it could not fight the
strength of the capitalist market processes. Cities are sites for social interaction on a
large and small scale and the essence of life is process. The question is how can these
processes be humanised, and the conditions for a meaningful social existence be
made possible? For a time, those who wrote from a socialist perspective argued only
a wholesale replacement of the values underlying the social structure would suffice.
As Quinney and Widlerman put it in their 1977 book The Problem of Crime:
‘Urban America as we know it has become outmoded and like the dinosaur, is
threatened with extinction unless we radically restructure our urban institutions along
truly humanitarian and socialistic lines, free from alienation, competition, hierarchy
and exploitation. Such restructuring, for example, would accord priority to decentralised
power structures of community control over massive dehumanised and centralised
power structures (1979:149-50).’
1 Oscar Newman (1972) created a theory of ‘defensible space’. This sought to identify the features
of low-crime neighbourhoods and buildings that make them ‘defensible’. These include a strong
sense of territoriality; natural surveillance of public spaces; a good image and attachment by
residents to the locality. Territoriality implied that as people felt attached to a locality they were
inclined to defend it against intruders; natural surveillance referred to the ease by which residents
could keep watch over places where crime might occur, thus potential offenders are likely to go
elsewhere. Neighbourhoods which appeared run-down or vandalised were more likely to become
even more so.
252
The recent post-modernist movement in social geography argues that instead of

waging war upon social disorganisation, we should learn from healthy city
environments with their subtle systems of organised complexity. The post-
modernists argue the energy and vitality of successful social interaction depends
upon diversity, intricacy, and the capacity to handle the unexpected in controlled
but creative ways. The cry goes up to turn against the limited period of modernism
and seek differentiation. The idea is consciously to only plan and think on the
small scale – to attempt to construct a whole series of little communities. There are
some (for example, Krier 1987) who think we should be seeking to create a city
form made up of complete and finite communities, each constituting an independent
urban quarter within a larger family of urban centres. Thus, it is hoped, the symbolic
richness and purity of ethnic diversity and participation will create a tolerant and
vibrant whole. The danger is this in turn would create a new set of problems;
specifically a return to pre-modern forms of ethnic solidarity.
Present cities are socially created places. If the concept of community has any
force as a goal, then community has to be actively and consciously created anew in
defence of a sphere vulnerable to colonisation by the operating dictates of the
market. We may not, in the end, want community. We are trapped in the range of
processes which modernity has unleashed, we cannot stabilise them without
recognising their scale; nor does the idea of insulating ourselves into some small
pockets of resistance (as some, such as Alisdair MacIntyre (1981), appear to desire)
hold much for humanity. Once the idea of process is to the forefront then we are
led to consider the catalysts of these processes. In post-Second World War city
planning, urban planners and designers in the period of high modernism made a
mistake in waging war on diversity, fearing chaos and complexity because this
was identified as disorganised, ugly, and irrational – thus their approach engaged
in a reductionist association of processes which were complex with social
disorganisation. But the late-modern city has defied this modernist approach – it
has responded to processes of capitalism on the global scale, together with the
increasing complexity and power of technology, communication, transportation,
and the desire for individuality. The result may be a city environment appearing as
if it is about to disintegrate, as if the city will soon to be transformed into the
terrain of Blade Runner or Escape From New York, or other cinema representations
of the urban future. To survive we must humanise the processes, although the
chances of defeating them by negation alone appear slim. Perhaps it is not the
inclusivity of community we can strive for, but a modernised structure of civil
society.
End-Game: the city as a site of communication and the arrival of the

post-modern city
Post-modernism indicates a loss of control of the nation state over its affairs. Post-
modernist discourse speaks of a world in which social and economic forces cannot
253
be contained within the area of the nation state. Global forces are transforming the
economic bases of the city areas. In industrial terms, the West experiences a change
from a heavy manufacturing industrial base (displaying the Fordist arrangement
of the large scale factory with a set assembly line, employing a large number of
semi-skilled males, and using raw materials themselves produced in very labour
intensive ways, and transported onwards to markets by rail and sea) to a situation
where a considerable amount of production is relocated in Newly Industrialising
Countries (NICs). The world has moved into a new logic and geography of
production, employment and distribution, which has changed both land-use and
the opportunities for social occupation. This has effects on the ordering of the
urban hierarchy and has profoundly affected the economic links between
geographical locations. Several trends have appeared across the developed capitalist
countries: a decline in manufacturing and an increase in service employment; a
decline in the status of the industrialist and engineer, with a rapid growth of the
producer services sector at the top of the urban status hierarchy; a concentration of
economic power in multinational forms and financial institutions; the
transnationalisation of information and capital flows; the decentralisation of
manufacturing and routine office functions; the demand for a greater flexibility
for production technologies and a decline in the role and status of non and semi-
skilled labour; the social fragmentation of industry; the need for new forms of
cooperation and coordination between economic sectors; and the linking together
of spatially distant sites of production and distribution. The financing needs and
techniques available for modern corporations, as well as take-over strategies, have
become larger and more complex. In short, the whole organisation of social practices
across time and space has been radically disorientated from its modernist structures
of production, exchange and consumption.
Cities have changed and their layout and functions depend upon their respective
niches within the economic and political hierarchy of their nation, and the place
of the nation in the world economy. Western cities are capitalist, but are not
simply different models on the one capitalist city theme. Some cities, have become
premier global cities, while others have suffered the decline into ‘rust-belt’ status.
All cities have been affected by the internationalisation of capital and the rise of
new technologies that have caused the outflow of manufacturing from old urban
centres to peripheral areas at home and abroad. Some, for example, London,
Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, have gained from the increasing importance of
financial and coordinating functions, as well as tourism and cultural production.
Above all the fate of cities takes place within a new set of spatial and social
circumstances for which we use the terms post-industrialisation, transnationalism,
or post-modernism.
Politically, economic activity has to respond to (and has mostly encouraged) a
change in the overall technology of production away from hierarchical to market
forms of control. Instead of settled concentrations of populations forming
hierarchically organised structures (communities) around sites of industry and
manufacturing, Scott argues:
254
‘... the net effect will be an intricate labyrinth of externalised transactions linking
different producers, many of whom will coalesce in geographical space to form clusters
and subclusters of agglomerated economic activity.’ (1988:54)
Perhaps the new urban region will be looser, connected by modern communication
and transportation technologies. The process, however, cannot be reduced to some
simple economic determination – various subprocesses of local political and
organisation forms operate with particular localised effects.
Large cities create various ‘technoburbs’, or peripheral zones, with
concentrations of knowledge and skill intensive functions, while the central areas
retain the concentration of finance, advanced services, entertainment, and site of
immigrant location. The daily life-world of the citizen reflects the development of
communication and transport: the experiences of those of the outer suburbs may
be more of communication with other regions than with the core of their city. This
new city life promises greater freedom: people live lives that are not limited to
their locality or region, they move rapidly across major areas of their country and
freely travel to other countries (at least they do if they have the resources, otherwise
they watch others do it). The post-modern city is a communication and transportation
network, a site where images from all parts of the world are available, where freedom
tempts and desire is encouraged.
The onset of new divisions, social polarisation and the development

of an underclass
As we shall discuss in Chapter Seventeen, controversy surrounds the changing

social structure of major urban areas. Against the development of what is now
termed post-industrialisation, or post-modernism, for most of the 1960s and 1970s
politicians argued that a return to affluence would soak up the unemployed, and
recreate the forms of social interaction and relative economic stability and
homogeneity that appeared to characterise the immediate post-Second World War
period. Instead more complicated social structures emerged, with a lower class
unable to find work within the prevailing occupational hierarchy and drifting into
the status of an underclass; a working class employed, perhaps, as clerical personnel
in large offices, or as low-level service workers in hospitals, hotels, and retail
establishments; a technically trained middle class acting as the support structure
for the major firms and government; a disparate group of aspirants seeking fame in
the entertainment industry; an astonishingly affluent upper class occupying the
top echelons of the big law partnerships, real estate development firms, investment
banks, security brokerages and media companies; and in some cities, such as New
York, a largely immigrant stratum working in the old manufacturing sector, and
frequently also forming its managerial ranks (for example, Asian families
revitalising the English textile business). These groups inhabited a city where former
manufacturing buildings and dockland sites housed the affluent; recent immigrants
imparted life to decayed neighbourhoods; previously sound housing deteriorated
255
as a consequence of low-income occupancy, and inadequate or non-existent

government subsidies; while monies for Local Authority housing was restricted,
and investment in such accommodation often became a question of The Colour of
Money (Mullings, 1991), and parks and abandoned buildings became the
dormitories of squatters. Increasing land values in the urban core encouraged the
dispersal of mobile middle-class residents and back office functions, even as
professional and managerial personnel gentrified centrally located housing. Private
market forces wrought this physical and social restructuring of major cities, but
the state encouraged the process by relaxing planning controls and underwriting
development costs. In Britain the ‘right to buy’ legislation, whereby residents
inhabiting local authority accommodation were given the right to buy previously
rented property at substantial discounts on market prices, had one effect in
‘residualisation’, or increasing demarcation of housing estates into upwardly mobile
and problem estates. The interaction between macro- and microsociological factors
occasionally brought results which were locally unpredictable. Violent urban
disturbances, for example, may have served to force investment in particular areas.
As one localised study in London argued:
‘An assessment of the scheduling of major housing investment programmes in the
boroughs studied, suggests a relationship between the approximate dates of approval
and the incident of urban unrest. When poorly represented people actually took charge
of a situation through riot or threat of riot there appears to have been a greater drive
towards investment in the most volatile areas. Since the 1980 urban riots there appears
to have been a mushrooming of major projects on run down estates, disproportionately
populated by black households.’ (Mullings, 1991:49)
Meanwhile the state reinforced ‘private’ business concerns by guaranteeing that
banking failures would not result in either a crisis of confidence or the sort of
economic disaster which occurred in 1929.
The decline of certain cities had disproportionate effects by ethnicity. The
population of Detroit in 1950 was nearly 2 million, of which 15% (about 300,000)
were black; this had fallen to a little over 1 million in 1990, with a black proportion
of over 70% (over 700,000). Thus the white population had declined from 1,700,000
to less than 300,000 in only 40 years. First the white middle classes, and then
black professionals, moved in massive numbers from the city to its independently
governed suburbs. As its population has fallen, Detroit’s murder rate has increased
tenfold, from six murders a year per 100,000 people, to about 60 per 100,000
people in 1990 (The Economist, 1990).
With intensification of capital flows and concentration of finance in central
areas, for cities such as London, New York or Los Angles, areas of the old city
were reconquered by a new gentrification. Government allowed big business and
real estate speculators to have their head, with the argument that the effects of a
new wealth would ‘trickle down’ to the poorest sections. The 1980s were talked of
in terms of an urban renaissance, but many community groups pointed to the
persistence of the older characteristics, including high levels of unemployment
and poverty, deteriorating housing, declining public and private services. From
256
this perspective, the trickle down effect appeared nonsense, or one sided; all the
costs and few of the benefits.
Dualities or pluralities of life worlds may exist in the same city. London, Los
Angles, or New York may contain two or more separate economies, occupying
increasingly segregated neighbours and social systems. While we may see a zoning
of areas in terms of wealth, Los Angles, London or New York may witness a
juxtaposition of homogeneously low and high-income areas, the homeless sleeping
rough on the streets of the richest areas, the broadening of educational and
employment opportunities for some, and the narrowing for others. The new high-
skilled labour force occupy a different social geography of the city, to the misery
of those on the margins of the market and outside it. While their lives may be in
close spatial proximity, they are distant in social and economic expectations, and
perceptions of legitimacy.
An environment of communication
Our scenes and ideas are no longer a factor totally of spatial locality. The city
is a site of communication dominated by the technologies of imagery and
signification (television, advertising hoardings, radios, cars), but situated within
themes of the aesthetics of decline and renewal. Everyday life is a routine
existing in commodified spaces (the experience of which is clearly influenced
by which mode of transport is your usual one: the bus, the tube, the train [and
which class], or the car [and which type of car]?). This is the terrain of divisions
and tensions: not just public and private, but surveyed and targeted; the
predominance of ‘urban style’ with all its various manifestations; the gleaming
towers of the new, status-conscious, post-modern architecture, the development
of ‘graffiti art’.
The city is a site of the communication of popular culture... music, noise, beat,
the symbolism of fashion... How do individuals construct their self-identities in
these surroundings? What is going on? Is the culture of the modern city a radical
democratisation of life forms... or a bureaucratic society of little noticed, but very
real, enforced consumption?
Perhaps the reality contains both aspects. Daniel Bell (1979:20) talks of the
impact of the professional cultural mass (DJ’s, advertising, publishers, TV
personalities etc), who turn the creative energies of designers and artists into
commodities for mass consumption, and who are moved by the constant need
for consumption to keep capitalism developing. For Bell, we have lost a sense
of hierarchy in cultural authority, which has been replaced by an ‘anything
goes’ levelling (pop-art, pop culture, ephemeral fashion, mass taste – the circular
effect of the pop-ratings), where the quality of a product is judged by the number
of sales. Thus, culture becomes a qualitatively mindless (replaced by emotivism
or whatever sounds or feels good at the time), hedonist consumerism. A top
record stays at Number One on the charts for a matter of a few weeks, but then
257
the DJ asks ‘Haven’t you all become sick of this – I know I have,’ and so it
plummets.
Chambers (1986, 1987) argues working-class youth in the post-Second World
War era have increasingly come to participate in the capitalist consumer culture,
where they actively use fashion to construct a sense of their own public identities.
A dialectic is in place. On the one side, the impact of a mass fashion and advertising
industry, on the other, the desire for individuality and authenticity. Out of this
comes increasing flexibility and short-termism. Above all, throughout all, moves
the growing importance of image:
‘Post modernism, whatever form its intellectualising might take, has been
fundamentally anticipated in the metropolitan cultures of the last twenty years:
among the electronic signifiers of cinema, television and video, in recording studios
and record players, in fashion and youth styles, in all those sounds, images and
diverse histories that are daily mixed, recycled and ‘scratched’ together on that
giant screen which is the contemporary city.’ (Chambers, quoted in Harvey,
1990:61)
Reality becomes a mobile set of signifiers. Is Madonna really Marilyn Monroe?
What does it signify to be ‘dressed like a virgin’? Who gains out of ‘cherishing
you’?
Harvey suggests, that in the era of mass television:
‘... there has emerged an attachment to surfaces rather than roots, to collage rather
than in-depth work, to super-imposed images rather than worked surfaces, to a
collapsed sense of time and space rather than solidly achieved cultural artefact.’
(1990:61)
What is going on? Who, or what, determines the superimposing of different worlds
in the advertisements we are surrounded by? And what is their effect(s) upon desire?
Upon motivation to crime? Who determines the winners and losers?
The late-modern, or post-modern, city as a mobile site
The depthlessness of the late-modern architecture of the city becomes a cultural

manifestation: appearances, surfaces, instant impacts with an ambivalent concern
for sustaining identity and power over time (Jameson, 1984; Jencks, 1984).
Does a new sense of dimension or (non)control result from the flows of spectacles
and images of the late modern city? Consider the growing preoccupation with
instantaneity – ‘we dream the same dream, we want the same thing... oh, oh, heaven
is a place on earth’ (Belinda Carlisle, 1989). Was it two songs or one? And in Real
(Album of 1993) in ‘Situation Flammable’... if life is a big scary animal... who or
what are the big scary animals? Consider also the impact of technological advances
for transport links and communication, including the international flow of television.
What are we to make of Harvey’s suggestion that in the age of mass television
there has emerged an attachment to surfaces rather than roots, to collage rather
258
than indepth work, to superimposed images rather than solidly achieved cultural
artefact? Why should individuals who feel the pressure of urban society, for the
everyday world does not pressurise everyone to the same extent, feel bonding to
the historically created bonds of civil society? In a world of the mass, of the
technologically produced, why should those almost invisible renderings of human
endeavour warrant protection?
We are referring to the visualisation of buildings – new technologies for
construction mean that urban forms can be more dispersed, decentralised and
deconcentrated than ever before. While modernist forms highlight utilitarian
functionality, certainly the representational appearance of community can come
back in with post-modernist architecture. In the best light, we can see a challenge
for the urban designer to communicate with different client groups in personalised
ways considering different situations, functions and taste cultures. So called post-
modern architects are working with signs of status, history, commerce, comfort,
and ethnic domain. They are attempting to create images of neighbourliness catering
to the taste of the locality. The danger is that these features are expressed through
the process of the market and popularism. Rowe and Koetter, in a recent work
entitled The Collage City, see the icon of the abstract entity ‘the people’ coming
into play at the expense of real human concerns.
‘The architectural proponents of populism are all for democracy and all for freedom:
but they are characteristically unwilling to speculate as to the necessary conflicts of
democracy with law, of the necessary collisions of freedom with justice.’ (Quoted in
Harvey, 1990:76)
The image of the people as the source of legitimacy presumes assimilation and
hides the fact of real diversity – the problems of minorities and the underprivileged,
or the diverse counter-cultures, get forgotten. The hope for community based
planning that will cater for the needs of both rich and poor alike tends to presuppose
the existence of close-knit, cohesive urban communities as the basic point of
reference in an urban world that is in flux and transition.
Different urban cultures and community groups express their desires through
differentiated access to political power and market status. For many critics, the
development of the city is likely to become even more market driven in post-
modernity, since the market is increasingly held out as the only possible universal
language of communication. Although in the short run we may get interesting
examples of cross-gentrification, a mixture of configurations, market and land-
rent potentials will shape urban landscapes into new patterns of conformity. One
tendency will be the further division of the city, and the marcation of locality into
areas corresponding to the secure and the dangerous, respectively inhabited by the
well adjusted citizen and the criminal. While the transport and communication
melange will ensure that even these are not hermetically sealed. Again the individual
is pushed into the dialectics of control and angst, of the feeling that he ought to
know what is going on, and the impossibility of grasping meaning. Almost by
necessity, late-modern city life imposes a tension boardering on the radically
259
schizophrenic. The surroundings are all artifacts; they are all creations of modernity
and cannot claim any natural stability. They display the symbolism of power, but
their contingency is too obvious. If stability is sought in these forms, incongruity
results. Urban residents need distractions from the onset of this absurdity of
contingency.
In part, the production of needs and wants, the mobilisation of desire and
fantasy, depend upon the politics of distraction, as part of the tactics of the
market, to sustain consumer demand. Modern politics may require the
disorientation of potentially opposing groups to maintain the mirage of technical
superiority.
We talk of a shrinking world; communication and transport infuse local space
with the events of more distant space, so that it becomes confusing to draw steady
time-space lines to preserve a sense of control over the locality. In an unruly world
displaying disjointed moral, political and economic systems, with images of stock
market crises daily, the architecture of order is one theme which may stand amidst
change, decline, power, and transitoriness. But what is the message to the individual
of the contemporary city?
‘Destruction and demolition, expropriation and rapid changes in use as a result of
speculation and obsolescence, are the most recognisable signs of urban dynamics.
But beyond all else, the images suggest the interrupted destiny of the individual, of
his often sad and difficult participation in the destiny of the collective.’ (Rossi, 1982:22)
Again the concepts of familiarity and distance are in play; they provide a locus of
control. Not control of the individual, but the individuals’ existential perception of
security, the understanding that he or she is in an environment that is not threatening,
that the environment is itself under control. Thus it is not some mechanical social
disorganisation that should be taken out of the social ecology approach as the
relationship of locality to crime, but a human understanding that a locality that
does not provide the material and psychological resources for self and group growth,
providing instead messages which are disorienting and confusing, will stimulate
impulses to do something. On some occasions crime may stem from an absence of
control, but that this does not function as usually acknowledged; instead of crime
being undertaken when control has lessened, and so crime appears as the negation
of control, crime may well be an attempt to seize control of the moment. This
theory will be developed in our consideration of culture, the influence of Matza
and a reading of existentialism, but here we should also recognise that if crime is,
in part, an attempt to seize control in an environment which threatens one with
systematic powerlessness, it is a movement which is destructive and adds to the
criminogenic condition; it is an action which causes harm to the networks of the
locality. But this locality may not be apparent to the offender, to this actor, since it
may present itself as fiction, fragmentation, collage, and eclecticism which, if
infused with a sense of ephemerality and chaos, impacts upon the sensibilities of
orientation and disorientation creating a new mood of life and action. Freedom
and frustration: the divisions remain. Perhaps the offender would ‘wish the same
260
things, dream the same dreams’... but if one is alienated, distanced from one’s
locality, why should one wish to caress it?
Modernity: the desire to construct a home and the differing

experiences of post-modernity
Modernity wished to create a home for mankind on this planet. Is our urbanity the
place we can call home? If modernity was intended to be a construction project,
have we found a home? Or is crime a sign of homelessness. Consider two statements.
The first is by Parminder Chadda (1992), a female, Asian poet, born in Kenya,
about her relationship to Southhall, that strongly Asian suburb of London. It is an
image of home, a home that offered some security, so that the self could move on
but still be bound. The second by Strome Webber (1992), an African-American
poet, relating her image of New York and the lack of freedom to be herself (a
lesbian searching for the personal, and social liberation, modernity promised).
Southall
‘Oh dear Southall
didn’t we struggle to call you home
But you, alone gave birth to us
and weren’t we strong in you once
In your arms we ran and played,
and then,
God, how your streets aroused us
But we came away
We couldn’t control you
We couldn’t let you control us
And so we struggled, we discovered
We came to find ‘our place’
and you are now so culturally accessible
and we are of course, so safe
Oh dear Southall
Coming to you now still bolts the system
and why not? Maybe it should
We have no right to call you ours:
Maybe we should have stayed
Oh, and as the Broadway looms, and
the traffic jams start,
Some part of our naive hearts
still call out to seek refuge
but too much has passed between us
How is it that you rule us?
We fought to leave
We struggle to return
How indeed you fool us’
261
to be a woman in new york city

‘to be a woman in new york city
is to be a warrior
these days
i’m so sick of violence
i’m ready to kill somebody
like every two-footed dog
i heard say bitch this year
& laugh/yes every mother’s son
why waste the oxygen?
consider the greenhouse effect
& all this so called expression
of popular culture
that uses me for an asswipe
or a jack off rag
may the poison you disperse
so freely/choke you slowly
while mr. t fucks you up every orifice
(wit no grease)
& i’ll play those records LOUD in yr ear
yeah motherfucker i house you
you in MY HUT NOW
little mister man
you who are not my daddy
my brother my son or lover
MIND YR BIZNISS
my hair my ass my tiddies
my girlfriend are MINE
you know you cd be LIVING
instead of barking & scratching
on street corners
whyn’t you STAND UP
let go of yr dick
& be a human being’
We search for home, late-modern (or post-modern) urbanity provides it, and
dislocates it. For some time criminology shared in the dream of total reconstitution;
the image of the total renewal of the society. Realism has now set in.
New left realism
In the UK, new left realism refers to a movement loosely grouped around Middlesex
University under the guidance of John Lea and Jock Young. Its founding text is:
What Is To Be Done About Law And Order (1984). Left realism originated as a
political platform – an injunction to the political left to take crime seriously –
rather than an academic theory. It is concerned both with the crimes of the powerful
(organised crimes, the crimes of powerful corporations, and of the state), and with
262
the problems of street crime, such as mugging, burglary and interpersonal violence.
Together, these activities have a real and destructive impact on the poor and working
class communities which are least able to cope with them.
Left realism is both an outgrowth of the ‘radical’ tendencies of the new
criminology of the 1970s, and a consequence of the decline of utopian energies.
The crime problem is no longer seen as partly created by media myths, moral
panics, or false consciousness; crime is acknowledged to be a real problem, and
fear of crime has both a rational core and real effects. Crime has anti-social impacts
and results in real victims. Crime, however, should cause us to think about the
moral bonds of the social order and the idea of disorganisation – crime appears to
be implicated in a rather special way. For example, the traditional emphasis upon
inter-personal crime, as identified with street or lower class crime has both social
causes and social effects. Moreover, while the particular psychological form, or
correctionalist perspective, early positivism took was misconceived, the search for
finding the causes of crime should not be discarded. As mainstream Criminology
has come largely to abandon these etiological questions in favour of a know-nothing
managerialism, left realism argues that radicals must return to the obvious contexts
in which crime emerges in modern capitalist society (poverty, racism, deprivation,
social disorganisation, unemployment, the loss of community) and demonstrate
causal links.
Rhetorically, left realism discards earlier idealist notions which elevated the
criminal into a ‘primitive rebel’ or cryptopolitical actor. Marxist concerns and
imagery of economic determinism are valuable, but while important for retaining
a grasp of the overall social, historical and economic context of crime and social
life, criminology cannot afford political marginalisation. It should strive for
relevancy by operating on the very same terrain that conservatives and technocrats
have appropriated as their own.
Left realism strives to gain touch with the everyday realism of crime. By use of
victim surveys and local knowledges, it moves closer to the commonsense public
knowledge of what constitutes the crime problem. Only here, it is claimed, in the
age beyond grand scale utopian visions, can any credible alternative to mainstream
criminology be constructed, and the possibilities for effective participation in policy-
making be realised.
A particular focus of attention is the problem of community integration and
policing within the locality of inner-city socially deprived areas. Working with
tools derived from Merton and American sub-cultural theory (see Chapter Twelve)
the experience of relative deprivation and the individuals’ perception of unjustified
inequality is highlighted. In modern inner-city life, working-class individuals
inhabit a locality of immediate surroundings of neglect and deterioration,
alongside advertising images of the glittering prizes of capitalist society. Relative
deprivation explodes the mythology of equality of opportunity and the easy
availability of wealth and affluent lifestyles, it enhances the sense of frustration
263
and failure experienced by marginalised groups. The impact of communication,

advertising and transport destroys any insularity of working class communities
and renders difficult local solidarity. Left realism also understands much crime
as innovative, as rational adaptations by individuals to the situations they find
themselves in.
The concept of relative deprivation describes feelings which are not specific
to inhabitants of absolute deprivation but can be experienced also by the successful
white male in business, who is constantly chasing a new consumption dream.
The feelings of relative deprivation demand action, not merely to achieve what
are perceived as the necessities of life, but also to attain status. In late-modernity
self-worth is often gauged by the power to display status goods, such as particular
types of clothing, sports shoes, watches, video recorders and other items which
are valued not so much for their functional utility, but for their symbolic messages.
Left realism argues that the impact of relative deprivation was made worse in the
1980s by an increasing culture of pure egoism. This culture of egoism appears in
the economic and political discourse, characterised by the Thatcherite claims for
privatisation strategies, and the actions of large multinational companies, as
exampled by the Bhopal incident in India. At the same time large numbers of
people were becoming economically marginalised through no fault of their own,
thus being cut off from legitimate channels of consumption, while the Company
Directors, whose decisions were responsible for their redundancies, enjoyed
record pay-outs. The 1980s were, therefore, a period of increasing relative
deprivation.
Victimisation and opportunity are other issues. For example, increased affluence
has increased the level of car ownership and the amount of time spent outside the
home. This leaves more homes unguarded, while also increasing the pool of people
vulnerable to crimes of violence committed in public places. Certain cultural values
intensify the vulnerability of particular groups by providing offenders with labels
to produce twisted justifications. Social groups identified as outsiders are
particularly liable to victimisation. On the one hand, they are less likely to get
support from the community, for example, by neighbours in cases of racial
harassment on housing estates, while, on the other hand, a rapist attacking a lone
woman may feel that ‘she is asking for it’ by being alone in particular social
locations, such as bars and clubs.
Crime is located as the particular outcome of a complex set of social structures.
It is impossible, analytically, to divorce crime from the whole set of social processes
which locate and structurally limit working class localities:
‘Crime is the end-point continuum of disorder. It is not separate from other forms
of aggravation and breakdown. It is the run-down council estate where music
blares out of windows early in the morning; it is the graffiti on the walls; it is
aggression in the shops; it is bins that are never emptied; oil stains across the
streets; it is kids that show no respect; it is large trucks racing through your roads;
it is streets you do not dare walk down at night; it is always being careful; it is a
264
symbol of a world falling apart. It is lack of respect for humanity and for
fundamental human decency.
Crime is the tip of the ice-berg. It is a real problem in itself but it is also a symbol
of a far greater problem; and the weak suffer most.’ (1984:55)
‘Crime impacts upon the public perception, but we are apt to be confused by its
nature and limits. We fail to see its wider nature, its linkages, implications and
underlying depth. The event which is labelled a “crime” creates an immediate
impression upon our mind, and is the most blatant example of anti-social behaviour,
but it is only the tip of the iceberg of a whole series of more frequent, supposedly
everyday, events which are not deemed as criminal acts. Nor do they readily come to
mind as the source of the expressed criminality. Petty vandalism may be regarded as
just kids fooling about; larking and hooliganism as mere exuberance, but they are also
part of a structure of aggression – thus left realism argues against the commentators
who maintain that because most crime is minor, it is unimportant. Consider sexual
harassment; rape should not be clearly demarcated from the considerable level of
sexual harassment at work and in the streets. Such harassment is often deemed as a
minor inconvenience or the woman misinterpreting what are really complimentary
behaviour; but rape is the end-point of a continuum of aggressive sexual behaviour.
It’s comparative rarity does not indicate the absence of anti-social behaviour towards
women; on the contrary it is a real threat which also symbolises a massive undercurrent
of harassment.’ (1984:58)
Thus, we see a depressing dialectic: crime is not only an effect of structural
dislocation and powerlessness, but also reinforces and perpetuates such
powerlessness. Crime is an expression of alienation, frustration, and the way in
which unfairness is experienced in the world; but its commission propagates
itself by involving others and intensifying the powerlessness experienced in that
locality. While the harshness of crime is a survival mechanism in an unjust world,
the commission of crime continues and develops this experience of harshness
among the poor. It feeds upon itself by further brutalising an environment already
brutalised. ‘Paramount in this context is a feeling of political and social
impotence.’ (1984:61). For left realism the differential location of crime, with
high rates of crime experienced in particular localities, is an obvious and blatant
injustice affecting that locality. Moreover, it is in such localities that the police
themselves are apt to act criminally, which further intensifies the feelings of
political impotence and social stigmatisation. Bad policing creates crime by
destroying community interaction, destroying the flow of information to the police
and destroying the perception that real criminals will be apprehended.
Discriminatory legal treatment further marginalises vulnerable groups; black
youths, for example, economically marginalised to begin with, are forcibly
impressed with their political marginalisation and powerlessness by illegal
treatment by the police. Left realism attempts to combine perspectives from both
strain and control theory. While street crime is caused by the experience of
injustice in brutal circumstances, anti-social behaviour is also a function of the
degree of social control. Society is not held together by the thin blue line of
police, but by the feelings of the public and the everyday bonds of civil society.
The police can only operate effectively when civil society is reasonably coherent;
265
for example, the police require a steady flow of information from the public. It is
the public which inform the police of a crime, either as victims or witnesses and
provide the police with the information, to solve it. The public are both alarm
systems, providers of information and witnesses in court. If any one of these
functions breaks down, crime would go unsolved. Street crime however, has a
paradoxical image, which means it can be easily appropriated by the New Right.
The New Right sees in street crime only the interaction of a predator and victim.
The narrative and cultural forces tending towards individualisation in modernity,
encourage the search for causality to be located within the construction of the
offender/criminal. Conversely, for left realism, street crime is the most transparent
of all injustices. The act of crime is a breach of justice, in that it is an infringement
of the law, but the causality of crime is unjust, in that it offends the structure of
social justice. We see a form of divided victimisation: while the offender is a
victim of social injustice, his/her own victim becomes a victim twice over. To
left realism, street crime is the outward manifestation of the underlying levels of
deprivation and the structures of racism, chauvinism, and egoisms running through
the social order. By contrast, the concentration of right realism on controlling
the offender, omits the real and pressing problems which working class people
experience.
Investigating Los Angeles: Mike Davis and the post-modern City of

Quartz
For Mike Davis (1990) in his book City of Quartz:

‘The ultimate world historical significance – and oddity – of Los Angeles is that it has
come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. The
same place, as Brecht noted, symbolises both heaven and hell. Correspondingly, it is
an essential destination on the itinerary of any late-twentieth century intellectual,
who must eventually come to take a peep and render some opinion on whether ‘Los
Angeles Brings it All Together’ (the city’s official slogan) or is, rather, the Nightmare
at the terminus of American history.’.(Flysheet)
Los Angeles incorporates many of the features of post-modern concerns. From
its beginning Los Angeles was an imagined city - it was a site with few natural
reasons for existence, apart from the images of the future held by powerful
investors. Its development depended upon a huge artificial harbour, the piping in
of water from a long distance, and the mythology of real estate speculators that
here was a city in the making. But what was first imagined, became, admittedly
in changed forms, a reality. Contemporary Los Angeles portrays immense
technological power (it is the site where the space shuttle lands, and in the giant
shed of Air Force Plant Forty-two the stealth bombers and other secret weapons
of destruction are assembled); it is also the home of gangster rappers, like the
former group NWA (Niggers With Attitude) who featured sirens and gun shots
as background accompaniment to brutal and super-realistic x-rated tales of drug
266
dealing, gang-banging and police confrontations. The records/discourse of NWA

claimed to be merely telling the real story of what it is like living in the ghetto.
As the lead singer EZ-E stated ‘... we are giving reality. We are like reporters.
We give them the truth. People where we come from hear so many lies that the
truth stands out like a sore thumb’. But this reportage out of Compton was done
for a specific purpose: ‘We are in this to make money’. Thus the story of the
effects of commodification and consumerism, telling the reality of the streets
like it is, becomes another commodity. The work of the gangster rapper, telling
the exploitation and horrors of the down-side of late-modernity, becomes
translated into another consumer unit. The rapper becomes a celebrity, presented
by the smiling white record company executives, while the audience looks at
their customised assault rifles and listen to the rhythm of recent drug-busts, mega-
bangs and funerals of friends. In their own way NWA join with the mainstream
Hollywood of Rambo and Robocop in providing fantasy power trips of violence,
sexism and greed.
The physical structure of the city towers over an emerging poly-ethnic and
poly-lingual society. Perhaps the two most obvious symbols are the recently rebuilt
commercial down town, with its amazing celebrations of accumulation, and the
run down bungalows of the ghettoised areas. For Davis contemporary Los Angeles
witnesses the destruction of public space. Space becomes either ghettoised and
segregated into ethnically strong territories, or privatised. It becomes divided
between arenas of non-security and Fortress LA:
‘... the carefully manicured lawns of Los Angeles’s Westside sprout forests of
ominous little signs warning: “Armed Responses!” Even richer neighbourhoods in
the canyons and hillsides isolate themselves behind walls guarded by guntoting
private police and state-of-the-art electronic surveillance. Down-town, a publicly-
subsidised “urban renaissance” has raised the nation’s largest corporate citadel,
segregated from the poor neighbourhoods around it by a monumental architectural
glacis. In Hollywood, celebrity architect Frank Gehry, renowned for his “humanism’,
apotheosises the siege look in a library designed to resemble a foreign-legion fort.
In the Westlake district and the San Fernando Valley the Los Angeles police barricade
streets and seal off poor neighbourhoods as part of their “war on drugs”. In Watts,
developer Alexander Hagen demonstrates his strategy for recolonising metal fences
and a substation of the LAPD in central surveillance tower. Finally on the horizon
of the next millennium, an ex-chief of police crusades for an anti-crime “giant eye”
– a geo-synchronous law enforcement satellite – while the other cops discreetly
tend versions of “Garden Plo”’, a hoary but still viable 1960s plan for a law-and-
order armageddon.’ (1990:223)
Davis draws out how Los Angeles has become a post-liberal space, where the
overriding concern to defend luxury lifestyles creates a network of repressions of
space and movement. A range of electronic technologies survey a post-modern
space, clearly demarcated for the inhabitation of the insider at the expense of the
others. The images of carceral inner-cities (Escape from New York, Running Man),
hi-tech police death squads (Blade Runner, Robocop), sentient buildings (Die Hard),
Vietnam like street wars (Colours), are not fantasy, but representations of existing
267
trends. Modernity is turned on its head. The ideal of control of space becomes the
denial of social integration. The dialectics of modernist social control (that of control
and liberation), progress as a balance of repression and reform, is overtaken by a
rhetoric of social war which positions the interest of the urban poor and the middle
classes as incompatible and irreconcilable. Fortress LA refers to the unprecedented
tendency to merge urban design, architecture, and the police apparatus into a single
all-encompassing security effort. Security becomes itself a commodity defined by
income. It is obtained by membership of an enclosed residential enclave and access
to private security forces:
‘While the city becomes segregated into zones of crime rates, fear moves beyond
them. Statistically crime rates are self-contained within ethnic or class boundaries,
kept out of the middle class areas by the boundary of security. But the fear of crime
enters the middle class area through the media ceaselessly providing images of a
criminal underclass and psychotic stalkers. Sensationalised accounts of killer youth
gangs, high on crack [images] of marauding Willy Houghtons ferment the moral
panics that reinforce and justify urban apartheid.’ (Ibid: 236)
The contemporary architecture and symbols of surveillance create pseudo-public
spaces – shopping malls, office centres, cultural centres – a defended space shouting
a rhetoric of keep out to the other. While architects may not be able to read the
semiotics, pariah groups, for example, poor latino families, young black men, elderly
homeless white females, do not need lessons in decodification.
The consequence of this security is the destruction of accessible public space.
Predestrian streets become traffic sewers, public parks become waste bins for the
homeless and wretched. The interior surveyed is safe; the exterior public space is
discarded. The city becomes a collection of forbidden territories. We see a spatial
apartheid reinforcing clustered development, the city is pluralised, but into socially
homogeneous areas. When middle class individuals necessarily interact with the
homeless or working poor, as at places where welfare is distributed, design
precautions to ensure a lack of human contact (for example, grills, electronic bars)
are incorporated.
Perhaps this control of space is most exampled in what Davis calls the
development of the Panopticon Mall. Davis gives as a prime example, the layout
of Haagen’s Watts centre:
‘The King centre site is surrounded by an eight-foot-high, wrought-iron fence
comparable to security fences found at the perimeters of private estates and exclusive
residential communities. Video cameras equipped with motion detectors are
positioned near entrances and throughout the shopping centre. The entire centre,
including parking lots, can be bathed in bright four-foot candle lighting at the flip
of the switch.
There are six entrances to the centre: three entry points for autos, two service
gates and one pedestrian walkway. The pedestrian and auto entries have gates that
are opened at 6.30 am and closed at 10.30 pm The service area located at the rear
of the property is enclosed with a six-foot-high concrete block wall; both service
gates remain closed and are under closed-circuit video surveillance, equipped for
two-way voice communications, and operated for deliveries by remote control
268
from a security “observatory”. Infra-red beams at the bases of light fixtures detect
intruders who might circumvent video cameras by climbing over the wall.’ (Ibid:
243).
The LAPD have invested in technological capital over patrol manpower. At the
same time they have developed a paranoid esprit de corps, becoming a 50 pilot
airforce maintaining on average a 19 hour per day vigil over high crime areas. (By
way of contrast this exceeds the British Army’s aerial surveillance of Belfast, the
capital of Northern Ireland.) The LAPD see themselves as engaged on a war with
a force as strong as the Viet Cong. This force comprises members of local black
gangs divided into several hundred fighting sets while loosely aligned with two
hostile super-gangs: the Crips and the Bloods. Officially these gangs are portrayed
as urban guerrilla armies organised for the sale of crack, outgunning the police
with copious supplies of uzi and mac/10 automatics. With a public campaign over
drugs centring around the so-called crack-blizzard, even black leaders have weighed
police misconduct as a lesser evil compared to drug dealing gangs. The fight against
the drug gangs is often portrayed as handicapped by misguided civil libertarian
measures and badly interpreted constitutional protections. Davis depicts the war
on drugs as meaning every non-Anglo teenager is now a prisoner of gang paranoia
and associated demonology. The authoritarian reach of police control extends into
schools with schemes such as school ‘Buy’, where school visits by the police as
friends are replaced by the inducements of undercover police enticing students to
sell them drugs. Officially presented as an attempt to prevent the infiltration of
drugs into schools, this appears to its critics a cheap source of the felony arrests
which make the war on drugs statistically viable; at the same time, new sentencing
guidelines and laws with mandatory punishments have been introduced. Davis
reports the result as Kafkaesque class justice:
‘... in South Central LA, a young black three-time loser, never charged with violent
crime, but holding a weapon, was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility
of parole for the possession of 5.5. grams of crack. A 20 year old Chinese man received
two life terms (parole in forty years) for being accessory to the murder of federal
agents even though he was not at the scene, did not know that the murders would
occur, and was described by the judge as playing ‘only a minor role’. Meanwhile, a
21 year old Baldwin Park Chicano, high on PCP, who ran into the back of a truck and
killed his passenger, was charged with murder because he was a suspected gang
member. Finally, an elite LAPD stake-out team that the Times had exposed as a virtual
police death squad, ambushed four young Latinos who had just robbed a MacDonalds
in Sunland with a pellet gun. Three of the Latinos were killed by the cops, while the
forth, seriously wounded, was charged with murder for the deaths of his companions!’
(Ibid: 288).
This is a justice which since 1974 has arrested two-thirds of all younger black
males in California and provided a mass of prisoners an estimated four-fifths of
whom were addicted to some form of drug. As communism recedes, the image of
a black criminal underclass takes on the role of the evil other. The war on drugs
becomes a war on the underclass: a variant of the fallacy which reduces the war on
crime to a war on offenders. At the same time it is increasingly difficult to gain
269
empathetic views, given the reality of this new enemy. Statistically, young blacks
have been systematically excluded from the growth in suburban service
employment. Most of the Californian job creation occurred in areas with a black
population of less than 1%. The unemployment rate for black youths in Los Angeles
county remained at 45% throughout the late 1980s. In 1985 a public housing survey
conducted on various projects in the ghetto stated that there was only 120 employed
bread winners out of 1,060 households in Nickerson Gardens, 70 out of 400 at
Pueblo Delrio and 100 out of 700 at Jordan Downs. Yet spending on the state
school system has fallen sharply, with a drop out rate approaching 50% in many of
the inner city high schools. Statistically, black males from South Central are three
times more likely to end up in prison than at the University of California. While
the problem of drug addiction is simply faced with the criminal penalty there are
no schemes of education concerning drug usage, that would be unthinkable, drug
education usually consists of exhortation to say no. Whereas prison expenditure
rises, drug rehabilitation is starved of funds. Drug treatment programmes are
labelled, along with youth employment schemes, or gang counselling, as the
weakness of permissive wishy-washy liberals.
Davis suggests that gang members have become the stoic philosophers of a
cold new reality. The sub-cultures of the Crips and the Bloods have now an
impressive, almost irresistible, force. Gang bonding becomes a family for the
forgotten, providing excitement and a localised social solidarity blocking out
other empathies, while transforming self-hatred and low self-esteem into tribal
pride. Gang membership also provides a model for status. Their consumer power
and uniforms include Gucci T-shirts and top of the range Nike trainers. A cycle
of youth consumerism, and the fantasy of personal power, dances with self-
destruction; moreover the social contradiction of this post modern city is the
blocked mobility of the youth, in the midst of a communication and transport
world offering total mobility. With the only legitimate employment on offer often
being minimum-waged armed security guards for the enclosed spaces of the
rebuilt down-town, or the middle class area, where their role is to keep out their
own non-uniformed selves. For Davis it is little wonder that entry into the
underground economy, with guns blazing, and crack dealing franchises, is highly
prized. Writing in 1989 Davis predicts a growth of hatred and of ‘Black-lash’
against the institutional structure:
‘These particular contradictions are rising fast, along a curve asymptotic with the
mean ethos of the age. In a post-liberal society, with the gangplanks pulled up and
compassion strictly rationed by the Federal deficit and the Jarvis Amendment, where
a lynchmob demagogue like William Bennett reigns a drug czar – is it any wonder
that poor youths are hallucinating on their own desperado power trips? In Los Angeles
there are too many signs of approaching helter-skelter: everywhere in the inner city,
even in the forgotten poor-white boondocks with their zombie populations of speed-
freaks, gangs are multiplying at a terrifying rate, cops are becoming more arrogant
and trigger-happy, and a whole generation is being shunted toward some impossible
Armageddon.’ (Ibid: 316)
270
In 1992 Los Angles experienced the worst riots in American history and the world
came to talk of the rage of the underclass. A host of questions emerge. Does this
post-modern city’ point to a generalisable future? If the post-modern city cannot
be controlled by a humanised political economy, are we to face patrolling,
surveillance and segregation? Is the culture of the rule of law to be divided into a
contrast of deterrence and community bonding?
It is difficult to give an answer. However, it may be that the practical range of
responses varies according to our conceptual and imaginative grasp of the post-
modern city and whether we can find the energy to turn against the processes of
division intolerance, and the ‘false-necessity’ of listening only to the dictates of
the market.
271
CHAPTER TWELVE
CRIMINOLOGY AND THE CULTURE OF

MODERNITY
‘It all depends on where you are.

It all depends on when you are.
It all depends on what you feel.
It all depends on how you feel.
It all depends on how you’re raised.
It all depends on what is praised.
What’s right today is wrong tomorrow.
Joy in France, in England sorrow.
It all depends on point of view.
Australia or Timbuctoo,
In Rome do as the Romans do.
If tastes you happen to agree,
Then you have morality.
But where there are conflicting trends,
It all depends, it all depends...’
(Abraham, 1955 (Quoted in Edell))
‘...whether systematic delinquency does or not develop is determined not only
by associates that people make with the criminals, but also by the reactions of
the rest of society toward systematic criminal behaviour. If the society is
organised with references to the values expressed in the law, the crime is
eliminated; if it is not organised, crime persists and develops.’ (E Sutherland,
Principles of Criminology, 3rd ed: 8-9)
Social order is a series of complex, interconnected and variable patterns of
interaction among people in various social settings – social order is networks of
social practices ordered across space and time. If geography represents nature –
culture is ‘second nature’. It provides the medium for human life and human
expression – the site of human activity. From birth humans learn and internalise a
range of attitudes, norms, values and expectations. The child learns to speak and
use a living social language; a language which consists of words and ideas,
appropriate emotions, symbols, traditions. Culture shapes and moulds, limits and
develops, the plasticity of the human (potential) self. From a functionalist
perspective, while the modern self may escape from the bonds of tradition and
custom he or she must inhabit culture:
‘Culture, as a normative system, is a functional requirement of a human social order.
Because of the enormous degrees of biological plasticity and cognitive ingenuity
that, together, produce the broad variability characteristic of human behaviour, the
absence of this normative dimension would render human social systems impossible.
The range of behaviour patterns potential in any individual is much broader than the
limited range required for the performance of any custom or set of customs. beyond a
certain point, whose limits are still unknown, variability in behaviour precludes the
very possibility of custom. In other words, human societies have to set limits (by
273
means of prescriptive and proscriptive norms and of rules) to the range of permitted
variability in customary behaviour.’ (Melford E Spiro, 1968 vol 3:560)
Many westerners have been shocked by the strength of the prohibitions a strong
cultural network offers. In the midst of famine in India one reported:
‘Through all these months the white Brahmin cattle wandered by the hundreds through
the streets of Calcutta, as they always have, stepping placidly over the bodies of the
dead and near-dead, scratching their plump haunches on taxi fenders, sunning
themselves on the steps of the great Clive Street banks. No one ever ate a cow; no one
ever dreamed of it. I never heard of a Bengali Hindu who would not perish with all his
family rather than taste meat. Nor was there any violence. No grocery stall, no rice
warehouse, none of the wealthy clubs or restaurants ever was threatened by a hungry
mob. The Bengalis just died with that bottomless docility which, to most Americans,
is the most shocking thing about India.’ (Fisher, 1945:439)
Why does the strength of a coherent culture to restrain crime appear so shocking?
Where, asks the liberal, is the will to live, the call to action? Why do they not do
something? This non-western (perhaps, dare we say it, non-modern) culture appears
to overwhelm that injunction to life, to survival at all costs, Hobbes placed as
fundamental to human nature.
For Thorsten Sellin (1938) modern crime came out of ‘cultural conflict’, a
situation which modern western society was increasingly experiencing. Sellin
defined a well integrated social group as possessing a coherent and strong culture,
or sets of conduct-norms, setting out the routines of everyday life. As modernity
developed, cultural conflicts arose which meant the individual was subject to
competing definitions of the correct or incorrect action in given situations – crime
resulted:
‘For every person... there is from the point of view of a given group of which he is a
member; a normal (right) and an abnormal (wrong) way of reacting, the norm
depending upon the social values of the group which formulate it...
A conduct-norm in its irreducible form... is a rule which prohibits, and conversely
enjoins, a specific type of person, as defined by his status in (or with reference to) the
normative group, from acting in a certain specified way in given circumstances.’
(1938:30, 32-3)
Cultural conflict takes two forms. Primary culture conflict results when the norms
and value systems of different cultures clash (for example, when immigrants
continue to observe the customs of their country of origin; Sellin relates the case
of a Sicilian father who killed the sixteen-year-old seducer of his daughter and was
shocked to learn he had committed a crime); secondary cultural conflicts ‘grow
out of the process of social differentiation which characterises the evolution of our
own culture’ (Ibid: 105). As social differentiation develops, various groups are
created, which create their own sets of interpretations and central values:
‘Cultural conflicts are the natural outgrowth of processes of social differentiation,
which produce an infinity of social groupings, each with its own definitions of life
situations, its own interpretations of social relations, its own ignorance or
274
Criminology and the culture of modernity
misunderstanding of the social values of other groups. The transformation of a

culture from a homogeneous and well-integrated type to a heterogeneous and
disinterested type is therefore accompanied by an increase of conflict situations.’
(Ibid: 66)
Sellin reads the central idea of social differentiation, which Durkheim placed so
central to the development of modernity, as leading to a splitting of society into
various sub-groups. This cultural-conflict theory appeared to imply: (i) that
offenders were responding to norms and values at variance with those of the general
culture; and (ii) offenders derive from groups which are more or less culturally
isolated. Thus criminologists took as their research agenda the key postulate that
crime is the product of a value system fundamentally at odds with those of the
culture at large. Sellin’s formulation is, perhaps, rather unfortunate in that it leads
to the argument of sub-cultural identification predominating, rather than the image
of any one modern culture having various, competing, even contradictory messages.
Merton placed this assumption of the one dominant cultural message, that of
materialism, central to his theory of anomie (or strain). We have suggested that
this may have reflected a society of controlled bureaucratic consumption, however,
times have changed.
In the west, late-modern desire occurs largely in the context of non-systematic
cultural surroundings. We have seen MacIntyre’s pessimistic prognosis in After
Virtue. In Durkheim’s late 19th century analysis the open-ended possibilities of
desire were kept within limits by the social structure:
‘The economic ideal assigned each class of citizens is itself confined to certain limits,
within which the desires have free range. But it is not infinite. This relative limitation
and the moderation it involves make men contented with their lot while stimulating
them moderately to improve it; and this average contentment causes the feeling of
calm, active happiness, the pleasure in existing and living which characterises health
for societies as well as for individuals. Each person is then at least, generally speaking,
in harmony with his condition, and desires only what he may legitimately hope for as
the normal reward of his activity. Besides, this does not condemn man to a sort of
immobility. He may seek to give beauty to this life; but his attempts in this direction
may fail without causing him to despair.’ (1951 [1897]: 250)
As modernity has intensified the demands of desire have increased – the social
order is meant to produce; success is meant to be attainable and this success
means the possession of goods. People are meant to desire and to keep on
desiring. Is this desire natural? In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism ([1905] 1930) Weber highlighted the importance of culture by
arguing that people do not ‘by nature’ want to earn more and more but simply
wish to reproduce the conventional conditions of existence. The social system
needs to arouse desire for production: how could a surplus be produced if
there was no market or any demand for additional commodities? Weber
highlighted two themes underlying the development of capitalism: the
separation of the peasantry from the means of production (the land) by the
275
means of various forms of enclosure and the development of an ascetic calling

in the world to dominate and master the environment. Human geography and
culture interact; culture is part of social geography. Weber sees a progressive
distancing of man from an embeddedness in his natural environment (which
gave a form of natural community) where man’s thoughts were naive compared
to today and he only had a limited conception of his needs and desires. As
capitalism develops the body is rationalised and needs/desires are amplified.
Capitalism requires an expanding process of secular amplification and displays
of desire (advertising, marketing). The first law of the market is that desire
must be stimulated – but what limits or controls can be legitimately placed on
desire? And what happens when they are frustrated? What happens when the
items desired are not forthcoming?
Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argue the result depends on how an individual
perceives the legitimacy of the social order and locates failure:
‘The most significant step in the withdrawal of sentiments supporting the legitimacy
of conventional norms is the attribution of the cause of failure to the social order
rather than oneself, for the way in which a person explains his failure largely determines
what he will do about it.
‘Whether the ‘failure’ blames the social order or himself is of central importance
to the understanding of deviant conduct. When a person ascribes his failure to injustice
in the social system, he may criticise that system, bend his efforts toward reforming
it, or dissociate himself from it – in other words, he may become alienated from the
established set of social norms. He may even be convinced that he is justified in
evading these norms in his pursuit of success-goals. The individual who locates the
sources of his failure in his own inadequacy, on the other hand, feels pressure to
change himself rather than the system... By implication, then, attributing failure to
one’s own faults reveals an attitude supporting the legitimacy of the existing norms.’
(1960:111-112)
Perhaps the most basic theme of culture and crime can be summarised as follows:
culture can be a strong restraining medium, or it can be a medium through which
the solution to frustration or stress takes the form of a criminal act.
Consider the logical oppositions:
• If we accept culture as the medium: the necessary environment for human
understanding; then
• culture can be restraining; for example, in the case of Japan. Conversely:
• culture can be criminogenic; in particular, we should note the idea of modernity
as radically individualist and freedom loving; disrespectful of authority.
We may then need to ask whether late-modern or post-modern culture is developing
into a super criminogenic form. One theme appears to argue that Western modernity,
as it is currently developing, is inherently criminogenic. In his Thinking About
Crime, James Q Wilson made ‘attitude formation’ a crucial variable. Attitudes are
shaped and supported by intimate groups, family and close friends and Wilson
276
argues the west is producing a radical individuality amounting to a cult of self

gratification, rather than self-control.
Wilson seems to understand that crime is socially located. For example, he sees
drug dependence as a feature of that fraction of the population whose lives are in a
state of perpetual disarray; however, Wilson espouses a form of right realism, in
that whatever the ultimate causes, we must face up to the fact that we have to deal
with these disturbed persons:
‘We have not learned how to reach deeply into the lives of such persons; we can alter
prices, change penalties, and provide counselling, but we cannot create character or
restore a lost, or perhaps never extant, sense of identity.’ (1974:180)
For Wilson, as indeed for MacIntyre (albeit they consider themselves on opposing
sides of the political spectrum), contemporary cultural emphasis is upon an ethos
of self-expression rather than self-control. Thus culture affords an important remedy
for crime; the solution to crime is to understand culture and change its most
criminogenic forms.
Culture as a restraining medium: the case of Japan
Japan has appeared as the odd one out in terms of the growth of crime since the
First World War. After the devastation of the end of the Second World War Japan
was under foreign occupation and experiencing an extremely high crime rate. As
Japan subsequently developed into the second most industrialised and capitalised
country in the world, its crime rate has fallen. Both the quantity of crime, and the
quality and quantity of fear of crime is low in Japan. In 1990 the major reported
crime in Japan (a country of 120 million people) was larcenery – 88%, with
fraud and embezzlement at 3% each, indicating that minor offences predominante
in officially reported crime. The majority of larceny offenders were juvenile
(under 20 years old) and were mainly convicted for bicycle theft, motorbike
theft and shop lifting. Few violent crimes were reported in 1990:1,200 homicides;
1,600 robberies, 23 of which had death as a result and 671 resulted in bodily
injuries; only 81 of the burglaries involved rape. When traffic offences are
included, traffic negligence comprised 26% of all penal code offences involving
600,000 offenders and the death of 12,000 people. Japan has less than one-twelfth
of the number of reported homicides than the US or one-sixth of the US rate per
head of population, but has more than 1.2 times the clearance rate. (Figures from
Moriyama, 1993)
What factors influence the crime situation? Three direct factors have been
mentioned:
• Strict and effective legal control over firearms; since the confiscation of swords
by the ruling elite in the 16th century to prevent rebellion, modern Japan does
277
not have a tradition of weapon carrying. Only 1% of so-called armed robberies

are carried out with a gun compared with more than 60% percent in the US.
Japan does have organised gangs which carry guns, and there have even been
reports of a mortar attack on a police station when a ‘disorientated police officer’
made the mistake of investigating organised crime.
• Japan has only a small incidence of illicit drug usage.
• Criminal justice agencies are very effective; the relationship between police
and public is good and there is a high clearance rate. There is a large flow of
information from public to police and most Japanese suspects speak freely.
Various indirect factors have been proposed:
• The homogeneity of Japanese society
It should be noted, however, that while the largest ethnic minority in Japan is
650,000 Koreans, Japan has its own version – Bura Kumim – of the untouchables
of the Indian Hindu system. There are about 3 million Bura Kumin in 6,000
ghettos in Japan.
• Geographical isolation
Nonetheless, there are several other countries which possess one or other
of these factors yet still experience a high crime rate. Britain, for example,
is an island nation, and Poland and Hungary have similar levels of
homogeneity. Tadashi Moriyama (1993) therefore argues that other factors
have to be looked at to explain the low crime rate. Specifically, the process
of social conditioning to established norms. He argues the following factors
are crucially important.
(i) the absence of an established class system
The Maji-restoration of the mid 19th century ended the policy of isolation
and formally abolished the hereditary system through which occupational
posts had been filled, replacing this with selection by competitive
examination. After the Second World War the aristocracy was abolished
and an education policy specifically geared to meritocracy was established.
More than 90% of Japanese consider they belong to the middle class. Age
represents the primary social distinction between Japanese. The emphasis
upon meritocracy results in an extremely competitive attitude, particularly
concerning school education. Most Japanese children attend a second
private school after their public school is finished, normally studying until
9 pm; many Japanese students also attend school on Saturdays while further
private tuition may be provided on Sundays. It is not unusual for Japanese
high school students to be in a closely supervised educationally related
activity for more than 70 hours a week. They simply do not have free time
to commit delinquent acts unless they engage in truancy, thus there is a
strong correlation between school truancy and delinquency.
278
(ii) Strong family loyalties and duty to the group

The dominant social value in Japanese society which provides the
framework for respect and interaction of human relationship is the group
rather than the individual. Family cohesion and solidarity is strongly
emphasised. The family is called Uchi meaning inside as opposed to
Soto or Yoso meaning outside. It is common to refer to companies as
Uchi designating a special sense of belonging. The dominant
demarcation of Japanese social life is between persons inside the group
and those outside. The special term for foreigners – Gaijin – indicates
those unable to truly enter into Japanese groups. Membership of the
group involves a tight relationship, with mutual help and a willingness
to intervene and support or admonish each other. One of the great fears
of the Japanese is ostracism or Muahachibu. The first reaction to trouble
is to seek to maintain harmony within the group. While individual
members of a group owe a duty of mutual help to each other, each
owes a responsibility to the group irrespective of any legal standing. A
structure of duties pervades the company, the school and even
government with senior employees often resigning for minor
misdemeanours of lower employees which bring dishonour on the
organisation. Parents frequently apologise for the behaviour of their
grown up children.
(iii) A culture of shame as opposed to that of guilt. This distinction comes
from the work of Ruth Benedict (1946), a cultural anthropologist who
was asked by the American Government to explain the attitude of
Japanese soldiers following orders despite the most adverse
circumstances. Benedict argued that the Japanese were dominated by
external signs of good behaviour and the need reciprocally to balance
obligations. Shame denotes the reaction by a person to the criticism of
the others; whereas a guilt society is orientated more towards the
achievement of self-regulation. The sense of shame is a strong deterrent
to crime in that individuals are deeply concerned with the views and
opinions of others. Their own view is of lesser importance and perhaps
underdeveloped; thus the behaviour of Japanese people is substantially
controlled by others, especially family members, neighbours, relatives,
colleagues at the work place or school mates. The Japanese place great
emphasis upon keeping what is called a ‘clean face’; juveniles do not
like to make their parents’ faces dirty. To commit a crime is to bring
reaction not only upon oneself but upon all the others involved in the
group.
(iv) The family model of social control. The Japanese group enforces collective
responsibility, or collectivism, which is reinforced by the culture of shame
and the philosophy of confucianism. The family model is involved in social
control in three ways:
279
(a) The formal criminal justice system uses both the family, and the family
model, as much as possible. Police interrogation, which is supervised by
the prosecution, is conducted in the guise of the interrogator as a father
figure; confessions are obtained in over 85% of all cases. Even the trial
takes on the structure of a family investigation, and there are only a few
cases in which a defendant does not admit his guilt;
(b) the family model clearly works as a form of informal control. If an
individual deviates family members quickly learn, while the fear of
ostracism may prevent much deviance;
(c) confucianism emphasises obligations and respect to ones parents and
implies that people should not bring dishonour on their family.
This homogeneity and family orientation minimises individuality and diversity,
moreover, there are signs it is under considerable stress in contemporary Japan.
The culture of shame and familisation makes for a society with very predictable
and tight relationships, various tensions are apparent, namely:
• Security versus freedom Self-expression is down played, and Japanese tend to
follow others and the group uncritically.
• Rights versus obligations Japanese social relations are characterised by a sense
of obligations rather than rights. To claim rights is viewed as the act of an
aggressive person threatening the social harmony or natural order. In criminal
justice the emphasis is upon the obligations and duties of offenders rather than
their rights. The aim of criminal justice, particularly for minor offences, is to
gain an apology from the offender, together with a statement that he or she
recognises the duties they have breached and will respect the social harmony
in the future.
• The new individual versus the traditional Japanese. There is much talk in Japan
that the young are developing a new persona which appears to be adopting the
Western approach. These Shin Jinrui, or new species of humanity, tend towards
individualism and talk in terms of their rights.
• Internalisation versus internationalisation The traditional vision or horizon
of the Japanese person has been inwardly focused, but economic success is
demanding that Japan looks outwards. Although the Japanese government
has not encouraged foreign visitors or tourism, the number of foreign
visitors, as well as foreign persons, or Gaijin, residing and working in Japan
has increased. An increasing number of Japanese work abroad for a period,
and increasing prosperity means that Japanese people can now take more
than one foreign trip in their lives. It is therefore more common for Japanese
persons to have encountered some diversity and variety of experiences.
The social cost of the low crime rate of Japan is the devaluation of the individual.
Individuals who seek to develop projects of free self-expression and the pursuit of
individual life plans find barriers and experience great stress; the desire for freedom
encounters structures of security and predictability in social relations. Many suicides
280
in Japan appear to be from embarrassment at particular actions or the individual

being unable to take the stress of group involvement. Moriyana claims that the
development of guilt in Western societies historically comes from the relationship
of the person with an abstract God, where ultimately they have to account to God
for their actions and thoughts. In Japan condemnation comes from other people on
a collective basis.
Culture as criminogenic
A traditional area of concern for criminology has been in the area of culture and
youth crime.
The main object of analysis for sociological theories of crime, from the 1930s
onwards, involved urban male youths. The 1950s saw work develop on both juvenile
delinquency and gang involvement. This area is generally referred to as sub-cultural
theories, which postulate that delinquent sub-cultures are created within the wider
culture of society. There are three areas of explanation:
• The work of Albert Cohen, sometimes referred to as the middle class measuring
rod.
• The differential opportunity structure theory, associated with Richard Cloward
and Lloyd Ohlin.
• The lower class value system, associated with Walter Miller.
Albert Cohen
In Delinquent Boys (1955) Cohen criticised previous theories for not

differentiating between the terms culture and sub-culture sufficiently. Cohen
argued that a specific kind of criminal behaviour, a non-purposeful and non-
acquisitive crime characterise juvenile delinquencies. For Cohen previous
criminology had taken adult crime, as exemplified by theft and robbery, as its
paradigm case. Cohen was more interested in delinquency which was primary
expressive and appeared purposeless, even nihilistic in character, as exemplified
in almost random acts of violence, vandalism and joy riding. Although such
crimes had been mentioned in Thrasher’s classic study of the Gang in Chicago
published in 1927, later sociology, under the influence of Merton, had
concentrated upon the fundamental purpose of material gain as principally
characterising crime. Cohen reasoned that criminological theory should provide
both an explanation of the nature of the delinquency to be studied, as well as an
account of the characteristics of the people engaged in it. Cohen’s account is
still very much influenced by the same sociological structure which Durkheim
laid down, in that sub-culture is seen as a functional creation enabling individuals
to handle many of the problems created for them by the social structure. Culture
281
is made up of traditional ways of solving problems, or learned problem solutions,

which are transmitted through the process of childhood socialisation.
Cohen’s theory is termed a strain theory, in that the criminogenic mechanism
lies in the incompatible demands of structure and culture with the consequential
creation of sub-cultures to solve the problems thus caused. Again like Merton,
Cohen appears to assume a universalistic set of achievement-oriented standards
as comprising mainstream society. Instead, however, of Merton’s goal of success
Cohen argued that delinquent youth were more motivated by gaining status among
their peer groups. Much of the competition for status takes place in the setting of
school which, for Cohen, is a largely middle class institution. To succeed in that
institution a youth is judged according to criteria of ambition, responsibility,
achievement, deferred gratification, rationality, courtesy, the ability to control
physical aggression, and the constructive use of time in the rational pursuit of
property. The lower class youth finds himself being evaluated by the middle
class measuring rod. Lower class male youth have little chance however of
achieving the standards required because of their structural position. Moreover,
lower class youth have little ascribed status by virtue of family position and are
typically losers in the competition for achieved status. Such a youth has three
options:
• If he is bright he may attempt upward mobility. This ‘college boy solution’
lays emphasis upon educational achievement.
• The less able may accept becoming what Cohen calls ‘stable corner’ boys.
These youth continue to conform to middle class values without any great
success, and accept a low status position amongst their peers.
• The delinquent option or solution. In this case, the lower class youth initially
strongly aspired to middle class standards of success, but his repeated
failures in the school system, both academically and socially, cause him to
reject the school and the system of values it represents. This is made possible
by a psychological process which Cohen calls ‘reaction formation’; a
Freudian term describing the process by which a person openly rejects that
which he wants or aspires to, because he can neither obtain or achieve it.
By means of this process, the attachment to middle class values of
utilitarianism, respectability, deferred gratification, and the avoidance of
aggression, is transformed by a powerful rejection. The values are inverted,
but the resultant value structure is not a simple opposition, but characterised
by ambivalence.
Many lower class youth come to repudiate middle class values and assume a
malicious and hostile attitude towards the sets of standard and behavioural
patterns symbolising the middle class. A youth searches for a peer group or
gang; within this supportive context he nurtures developing feelings of hostility
derived from his damaged self-image. These groups are formed by youths in
order to validate their choices and reinforce their new values. The delinquent
282
gang becomes to its members a means to acquire status and to hit back at the
282 system that has labelled them as failures. The gang inverts the rules of
middle class society and provides a mechanism for attaining status via the sub-
culturally legitimate use of aggression and hostility – the delinquent gang is
characterised by a sub-culture which allows the use of violence and hostility –
in time this becomes a way of life in inner city environments. Much of the
delinquency committed in the gang context appears to serve little useful purpose,
such as vandalisation and malicious destruction of property, random and
unprovoked assaults and gang wars. Cohen noted six characteristics of the
delinquent behaviour of the juvenile gangs.
• They are non-utilitarian Goods would be stolen merely for kicks and given
away, discarded, or destroyed, rather than consumed, or sold for profit.
• A strong element of malice and destructiveness ran through the delinquency,
for example, breaking and entering or burglaries would be accompanied by
wanton vandalism.
• Negativism Much of the delinquent behaviour appears an inversion of
respectable values.
• Short run hedonism The desire for instant, rather than delayed, gratification;
immediate pleasure or reward of sorts.
• Versatility Gang activities were not highly specialised, rather they covered a
wide spectrum of delinquency, ranging from theft or vandalism, to interpersonal
violence and aggression.
• An element of primary loyalty to the delinquent gang existed. Other allegiances
were subordinated to gang loyalty.
In summary these characteristics constitute an ideal type of delinquent subculture.
Four empirical assumptions underlie Cohen’s theory:
• A large percentage of lower class youth do poorly at school.
• Poor school performance is related to delinquency.
• This poor school performance can largely be attributed to the conflict between
the dominant middle class values embodied in the school and the values and
structural position of the lower class youth.
• Lower class male delinquency is largely committed in a gang context as a
means of developing positive self images, gaining status and nurturing antisocial
values.
On the face of it, Cohen’s theory appears a coherent explanation accounting for
the facts of official crime. Downes and Rock (1988), however, argue that it is
neatly tailored to account for the much lower rate of such delinquency among the
middle class, since they are far more likely to attain success by the conventional
route. The lower rates of delinquency amongst girls can be explained under this
theory, in that they are taught to value marriage to an occupationally successful
male rather than achieving success in career terms themselves. Moreover, it appears
283
to explain the lower rates of crime in rural areas in that the pressures of school are
less because of access to more traditional modes of occupation.
There have been many empirical doubts cast on Cohen’s theory. Although
class differences are important in relation to school performance it is not
proved that such class differences give rise to the processes outlined by Cohen.
Nor has the Freudian process of displacement been shown as providing an
effective explanation. Neither does it appear that school failure is always
interpreted in such a way as to necessitate a delinquent response. The reasons
for a delinquent response as compared to the adaptive corner boy response
are not brought out.
It remains significant for beginning to develop interactional processes and for
highlighting the non-utilitarian features of much delinquency. Moreover, it points
to the complexity of culture, in that while Cohen’s theory appears similar to
Merton’s rebellion adaptation, this form of rebellion is a reaction against middle
class values rather than the pursuit of material success. One weakness lies in its
overreaching determinist ambitions.
Cloward and Ohlin
In Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs (1960), Cloward

and Ohlin appeared to integrate notions from Merton and Cohen, as well as ideas
stemming from the Chicago ecologists, in particular the role of neighbourhood
influences. Whereas Merton had assumed the universal goal of monetary success,
and Cohen the universal striving for status, Cloward and Ohlin argued that these
were separate aspirations or strivings, which could operate either together or
independently. Thus some youths may strive for status in the form of membership
of the middle class without seeking to improve their economic position; whilst
others may seek to improve their economic position without aspiring to change
their class position.
Cloward and Ohlin developed a four-fold typology of lower class youth:
• Youth who strive for both middle class status and monetary success.
• Youth who strive for middle class status but are not interested in monetary
success.
• Youth who strive for monetary success but not middle class status.
• Youth who strive for neither middle class status nor monetary success.
According to Cohen’s theory most delinquency will be committed by youths of
either category (1) or (2) who are seeking to improve their status and actually
aspiring for membership of the middle class. Cloward and Ohlin agree that when
pressures towards delinquency arise with these youth they could be described by
Cohen’s theory, ie as reactions against middle class values the youth believes in
but with which he has been unable to conform. However, they go on to argue,
these youths do not commit the most serious delinquency. Instead, the serious
284
delinquency comes from type (3) youths who desire material success, without
any corresponding desire for middle class status or membership. These youths
are orientated towards conspicuous consumption, fast cars, fancy clothes, flashy
women, and do not see success in terms of a middle class life style. These youth
experience the greatest conflict with middle class values, since they are frowned
upon both for what they do not want, ie the middle class lifestyle and for what
they do want, crass materialism. Type (4) youths, although they may incur
criticism from middle class authorities for their lack of ambition are not normally
involved in trouble; they tend to avoid middle class institutions as much as
possible. Thus Cloward and Ohlin, like Cohen, followed Merton in looking at
achievement values and aspirations, and the means of obtaining them. Like
Merton, they argue that lower class delinquency results from a systematic
exclusion of the lower classes from real access to the legitimate channels that
lead to economic success in society. But since they place the original emergence
of delinquent sub-cultures as arising out of an economic pursuit of monetary
success, without any accompanying desire to adhere to middle class values, the
school becomes an irrelevance. Thus the economic pursuit of monetary success
is the prime source of embittered frustrations in the metropolitan slums. The
sub-culture comes about because discontented lower class youth seek material
success and status within their own community and employ illegitimate means
to achieve these ends.
Cloward argues that not all those denied legitimate success can take
advantage of criminal means of achieving success. Some persons are ‘double
failures’ unable to find either legitimate or illegitimate means of success
available to them:
‘Note, for example, variations in the degree to which members of various classes are
fully exposed to and thus acquire the values, education, and skills which facilitate
upward mobility. It should not be startling, therefore, to find similar variations in the
availability of illegitimate means.’ (1960:176)
In contrast to Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin suggest that most serious lower class
delinquency, far from being purposeless, is the result of a goal orientated action by
people who do rationally understand their economic position and act accordingly.
Lower class delinquency comes out of blocked legitimate economic opportunities
which America’s conventional institutions are not providing. Moreover, the specific
nature of the opportunities available is a factor in the characteristics of the
delinquency. The character of particular neighbourhoods structure the opportunities
for committing illegal acts, and the types of illegal acts. Cloward and Ohlin thus
determine that the opportunity to commit illegal acts is not constant throughout
societies; this theory is, therefore, sometimes called a theory of ‘differential
opportunity structure’. Both legal, and illegal, avenues for achieving economic
success are unequally distributed throughout society. Cloward and Ohlin distinguish
three types of delinquent sub-cultures:
285
• the criminal sub-culture or gang;

• the conflict sub-culture or gang;
• the retreatist sub-culture or gang.
Whether any one of these sub-cultures predominates is a factor dependent upon
(a) the opportunities for integration in conventional values and behaviour systems;
and (b) the impact of organised illegitimate values and behavioural systems.
The criminal sub-culture or gang
The criminal sub-culture emerges in conditions where there is a significant

presence of organised adult criminal activity in the lower class neighbourhood.
Adult criminals provide successful role models for juveniles further developing
criminal skills within the neighbourhood. These neighbourhoods display a stable
relationship between adult criminals and juveniles with patterns of
accommodation and mutual interdependence; for example, networks of dealing
in stolen items are provided. Local political and criminal justice officials also
accommodate the criminal behaviour, whether by ignoring it, or by offering
protection in return for personal gains, or community stability. We have therefore
a ‘collective delinquent solution’:
‘Interaction among those sharing the same problem [discrepancies between aspiration
and opportunity] may provide encouragement for the withdrawal of sentiments in
support of the established system of norms. Once freed of allegiance to the existing
set of rules, such persons may devise... delinquent means of achieving success. A
collective delinquent solution to an adjustment problem is more likely to evolve by
this process in a society in which the legitimacy of social rules can be questioned
apart from their moral validity... What seems expedient, rational, and efficient often
becomes separable from what is traditional, sacred, and moral as a basis for the
imputation of legitimacy. Under such conditions it is difficult for persons at different
social positions to agree about the forms of conduct that are both expedient and morally
right. Once this separation takes place, the supporting structure of the existing system
of norms becomes highly vulnerable.’ (1960:108-9)
This relative community stability and set of cultural values which make delinquency
and criminal activity acceptable, albeit illegal, also imposes limitations upon the
type of delinquency found acceptable, and orientates gang behaviour towards theft
rather than violence, since violence would prove more disruptive. Thus illegitimate
behaviour must not be irrational, or out of control: ‘there is no place in organised
crime for the impulsive, unpredictable individual’.
The conflict sub-culture or gang
The conflict sub-culture emerges in the absence of either legitimate or illegitimate

opportunities in neighbourhoods where no stable organised pattern of adult
286
criminality has developed. In areas characterised by unstable and transient living

conditions and lifestyles, adult role models, either criminal or conventional, do not
develop. Juveniles experience a high level of frustration and discontent and resort
to violence as a primary form of delinquent behaviour. This acute frustration is
unstructured, and results in violence, partly because of the absence of stable
structures of social controls; either those of the criminal sub-culture or
conventionalist systems.
The retreatist sub-culture
The retreatist sub-culture bears similarities to Merton’s retreatist adaptation,

and is characteristic of youths unable to achieve either economic success or
resort to violence but instead turn to drugs or alcohol and drop out. Not all
double failures become members of the retreatist sub-culture, some scale down
their desires and aspirations to become ‘corner-boys’, which particular path a
youth will adopt depends on the personality of the youth, and also his peer
group and particular circumstances. Some youths who fall into the retreatist
sub-culture may well have been rejected by other gangs, because of their
inability to handle gang life.
Cloward and Ohlin stress the role of neighbourhood; the criminal subculture
relies upon the presence of relatively stable adult role models, or groups, who
may be said to encourage criminal activity – whilst the conflict gang exists in
areas without such stable patterns. An assumption of Cloward and Ohlin’s theory
is that much lower class gang behaviour is specialised, and that the specialisation
is related to neighbourhood characteristics. A criticism of the frustration element
has been made by Kornhauser (1978) writing from the control perspective and
proposing a general criticism of all strain theories, who argued that the empirical
research did not support the assumption of delinquency as being a factor of high
aspirations and low expectations. Instead, she claimed, delinquency is more often
associated with both low expectations and low aspirations, thus there would be
no strain because there was little gap between what youths aspired to, and what
they actually expected to achieve. Kornhauser claimed that the evidence suggested
that most delinquents did not expect much from society, but they did not want
much either.
Strain theories have been generally criticised for assuming a consensus of values
in society. Edwin Lemert (1961), for example, criticised Merton’s use of anomie
theory for assuming that modern society had one dominant set of values.
Both Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin have additionally been criticised for placing
too much emphasis upon gang delinquency at the expense of accounting for
individual or small group delinquency.
287
Walter Miller
The work of Walter Miller proposed a much more autonomous notion of lower
class culture, claiming that delinquency was an extension of a separate and relatively
self-governing value system responsive to adult working class culture. In a famous
article Lower Class Culture As A Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency (1958)
Miller argued that instead of being produced as a reaction to the dominant culture
– an inversion of the ethics of the dominant society – lower class culture had its
own established values or ‘vocal concerns’. Rather than constituting a counter-
culture, lower class delinquency is a direct expression of the dominant values or
culture patterns of the lower class community. Thus lower class gangs were
predominantly male and street orientated groups, and were an expression of a
generic lower class cultural system. For Miller delinquency comes about from a
clash of conduct norms or cultural understandings. Rather than being created as a
reaction, sub-cultures are in direct conflict with dominant middle class values which
may be inscribed in the laws. Miller is clear:
‘... engaging in certain cultural practices which comprise essential elements of the
total life pattern of lower-class culture automatically violates certain legal norms.’
(1958:68-69)
Miller recognised six focal concerns to lower class culture:
• Trouble
Conflict with police, authority, state bureaucrats, and the issues around fighting
or sexual activity for males, and the use of drugs.
• Toughness
A concern with physical prowess and strength; the development of so-called
masculine traits; with an associated lack of emotional display.
• Smartness
A desire to outwit others through mental gymnastics and cunning; the ability
to hustle.
• Excitement
The pursuit of thrills experienced through alcohol, sex, gambling, going out
on the town. Such excitement may be periodic, interspersed with periods of
inactions or ‘handing-out’.
• Fate
The feeling that one’s future is out of one’s hands and that one’s destiny is out
of one’s control.
• Autonomy
A paradoxical position, reflecting, on the one hand, a strong desire to be free
of external controls such as the boss; the wife; bureaucratic authorities, while
on the other hand, a consistent pattern of seeking out nurturing situations, such
as a steady job or comforting wife, can be discerned beneath this claim to
interdependence.
288
Miller further claimed that many working class households were dominated by a
strong mother figure, which drove many adolescent males from home in the search
of male identity in street gangs.
‘A significant proportion of lower-class males are reared in a predominantly female
household and lack a consistently present male figure with whom to identify and
from whom to learn the essential components of a “male” role. Since women serve as
a primary object of identification during the pre-adolescent years, the almost obsessive
lower-class concern with ‘masculinity’ probably resembles a type of compulsive
reaction-formation.’ (1958:9)
Thus the gang resolves problems of identity by magnifying the pursuit of masculine
traits and status.
This was a widespread idea in 1950s American sociology. The leading
American sociologist of the 1950s and 1960s, Talcott Parsons, for example,
asserted that the structure of the American family, and the sharp differentiation
between occupational roles and kinship responsibilities of the father, make it
very difficult for American boys to develop masculine traits and characteristics
naturally. The requirements of occupational roles, which had become much more
sophisticated, keep the father preoccupied with interests outside the home and
leave the mother as the most significant person in the family. The relative absence
of the father from the family, and the consequent weakening of his domestic
status, make him an unfit model for identification, thus depriving American male
children of the opportunity to develop skills, attitudes, mannerisms, and
characteristics associated in American culture with the masculine image. Because
of this faulty (non)identification with a masculine model, some youngsters join
gangs. They overreact to their basic sense of masculine ineptitude by acting
tough, by engaging in fights and other types of anti-social activity, which are the
identifying mark of delinquent groups in America. The process was described
by Parsons as follows:
‘Our kinship situation, it has been noted, throws children of both sexes
overwhelmingly upon the mother as the emotionally significant adult. In such a
situation, “identification” in the sense that the adult becomes a ‘role model’ is the
normal result. For a girl this is normal and natural, not only because she belongs to
the same sex as the mother, but because the functions of housewife and mother are
immediately before her eyes and are tangible and relatively easily understood by a
child... Thus the girl has a more favourable opportunity for emotional maturing
through positive identification with an adult model, a fact which seems to have
much to do with the well-known earlier maturity of girls. The boy, on the other
hand, has a tendency to form a direct feminine identification, since his mother is
the model most readily available and significant to him. But he is not destined to
become an adult woman. Moreover he soon discovers that in certain vital respects
women are considered inferior to men, that it would hence be shameful for him to
grow up like a woman. Hence when boys emerge into what Freudians call the “latency
period”, their behaviour tends to be marked by a kind of “compulsive masculinity”.
They refuse to have anything to do with girls. “Sissy” becomes the worst of insults.
They get interested in athletics and physical prowess, in the things in which men
have the most primitive and obvious advantage over women. Furthermore, they
289
become allergic to all expression of tender emotion; they must be “tough”. This
universal pattern bears all the earmarks of a “reaction formation”. It is so conspicuous,
not because it is simple “masculine nature”, but because it is a defence against a
feminine identification.’ (1954:304-5)
Parsons remarks that the structure of the American family system, and the relative
absence of a masculine model at home, results in ‘a strong tendency for boyish
behaviour to run in anti-social if not directly destructive directions, in striking
contrast to that of pre-adolescent girls’. While Parsons does not himself claim that
this lack of identification with a masculine figure is the cause of juvenile
delinquency, the work of Miller and Cohen placed the problem of masculine
identification as a causal factor.
In Miller’s favour, there is some empirical support that a definite lower class
culture emphasising particular lifestyles and values particular to the lower class
has existed. A variant of this concept is Oscar Lewis’s (1959) culture of poverty
thesis which became influential in the 1960s. Wolfgang and Ferracuti in their study
of violence (The Sub-Culture of Violence, 1967) specifically located a subculture
of violence amongst young, urban males. Moreover, the concept of masculine
consciousness being associated with crime is a recurring theme in all studies of
lower class crime, from the work of the Chicago School onwards.
In criticism, many have argued against this identification of matriarchically-
headed home situations of working class families. Empirical studies did not appear
to show a predominance of female dominated households in the lower class. In
recent decades we have seen the growth of one parent families most of which are
headed by women. Yet as late as 1988 the US statistical abstract found that fewer
than half of lower class families with children are headed by females alone with no
male spouse present. Further the linkage between such households and delinquency
is not simple; assertions for it are often highly anecdotal and simplify the complete
processes at work.
In America, attempts to empirically test the theory concerning the role of the
matriarchical family, became embroiled in the issue of race rather than social class.
The culture of poverty thesis became imbued with racial connotations after the
controversial report by Daniel Moynihan in 1965 (The Negro Family), in which he
argued that the contemporary urban Black population was becoming divided into
two sections: a stable middle class and a deteriorating lower class. This deteriorating
lower class section of blacks was directly related to the presence of female-orientated
households, which, it was argued, was traceable in American to the breakup of the
black family structure during the period of slavery (in which no marriage between
blacks was legally recognised). Female dominated households create a situation in
which the lower class black family is subjected to a range of pathologies, including
a high rate of delinquency.
The reaction to the Moynihan report is a reflection of the politically and culturally
loaded nature of social science. On the one hand it appears liberating to deny that
working class culture is nothing but an unconscious reaction to an inversion of
middle class values, but the particular formulation of Moynihan’s report was
290
criticised for locating the causal responsibility for the conditions of black households
not in the structures of contemporary white-dominated society, but within the
contentious, but unalterable, legacy of history. In this way instead of a campaign
against institutionalised racism, the causal factor for the failure of blacks to achieve
middle class status could be located in conditions which are historically created,
but contemporarily located in the black family; thus implying that there was little
social programmes could achieve by way of improving the situation. Miller has
suffered a similar structural criticism.
Culture and social structure: does working class culture, or a culture

of poverty, determine social conditions, or social conditions
determine culture?
In his 1969 work, Travis Hirschi was scathing towards the idea of a coherent and
self-sustaining lower class culture:
‘The issue is whether acceptance of (lower class) beliefs is rooted in culture or social
structure, whether the feeling that one is powerless arises from objective powerlessness
or is transmitted by one’s culture, regardless of one’s power in some objective sense.’
(1969:219)
Lower class beliefs were a factor of the objective conditions people found
themselves in:
‘The ease with which middle class children absorb ‘lower-class’ beliefs, and the
ease with which they are discarded or ignored by lower-class children forces us
to conclude that if ‘lower-class’ culture is ‘many centuries old’, it is only because
powerlessness and deprivation are older. If they were to disappear, lower-class
culture would quickly die. And there would be no one to mourne its passing.’
(Ibid: 223)
This implies that one solution to crime is social integration. Crime is directly
influenced by the offender having sets of definitions of the situation favourable
to violations of the law, and such definitions ‘often reflect the absence of stakes
in conformity’, therefore increasing the return on conformity, in other words
playing the social games by the rules, should lower the production of social
definitions (cultural factors) favourable to crime. Note: Social control theories
such as Hirschi’s, and strain theories, such as Merton’s, are usually seen as
mutually exclusive, but can we not read Hirschi’s lack of stakes in conformity
and hence commitment, and Merton’s lack of legitimate opportunities, as pointing
to a similar existential phenomenon? Namely, the absence of an internally felt
direction to one’s actions which points to achieving universally accepted desires?
Hirschi calls this freedom; Merton stress. In the chapter on existentialism in the
current text, it is proposed that this indicates certain macro-cultural conditions
of modernity: namely the dicta to be self-directing and self-creating, the dicta to
take control of one’s situation, a driving force which can be interpreted in much
291
the same ways as Merton’s drive for monetary reward, and which imposes
throughout the variety of social locations.
Let us clear up a common misunderstanding concerning culture in
criminological writing. It has become common to criticise Merton for postulating
a universal cultural driving force throughout society; specifically financial success.
The distribution of crime is then a factor of the distribution of legitimate
opportunities in the social structure, and given blocked legitimate opportunities;
thus crime is a rational choice for some individuals given their location in social
structure. It is sometimes asserted that Merton’s theory is very specific and gives
us one constant cultural drive in any particular society because of cultural
uniformity (Bernard, 1987b). It seems to some, that if we allow a variety of
cultural messages we discredit Merton. But our use of Merton’s theory should
not preclude a range of other cultural factors, instead it should alert us to the fact
that we can sensibly refer to certain large scale, macro-cultural prescriptions. In
our concern to trace theoretical criminology from modernity to post-modernism,
our argument has asserted a range of these in the process of individualism
modernity throws into place. The next chapter will argue that post-modernism
denotes a process wherein certain prescriptions are being internationalised under
the dicta of consumption and the significance of personal worth and status by
possession of consumer goods.. Surely Merton is correct to warn us that we are
never free from macro-cultural forces, we exist at the site of various sets of
cultural messages? The fact that more of them are being created, and that they
are getting complicated, does not reduce the strain of being modern – it may
increase it.
Hirschi’s (1969) comments on powerlessness and deprivation point
criminology towards the investigation of the linkage between social structure,
the cultural production of resentment and emotional states which may be
conducive to criminal conduct. While this would appear essential for a general
theory it is under-developed; in fact, strong factors in current conditions point in
an opposite direction.
In Chapter Seventeen the discussion of the emerging underclass phenomenon
notes the extent to which a culture of poverty argument is fundamental to the
Right’s blame of welfare for the creation of the underclass. From the first chapter
we have noted the strong individualist orientation of contemporary Right
criminology; social explanations are being sidestepped in favour of locating
responsibility firmly on a self which has failed to both control and link itself into
the supposed meritocratic structures of late-modernity. When social factors are
indicated, they are factors located in close proximity to the individual self –
faulty socialisation, the rise of one-parent families, the absence of responsibility
in appropriate role models (specifically absent fathers) – all of which are not
adequately located in wider forces. In other words it is argued that the moral
fabric of individuals and their individual belief patterns, not the social and
economic structure of society, that is taken to be at the root of current problems.
The cultural beliefs of the poor and powerless are somehow their responsibility
292
and the determining factor as to why they are poor and powerless (for a review
see William Julius Wilson, 1994).
Bridging concepts: from social structural to individual or

psychological states
By bridging concepts is meant ideas on the integration of macro factors (such as

culture) with theory derived from clinical research findings at the level of the
individual. In what way can the experiences of our past, our upbringing, our labelling
processes (see the Chapter Fourteen), be incorporated into a model of the self
without overwhelming it?
One method is to understand that actions have an action rationale; in other
words, we must bring out the meaning of the behaviour for the participant. If you
try to be faithful to the individual’s perception of what he or she was about, you
may find a disjunction between that view and the predictive generalisations of
large scale theory which of necessity, to a certain extent at least, assumes, or takes
for granted, certain motives of the actors. We may assume, for example, that a
central cultural message in a modern society is that educational achievement makes
possible occupational mobility, and that high school performances and going on to
tertiary education opens the way to a higher ranking job, but individuals do not
possess this image in equal degrees. Individuals have sets of everyday theories
which make sense of their world and guide their actions; these are based on past
experiences which are unique to some degree. This is so even when two or more
individuals share various characteristics, and come from a similar location in social
geography. It is often asserted in criminology that theories of strain, or relative
deprivation, cannot be accepted as causal influences for crime because not all poor
people commit crime, or not all of the unemployed commit crime (interestingly, it
is less frequently heard that we should look at the experiences of those who do not
commit crime to see why not!). This is to make a mistake arising from generalisation.
Individuals vary in their socialisation in deprived or privileged conditions. Although
we can have certain expectations as to behaviour according to our social
classification (otherwise what does it mean to talk of class or other social forces?),
we cannot predict from this expectation that any one individual will behave in a
predetermined way.
When we say that an individual possesses an action pack of knowledge which
forms a repertoire of norms and rules for his own behaviour, we build variation
into our expectation. The action pack is clearly influenced by an individual’s
experience of participating in, or being excluded from, society’s most coveted
goods and titles – a person exists, not just as an individual but also as a member
of social categories demarcated by race (ethnicity), class and gender. The action
pack of knowledge has both a certain contextual specificity and a certain
universality; the questions the individual poses him or herself are part of certain
questions of what is deemed proper to do as a man, a woman, or otherwise. At
293
any one time, the options culturally held out simply fit into a set of possibilities.
How one learns social activities – what it means, for instance, to drink properly,
how to become a successful ganja smoker, how to carry out everyday tasks
properly – these add to the action pack of your everyday wisdom. Sociology
even has a specific branch called ethnomethodology which analyses the intricate
and complex layers of interaction and skills everyday existence calls upon; it
points out the richness of those diverse sets of understanding and social skills
which members of society draw upon to negotiate the interactions they engage
in throughout a ‘normal day’. No day is actually boring if one bores deeply
enough into its layers!
Post-modernism intensifies ambiguity, ambivalency and increases the
complexity and range of information available to everyday life. The post-modern
city, such as London, reels with diverse communication technologies and units
of cultural significance originally embedded in a (relatively) coherent structure
(the sari, the food stalls, the three-piece suite, the veiled women), which now are
random significations within diversity, plurality and interpreted (ideally) with
tolerance. What were once significations of ethnic purity, become significations
of ethnic diversity – conversely, we ask, are they thereby enjoyed or seen as
insults? This depends on the audience, and the tolerance of the audiences
sensibilities; a question of socialisation. Socialisation involves learning the
predictability of the behaviour of others; the dialectics of the civilising process
require a reciprocity of expectation. Trutz Trotha (1974) reviewed the situational
cultural factors of inner-city life, highlighting normative ambiguity and
inconsistency in the observation of conventional norms and sanctioning responses.
Inner-city poor live in the midst of both serious and petty crime (including
prostitution and drugs), varying police activity, welfare and social work officials,
and various government bureaucracies. Many of the roles and effects of the police,
social and welfare officials, as well as government bureaucracies, may appear as
much part of the problems than as part of the solutions. All these factors render
everyday life heavily upon the poor and reduce the predictability of behaviour
and life in general; to survive, a ‘hustling’ orientation is one consequence. For
Trotha the oppositions within Walter Miller’s ‘focal concerns’ of the lower-class
is a result of the reduced behavioural predictions, normative ambiguity, and
inconsistency in sanctioning. Thus the belief that luck or fate largely determine
the course of one’s life chances is intensified by the structural conditions of
deprivation and disadvantage that are necessarily beyond one’s control. There is
a growing body of writing indicating that arousal of emotion cannot be divorced
from mediation through cultural definitions of the situation (Shott, 1979;
Hochschild, 1979), although there is dispute as to the actual dynamics. However,
we clearly need to move beyond micro-level analysis into addressing not only
the social basis of emotion but also the social impact. Certain emotional states
(or the readiness with which emotions are aroused) may prepare for action, while
others inhibit. It may be that the social structural location of individuals may
294
systematically prepare them for certain emotions and decrease the frequency of
others; the development of resentment may be a case in point.
Is the idea of action pack compatible with, or antagonistic to, the idea that
personality deficiencies cause people to commit crimes? Does it fit in with the
relatively clear-cut ideas of seeking causal influences in the effects of unequal
distribution of chances in society and widespread emotional reaction to it,
particularly amongst the young, together with relative class bias in the labelling of
criminal activity in society? Certainly, the individual’s action pack can have common
elements, and items particular to that individuals’ specific experiences; it also varies
across time and space, in other words elements are added by historical specificity.
Culture and crime: an extreme example?
The first issue of The Guardian Weekly of 1984, carried an article entitled ‘A
Murder in Namibia’ relating to events on a farm, in Namibia, in 1983. A white
farmer, van Rooyen, aged 24, had tortured and killed 18 year old Thomas Kasire,
a new black worker on his farm. On account of the language he speaks and the area
he comes from, Kasire was accused by his boss of being a supporter of the national
liberation movement SWAPO (South Western African People’s Organisation).
The white farmer kept Kasire chained by the neck in his farmyard for several
days, tortured and abused him. Eventually, Kasire is killed as van Rooyen’s drinking
pals applaud and take pictures.
The article is accompanied by three pictures, one showing the murderer ‘as he
appeared in court’, wearing a suit and tie. The other two pictures are from the
`scene’ of the crime: a close-up of Kasire’s head, bleeding, one ear half cut off, a
heavy iron chain around his neck, with the white left arm of his torturer holding on
to the chain, intruding from the left into the middle foreground of the picture. The
third photograph has the caption: ‘The victim is forced to pose with a clenched fist
(SWAPO salute), while a friend of the murderer takes photos.’ The murderer himself
is in the picture, towering over the young black man whom he holds by the chain.
He is wearing farm clothes and a cap (they could also be paramilitary gear) and he
is facing the camera. The young black man looks as if he were held up on his feet
chiefly by the chain the white man holds.
These pictures provided the damning evidence. Without them, the court would
in all probability have acquitted van Rooyen, since the explanations given by him
and his white friends would have outweighed the statements of any black witnesses.
So safe were the whites in their dominant position within the apartheid system,
that the whole event was photographed at van Rooyen’s request. The act of
photography and the kind of violence were linked. The pictures were not snapped
by a journalist or observer by chance in the right place at the right time but were
deliberately taken to record the power and imbalance in the social relationship.
For Susanne Kappeler (1986) the events verge on pornography:
295
‘The victim is forced to “pose”; the perpetrator of the torture positions himself in the
other picture with reference to the camera. Another white man is behind the camera,
framing the picture. The picture may remind us of those taken by fishermen and
hunters posing with their catch, smiling into the camera. But the catch is a human
being, a victim, and thus the picture also reminds us of some of the darkest photographic
memories of the Vietnam war, those pictures which break the documentary mould
and where a temporary victor briefly poses for the camera with his victim vanquished,
acknowledging the presence of the camera, drawing it into complicity. The picture
may also remind us, or some of us, of pornography, a woman in the place of the black
man, the white men in their respective positions – in the picture, behind the camera –
unchanged.’ (1986:6)
Culture is the necessary mediation for modernity: the mileau which helps position
the moral (non)relationship between victim and offender. Post-modernist writers
argue that the hegemony of culture in modernity has both given coherence and
allowed domination: the celebration of post-modernism is of a hope that a radically
differentiated culture – a culture of pluralism and diversity – will make domination
impossible. Post-modernism will, in other words, lead to Durkheim’s idea of moral
individualism: the creation of a social individuality conscious of the interdependency
plurality and differentiation requires. But whether this hope becomes a reality is
an open question.
296
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CULTURE AND CRIME IN THE POST-MODERN

CONDITION
‘Overweening ambition always exceeds the results obtained, great as they may
be, since there is no warning to pause here. Nothing gives satisfaction and all
this agitation is uninterruptedly maintained without appeasement. Above all,
since this race of an unattainable goal can give no other pleasure but that of the
race itself, if it is one, once it is interrupted the participants are left empty-
handed. At the same time the struggle grows more violent and painful, both
from being less controlled and because competition is greater. All classes
contend among themselves because no established classification any longer
exists. Effort grows, just when it becomes less productive.’ (Emile Durkheim,
Suicide: 257)
‘The ultimate support for any social system is the acceptance by the
population of a moral justification of authority... The “new capitalism” of
the twentieth century has lacked such moral groundings, and in periods of
crisis it has either fallen back on the traditional value assertions, which
have been increasingly incongruent with social reality, or it has been
ideologically impotent.’ (Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism, 1979:77)
The challenge of culture under post-modernism: democraticism or

incoherence?
Durkheim asked how could moral individualism be achieved in modernity? While

Weber pessimistically foresaw the necessity for bureaucratic modernity, Durkheim
argued that durable social order came about in a more spontaneous or organic
fashion. The previous chapter contained two radically contrasting roles for culture.
One was the cultural prohibitions which allowed Indian people to starve rather
than commit crime; the other was a horrific crime committed in Namibia – only it
did not appear a crime to its perpetrator and immediate audience. The relationship
between (non) perpetrator and (non) victim is always a moral relationship – a
relationship mediated by culture, by sets of meanings, by sets of ‘significations’,
messages, information, pieces of larger narratives – a relationship constituted by
the resources we use to ‘represent’ the other.
For Durkheim the ‘collective conscience’ could not be simply manufactured;
Weber’s bureaucratic imagery inspired critics to warn of an impending
Orwellian world of 1984, where control of cultural imagery dominates the
social body; political rule achieved through the twin element of hegemony and
repression. Durkheim, conversely, argued for a social consciousness which
would express and reinforce the organic reality of interdependency which
expressed the continuation of social cooperation in modernity based around
the complex division of labour and differentiation and pluralism of social
spheres.
297
Two points: (i) while it is possible for political leaders to have recourse to the
rhetoric of popular purity (as we see in differing forms from Thatcher’s appeal to
Victorian values, Reagan’s appeal to the moral majority, Islamic fundamentalism,
a greater Serberia) – this is a pathological appeal in that it is premised upon the
foundation of a moral and cultural homogeneity which can only be policed through
repression (epitomised in ethnic cleansing); (ii) while it is possible to use state
power to pacify and homogenise populations (for example Socialist Bureaucracy
under Stalin or Apartheid), durable social order must retain some collective
sentiment of naturalism or voluntarism; it cannot be superimposed through the
agency of the state.
If social order is a social construction, if the traditional and custom bound forms
of social solidarity must give way for modernity to gain in progressive power, and
if state imposed regimentation is unstable, what is the ultimate guarantee of social
solidarity? Durkheim, as in all things, argued for a balance, a mean between riding
the roller-coaster of progress (with the prospect of anomie) and seeking stability
(with the prospect of stagnation and fatalism). The culture of the society must
encourage individuality without so loading the dice in favour of self-interest over
the interests of others, that no social solidarity is possible; while a society that
encourages self-denial at the expense of self-assertion would not know freedom –
it would not be modern. Cultural understandings are both resources and weapons.
Traditionally, culture reinforced rather static powers of social structure. What
happens when culture becomes relatively autonomous? Or, when the social structure
is radically differentiated? Is the cultural fluidity and rapid change of current
conditions – a feature commentators have traced to the impact of mass
communication and new technologies of transport and imagery – responsible for a
post-modernisation of culture posing new challenges and opportunities for social
order?1 While a society or social location, that offers no hope for the future also
offers no defences against social predation and crime, a society that changes with
extreme rapidity and fluidity, may rob the population of normative expectations
1 The features referred to by the post-modernisation of culture are the increasing fragmentation
and differentiation of culture, as a consequence of the pluralisation of life styles and the
differentiation of social structure; the employment of irony, allegory, pastiche and montage as
argumentative styles and as components of rhetoric; the erosion of traditional ‘grand narratives’
of legitimation in politics and society; the celebration of the idea of difference and heterogeneity
(against sameness and standardisation) as minimal normative guidelines in politics and morality;
the globalisation of post-modern culture with the emergence of global networks of communication
through satellites; the emphasis on flexibility and self-consciousness in personality and life-
style; the greater demands for reflexivity in personal and organisational development; a weakening
of the idea of coherence as the goal of personality and the scientific picture; the decline of
‘industrial society’ and its replacement by complex ‘post-fordist’ highly technological and service
orientated configurations; the decline of the demarcation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture
epitomised in the rise in acceptability of Jazz and Blues music; the technological production of
cultural forms (epitomised by the poster and the electronic guitar which leads on to Techno); the
wider acceptance of drugs as enhancers and instigators of ‘moods’; the growing acceptance of
‘inter-disciplinary’ studies (epitomised in the collapse of the line between literature and cultural
studies); etc.
298
Culture and crime in the post-modern condition
and undercut predictability of social and individual events, thus removing important
constraints on individual behaviour, and ensuing that the activities of individuals
lose their signification. If criminology has sought to provide information and some
guidance to our views on crime and punishment in modernity, the cultural challenge
of post-modernism entails that they may lose whatever meaning they have and
become lost in normative stupidity. Two contrasting positions – at least – are
possible, cultural incoherence, stupidity and indifference – we can call this the
position of MacIntyre (1981) – or a radical democratic possibility in the freeing of
cultural messages from a settled social structure – we can call this Richard Rorty’s
(1989) position. Rorty believes
our time is the first epoch in human history in which large numbers of people have
become able to separate the question ‘Do you believe and desire what we believe and
desire?’ from the question ‘Are you suffering?’ In my jargon this is the ability to
distinguish the question whether you and I have the same vocabulary from the question
of whether you are in pain? (1989:1981)
Thus Rorty believes that post-modernism has made it possible to free ‘questions
about pain from questions about the point of human life’. While Rorty points us to
a progressive and optimistic reading of post-modernism, we do not know the answer
to the question whether post-modernism is a celebration of the greater
democratisation in life-forms of the social body, or increasing noise and
ungovernability. Thus, while cultural unity has been split by the process of
modernity and the advent of post-modernism, the allure of a reactionary
fundamentalisation of society and culture, a splitting of society into the insiders
and the outsiders, the moralists and the criminals, becomes strong; whether this is
achieved by the openness of a social apartheid and repressive policing, or the market.
But there may be no fundamental contradiction between modernity and post-
modernism; hence understanding modernity may offer resources to sustain human
interaction in post-modernism.
Conceptualising modern identity
What does it mean to conceive of ourselves as modern? One of our beliefs is that
we are cut off from traditional values and ways of life. We may rejoice, interpreting
liberation from tradition as freedom, while others, with equal logic, may claim
that the results are a loss of roots, a loss of core meaning to life. We live at a
distance from what was taken for granted in earlier ages, and still taken for granted
in many societies in the world. We do not follow traditions as if they provide for us
the natural way of life. We do not define ourselves by the socially given as closely
as we believe our ancestors did. We wish to create a place for ourselves separate
from the social framework – the ideas of class, values, roles and institutions – that
have structured our parents. We almost believe that we can distance ourselves
from the framework itself, seeking authenticity in some other true form of self-
sustainability.
299
Perhaps this can be summed up in one sentence: We do not accept ourselves as

limited to the status we were born with – that is mere contingency – this
understanding is the cultural key to being modern.
What does this mean? I shall restate this from the bottom up. When we are
born, what we are born, to whom we are born, our location in social geography –
all these are not predetermined, thus our life begins as a contingency. We all could
have been something, someone else, we could have been the other: this is the
perception of contingency only known to the late-modern.2 Nothing in the history
of the world predetermined that I should be born a white male, in New Zealand, to
the particular set of parents, in their particular set of socio-economic circumstances.
There is no natural order that prefigures our existence. I might just as easily have
been born a black female in Kenya... but I was not... from the time that I am born
I can begin from no other starting point than that and where I am. The pre-modern
world fought against this existential awareness of contingency – it created the
image of God’s will, of fate, of destiny – but we moderns know of no such solace;
even if we were to seek it. The burden of dealing with contingency is the cultural
burden of being truly modern – it is the flipside of the demand to be free – it is an
awareness which comes to bite upon us only after the search for fundamental
ontological security by modern science has demonstrated the reality of process
and not some ontological bedrock. This is an existential weight which science has
created; the search for some structure in the cosmos which we humans can latch
on to, some set of deterministic social laws which structure the way things operate
and ought to be, has not just failed to uncover any, but has resulted in the realisation
that the cosmos operates in an open-ended way. The place in the order of things
one was born to in pre-modern life set limits and possibilities; being born into a
particular status meant that certain things were expected of you, certain possibilities
open to you (if born to the highest stratum the greatest possibilities were open to
you). As Durkheim indicated, for early modernity a functional division of labour
appeared to set limits upon what an individual expected in life; in times of
disturbance this may be upset, and then there would be no bounds on ambition/
desire because the sense of contingency overwhelmed the sense of the natural
order. As modernity has developed, this ideology of the natural order of things,
which provided a cultural corollary to the functional division of labour, has come
unstuck. While we once may have accepted our fate to be born into this or that part
of the functional structure, into this or that part of the operation of things, that now
merely provides our context. It represents only the locality of our position, and
neither the forms of life it holds out to us, or the possibilities it appears to naturally
offer us, are accepted as the natural limits of our existential determination. The
culture of modernity, precisely the culture of late-modernity, the culture that knows
2 In social and political theory this is the cultural underpinnings of the moral decision-making
procedure of the ‘original position’, or ‘veil of ignorance’ utilised in John Rawls’ massive Theory
of Justice (1972). In other words, whatever the social structures of a society, the position/location
of the ‘other’ might have been mine, and ‘I’, might, be the ‘other’.
300
of the death of God and embraces contingency, holds the self as the bearer of
possibilities. Everything becomes possible if only the self can transcend the
constraints of his or her context – transform the limitations of locality – but how
can this be done?
A tension boarding on an inbuilt schizophrenia is present in late modernity. Let
us recap. The self becomes the focus of the modernising process in that the
determinations of culture (the demand to become modern) works against the
determinations of the social structure (your position at birth, your skin colour,
your gender). The essence of that which you are, is not to be read from the location
of your birth, but from the creative positioning of your future. Your future depends
upon your actions, you are to be the maker of your life – the modern is the self-
made man or woman – those who merely carry out the fate of their birth are pre-
moderns wearing a false modernity; but it is structural conditions of modernity
that allows such action.
Do we have the power to realise this demand to be modern? Listen to the
American ‘realist’ sociologist C Wright Mills writing in 1959:
‘The very framework of modern society confines [people] to projects not their own,
but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass
society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they
are without power.’ (1959:3)
The reality of modern society imposes constraints: what then is the cultural message?
Does contingency demand an imagery of self-control and self-creation in modernity
to over-come the reality of social constraints? Consider Heller and Feher:
‘... it is not only the individual’s relation to his or her initial ‘context’ that becomes
contingent; the context itself also becomes contingent. Put simply, from a modern
point of view, particular social arrangements and institutions can just as well exist as
not exist. The world into which people are born is no longer seen as having been
decreed by fate but as an agglomerate of possibilities. One can shape the world as
much as one can shape oneself. At least in our imaginations, there are no limits to the
possibilities for our ‘shaping the world’. We can take the destiny of the world into our
own hands. Just as our future depends on us, so too does the future of the world. How
we can transform possibilities into destinies is now the question.’ (1988:17, emphasis
added)
We encounter a dilemma similar in structure to the classical strain theory of Merton
(1938). Instead, however, of the cultural message being the accumulation of money,
the message now is taking control of our destiny. Modernity gives us a series of
expectations as to self-realisation and personal growth – we are to become other
than what we have been through the choosing of identities, employment roles, and
seizing opportunities – but actual human beings have not fully escaped being defined
by their location in situations of enablement and restraint. Human beings will be
disappointed – they wish to take control of their selves, they wish to realise their
(future) self-potential, but are located in demeaning and restraining circumstances
– a crisis demanding action develops.
301
The post-modern condition is the contingency of the normal
Consider the interaction: contingency, normalcy, everyday, modernity.

Contingency may be a criminogenic factor – what does this claim amount to?
How can such an abstract concept as contingency have enough bite to be an
influence on crime?
The culture of contingency is both a determinate and recognisable set of
understandings, and a variable set of interpretations by individuals. An
individual accepts contingency, when, for example, he or she refuses to listen
to any claim that it had to be like this; that there is a natural reward for this or
that level of service; that this or that is your natural station in life; that this is
the appropriate level of your horizon; that you ought only to desire to this
level.
Contingency has a generality in that it is the realisation of the unnaturalness
of modernity. Contingency is the cultural fate of the project to liberate human
beings from their subjection to nature, from unchosen ties, and to resolve the
contradictions inside themselves. Contingency is the counter-claim to the idea
of the natural order, it upsets all claims for an order of things that is not wholly
satisfactory, ie that is not holding itself out as striving for justice. Contingency
recognises the impossibility of justice as a state of being that will last –
contingency is the understanding of the fluidity of life – contingency is the
understanding that while it is important to strive, while it is important to pursue
justice, a stable state of justice will be unattainable. We will never know justice
yet she is the goal.
Post-modernism has appeared to some as if it were a mood – a strange sort of
melancholia at the end of a great project – wherein we ask what modernity has all
been about, and we do not know the answer. Modernity subjected life itself to
scientific examination; we were sceptical towards the old narratives – those that
held out life as a gift of God – and asked science to tell us the answers. But science
cannot; so we keep asking the questions... with little hope of a scientific answer.
Science can tell us the how, but leaves us with the why unanswered and returns to
us the quest for meaning. Life... what is it? what is its force, its flows, wherein does
it reside? The moods of post-modernism are indices of the dialectics of everyday
existence.
Its first movement represents the misery of everyday life, its tedious tasks and
humiliations, its degradations which reflect most strongly on the lives of the
working classes and underclass. The ‘flying fucks’ that the women of slavery
had to endure, are the extreme of the reality of the lot of women in the owned
portion of humankind; a bondage intensified by child bearing and child-rearing
and the basic preoccupation with the bare necessities. Daily life weighs heaviest
upon the poorest sections – the daily tasks of many are burdened by the absence
of money; urgent negotiations with the utilities companies; the threat of gas or
electricity or water being cut off; the tone of dismissal from a petty bureaucrat at
the other end of the phone; the realm of numbers which do not meaningfully
302
relate to experienced reality; an all-too-familiar knowledge of the intimate things

beyond material reality (the connection with living death) – poor health,
‘irrational’ spontaneity, vitality; the constant recurrence of problems which appear
petty to others; unending poverty; the endlessness of want; the non-choice of
economy and abstinence, hardship, repressed desires, meanness and avarice; the
beauty of the fantasy world; the endless mirage of popular music; music videos
which cut scenes and transpose images to confuse all sense of (un)reality, leading
one to escape into the other-than-real...
Its second movement represents the power of everyday life, its flexibility,
its surprises, the adaptation of the body to variations in time and space, the
continuation of desire when its momentum is failing. The linkage of
environment and the home; the unpredictable and unmeasurable tragedy forever
lurking ready to surface. The renaissance of women, the phenomenon which
has often appeared the crushed and overwhelmed object of history and society,
but also the inevitable subject, and foundation of renewal; the creation by
humans of sensitivity and hope from recurrent blows of a world of sensory
pain; the everlasting journey of experience; the enjoining of satisfaction with
(unexpressed) need; the success of work; the encountering of pleasure in beauty;
the ability to create out of the material of everyday life from its solids and its
spaces, and to change the terminologies, to develop character in the individual
or the group; the reproduction and continuity of essential relations; the ability
of the women of Bosnia to forgive those who have killed their fathers, and
husbands, and raped their sisters...
Everyday life is the battlefield where wars are waged between the sexes,
generations, communities, ideologies; the struggle between those at home and those
not, between the adapted and those not, the shapelessness of subjective experience
and the chaos of the void; meditations between these terms and the aftermath of
emptiness, where antagonisms are bred...
How are we to understand this? Let us first look to Marx. Everyday life is
produced; this production is not the mere making of products but includes a
‘spiritual’ production, that is, the creation of social things (such as the
understanding of time and space) and the material production of things (cars,
houses, wages). Above this, there is human production; the social self-production
of ‘human beings’ in the process of historical self-development (which in turn
entails the production of social relations). Finally, for Marxism, the term
production entails re-production, not simply the biological but the perpetuation
of the social structure and human relations, of technical instruments and the
tools of industry; all those things which give structure to societies. Throughout
this social reproduction lies the binding forces of ideology. What are ideologies?
Ideologies are made of cultural understandings and interpretations (religious,
philosophical, common-sensical) of the world plus illusion. Ideologies are the
false yet the necessary – without which the system could not operate. Culture is
also a praxis, or a means of distributing meanings in a society and thus directing
the flow of the production; culture in the widest sense is an element in the means
303
of production in that it stimulates, it drives, it provides the source of ideologically

motivated actions and activities. The notion of production, thus understood, has
its full significance as production by human beings of their own existence. For
modern Marxism, modernity has become consumption driven; consumption is
twinned with production and mediated by ideology, culture, institutions and
organisations. There is a feedback between production and consumption; culture
structures and gives life to desires, wants and satisfactions. Everyday life is the
terrain of this feedback; it has a dual character, the residuum of all the specific
and specialised activities and the product of society in general. It is a point of
delicate balance and where imbalance always threatens. A revolution takes place
only where the balance of everyday life cannot be sustained.
Modern social life is unnatural in a way not knowable to the past. Conversely,
with country or village life the rhythm of nature still held its ideology, but with
urbanity this is unable to be sustained. What factors have we identified which
demand we uncover the extraordinariness of everyday life?
• man’s disembeddedness or estrangement from nature, accompanied by a feeling
of loss (loss both of nature and of the past);
• the substitution of signs and signals for symbols and symbolism;
• the dispersal of communities and the rise of individualism;
• the profane displacing (but not replacing) the sacred and the accursed;
• the advance of the division of labour and growth of specialisation, the growth
of knowledge divided into disciplines;
• a growing complexity or post-modernism surrounding culture and the location
of meaning to the normal; the condition for a global system of symbolic
interaction and exchange – the growth of the spectacle as the significant mode
of organisation of feeling in the ‘semiotic society’;
• anguish and a general sense of meaninglessness, a proliferation of signs and
signifiers, which cannot make up for the general lack of significance.
As we have constantly emphasised, however, everyday life has, and still does,
in considerable part, appear natural, unproblematic. The social science of
modernity had a crucial role in this – the ideology of positivism, together with
the functionalist approach of social science, co nspired to render life naturalised.
The former superstitions that used to pervade everyday life, and give irrational
value to objects, receded before a greater more deep-rooted irrationality that
was an extension of official rationality – nature was receding, since even the
manual labourer had mostly lost contact with his material, yet a sort of general
naturalisation of thoughts, reflections and social contacts took place. According
to those who had the tasks of investigation, of articulation – sociologists –
society was a functional formation. Everything had natural functions. This
general framework was aided by the routine of observation made possible by
positivism.
304
Positivism accepts the objectification of (social) reality. Thus, objects reflect

abstract forms that appear to belong to them, social and moral forms appear as
given in a society, so does the ritualised form of social relations. The rational is
considered normal according to the norms of a society sufficiently self-conscious
and organised for the misunderstanding to take root; and the normal becomes
the customary, and the customary is taken for natural, which in turn is identified
as the rational, thus establishing a circuit or blocking to critical awareness. The
consequences of such apparent logic is convention understood as naturalism,
naturalism understood as the rational – all contradictions are abolished, social
reality is natural, social reality is rational, but this reality is narrative, knowledge
is ideology.
But the contingency of the post-modern condition speaks to two paths. One,
the intertextuality of all; the interconnectedness of all. Two, the contingency
of all, it could have been other... what then can justify an assertion that one set
of cultural particulars are more natural, or more just, or simply superior to the
other?
The criminology of modernity predominantly assumed a normal culture and a
sub-culture; the normal was associated with the middle-class ethic of western
industrialised society focused around achievement, stable families and economic
exchange. While Lemert (1964) could criticise Merton for assuming the domination
of one set of cultural values, one answer to crime implicitly taken has been to hope
that all of society becomes middle class. In Wolfgang and Ferracuti’s (1967) The
Subculture of Violence, the middle class ethic was regarded as variable and rich
enough to contain crime. The middle class ethic kept at bay the ironies and nihilism
of a subculture of violence the working classes were prone to. What, however, is
nihilism and why does it appear as a cultural phenomena so much today? Consider
Helmut Thielick writing in 1969:
‘A middle class life is stable because its forms have the power of myth. Those
forms silently shape perceptions and expectations. Hunger, disease, ignorance,
confusion, violence, and risk – for most of the human beings in history the stuff of
existence – are kept outside the hedges of the suburbs. It is no wonder that young
people of the middle class can hardly understand the philosophy and literature of
the humanities; they have little experience of what most historical peoples meant
by “humanity”.
What is remarkable is that the radical young have in the last few years seen through
the illusions of scientific, technical, democratic stability. They have tasted nothingness.
Their refusal to accept the most powerful fantasy of security ever attained by human
beings is one of the great spiritual triumphs of history. Their lack of spiritual discipline,
of a tradition of dealing with nothingness, makes their triumph fragile and dangerous.’
(1969:3-4)
The middle class ethic denoted a world that made sense; a world of functional forms
– the criminology (and this is the criminology of the Chicago School and Merton) of
the middle class, was the criminology which offered the public policy of social
organisation, of creating the conditions for a controlled bureaucratic
(semi)meritocracy. We were offered important messages that wages and rewards
305
were determined on the basis of performance and desert – but in a world of various
strategies of desert and value, in a world where it is only too apparent that those born
into a certain social station have the greatest chance of going to the right schools, of
attaining the advanced qualifications necessary for the higher paid occupations, how
can a sense of community and objectivity be created? In other words, how can the
cultural messages of the society and time, offer a sense of justice?
Contingency and the sense of justice
Certainly ‘justice is relative to social meanings’ (Walzer, 1983:312). A classic notion

of justice has been the giving to each what he or she is due. Thus justice is internal to
the cultural sets of understanding of function and desert. If the social structure is
static (a feature of the social orders Gellner (1994) has called ‘segmentary’ societies,
and which Durkheim referred to as characterised by mechanical solidarity), then the
social meanings are integrated and hierarchical – the sense of justice is a fixed and
reassuring ideology (and to our modern minds supportive of inequality). Walzer,
using the example of the Indian caste system, refers to a summary account of the
hierarchy operating in the distribution of grain in an Indian village:
‘Each villager participated in the division of the grain heap. There was no bargaining
and no payment for specific services rendered. There was no accounting, yet each
contributor to the life of the village had a claim on its produce, and the whole produce
was easily and successfully divided among the villagers.’ (Quoted in Walzer, 1983:313)
While everybody had a claim, each persons claim varied according to his station
in the order of things. The distribution was unequal, but perceived as just. We say
that the villagers shared in a set of doctrines which supported the caste system;
they did not distance themselves as individuals out of the totality of this universe
of meanings. An individual could only perceive the distribution as unjust if he or
she could distance him or herself from the circle of the meanings in which he or
she was emersed.
A sense of separation and distance – which has been traced to many things,
christianity, capitalism, science, to masculine modalities – is central to late-
modernity. It is undeniable that our relations to ourselves are clearly affected by
distance; by movement out of locality we are told that we are free, we should
choose rewarding lifestyles, we should be authentic, we should be self-calculating,
self motivating and we should view ourselves as an unfinished life project. What is
self-development if the self is absolutely fixed? It is the achievement of our telos...
but in the contingency of the modern condition there is no telos. Perhaps the real
message of Alisdair MacIntyre’s (1981) analysis in After Virtue, was that outside
of the conditions of the well-balanced community the process of self-development
becomes more important than the image of what you are to be. In other words the
goal of participating in a process of building ourselves, can be defined independently
of any particular content the self possesses. The process of creating yourself, of
306
acting, becomes more important than being ‘good’ (as laid down by some structure
of virtue), or being a person of ‘virtue’.
Is it too strained to apply the distinction Weber made between substantive and
formal rationality to this process of self-creation in late-modernity? Do these
messages of restructuring, redevelopment, retraining of the self, amount to a formal
methodology of development of the self – the unification of ourselves, the striving
for freedom to develop, the searching for new possibilities, the creation of
individuality, all of these can be goals and processes – referred to without mentioning
any concrete substance or content for our choices. Is it the case that the process of
self-development itself can become the goal? And is this reflected in social
development, where social progress may become an endless sea of change without
any substantive goal to be reached?
If so, then we cannot satisfy the ambitions of self-creation and self-direction –
we cannot make ourselves into that wherein we are happy for what we are
substantively – the secret to satisfaction/happiness will have to be something other.
Socially, there can not be a just society in the sense of a state of being, or organisation
that is the end of the search – the image of the goal of the just society will have to
be something else.3
3 Consider a central cultural message inscribed in the ethical philosophy of modernity, namely,
utilitarianism, which tells us to treat social life as a question of calculation, of seeing others as
units to be added up or subtracted. For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant it was never right
to use another person as a means. However, he saw the whole cultural edifice of modernity as
increasingly embracing an alternative view: the other is to be treated as the instrument of your
own self-satisfaction. The individual was to be the centre of a system of calculation, a structure
of rational choice... the others were mere pawns in the game of self-gratification.
How am I made aware of the consequences of my actions? How do I assume responsibility for
my actions? In unmediated form preforming our actions towards others become the expressions
of our will – of our very humanity. But modern life is a radically mediated life; the other we come
into contact with is not directly visible to us, is not revealed, but identified; we cannot have direct
experience of the selves we encounter around us. We rely upon an array of things interposed
between our ‘self’ and the reality of the ‘other’ – we rely upon representations of the other. This
is the unavoidable sociality of role, status, of social distance; the combination of social distance
and utilitarian thought in the conditions of modernity tells us to use the other as the instrument of
our will. From Kant onwards we can understand crime as the deepest expression of the culture of
utilitarianism. Psychic distance is perhaps proportionate to lack of knowledge as to the other. Our
ignorance of our actions is partly a consequence of the chains of intermediaries between ourselves
and our acts. The longer the chain of intermediaries the less one retains control over them. How
are the others represented to the self? Consider pornography. What is pornography? Pornography
is not sex, it is not eroticism, rather it is the representation of women as objects. It is the presentation
of women as objects of use, abuse, humiliation and submission in such a way usually that we are
told this is their real role.
We may call the situation of embeddment as a structure of coherent and intergrated cultural
messages as narratives as hard culture, our position, in the contemporary West, is not embeddment
in hard culture, rather it is disorientatory, pulsating, multivarious, a mixture of language bites,
significators which float free from their structure of signification – pieces of larger narratives
which have broken free.
Instead of intergration our locality is the post-modern city – and cultural melange supported by
bureaucracy and communication technology. Within this terrain everyday life takes its forms and
energy.
307
The melange of the late or post-modern
Late modern society is characterised by a fluidity in ideology and boundaries. The

political ideologies of democracy, communism, socialism, liberalism,
conservativism are blurring; the modern boundaries between states are collapsing
(USSR, Yugoslavia, Rwanda), governments are losing control of their economies
(the effect of internationalisation of capital) and cannot contain the internal integrity
of the cultural imagery (satellite TV etc). The citizenship of a country does not
overlap with a particular cultural imagery and goods, or necessarily constrain the
style of the person. Traditional meanings of health, illness, the human body,
reproduction, medicine, sexuality, the family, intimacy, love, education, work,
leisure, science, religion, art, entertainment, the private and the public are being
destroyed or rendered unstable. As these effects bite, nostalgia for the supposed
certainties of the past lead to uncomplicated images of the past being represented
in the medium of popular culture.
The late modern or post modern is characterised by the cultivation of
consumption, consumer life styles which were established under capitalism, and
which render the self as a matter of signification, as a matter of the style of
presentation. The public self is an array of masks ranked by the prestige and
exchange value of their appearance(s), located in a internationalised media-
orientated mass culture in which the meaning of personal civility, personal pleasure
and desire, is principly understood by values flowing from the technologies of
representation (advertising, films, television, magazines). The past and present are
intermingled (noisy, brightly coloured TV advertising is laced with the soft nostalgia
of old black-and-white films (in 1994, as Clinton prepared to invade Haiti, a series
of carefully staged black-and-white photographs were released to remind the public
of Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962), classical music (16th century
religious music provides the score for advertisements promoting aftershave
products). By the early 1980s Lyotard argued that cultural eclecticism had become
the post-modern way of life, a new international cultural subject becomes the norm:
‘... the degree zero of contemporary culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western,
eats McDonalds’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in
Tokyo and “retro” cloths in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.’
(1984:76)
Open the weekly guide to activities in London, Time Out, where do you want to go
in London tonight? We could watch a play from Britain, US, Brazil, China; opera
from Italy, France and Russia; ballet from Poland, and Japan; or we can watch a
movie from almost everywhere (mostly US if you want to go the mainstream large
cinemas but a large range of countries/languages if you go to the smaller or
repertory cinemas). We can eat, well, lets start with Asian... Japanese, Chinese,
Korean, Malaysian... anything... Then go to a range of nightclubs... All one needs
is money...
Surrounded by this pulsating melange a degree of confusion arises.
308
The skills of post-modern living: or how can we live in the absence of

‘real’ meaning?
Modernity set out the project of building the good society upon the firm foundation
of secure knowledge, but knowledge has become temporary, a matter of
experimental strength. Knowledge proliferates providing an immense number of
studies or bites of information. Knowledge was meant to bring emancipation
(consider Marx’s argument that truth would mean escape from ideology) the end
to victimisation, the end to humans doing cruelty to others.
The increase in information, the depiction in myriad forms of reality, makes it
difficult to conceive of a single reality. We become drunk with images.
In Fatal Strategies: crystal revenge, Jean Baudrillard (1990) presents post-
modernism as the disappearance of true meaning as we become surrounded by a
pulsating ecstasy or communication of meanings. Modernity has produced the
distorted intensification of certain elements of its forms, and we have moved
into a social environment of play and localised enjoyment but melancholy,
boredom and pessimism impact upon us when we consider making sense of the
larger picture. Whereas modernity was seemingly based on a structure of binary
oppositions – true/false, male/female, insider/outsider, white/black, sane/insane,
normal/deviant – increasing differentiation has made confidence in each of these
identities appear simplistic. Modernity itself has become bored with the attempt
to reconcile them. Instead it has allowed their proliferation. We are locked into
an indefinite process wherein each of these terms or oppositions no longer allude
to some stable reality, but are merely a process of bids to signify, or to position,
the unknowable. We are surrounded by images and information bites which look
obscene if we believe they depict some natural reality. In our search for the real,
for the authentic, we have become seduced by signs. It is no longer possible to
make sense of the world in its totality, we are adrift in a sea of communication –
reality is debauched by signs, it becomes a perversion of reality. Where are we?
What is the meaning of our present times? How can we actually tell? We move
inside a spectacular distortion of facts and representations – the triumph of
simulation. How can talk of socialisation make sense? What are we going to
socialise the next generation into if there is no stable social structure for them to
find their place? As a young, black, solo mother put it in talking of rearing her
son in New York:
‘How can I give my child a sense of real being in the midst of all those signs?’
(Personal Communication)
A range of writers, such as Wilson and Herrnestein (1985) and Charles Murray
(1985; 1990) imply that a cultural change has occurred which has resulted in a
different appreciation of time amongst late-modern youth. The time-horizon has
been shortened; instant, rather than delayed gratification has resulted in the pursuit
of short-term goals at the expense of building up long term projects. This short-
term time horizon is said to result in a willingness to disregard the normative
309
structures which are supportive of longer term methodologies and projects. This
change in time horizons is said to be a crucial part of the culture-of-poverty and,
for Murray, is indicative of the development of an underclass (see Chapter
Seventeen). Writers such as Murray however, distort if they imply that being anti-
human is the conscious, although irrational, longer-term choice of increasing
numbers of people in late-modernity and thus determines the criminogenic
situation of the underclass – the question is rather how can one construct a strong
humanity in the midst of the ocean of signs that present us only with reflections.
And it would be easier to resist, to keep sane, to keep normal, if we believed that
these were simply the signs imposed by ‘those who have the power’ (in sections of
American Black narratives, for example, it has been seriously argued that AIDS
and drugs may have been created by white elites to destroy black youth), but the
meta-narratives of capitalism, socialism, racism and the secure power elites have
become unstable. Late modernity is a world of signs and multi-layered
processes... without a dominating master key.
Put another way, late or post-modernity has become a systematic condition
without a corollary centre of political and social action which serves as the
touchstone of all others. We cannot believe in the one meta-narrative. As
criminologists we move from the one perspective, such as that of David Garland in
Punishment and Welfare (1985) to multiple perspectives as in Punishment and
Modern Society (1990) which we understand as connected in an interactive
development. Reality becomes interactional.
Addressed on another terrain, one cannot any more believe in a sociology of
deviance or in the progressive typologising of positivism – for the ascription deviant
is by the signification of censure and to believe in positivism’s ability to tackle
imminent finality is senseless reason.
What can social progress mean? Marxists used to believe that the world would
be moved forward through a series of conflicts or dialectical struggles which
would finally result in reconciliation, but why did we think reconciliation is the
end of history? Is not late-modernity sworn to extremes. For Baudrillard it is
clear that social diversity does not aim for equilibrium, but is merely pulsating
radical antagonisms incapable of reconciliation or synthesis. While this is the
principle of growth, it is also the principle of evil or the victory of unreason. The
processes of the world do not proceed of their own accord to any utopia of
triumphant harmony.
What tactics therefore are possible if we lose sight of positivism and
functionalism? One (perhaps it was after all De Sade’s) is to fight obscenity and
crime not in terms of a dialectical opposition (ie to oppose crime by punishment)
but by taking it on its own terms in search of limits (to offer films, TV shows which
are only crimes, only full of the symbolism of violence so that we may be cleansed
of violence in our passive selves). We seek the radical secret quality of truth by
opposing the false with the even falser, not in opposing the ugly by the beautiful
but looking for the uglier than ugly; by meeting the monstrous. We cannot oppose
310
the visible to the hidden; we can only use more and more forms of visibility, but
our search is always for that which is more hidden than hidden: the secret. We are
committed to an ascent to extremes.
We have raised every trait to a superlative power in a spiral of increasing
complexity and technical verbosity whereby we extend the true into the truer, the
beautiful into the more beautiful in search of the more beautiful than beautiful, the
realer than real. Ecstasy and inertia: we lie tired on our bed exhausted from the
performance of the daily life, do we really want to perform at that restaurant date?
Yes we shall go, but we place on the post-modern escutcheons of the (non)self our
roles, our jewels, our designer clothing. We go to seduce, and this seduction is
achieved not by some simple attraction (not by the presentation of the self, for that
remains hidden, in private) but by the redoubled attraction of a sort of challenge –
do we repeat the story – what is presented is not the (other) true self that was left
on our bed with the discarded jeans, but a different true, one that has absorbed all
the energy of the false (‘I feel a con’) a simulation. But the simulation is truer than
the true, it has greater performability, a dazzling over performance, which works
through the multiplication of the formal qualities of social skills.
We live in the age of the model and the effigy of the model assured by the
variety of wigs – the wig means she can change style, he can change age. The body
becomes the ‘living display unit of the post-modern person’. (Lefebvre, 1984:173)
The model is truer than true, since she/it is the quintessential of the significant
features of a situation producing a vertiginous sensation of truth. The super-model
achieves in the domain of fashion the being of more beautiful than the beautiful.
The fascinations which seduce in a process greater than any one value judgment.
The superficial, the fragile, the total passion, the desire, the imagination... Fashion
is the ecstasy of the beautiful, a pure and empty form of an aesthetic which is
spinning upon itself. The real becomes lost in the multiplicity of simulation. The
same process occurs in all the sites of communications. On the television news
real events follow each other in a dizzying, stereotypical, unreal and recurrent
fashion that dulls sense, while providing an uninterrupted concatenation for the
allotted time space. Real news has a duration of use and exchange value, a shelf
life similar to the brand name of the jeans. Things have stopped being real. Our
communication processes offer us a form of hyper-reality; they provide a cancer
of information. The search for knowledge has taken revenge upon its human actors
in excrescence. The construction process of knowledge and power is short-circuited
by a monstrous overkill.
What are the sites of everyday life? While the greatest damage of crime may be
in the unreported damages of white-collar crime (pollution, computer scams,
government corruption, political mismanagement) quantitatively official crime is
the activity in the main of youth – today adolescents are given or demand their
own operational physical and electronic environment (TV, bedrooms, CD players,
cars, street corners, clubs, schools, sports, hobbies, make-up, drugs) where they
learn to understand, appropriate and value the symbols of happiness, eroticism,
311
taste, power, meaning, pulsation, highs, and personal experience. What is at stake?
The search for a locality, an experience which is uniquely one’s own. An
individuality which is learnt to be expressed through hair style, clothing, perfumes,
aftershave lotions, make-up and jewellery which is put on in private and worn in
public. For Lefebvre the pursuit of an authentic self becomes tied into the
methodologies and roles of the market: consumption, wearing, display:
‘... everybody is confronted in his daily life with the heart breaking choice between
non-freedom or non-adaption.
Youthfulness with its operational environment... enables adolescents to appropriate
existing symbolisations, to consume symbols of happiness, eroticism, power and the
cosmos by means of expressly elaborated metalanguages such as songs, newspapers
articles, publicity – to which the consumption of real goods is added; thus a parallel
everyday life is established. The adolescent expresses such a situation in his own way,
stresses it and compensates for it in the trances and ecstasies (simulated or sincere) of
dancing.’ (1884:171)
We can see in the combination of dance and drug – ecstasy in the rave scene – the
perfection of the late-modern commodification and consumerisation of life (now
ecstasy becomes available in a tablet form) and a music fits a drug perfectly, a
music which is the production of technology (techno or jungle). Under the influence
of the drug ecstasy, the brain patterns change to fit the music... where is reality?
What is substance, what is enchantment? What is the cause of this technically
enhanced dizziness? What is so post-modern about ecstasy? Take a rave with large
scale video screens. Ravers dance to techno or jungle (an even more technically
enhanced techno music) while around them are screens where a simultaneous video
is shown of the dance floor – they watch themselves while tripping on the drug
which increases the feeling of fellow-feeling; feelings, emotions, have become
hyper-real. The whole is an ecstasy of simulated communication and simulated
empathy. The totality is a lived experience which owes its existence to a technology
of music and drugs – to the creation of technologies of the real, and the
manufacturing of the real and understandings of the real. The whole is real, while
it is comprised of manufactured realities. And what is actually the supposed reality
of the whole?
What is everyday life for those who cannot club everyday? Lefebvre asks how
can one escape the orbit of a youthfulness which is a simulation of ‘fulfilment,
charm, happiness, completeness’?
‘The inevitable outcome of such tuned-up, geared-down dizziness is a feeling of
incalculable discomfort and unrest, a sense of frustration that cannot easily be
distinguished from satiety, a craving for make-believe, compensations, and evasions
into unreality.’ (Ibid: 171)
In this loveless everyday life eroticism is a substitute for love’, youth the measure
of joy and freedom. The cult of eros and youth (love and death) turns sexuality
into a commodified entity traded for the simulation of intimacy and love. But as
ageing takes place the young woman finds the social structure is not yet totally
312
open: patriarchy works its magic and in early adulthood women are usually once
again placed within the male domain (faithful wives) who now become a team set
to consume the late-modern cultural symbolism of adulthood (TV, VCR’s, family
cars, house, foreign holidays). The alternative: solo parenting...
We have attunement to systematicity: consider two paths – One the pursuit of
pure desire, the perfection of desire, can it be attained? Second the
institutionalisation of romantic love via the modern marriage for love.
Can the first be satisfied? For Lefebvre desire can not be satisfied by the
possession of the significants that it sought when desire was aroused.
‘Desire refuses to be signified, because it creates its own signs as it arises – or simply
does not arise; signs or symbols of desire can only provoke a parody of desire that is
never more than a pretence of the real thing.’ (1984:172)
The commodification of desire, of all forms from the commodification of love into
sexuality, or the commodification of feeling good into drugs, means that desire
cannot of its nature be ever satisfied no matter how many commodities desire
accumulates.
Location by consumption patterns
Late modernity offers equal access to the world of the image – as a viewer – and
we demand equal access to the goods so (re)presented – as a participant. The late
modern demand of citizenship is for access to an equal standard of consumption.
For Turner:
‘Equality of opportunity allows individuals to enter a race at the same point, but it
does not guarantee equality of outcome; indeed it partly requires significant
inequalities in terms of ultimate benefits. Social groups which experience major
disadvantages will seek to achieve greater equality of conditions, which will
compensate for differences in individual capacities. Employing the analogy of an
athletic race, we can say that elderly participants within the games will seek some
compensation (such as starting the race in advance of younger competitors).’
(1988:44)
Many commentators regard the races of late modernity as a return to status;
modernity has turned cyclical. Whereas the utopia of modernity is self-definition,
the self needs a language involving the recognition of others to understand him or
herself. Socially, personal worth in early modernity may have escaped from the
feudal hierarchies of status into a class structure defined in relation to the system
of production (working class, middle class, upper class); late-modernity tends to
make such definition of class increasingly redundant. Instead, consumption patterns
and the achievement of lifestyle serve to locate new forms of stratification. While
this may appear unorganised – it certainly will be more fluid and apparently chaotic
than in early and middle modernity – the game will have rules. The overriding rule
is recognition, or stratification, on the basis of consumption, and the presentation
313
of (self)image this consumption makes possible. Purchasing consumer goods

becomes an investment in a status claim, which may or may not pay off. The time
period is short, a new item may be purchased and the old one taken to the opportunity
shop or thrown out almost immediately. For Baudrillard (1988) in this late-modern
consumer society, objects are not purchased for use, but so that they can function
as signs. The brand name prominently displayed on the jacket matters. The
previously important, utilitarian, characteristic as a garment for warmth, becomes
a lesser function in their new role as signs, providing a reading as to quality of the
product and the type of person weaning it. The status (the standing of the person)
becomes visible through consumption:
‘Within ‘consumer society’, the notion of status, as the criterion which defines social
being, tends increasingly to simplify and to coincide with the notion of ‘social standing’.
Yet ‘social standing’ is also measured in relation to power, authority and responsibility.
But in fact: There is no real responsibility without a Rolex watch! Advertising refers
explicitly to the object as a necessary criterion: You will be judged on – An elegant
woman is recognised by – etc. Undoubtedly objects have always constituted a system
of recognition (reperage), but in conjunction, and often in addition to other systems
(gestural, ritual, ceremonial, language, birth status, code of moral values, etc). What
is specific to our society is that other systems of recognition (recognisance) are
progressively withdrawing, primarily too the advantage of the code of ‘social
standing’.’ (1988:19).
In this analysis, the industrial system with its production of commodities for
exchange, has been replaced with a system where the production of signs for
communication is paramount. But a new stable system cannot be based on
cybernetics, instead we are surrounded by simulations and indeterminacy;
instability is inbuilt. It has become difficult to grasp the reality of one’s social
position; the supposed concrete reality of the modern social system based on
ones’ place in the system of production, ones’ class location and the cultural
signification of ones’ locality, has imploded on itself leaving us lost in a vast sea
of media messages, significations, referential objects pointing to a reference
points of their own making; in short, to use Baudrillard’s phrase, we live in a
system of the hyper-reality of self-referential systems. Our cultural indices, our
cultural signposts, are signs which point to other signs rather than to any certain
reality.
Located amidst the swirl of late or post-modern culture the individual inhabits
a circle of image, simulation, stimulation, desire and materiality: but can
contemporary desire be satisfied?
Criminology has worked with rather basic models of desire. From Merton (1938)
onwards, criminology saw the overriding goals of material success and crime as a
response to the frustration of that desire. Perhaps Durkheim’s original formulation
was richer, it moved more towards the possibility of a desire which could never be
satisfied, no matter what material goods were provided. The question for
criminology is, has modernity unleashed insatiable desire(s) which cannot now be
brought under control?
314
Desire, growth, materiality and the coherence of practical justice
A rather neglected criminological theory of crime, desire and culture is that of W

I Thomas (1909, 1923). Thomas argued an inevitable contradiction arose between
the desires and needs of individuals and the social order. The task of social control
was to mediate and regulate the four central desires of an individual – for security,
new experiences, response, and recognition – through a cultural moral code or
‘definitions of situations’. This needs to be coherent to prevent social
disorganisation. As American society was developing, the cultural surrounds were
throwing up sets of competing definitions of behaviour, and issuing new demands
for rights and freedoms. Thomas saw, in particular, greater opportunities for
young women with new public settings of office, stores and factories. Young
women were being subjected to conflicting and competing demands. In The
Unadjusted Girl, Thomas argued that sexuality took on a new exchange value: ‘...
sex is used as a condition of the realisation of other wishes. It is their capital’
(1923:98).
For women, located in the social disorganisation of the new city and conflicting
cultural messages, sex became an item to be traded, and an instrument for
materialising the desires for ‘security, new experience, and response’.
The desires, Thomas acknowledges, are not desires for material things, but rather
desires for existential phenomena for which material things are medium. In his
studies for The Gang, Thrasher (1937) defined these wishes as ‘lively energies’
which helped make adolescent life free and wild. Gang members were not immoral
– they actually had moral codes of their own – but their language for expressing,
and the ways of achieving their desires, were deviant. The activities of the gangs
were full of adventure and fun not rivalled in the playgrounds, or the more orderly
portions of the city.
What offers both recognition and self-worth in the culture of contingency? For
Hume the self as an embodied theatre makes sense of life through its biography, its
memory and the criteria it holds as to value. The self has a project when it approaches
the world as the site for activities which provide meaning – thus the self is dependent
upon the cultural messages of the world to find its direction, to locate its desires
for authenticity, fulfilment and meaning. Perhaps this is the message of control
theory (both Durkheim, Thomas, Thrasher and Hirschi may be agreed on this), in
that the narratives of civil society serve to constrain one by providing images of
the good, and allocating value for your endeavours; these informal patterns constrain
since they determine whether your actions are worthwhile or viewed as shameful
by your peers and important others. Classical criminology is mostly read as setting
up a formal system of criminal justice but this formal structure and the use of the
utilitarian science of ethics to control the rational desire of the populace for pleasure
and the avoidance of pain sat on top of assumptions concerning civil society for
the middling masses. While the dangerous classes needed to the rationalised,
Bentham listed a whole host of social sanctions which the ‘normal’ person was
315
constrained by in everyday life. We can call these factors determining the integrity
of everyday actions. For those who would, or could, not be so controlled by rational
calculation, Bentham indicated the Panopticon – imprisonment was the fate of the
irrational. The divisions rational versus irrational, those able to appreciate the truths
of political economy, versus those unable to, became the division of the prison
walls. This was a feature endemic to utilitarianism (Morrison, 1995,b). The question
is simple: can the culture of post-modernism operate to constrain crime? Or does
its differentiation, pluralism, its hyper-reality, so distort bearings that cultural/social
disorganisation result?
The return to neo-classicism, with the demands for fixed and severe punishment,
coupled with the demand that individual responsibility must be strengthened, has
been prompted in part by the confusion engendered by the apparently dramatic
increases in crime when the West appears to be the lands of plenty. Modernity has
given material abundance and technological progress, so why all the crime? Are
we not surrounded by the instruments of happiness? And, as opposed to the images
of classical utilitarianism, we are not being force fed the entities which will ‘make
us happy’; we have released the market to satisfy our individual preferences. Is it
rather that we have so many items of happiness, so many consumerable entities,
that we cannot carry them all, cannot enjoy them all? Or is it we can observe them
all, but enjoy only a few?
And existential questions arise... is this the home the early moderns thought
they were constructing for us? Does material plenty, or the stimulation and material
gratification of our desires, guarantee satisfaction? It is a cruel irony that
improvements in the standard of living leave us more comfortable but not happier...
And by some strange inversion every granted wish may take us further from
wholesomeness and inner peace.
This did not appear so to Thomas Hobbes, who set out a creed that remains a
central part of the official consciousness of the industrial liberal-democratic world
today. To Hobbes, happiness is a function of the goods we possess and the things
we consume: it is a result of urges satisfied. In his best known work, Leviathan, he
summarised the attainment of happiness in a classic definition:
‘Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desires,
that is to say, continually prospering, is what men call FELICITY.’
Taken in this light, the introduction of massive advertising and credit buying are
the two greatest steps ever taken to promote the happiness of man. Advertisements
create new desires, and consumer credit makes it possible for these cravings to be
instantly gratified. The unbroken circle of new desires and satisfactions guaranteed,
amounts to that ‘continual prospering’ which men call felicity. Continual success
– ie happiness – is the share of the citizen who desires, purchases and consumes in
proportion to the instalment payments he can meet. What is purchased need not be
a fabricated object – it may be love; nor need the payment be a sum of money – it
316
may be time to listen to a concerto, another person’s troubles or the promise of

security.
Is the legacy of Hobbes correct? Is happiness the satisfaction of desires on the
basis of astuteness in trading? No, we simplify the problem if we read the
process of desire and consumption so narrowly. As Nietzsche and others
recognised, goods are not simply objects of materiality, but significations of
status, or ‘positional goods’, ie goods denoting the relative status of the wearer/
possessor.
How does this effect criminological theorising? Criminology not only operates
with underdeveloped models of desire, but also largely restricts itself to narrow
interpretations of strain theories; wherein crime is the result of frustration by the
social structure of the needs which culture identifies for the individual. Today,
even in the most contemporary of mainstream criminological theory, ideas of
positionality and status are underdeveloped. Instead ideas of needs and greed
predominate. For example, Braithwaite argues that both common crimes and white-
collar crime have a common explanation:
‘A general theory of both white-collar and common crime can be pursued by
focusing on inequality as an explanatory variable. Powerlessness and poverty
increase the chances that needs are so little satisfied that crime is an irresistible
temptation to actors who have nothing to lose... When needs are satisfied, further
power and wealth enables crime motivated by greed. New types of criminal
opportunities and new paths to immunity from accountability are constituted by
concentrations of wealth and power. Inequality thus worsens both crimes of poverty
motivated by need for goods for use and crimes of wealth motivated by greed enabled
by goods for exchange. Furthermore, much crime, particularly violent crime, is
motivated by the humiliation of the offender and the offender’s perceived right to
humiliate the victim. In egalitarian societies, it is argued, are more structurally
humiliating. Dimensions of inequality relevant to the explanation of both white-
collar and common crime are economic inequality, inequality in political power
(slavery, totalitarianism), racism, ageism, and patriarchy’ (1991:40, emphasis is the
original).
At stake, however, is not a simple greed for goods for exchange as mere wealth,
but goods for status. Goods, commodities, become readable: possession of goods
serves as signs of position and identity. Similarly, accumulation of goods signifies
power, as indeed does the power derived from the humiliation of another in the
perpetration of crime (power to humiliate, power to outwit).
Put another way, what is at stake is the creation of a meaningful location and
signification of being. The modernism of Marx and Durkheim gave us a legacy of
alienation and anomie, in which the frustration caused by systematic distancing of
people from the goods which the culture held out as the source of value (labour
reward for Marx, participation for Durkheim), resulted in the need for crime. But
we are no longer in the fear of alienation but rather in the morass of communication.
Weber told us of the fundamental need humans have for a meaningful cosmos
(why else did they dream up God(s)?), and warned of fundamental human
317
experiences being endangered by modernity, by the industrialisation and

compartmentalisation which has occurred – the spread of machines mediates our
contact with the world removing the experience of using the entirety of our bodies
in the service of a task. Culture and bodies interact – we need to feel, to desire.
Today, few of our normal tasks cause us to sweat; in the civilised world more
sweat is due to worry than to work. Perhaps the only activities left that involve the
whole body are sex, sport and dancing, and possibly in sublimated and distorted
style, the taking of certain drugs. Our devotion to them reflects a need for, and joy
in, total involvement; at stake is ecstasy. As Becker (1963) and others have pointed
out, part of the problem with drugs that appears to upset moral entrepreneurs, is
that they provide us with an artificial way to fulfil certain desires and cravings for
bodily experiences. Consider Finestone’s description of the meaning that heroin
use had for the ‘cool cats’ who had created a cultural identity claiming superiority
over the ‘square’ others:
‘It was the ultimate “kick”. No substance was more profoundly tabooed by conventional
middle-class society. Regular heroin use provides a sense of maximal social
differentiation from the “square”. The cat was at last engaged, he felt, in an activity
completely beyond the comprehension of the “square”.’ (1964:285)
Perhaps what is being said in the discussion of late-modern culture, is that there is
no one overriding criterion. There are various codes of success.
Consequently in a mobile late-modern society everyone is likely to feel
somewhat insecure. Success in the framework of one set of values, is not success
in the other. One reads a book encouraging consumption, and buys a book which
offers another view, say A River Sutra. Personal enlightenment verses the
accumulation of wealth.
Many of the codes, much of the criteria for success and security, from another
perspective, appear illusions. But civil society does not collapse – in fact, in many
respects, it is in rather good shape. Take a central theme of liberal civil society:
tolerance (classically expressed by John Stuart Mill in The Essay On Liberty but
by now fundamental). What are the conditions for one’s tolerance? The early
idea of tolerance as a strategy of accommodation while assimilation takes place,
in other words, while difference is transformed into similarity, seems to have
been replaced by tolerance as the foundational methodology of enabling a social
solidarity to be established over difference. Late modern civil society flourishes
on difference, on experimentation, and for most of this century it has been felt
this lay at the root of Western economic success. While historically it does
appear that tolerance was required to create and sustain modern economic
prosperity, the advent of Japanese and Far Eastern success has presented us with
new challenges. We may not need to be tolerant to be economically successful;
particularly if we do not need the whole population to be involved as producers
and full consumers.
318
Understanding the (non)reality of crime: the non-positivist sign
For Baudrillard it is becoming difficult to distinguish Disneyland from the real

America – when we think of Disneyland we think it is fantasy, and thus believe
there is a real America somewhere else. However, we err if we think Disneyland is
false, Disneyland is America, it is real, except it is hyper-real. The new social order
makes it difficult to accept the binary oppositions of the true-false, allowed-
prohibited, science-metaphysics, black-white, woman-man – reality has become a
spectacle, and the social world a cosmos of swirling world of signs.
No over-reaching theory of the social can be produced. Every perspective is but
one perspective. Sociality is multiple... pluralist... the belief of criminology in
‘subcultures’, in others words, to priviledge the norm, and the other as thereby
inferior, becomes the visualisation of merely different phenomena... diverse
aspects of the de-centred social cosmos. How can we identify the normal and the
sub? That is not to say that we cannot do it, but that we have to develop a different
methodology for post-modernism. One question re-occurs... if God is dead how is
it possible to commit a true crime? How is it possible, in other words, to really
transgress? If post-modernity absorbs everything, and if there is no Super Other –
for if there is no God then there is no Devil – how is it possible to do anything that
really opposes this new social order? Nothing can be refused, everything is
available for an appropriate sign, for an appropriate price (one among other
systems of signification). How can one seduce if one is surrounded by sex?
‘When desire is entirely on the side of demand; when it is operationalised without
restrictions, it loses its imaginary and, therefore, its reality; it appears everywhere,
but in generalised simulation. It is the ghost of desire that haunts the defunct reality of
sex. Sex is everywhere, except in sexuality.’ (Baudrillard, 1990:5)
If reality is intertextuality, if deconstruction cannot draw us to some core of the
natural... how can we investigate crime? What is a crime if not a set of significants
that have been used previously? Is that person taking cocaine really a criminal? Is
that woman saying yes to the driver of that car really a prostitute? What is a
prostitute? Is the corporation that gets information concerning the side effects of
its drugs and neither passes on the information, or withdraws the drug from sale,
really criminal? Does it have to be in breach of its duties for us to say it is a crime?
By what criteria can legislation and censure proceed?
The cultural paradox of post-modernism: energy and exhaustion
Post-modernism... the world of the hyper-real is the world of the hyper-active, a

world that pulsates with an explosion of imagery and technological (re)development
and (re)deployment. At the same time exhaustion overwhelms. One cannot portray
it all as a totality. Who, or what, can take responsibility for a sociality which
fluctuates and pulsates? Has not that grand attempt to portray the totality of the
319
social in theory and practice, ‘Marxism’, collapsed? While its other rival to the
West, Islam, although still growing, holds little for the believers in civil society to
take heart from? So how then can a post-modernism be governed rationally? How
can it be policed socially? If we can no longer believe in the coherence of the
social, the answer looks simple: a formally rational framework of a rule of law and
privatise the (non)social. The social has disappeared into hyper-reality... how then
can anyone take responsibility for it? Thus stands exhausted any appeal to a social
responsibility read as accountability for societal fulfilment... How can such an
appeal escape from falling prey to the charge of being a mere expression of the
interests of dominant groups or factions, if the idea of societal progress, as the
realisation of universal aspects of human interdependence, no longer has meaning
in the sea of images?
Thus we can hear the voices of ‘personal responsibility’; the voices of ‘self-control’.
And the voices which call for the return of classicism... And the voices which ask the
market to determine our priorities and tell us to retreat to our private selves safe
within our policed, segregated domains, parified from contact with the other.
320
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LABELLING THEORY, AND THE WORK OF DAVID

MATZA
‘Our private sphere has ceased to be the stage where the drama of the subject at odds
with his objects and with his image is played out: we no longer exist as playwrights or
actors but as terminals of multiple networks.’ (Baudrillard, 1988:16)
‘The lunatic was put into a coffin and laid in a vault in which was another coffin
occupied by a man who at first pretended to be dead but who, soon after he was left
alone with the lunatic, sat up, told the latter how pleased he was to have company in
death, and finally got up, ate the food that was by him and told the astonished lunatic
that he had already been dead a long time and therefore knew how the dead go about
things. The lunatic was pacified by the assurance, likewise ate and drank and was
cured.’ (Hegel, 1971: para 408, p 139)
Introduction
Within American writings of the 1960s criminological positivism became attacked

by an interactionist orientation called labelling theory, and the rise of a general
anti-deterministic current within the philosophy of social science. This chapter
will first consider how labelling theory changes the naturalist perspective of
positivism into a concern with process, then discuss the work of David Matza, and
suggest how we can read connections between the themes of Matza, and a
philosophical position which represents some aspects of the modern human
predicament and the culture of contingency, namely, existentialism.
Labelling theory: from mechanical naturalism into interactional

process
At the core of the labelling orientation is the assumption of process: deviance and
social control always involve processes of social definition and reaction. While the
idea of social process had always been at the centre of the preoccupations of the
Chicago School, labelling was to give it greater scope and implicitly introduce the
idea of contingency. Howard Becker’s famous definition emphasises the act of
labelling:
‘... social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes
deviance, and by applying these rules to particular people and labelling them as
outsiders. From this point of view deviance is not a quality of the act the person
commits but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions
to an ‘offender’. The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied;
deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.’ (1963:9)
321
The epistemological basis for labelling is pragmatic. Knowledge is humanly created

and is true to the presumptions which are brought to bear, moreover these knowledge
claims have totally empirical consequences. One’s perception of the world is a
vitally important factor in how one relates to the world, one’s perceptions shape
one’s social world, they constitute it. As W L Thomas put it: ‘if men define situations
as real, they are real in their consequences’. To those who share the naturalist
perspective Becker’s remarks appear scandalous; the labelling school has often
been misunderstood in the extent of its claims and its technical standing as a mode
of explanation.
Labelling is a theory of process; deviance is not viewed as a static entity, but
rather as a continuously shaped and reshaped outcome of dynamic processes of
social interaction. Labelling theory came out of the traditions of the Chicago
school and the general theme of process, which concentrates on deviant roles and
the development of deviant self-conceptions, and has given rise to such concepts
as ‘career’ and ‘commitment’. In terms of its intellectual lineage, labelling is a
development of the American sociological perspective of symbolic
interactionism, and draws upon the image of the self which George Herbert
Mead held, namely, that the self is a process and not a structure. Schemes that
explain the self through an image of structure alone, ignore the reflexive process
that Mead recognised as central to social interaction. For Mead, human action
could not be viewed simply as a product of determining factors operating upon
the individual, rather, he saw the human being as an active organism in its own
right, facing, dealing with, and acting towards the objects he or she indicates.
Social patterns are believed to reflect a continuous process of fitting developing
lines of conduct to one another. As a consequence, we can expect interactions to
produce outcomes which could not have been predicted using a Newtonian picture
of determinant entities banging into each other like billiard balls. As the
sociologist Norman Denzin (1969) puts it, interactionism alerts us to an emergent
quality to the social situation that may not have existed before the parties came
together.
We have been mapping the voyage of criminology through modernity into post-
modernism. Post-modernist writers refer to an overburdened self – a self as the site
of multiple exchanges of narratives and cultural messages. Denzin (1991) tells us
that the post-modern self is a form of subjectivity hailed, or created, by specific
sites of familial, group and ideological discourse. These include film, the media,
television, biography, social science, and the speech situations of interaction with
peers, friends, and enemies in everyday life.
The understanding of social psychology espoused by Herbert Mead

Mead argued for a social psychology which combined the actions we observers
could note, with the mysterious subjective considerations an individual cannot
really even communicate to others, ‘those phenomena which are accessible to the
individual alone’:
322
Labelling theory, and the work of David Matza
‘Social psychology is behaviourist in the sense of starting off with an observable

activity - the dynamics of on-going social processes, and the social acts which are its
component elements – to be studied and analysed scientifically. But it is not
behaviouristic in the sense of ignoring the inner experience of the individual - the
inner phase of that process of activity... It simply works from the outside to the inside,
in its endeavour to determine how such experience does arise in the process. The act,
then... is the fundamental datum in both social and individual psychology when
behaviouristically conceived, and it has both an inner and an outer phase, an internal
and external aspect...’ (1934:7-8)
While human behaviour has easily observable overt features, the covert aspects
are of crucial importance in determining human action. Behaviourist psychologists,
such as Watson, condescendingly referred to ‘mentalistic concepts’, such as the
study of consciousness, images and language, as shorthand statements which were
to be reduced into more basic entities in the name of science. Mead, conversely,
saw these as the foundational elements for an psychology true to the actors actual
perceptions.
This raises the theme of process, and rejects what Albert Cohen (1965) has
called the assumption of discontinuity in positivist criminology. When you place
individuals in their full location in social life they are not discreet entities. A full
explanation of human activity would include the social history and ramifications
of the behaviour, rather than limit itself to the supposed basic characteristics of
deviating acts or actors (as determined by examination of associations with standard
sociological variables). For Albert Cohen, the positivist bias in American sociology
had:
‘... been toward formulating theory in terms of variables that describe initial states, on
the one hand, and outcomes, on the other, rather than in terms of processes whereby
acts and complex structures of action are built, elaborated, and transformed.’
(1965:9)
By contrast, Becker (1963) argued there were simultaneous and subsequential
models of deviance. If all causes do not operate at the same time, we need a model
which takes into account the fact that patterns of behaviour may or may not
develop in relatively orderly sequences. This model, however, also needs to be
aware of the possibility of ironical outcomes. Labelling theory questioned the
static statistical comparisons that had tended, despite recognition of severe
sampling problems, to dominate research into the ‘causes’ of deviating behaviour.
Some American scholars, for example, Edwin Sutherland (1927), in his classic
definition of criminology, had referred to knowledge of the processes of making
laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting towards the breaking of laws. Sutherland
saw these processes as constituting three aspects of a somewhat unified sequence
of interactions, and concluded that this sequence of interactions is the object-
matter of criminology. Setting out some over-riding unification process was,
however, neglected.
The earliest statement of labelling comes in Frank Tannenbaum’s textbook Crime
and the Community (1938, first published 1923). Tannenbaum described a process
323
in which some, but not all, of the individuals who engage in deviance are likely to
be singled out for stigmatising treatment. Once a person has been publicly defined
as a criminal, the person is likely to find the ratio of contacts he has with others
defined as criminals, and those deemed law-abiding, changes dramatically. This
change leads to the adoption of a criminal identity, and a criminal career becomes
a natural progression. Tannenbaum calls this act of labelling ‘the dramatisation of
evil’.
‘The first dramatisation of ‘evil’ which separates the child out of his group for
specialised treatment plays a greater role in making the criminal than perhaps any
other experience. It cannot be too often emphasised that for the child the whole
situation has become different. He now lives in a different world. He has been
tagged. A new and hitherto non-existent environment has been precipitated out for
him:
The process of making the criminal, therefore, is a process of tagging, defining,
identifying, segregating, describing, emphasising, making conscious and self-
conscious; it becomes a way of stimulating, suggesting, emphasising, and evoking
the very traits that are complained of.’ (1938:19-20)
To its critics labelling is deterministic in that the person so labelled becomes the
thing he is described as being – this criticism misses the elements of contingency
and irony which are implicit to the theory. Labelling theory points to ironical
outcomes. We think, that in defining some act as criminal, and some person as a
criminal or deviant (or mentally ill) we are adopting an attitude which will lower
the incidence of crime, or lead to treatment and cure. Unintended consequences,
however, follow the act of labelling. The criminal conduct is actually continued,
the illness worsens. It does not appear to matter whether the valuation is made by
those who would punish, or by those who would reform. The harder they work to
reform the evil, the greater the evil grows under their hands. The application of
labels, whether criminality, deviance or illness brings out the behaviour that the
label was supposed to control. To the labelling theorist the practical implications
are clear: refuse to dramatise the evil.
The labelling process fits any type of socio-political order. As Edwin Lemert
wrote in 1951:
‘... we start with the idea that persons and groups are differentiated in various ways,
some of which result in social penalties, rejection, and segregation. These penalties
and segregative reactions of society or the community are dynamic factors which
increase, decrease and condition the form which the initial differentiation or deviation
takes...
The deviant person is one whose role, status, function and self-definition are
importantly shaped by how much deviation he engages in, by the degree of its social
visibility, by the particular exposure he has to the societal reaction, and by the nature
and strength of the societal reaction.’ (1951:22-23)
Lemert draws a distinction between primary and secondary deviation which seems
to be an attempt to preserve a notion of natural deviancy that any group would
label or define as ‘deviance’. He argues we can distinguish between (i) a primary
324
or initial act of deviation; and (ii) deviant roles, deviant identities, and broad
situations involving deviance, as shaped by societal definitions and responses. As
criticism of labelling theory mounted, it came to be seen as appropriate to explain
the second part of the process rather than the initial primary deviancy.
In general, the labelling school asserts that deviant outcomes reflect complex
processes of action and reaction, of response and counter-response – labelling
theory points us to certain contingencies of social life. If there is no natural crime,
then what constitutes crime in a given society could have been something else; the
structure of definitions could have been organised in another way. Moreover,
criminalisation is only one tactic for dealing with troublesome situations.
Deviance ‘outcomes’ encompass both individual consequences of societal
reactions (as represented by the secondary deviant, defined by Lemert as ‘a person
whose life and identity are organised around the facts of deviance’), and situational
consequences for society at large (for example, the economic consequences of
labelling certain forms of deviating behaviour as criminal). At times the labelling
perspective has seemed to be concerned only with the former type of outcome,
that is, with the production of deviant identities, or characters in individuals,
however, the labelling perspective placed on the agenda for discussion all aspects
of the way in which the labels came to be thought up in the beginning; in other
words, why criminalise?
The labelling perspective poses difficult methodological questions. On the one
hand, the individual deviator (at least his personal and social characteristics) appears
to matter less than under positivism, while, on the other hand, we are asked to
focus on him more intensively, and question the meaning of his behaviour as it
appears to him, to seek out the nature of his self-concept as shaped by social
reactions, and so on. Normally this has been viewed as an issue of responsibility
and freedom but it also provides an underdeveloped route to a contrast between
the positivist approach to deviance and existentialism. Within criminology,
positivism remains strong, but labelling-influenced strategies take us deeper into
the individuals world. Under positivism, to the extent that the individual ‘offender’
remains an object of direct investigation, clearly the dominant, or favoured, mode
of research is still statistical comparison of ‘samples’ of supposed deviants and
non-deviant, aimed at unearthing the differentiating ‘causal factors’. The labelling-
influenced research methodology works with direct observation, in-depth
interviews, and personal accounts, which can illuminate subjective meanings and
the impact of situational contexts.
The most obvious advance that labelling theory accomplished was as a
consequence of the implicit argument that ‘deviant’ is in large measure an ascribed
status (reflecting not only the deviating individual activities but the responses of
other people to them); which resulted in a shift of focus from the deviator himself
to the reactors. As Kai Erikson puts it:
‘Deviance is not a property inherent in certain forms of behaviour; it is a property
conferred upon these forms by the audiences which directly or indirectly witness
325
them. Sociologically then the critical variable is the social audience... since it is the
audience which eventually decides whether or not any given action will become a
visible case of deviation.’ (1962:308)
What constitutes an ‘audience’? There are both direct and indirect ‘audiences’
which react to either a given deviating individual, or a particular deviance
problem/situation in a given society. Different levels of analysis come into play for
each audience. One ‘audience’ is society at large, the complex of interwoven
groups and interests from which emerge general reactions to (and therefore
labelling of) various forms of behaviour. Another ‘audience’ comprises those
individuals (including significant others) with whom a person has daily
interaction, and by whom he or she is constantly ‘labelled’ in numerous ways,
positive and negative, subtle and not so subtle. A third ‘audience’ includes official
and organisational agents of control. They are among the most significant of the
direct reactors or labellers, for they implement the broader and more diffuse
societal definitions through organised structures and institutionalised procedures.
It is on this third audience that the labelling approach especially focused, but this
audience is only one of several important research targets suggested by a labelling
orientation. The labelling orientation has brought to the fore the conflict, or
political aspect in the processes of criminalisation, in a non-ideological manner,
together with emphasising the close relation between deviance and social change.
Becker appears to operate within a pluralist political model of law and society, and
offers the concept of moral entrepreneurs operating within a set of social conflicts,
to account for the increased pressure to classify certain activities (such as drug
taking) illegal.
In addition to recognising that deviance is created by the responses of people to
particular kinds of behaviour, by the labelling of that behaviour as deviant, we
must also keep in mind that the rules created and maintained by such labelling are
not universally agreed to. Instead, they are the object of conflict and disagreement,
part of the political process of society. (Becker, 1963:34)
This view of law as a political weapon, and of the use of law in areas where we
were better off without it, upset the idea of consensus which served as the
background for many American scholars. Given that a Marxist orientation was
simply unacceptable (particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s in the era of the
Cold War), it required a seemingly non-political theoretical orientation, in which
rule-making was a major focal point of analysis (rather than a taken-for-granted
natural process) before the conflict-political features of deviance problems could
emerge to prominence. By the end of the 1960s, John Lofland could consider this
element crucial in providing a basis for defining deviance:
‘Deviance is the name of the conflict game in which individuals or loosely organised
small groups with little power are strongly feared by a well-organised, sizable minority
or majority who have a large amount of power.’ (1969:14)
The emphasis upon process demands a greater appreciation of the openness and
contingencies of social life. Consider the practical consequences of the labelling
326
approach on the work of sociology. It points to unpredictability and ironic results

for social policies and individual labelling situations; it asks us to question the
very basis of the naturalist underpinnings that a positivist sociology of deviance
had relied upon. In terms of research it does not so much represent a striking
departure from standard, acceptable research methods, as rather provided the
impetus to revitalise and give renewed appreciation to some basic sociological
methods that had fallen out of fashion, such as participant observation, and related
techniques, which seek to enter into the mind-set of the person(s) concerned. Such
techniques are particularly appropriate to efforts at capturing and depicting the
nature and impact of the social processes on which the labelling perspective focuses.
With participant observation, for example, the researcher gains knowledge by
empathising with the role of his subjects. Putting himself, as far as possible, in the
context of the observed, he re-creates in his own imagination and experiences the
thoughts and feelings which are in the minds of those he studies. The observer
attempts a symbolic interpretation of the ‘experienced culture’ of the subject under
investigation to bring out the meaning of the social world as the subject actually
experiences it.
Such efforts at deeper understanding have a substantial tradition in the sociology
of deviance (specifically in the ethnographical wing of the Chicago school, see
Beckers’ introduction to the reissue of Clifford Shaw’s The Jack-Roller, 1966),
yet, before the influence of the labelling perspective, this tradition appeared likely
to be overwhelmed by preferences for research geared to statistical comparison of
‘matched samples’ and so forth.
The concern with using a labelling-theory-influenced methodology has led
into a concern with a concept of the existential self (that is, a self whose nature and
structure is an open ended and contingent process) but using non-quantitative or
qualitative approaches has gone hand in hand with renewed interest in developing
a sociology geared to a general understanding of social phenomena. It was
believed, following Weber’s concern for verstehen, or understanding, that
sociologists should once again concern themselves more directly with
explanations that exhibit adequacy on the level of meaning, in addition to causal
adequacy. Work such as Anthony Gidden’s Modernity and Self-Identity: self and
society on the late-modern age (1991) can, perhaps, be seen as the result of this
orientation. Certainly the rather crass positivism we saw in earlier chapters, has
been dramatically compromised by labelling and related approaches; this search
for relevant meaning has sometimes led to quite radical critiques of quantification.
An example is Jack Douglas’ comments about official statistics on suicide (a
deviation to which, because of its total and final nature, we might expect the
labelling perspective to have only limited relevance, and which served as
Durkheim’s core case study):
‘Sociologists who have used the official statistics on suicide have erred in not
recognising that the imputation of the social category of ‘suicide’ is problematic, not
only for the theorists of suicide but for the individuals who must impute this category
to concrete cases in fulfilment of their duties as officials...
327
The imputation of the official category of the “cause of death” is very likely the
outcome of a complex interaction process involving the physical scene, the sequence
of events, the significant others of the deceased, various officials (such as doctors,
police), and public and the official who must impute the category.’ (1967:189-190)
This renders much positivist theorising on the basis of official statistics very
suspect; since the theory is built upon the foundations of the statistics, if the
statistics are not correct the resultant theory is compromised. Qualitative
techniques are necessary to get at the process aspects and meaning contexts of
deviation-control situations.
In conclusion, the labelling approach not only contributes to the identification
of aspects of the process, it causes us to face the whole issue of the relationship of
language to the world. Its effects are potentially to destroy any simplistic positive
theory. In reality it redefined the nature of criminological theory – but positivism
fought back: (i) the effects of labelling theory were constrained by arguing it cannot
be a full causal explanation of deviance; (ii) while it ushered in the era of multiple
perspectives and a concern with overall synthesis, the difficulties involved in such
an enterprise meant that late-modern criminology entered into an era of realist
concerns. Labelling theory contributed to the de-legitimating of the positive
enterprise, a new foundation was required, which realism (both right and left)
allowed – or the issue was ignored.
David Matza: from hard to soft determinism
In the 1960s another attack on the positivist enterprise came in the over
determination of hard determinism: put simply why were not more people
committing crimes? From the control perspective came the argument that strain
theories over-predicted delinquency. If the root cause of crime was to be found in
slum life; criminal traditions; differential learning; lack of legitimate opportunity;
and the emphasis upon property acquisition; how was it to be explained that most
of the individuals living in such situations did not appear to indulge in persistent
criminal or delinquent behaviour? The work of David Matza appeared to resolved
these concerns with his replacement of ‘hard determinism’ by the concepts of
‘drift’ and ‘soft determinism’.
Matza is interesting, not only for his actual work, but for the implicit direction
he provided for criminology. Matza was specific. Since its conception, the positive
approach had simply accepted the products of the criminal justice system, and of
official statistics, ie offenders and offending rates, as the basis for its investigations.
It neglected the process of constructing criminal laws, placing certain behaviour
into the illicit category, and also the nature of going against the laws of a society,
what Matza called infractions. Thus Matza specifically asked for an approach that
included scope for metaphysics, rather than avoided it. As he put it in his 1964
work Delinquency and Drift:
328
‘Positivism, blessed with the virtues and prestige of science, has little concern for the
essence of phenomenon it wishes to study. That is metaphysics. Thus positive
criminology could for close to a century display little concern for the essence of
crime - infraction.’ (1964:5)
There were two strands to this.
• Contrary to the structure of carrying out criminology as it then was, Matza asked
criminology to begin its theories with a notion of crime which saw it as an ‘infraction’,
and to take seriously the empirical features which characterised infractions. For Matza
an infraction entailed counteracting what had been socialised into a person as the moral
code of the society; that the empirical features of crime were that it was often transient
(rather than permanent), intermittent (rather than pervasive), characterised, not by
commitment or compulsion, but looser factors and represented something which most
delinquents simply grew out of with age.
• In a later 1969 work, Matza drew a contrast between correction and appreciation as
differing stances to deviant phenomenon:
‘The goal of ridding ourselves of the deviant phenomenon, however utopian, stands
in sharp contrast to an appreciative perspective and may be referred to as correctional.’
(1969:15)
The correctional perspective experiences a ‘loss of phenomenon’ by ‘reducing it to that
which it is not’. The overriding concern with causation or etiology:
‘... systematically interferes with the capacity to empathise and thus comprehend
the subject of inquiry. Only through appreciation can the texture of social patterns
and the nuances of human engagement with those patterns be understood and
analysed.
The appreciative attitude is on the other hand a subjective view; it demands a
commitment to render the phenomenon with fidelity, and without violating its
integrity.
It delivers the analyst into the arms of the subject who renders the phenomenon,
and commits him, though not without regrets or qualifications, to the subject’s
definition of the situation. This does not mean that the analyst always concurs with
the subject’s definition of the situation; rather that his aim is to comprehend and to
illuminate the subject’s view and to interpret the world as it appears to him.’
(1969:25)
It is not, of course, possible to escape to an innocent set of the subject’s own

definitions; as Foucault, among others, has cautioned us, the language of the interior
by which we know our deeper selves comes from the outside. The act of self-
description and of self-analysis of one’s situation is necessarily conducted in the
language of the ‘other’. It is possible, however, to play with alternative sets of
language games, to not obey the dictate to speak only in the language of the scientist,
but be open to the potentiality of alternative forms of language games to inform
and advance ‘criminology’.
Conversely to these two themes Matza found:
329
‘... positive criminology accounts for too much delinquency. Taken at their terms,
delinquency theories seem to predict far more delinquency than actually occurs.’
(1964:21)
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Matza joined Sykes (1961) to criticise the total
determinism of sub-cultural theory, arguing that even the most obvious ‘criminals’
or delinquents were not committed to an alternative set of cultural values, but were
actually conventional in their beliefs. Why then were they not restrained by that
powerful instrument of self-control in the modern West, namely conscience and
feelings of guilt (as opposed to shame, which is engendered by considering what
others feel about our actions) aroused in the psyche of an individual when that
individual contemplated the performance of an anti-social action? Obviously this
question, as well as being central to criminological theorising, has immense
repercussions for the legitimation of punishment, since, in the rationalist
tradition of punishment (building upon Judaic-Christian foundations) as
exampled by Hegel, punishment is a communicative activity in which the
offender is brought to appreciate the consequences of his or her actions and
ideally, comes to agree with the rightness of punishment being inflicted upon
him or her. In experiencing guilt the convict or offender comes to affirm the
judgment of the court, and to approve of the actions taken against him or her,
and thus comes closer to society. From all accounts, however, the operation of
our criminal justice system fails to bring about this outcome. Partly the
explanation may lie in the penal system and social attitudes, but Sykes and Matza
highlighted the process whereby the offender, while not immune to feelings of
guilt, has strong avoidance mechanisms which they termed techniques of
neutralisation. These avoidance mechanisms enable a delinquent to avoid the
morally problematic aspects of his or her activities. The delinquent, furthermore,
does not see him- or herself as anti-social, rather he or she is motivated by various
desires and images which are suppressed as latent in the dominant culture – these
are termed subterranean values.
The delinquent does not live in some different or inverted world, where the
norms and values were the opposite of those prevailing in conventional society.
Instead, we are told, he or she shares the values of the larger society; however, the
value structure of society is not a coherent, comprehensive system, but full of
conflicts and various layers. Theories of delinquent subculture over-predicted crime
and over-stressed the difference between ‘delinquents’ and ‘non-delinquents’. Why
then do individuals who accept the conventional morality and who are essentially
integrated into society and respectful of its regulations violate its conventions?
Sykes and Matza argued that while learning the conventional values of the society,
individuals could also learn certain excuses or techniques of neutralisation, which,
temporarily at least, neutralised conventional norms, and thus permitted violations
in specific cases, and under certain circumstances, without necessarily rejecting
the norms themselves.
330
Five distinct techniques are developed, all of which have some basis in society
at large.
• Denial of responsibility
The offender appropriates the language of the social scientist, or humane jurist,
or social worker who sees him as a product of his environment; he presents
himself as the helpless object of social forces (slum neighbourhood, bad parents,
peer group pressure). This obviates guilt since guilt cannot be aroused as the
deeds are not his own. We are familiar with this in the case of the soldier who
views himself as part of the larger whole, regiment or army, without effective
means to counter orders. Not only are thousands of his comrades doing the
same thing but there are others giving the orders and directing the enterprise.
Thus the deeds are not his own, but the product of orders, the product of the
forces of the society, the country, or the military. Ultimately he can earnestly
state: ‘it wasn’t really me that did it’.
• Denial of injury
The delinquent argues that the behaviour complained of has not really caused
any harm. Thus vandalism is only ‘mischief’; car theft is ‘borrowing’; stealing
is ‘getting paid’, or ‘getting my due’; and ‘anyway, they could afford it’; gang
fighting is a ‘private quarrel’. Psychologically, the spatial distancing of modernity
aids this; consider computer fraud, or, the soldier who can hide behind the
remoteness of modern weaponry.
• Denial of a victim
Like the soldier who is fighting the enemy, the delinquent is facing a victim
who is also guilty. In other words ‘they had it coming’, so why should the
offender care what happened? It is the victims who are the wrongdoers.
• Appeal to higher loyalties
The delinquent presents himself as torn between two groups, the victims, and
the smaller group to which he belongs and owes allegiance, demonstrates loyalty
towards, and defends his belonging to. The needs of this smaller group – the
army unit, the family, the gang, the country in the hour of need – serve to
change the nature of the acts he would not otherwise normally do. What was
regrettable, perhaps evil, because it was required by loyalty to this group, now
becomes justified, perhaps even obligatory.
These four defences do not appear to be positive forces, they appear to be
purely defensive measures. Summed up as avoidance mechanisms, they prevent
the self-esteem of the offender being washed away while serving to present
him as someone worthy of respect and appreciation. A fifth technique acts to
deflect the shaming powers of the others who are in communication with the
offender.
331
• Condemnation of the condemners or rejection of the rejectors Here the

delinquent shifts the focus of attention from his own deviant acts to the motives
and behaviour of those who disapprove of his violations. This time, the other
who is to be viewed as the enemy if guilt is to be avoided, is the whole class of
those who disapprove of the behaviour in question. The captors are either
hypocrites, actually deviants in disguise, or impelled by personal motives. This
technique is not one of engaging in communication with the disapprovers, and
of convincing them of the position of the offender, of persuasion, but of rejecting
them. There is no need to counter the basis of the disapproval, instead the other
is rejected as someone with whom no interaction need take place. The
discrediting of the other removes both the need to interact in this fashion, and
the basis by which the other could affect the self-image of the offender. The
only communication which the offender could end up with is with himself.
The reaction of authorities usually misses the core of the delinquents motivations
for infraction. While much of the authority has harmful consequences the
motivation usually was not to cause harm. Instead, Sykes and Matza suggest
that:
‘... the delinquent has picked up and emphasised one part of the dominant value
system, namely, the subterranean values that coexist with other, publicly proclaimed,
values possessing a more respectable air.’ (1961:717)
These subterranean, or latent, values include a search for adventure, excitement,
and thrills, and are said to exist side by side with such conformity inducing
values as security, routinisation, and stability. Citing the work of Arthur Davis
and Thorsten Veblen, Sykes and Matza argue that the delinquents are actually
conforming to society, rather than transgressing it when they put the desire for
‘big money’ central to their value system. Overall, subterranean values make
delinquency desirable, while the techniques of neutralisation allow this desire
to take direction and become effectual.
Drift theory
In the 1960s Matza analysed the life patterns of juveniles, in terms of their not
being any more committed to their delinquency than to conventional situations
and enterprises. Their delinquency was a matter of drift, made more possible by a
‘subterranean convergence’ between their own techniques and certain ideologies
of those authorities who represented the official moral order. The authorities had
themselves often excused violations by blaming parents, citing provocation on the
part of the victim, or accepting explanations defining the infraction as involving
self-defence, or accidental actions, and, thus, aiding the norm neutralisation of the
juveniles. Thus the controlling power of conventional norms could be weakened
by the growing presence of a variety of qualifications, or an array of objections,
excuses, and vacillations.
332
In Delinquency and Drift (1964) Matza specifically built an alternative picture

of the delinquent under the dictates of soft, rather than hard, determinism. One
consequence was to facilitate a conjoining of classical and positive assumptions. It
is worth quoting at length.
Some men are freer than others. Most men, including delinquents, are neither
wholly free not completely constrained but fall somewhere between. The general
conditions underlying various positions along a continuum from freedom to
constraint may be described. Viewed in this way, determinism loses none of its
heuristic value. We may still act as if we were knowable, but we refrain at least
temporarily from an image of the delinquent that is tailored to suit social science.
The image of the delinquent that I wish to convey is one of drift; an actor neither
compelled not committed to deeds nor freely choosing them; neither different in
any simple or fundamental sense from the law abiding, nor the same; conforming
to certain traditions in American life while partially unreceptive to other more
conventional traditions; and finally, an actor whose motivational system may be
explored along lines explicitly commended by classical criminology – his peculiar
relation to legal institutions.
Matza’s appreciation leads not to romanticism or heroics. We are dealing not
with the sensational committed criminal of the media reports, nor with the
heroic fighter against the status quo which Marxist accounts sometimes appeared
to suggest. Instead, Matza stresses the mundaneness of delinquency, its pettiness,
its transitoriness. He also puts central to his argument, the ambiguity of the moral
order arguing that the contact and experiences of the juvenile with the
correctional system is itself a criminogenic factor. Let us also consider the
concept of human nature which is underlying this. It is much more open than the
positivists viewed it. Note that neutralisation only makes delinquency possible,
as Matza put it:
‘Those who have been granted the potentiality for freedom through the loosening of
social controls but who lack the position, capacity, or inclination to become agents in
their own behalf I call drifters, and it is in this category that I place the juvenile
delinquent.’
Matza did not consider delinquency as some natural or steady state, which overtakes
an individual with the correct propensities once controls are relaxed, but, as
something which is involved in processes. Two processes acted as triggering factors,
namely the combination of ‘preparation’ and ‘desperation’. Preparation was the
process whereby a person discovered that a given infraction could be successfully
accomplished by someone, that he had the ability to do it himself and, further, that
the fear or apprehension connected with the event could be managed. But even if
the person realised that a delinquent infraction could be managed, it might not
occur unless he or she learned that it was possible, felt confident that he or she
could do it, and was courageous, or stupid, enough to minimise the dangers. If
these processes did not interact the possibility would not become a reality.
Desperation came into play when the self experienced a form of fatalism, a feeling
333
that the self was overwhelmed, and felt a consequential need to violate the rules of
the system so as to reassert individuality. Matza did not ask us to consider this
need for individuality as dangerous egoism. This need for individuality to assert
itself we can see as one bridge between Matza’s writings, and the existential
posterings of philosophers such as Nietzsche, but first we shall consider other
directions in which labelling and Matza took criminology.
Direction One: the irony of labelling and the reproduction of

delinquency by state intervention
Labelling highlights the irony of state intervention and bureaucratic response.

Labelling calls into question both the process of criminalisation, and the institutional
response to law-breaking.
1. An example is the policy of criminalising the possession and use of certain
drugs; and why the labelling of their users as criminals need not lead to desirable
outcomes. The present drug-control regime in the US and Britain uses
essentially a conservative, ‘law and order’ approach and in many ways operates
expressly counter to the impetus of modernity (see Morrison, 1995a). Various
commentators have pointed out a range of functions and outcomes to consider.
Among them:
• Drugs are pleasurable and/or effective. For a drug to be useful it should be
largely compatible with the chemical composition of the human body, and they
provide a reward the very first time they are used. They therefore may well
attract experimentation, especially among the disaffected. Other drugs, for
example, cocaine, may enhance performance and the ability to handle stress.
• Normally, drugs give little indication of their addictive power at first. The casual
user does not immediately feel threatened.
• Certain drugs may with time become intensely addictive, so that persons in
their grip suffer without them. At this point drugs possess what economists call
‘inelasticity of demand’, meaning demand will continue irrespective of the price.
This, naturally, attracts suppliers.
• Suppliers are also encouraged because, while addicts will pay extremely high
prices for drugs, they are very inexpensive to produce and purify (disregarding
the costs of avoiding arrest).
• Given the very high profit margins, this should attract competition among
suppliers, while in an open (legal) market this would tend to drive prices down,
in the closed underworld of illegal drug dealings the users may only have contact
with one or two trusted suppliers. With such limits on competition, prices are
driven still higher, attracting more suppliers.
• Law enforcement crackdowns reduce the number of suppliers; thus ironically
increasing the profits of those who are left. This creates an incentive for others
to move into the market.
334
• As time passes, the amount of the drug required for a given ‘kick’ increases;
hence the user is driven to demand greater quantities. This further increases
expenses beyond most users’ capacity to meet by legitimate means. Hence the
prohibiting of drugs produces, not only drug offences themselves (supply,
possession), but also increases in theft, robbery, and other secondary offences.
• One of the few ways to obtain enough money to pay for one’s habit is to become
a pusher; hence users, as well as producers, become agents for the further spread
of the problem.
• The supplying of drugs eventually becomes so lucrative that drug wars are fought
between rival suppliers. This violence constitutes yet another form of crime
escalation.
• Drug profits are so enormous that bribery and pay-offs among enforcement
officials become possible, posing a major problem, thus adding even further to
crime escalation.
• Most law enforcement catches the ‘small fry,’ the latter’s new criminal record
precludes certain occupations, often diminishing chances for legitimate income,
once again increasing the volume of predatory crime.
• A small amount of a drug can produce great pharmacological effects, and small
amounts of a drug are easily concealable. Hence, more and more taken-for-
granted civil liberties are lost as authorities turn to increasingly desperate search
measures. Finally,
• enforcement doesn’t work, and it is clearly seen not to be working; this breeds
despair and disrespect for law enforcement and civil society. But
• the rhetorical and institutional investment in the war on drugs is so high that the
authorities cannot change course without acknowledging that an enormous
mistake in strategy and overuse of the criminal law has occurred. Hence more
resources are poured into the campaign, while research shows the counter-
productive nature of the enterprise.
The search for a way out of this nightmare has led some social scientists to propose
the legalisation of narcotic drugs. With a constant supply of cheap drugs, the
unanticipated consequences of anti-drug laws are reduced or eliminated, specifically
items 5 through to 13. But legalisation carries with it the risk of its own unanticipated
consequences. Might it not become more fashionable to take drugs? Might not the
new, legal producers attempt to promote their product? Unless taken at low levels,
narcotics are generally bad for one’s health; if usage increased under legalisation,
might this have the unanticipated consequence of greatly increasing public health
costs?
2. The 1960s saw a range of work, which adopted either or both an anti-
bureaucratic and labelling approach, looked at various institutions, such as prisons
and mental hospitals, which took their legitimacy from a treatment and
rehabilitative ideology. Although institutionalisation had in the 18th and early
19th century been a rather mixed affair, by the turn of the 20th century specialised
institutions, each dealing with a particular form of deviancy (mental illness, crime,
335
delinquency, orphanages), had become established. Historians, such as David

Rothman (1980), analysed the ideology of treatment which argued a case by case
approach was required, with specific problems being referred and confined in
specific institutions under the supervision and programmes of specialised
treatment personnel in terms of the ‘institutional interests’ behind such
developments. These institutions lay at the end of the positivist technicalisation of
deviancy, that progressive rationalisation of the world Weber had foreseen. In
Weber’s analysis the world becomes ‘disenchanted’ through reducing social life
to the dominant idea of the application of technical methods to the solution of
social problems. This becomes a world view, which relegates aesthetic, religious
and customary thought to the status of the non-rational; conversely, labelling
became a weapon of the disenchanted with dis-enchantment. Franz Kafka’s
fictional work The Trial had emphasised the nightmarish qualities of an uncaring,
unfeeling bureaucracy, and sociologists now showed that actual institutions had a
virtually total power to intervene in individuals’ sense of self, to shape and
dominate personal identity; to determine the future liberty of the incarcerated
subject. Soon an ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement associated with Laing, Cooper,
Szasz (1961) and Goffman (1968, first published 1961), was joined by the critical
accounts of Foucault (1965) and his followers (for example, Donzelot who saw
the techniques spread into the wider realms of the welfare society (1979)), while
Scull (1961) could simply argue for decarceration for those institutionalised under
The Myth of Mental Illness. At much the same time Ken Kesey added the popular
fictional account of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), which was turned
into a highly successful film.
For Goffman contingency is the overriding factor in determining the reality of
mental illness. In other words people who end up in mental hospitals are not
naturally ill, but rather adjudged ill, and institutionalised as a result of a series of
interactions and powers. Total institutions lay at the end of the knowledge-power-
bureaucracy spiral. At stake was the very underpinnings of faith in the enlightenment
path of knowledge and professionalism; in the hands of revisionists, the project of
modernity looked suddenly very different:
‘... professionalism did not emerge, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in
response to clearly defined social needs. Instead, the new professions themselves
invented many of the needs they claimed to satisfy. They played on public fears of
disorder and disease, adopted a deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular
traditions of self help as backward and unscientific, misleadingly legitimated
themselves in terms of the mantle of science, and generally created or intensified
demands for their own services. The most important case for the utility of the helping-
healing-human service professionals rested, not on their technical or scientific
superiority and efficacy, but on their ability to control clients.’ (Holzner, B. and Marx,
H. 1979:351)
Professionalism, it was argued, actually created many of the needs and disorders
that it claimed the right to treat. Institutions created their own client groups. As
336
Goffman put it: ‘A crime must be uncovered that fits the punishment, and the
character of the inmate must be reconstituted to fit the crime.’ (1968:334)
Additionally, labelling theory stimulates research into the process by which the
label is produced. It argues that if we are to punish, we must consider the totality of
the labelling enterprise. Moreover, labelling has strong effects in the foundations
of jurisprudence. In the hands of Becker, and the resurgence of Marxist inspired
writings, the legal order was freed from the structural-functional idea that it was
the positivist expression of popular morality and was enforced fairly and equally.
The ideal of legal-rational authority was now seen as it always was intended by
Weber; as an ideal type rather than the expression of the functionality of the actual
social body. It may have been what legitimated the institutions and government,
but it only partially represented social reality.
Direction Two: the power of collective representation: fro m Matza

to Foucault?
The irony of the labelling outcome is so extreme for Matza that he is led into
asking is Leviathan aware of the outcome, and if so, is Leviathan implicated? In
other words, does this creation of delinquency have a function in the perpetuation
of Leviathan’s power? This notion, or direction, is implicit, rather than further
developed in Matza, but bears a striking resemblance to the work of Michel Foucault.
Consider the final two paragraphs of Becoming Deviant:
‘Even at the conclusion of the signification process – imprisonment and parole –
the process of becoming deviant remains open. Reconsideration continues;
remission remains an observable actuality. Nonetheless, signification implies a
closure or finality, at least in the minds of conventional members of society and
empowered officials, though not in the lives of deviant persons. The finished
product of signification is the collective representation of concentrated evil, or
deviation, and pervasive good, or conformity. Guided by its imagery and eternally
beguiled by the illusion that man has discovered the secret of correction, agents of
signification complete the symbolic representation of a deviant person by claiming
to cure or fix him. In that manner every contingency is covered. Apprehended
again, the subject continues to be a thief; or, with his way of life changed, he may
be known as one who used to be a thief but has reformed. The benevolence of
society and the wisdom of the state – the positive sides of the collective
representation – are affirmed.
In its avid concern for public order and safety, implemented through police force
and penal policy, Leviathan is vindicated. By pursuing evil and producing the
appearance of good, the state reveals its abiding method – the perpetuation of its good
name in the face of its own propensities for violence, conquest, and destruction.
Guarded by a collective representation in which theft and violence reside in a dangerous
class, morally elevated by its correctional quest, the state achieves the legitimacy of
pacific intention and the appearance of legality – even if it goes to war and massively
perpetrates activities it has allegedly banned from the world. But, that, the reader may
say, is a different matter altogether. So says Leviathan – and that is the final point of
the collective representation. (1969:196-7)
337
But who, or what controls ‘collective representation’? Does ‘self-interest’ override

social interest? A host of questions one raised as to the signification of the images
of deviancy and crime which the discourse of our society perpetrates. From
Durkheim onwards we have been made aware of the scapegoating effect of labelling;
we have even had essays produced on the conditions for successful degradation
and scapegoating! (Garfinkel, 1956). Society has appeared to need its images of
the ‘dangerous classes’ so that the power to punish can be mobilised. But once
activated, crime control threatened to even extend itself (cf Christie, 1993; Gordon,
1991).
Certain measures add to the original problem. Take imprisonment – in the US
and Britain record use is being made of imprisonment and the US is resorting to
capital punishment – yet as punishment levels have increased, and rituals aimed
at deterrence have intensified, crimes involving drugs and violence have
increased in the key areas. Imprisonment may create more crime through the
negative labelling effects, the disruption of social bonds, and the disruption of
future employment possibilities. But the failure of imprisonment does not affect
the reliance upon imprisonment. What is going on? Are we seduced by the
image?
The importance of the sign: the construction of hyper-reality
In our discussion of late-modern or post-modern culture we have stressed the

degree to which reality has become representational; whereas Bentham believed
that the public would visit the prisons, would see for themselves the reality of
punishment, the images of punishment now come to the citizen via media
technologies. The American Presidential election between Bush and Dukais was
clearly influenced by advertisements concerning the crimes a convicted violent
offender committed on weekend leave from prison. The legacy of the labelling
perspective on the ontology or the ‘reality’ of crime is only part of our cultural
melage of representation. The world can come into your TV room; the fashions
and customs of the ethnically diverse world can be located in your dresser;
knowledge of how to mix and match located in your fashion magazine or weekly
fashion slot on TV (while multiple channels ensure that it is always time for that
slot). Your walls display African masks, posters of Venice, rugs from Iran, the
creations of Miro re-represented into a consumerable item suitable to take from
that art exhibition the magazine had said was unmissable. When, after seeing
multiple representations of the Sunflowers by Van Gogh in friends’ flats and a
hundred books, you ‘actually’ see it in the National Gallery, you understand with
a sense of shock that you didn’t realise it ‘really’ looked like that (not real,
somehow, the colours a little garish). You prefer the poster, or the book, or, better,
the memory of the poster.
338
We are wrapped in a new language of the visual or video image. This language
displaces, rather than replaces, the earlier forms of literacy based on orality and
the printed media. It creates a new set of media logics and media formats – even in
newspapers the colour photograph assumes dramatic centrality, while magazines
become a collection of photo spreads. A new relationship of the person to the
‘real’ is entailed through these new technologies of the ‘real’. It is possible to be
surrounded by images (photographs, video reels) of the other place (Bosnia, a
victim, an offender). These disrupt the old narrative modality of recounting what
lies over there, what that person is like, since now one can see ‘what it is really
like’, one can ‘look at his image’. But this is a new form of narrative and a new
epistemological technique – the commitment is to the image, to the sign. The
individual whose photograph is represented is turned into a cultural object; an
object which produces cultural knowledge and cultural texts via the new information
formats. Social cultural practices do not evolve ‘freely’. The proliferation of images
and distribution of roles, stigma, and values, is dependent upon, and supported by,
technological changes and social and political organisations. We are presented
with images of the Women protestors at Greenham Common, with scenes of the
‘riot’ – but who chose those scenes? Who, or what, guarantees epistemological
adequacy? Why that image and not another? Riots look dramatically different when
the photographs (or video footage) presented are shot from behind the police lines,
or from behind the protestors (rioters). In the hands of the powerful they become
weapons for (re)presenting the reality of a situation; or aid in the expansion of an
authoritarian, technological and administrative attitude to the ordering of the social
body.
What was more real: the reality of the disturbance/riot/uprising or the images?
The images certainly have more effect – they are disseminated further, they are
believed more than the biased accounts of those who in ‘reality’ were there (who
must have been biased, why else would they have been there?), but who didn’t see
what you saw, did not see the truth of the photograph, an image ‘which doesn’t
lie’. The image both accentuates and simulates reality, it increases its power...
therefore meaningful reality becomes hyper-reality.
It is little wonder that the most fashionable cultural tool of the so-called post-
modernist radical left is deconstruction. Deconstruction is a de-centering and anti-
foundational process of attacking cultural artifacts, books, articles, photographs;
destroying their claim to represent truth, to present the unpresentable as if it were
successfully packaged in this newspaper, or that TV news slot. Epistemological
warfare is waged... but what is the result? Deconstruction opens up the labelling
process to contingency, and demonstrates the multiplicity of readings of
(non)reality... but what are we left with? Does it encourage the void which appears
to be the ever present result of through-going searches for absolute foundations in
late-modernity? Deconstruction without a pragmatic reconstruction (which itself
could be meat to the grill of further deconstruction) simply leaves the confusion at
an intensified level, allowing the appeal to the man of common sense to win the
339
day. The issue surely is to disentangle the representation of collective forms of

social solidarity from a simultaneous hostile opposition to (an)other group.
Responding to the tension of the new cultural subject: containing the

diversity of late-modernity by the recourse to common sense
The contemporary post-modern social structure threatens to get out of order – the
result: an appeal to law and order strategies, combined with the inate feeling of
right and wrong which every upright citizen is deemed to possess. In both America
and Britain, the late 1970s saw the rise to power of conservatives and the radical
right, with a corresponding coupling of the rhetoric of law and order and the rights
of the individual against the collective interest (privatisation). Labelling was
sidestepped in favour of a new realism. In the rhetoric of the right the subject of
real normalcy was defined as personifying the values of religion, hard work, health
and self-reliance. This ideology attempted to reinstate the certainties of the ordinary,
normal, commonplace individual who understood his position in the order of things,
and realised that the disappearance of certainties was the fault of those fashionable,
leftish intellectuals who spouted their nonsense of relativism, pluralism and
contingency. Thus a central core and foundation could be asserted for debates on
crime, abortion, child abuse, sex education, gay rights, AIDS, family violence,
drug and alcohol abuse, the war on drugs, homelessness, the general social health
and the overall climate of moral hygiene in British and American society. A new,
rather repressive and reactionary politics emerged in the 1980s, the immediate
legacy of which was carried into the 1990s. The demise of social certainties was
blamed on the permissiveness of the 1960s and the democratic socialism of the
1970s. The new certainties demanded a ‘just say no’ approach to drugs, a romantic
nostalgia for the past, a vigorous popularism and the rise in popularity of mass
produced (ie media influenced) religion. The new conservativism was not confined
to the British Conservative party, or the American Republic party, with so-called
socialist governments, such as those in Greece, New Zealand, and Islamic regimes
also using these sets of devices. In Britain and US the new right sought to dominate
the core of legitimate popular culture through a hegemony on discourse on the
family, the body, sexuality, desire and a patriotic individuality that made the military
a symbol of national virility (the Falklands, the collapse of the USSR, the Gulf
War).
The appeal was to common sense and ordinary human values: a return to basic
standards, or ‘back to basics’. With crime it was time to stop explaining (identified
with providing excuses) and return to formula of punishment according to offences.
Ordinary people understood the difference between right and wrong, understood
the need for extensive policing with increased police powers, for surveillance, the
necessity to build more prisons – the prison became a new containment point and
an employment area for the old working class. A set of ideological, religious,
political and juridical polemics emphasised crisis and the need to be patriotic while
340
defining out of the social frame the underclass, welfare recipients, the homeless,
the drug addict, the sexually promiscuous as morally unworthy persons who were
in difficult straits (out of work, addicted to drugs, with AIDS) because they chose
to be.
Direction Three: positivism fights back asking for a reconciliation

with process: seeing criminality as a thought process
Positivist psychology had searched for the criminal personality as if some stable
entity could be located. In 1976, a psychiatrist Samuel Yochelson, and a clinical
psychologist Stanton Samenow, published the first of their three volumes of a
great positivist enterprise mapping The Criminal Personality which saw criminality
as a problematic thought process (1976, 1985, 1986). As Samenow explained the
point of this enterprise in a related publication:
‘I shall expose the myths about why criminals commit crimes, and I shall draw a
picture for you of the personality of the criminal just as the police artist draws a
picture of his face from a description. I shall describe how criminals think, how they
defend their crimes to others, and how they exploit programs that are developed to
help them.’ (1984:5)
This paragraph contains many of the flawed assumptions of the positivist enterprise.
They assume that there is a specific set of characteristics creating a criminal
personality, and that this could be gauged from investigating those imprisoned –
they do not even use a control group. They developed a series of conceptualisations
from interviews they conducted with approximately 250 offenders (all but three of
whom were male), who had been adjudged not guilty by reason of insanity, and
remanded to the custody of officials at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC.
In a dozen or so cases, Yochelson and Samenow logged as many as 5,000 interview
hours per subject. These in-depth qualitative discussions with known offenders
provided a great deal of information about the thinking and behaviour of the
subjects.
Their analysis focuses upon both the content and process of the thought patterns
of their subjects. They developed a system of 52 ‘errors of criminal thinking’ that,
supposedly, form the criminal personality, including:
• superoptimism;
• criminal pride and perfectionism;
• a very self-serving attitude toward school, work, other people, and society in
general;
• chronic lying;
• great energy;
• manipulativeness;
• an inflexibly high self-image.
341
We can see, however, that their work was entirely within a correctional outlook.
The whole aim of the study appears to be to find a new methodology for treating
the criminal personality, seen now, not as some static cerebral structure, but as a
distorted process of cognition. The traditional psychological approach had tended
towards the view that Gaylin had proposed, namely:
‘... psychiatrically speaking nothing is wrong – only sick. If an act is not a choice but
merely the inevitable product of a series of past experiences, a man can be no more
guilty of a crime than he is guilty of an abscess.’ (1982:253)
But how can one engage in moral debate with someone who is mentally ill? Instead
therapy was all that could be legitimately carried out – even though both critics
and the prisoners perceived of this as a tyrannical form of punishment. Yochelson
and Samenow attempt to prove a positivist psychology in which moral
condemnation and exhortation can take place. Four assumptions serve as the
foundation of the approach of Yochelson and Samenow:
• man can will;
• man can choose;
• deterrents exist that are capable of correcting a criminal’s erroneous thinking;
and
• constructing a ‘moral inventory’ of one’s daily thoughts is an essential step in
the correction process.
Yochelson and Samenow’s work has been criticised as poorly operationalised;
difficult to evaluate empirically (Hagan, 1986); being dismissive of the role of
environmental factors in the etiology of criminal conduct despite evidence to the
contrary; and for resting almost entirely on the case study approach and so lacking
in generalisability (Meir, 1983). Additionally, in taking an a theoretical approach
to the question of crime, they become lost in the provision of a wealth of descriptive
information; their ideas lose a certain degree of applicability by not being tied to a
coherent theoretical framework. However, they do point us in the direction of process
and cognitive reasoning. A recent investigation by Michael L Benson (1985), based
on interviewing a sample of 80 white collar offenders, arrived at the conclusion
that these individuals employed a variety of rationalisations, and cognitive
distortions in an effort to assuage guilt feelings, minimise the seriousness of their
rule-breaking behaviour, and retain a view of themselves as ‘good people’. These
findings were obtained using a sample of predominately caucasian, middle-class,
white collar criminals, and were quite consistent with the patterns Yochelson and
Samenow witnessed in a group of predominately black, lower class, person-oriented
offenders.
This also highlights further issues (eg choice, thought, and personal
responsibility), which serve to place more subjectivity upon the individual holding
out the image that the individual is free to choose his path in life; that thinking is
the primary vehicle through which this choice is expressed. And, therefore, for
342
change to take place, the offender must assume greater responsibility for his or her
actions.
How can the individual take responsibility for his or her life choices in the
contexts of contingencies not of their making? The process outlook destroys the
naturalism and essentialism of positivism. The features that characterise the process
of activity which constitutes offending, are the same processes of life which
constitute success. The determined actor was a misnomer. For positivism the actor
only acted in such a way wherein his choice was determined by his own nature. He
chooses by way of a natural tendency. Any feeling of free will is the mere ratification
of a choice which appears to have been made by him, but which is actually made
by something which transcends him – his naturalism.
The problem encountering soft determinism is the existentialist problem of
reconciling freedom and necessity. Let us remember the classical or Kantian
resolution of the dilemma. Kant’s solution left us with two spheres of freedom and
necessity: it is our animal instinctual side which is subject to the laws of the universe,
our human side is subject to the laws of morality. The question which constantly
eludes analysis becomes ‘where does the control and responsibility of this human
freedom reside?’
Direction Four: does the act of labelling invite irrational responses?

The games of law, desire and death
We have so far neglected one of the great theoretical perspectives of modernity:

psychoanalytic theory. Whatever one thinks of Freudian theory, or that of his French
interpreter Lacan, or other variations (and this body of theory has many detractors,
including Karl Popper who believed it was a pseudo theory and virtual nonsense),
psychoanalytical perspectives are challenging and stimulating. They speak to a
counter tradition to that criminology usually engages in, namely the irrational, or
subconscious. Analytical discourse, the dictate of post-enlightenment focus, has
destroyed the interrelated beingness of things. By contrast psycho-analytic theory
returns us to a circle of desire, prohibition, obligation, guilt, desire.
Psychoanalytical theory has several approaches to crime. In particular:
• crime may be a result of psychic imbalance, with a turmoil of desires in the
subconscious which are virtually out of control;
• crime may be a form of neurosis, which finds latent expression, rather than
breaking out into recognisable symptoms. But the most interesting claim is that
• the existence of law creates crime. This occurs in two methodologies:
(i) law creates a prohibition which in turn creates the desire to transgress; or
(ii) law provides an opportunity to offend, and thus be punished. The offender
may actually desire punishment. The offender offends out of some
suppressed turmoil, and sense of guilt, which the subconscious wants a
response to.
343
Conventional criminology used Freudian perspective, which derived out of the

treatment of individual patients. It usually toned down the radicalism of Freud’s
original writings. It talked instead of the denial of normal or healthy desires in
neglected faulty upbringing, and usually presupposed that a healthy normalcy
constituted modernity. The aim of the therapist was to repair the damage caused
by faulty childrearing practices. For example, Abrahamsen asserted:
‘Every element that prevents children developing in a healthy way, both physically
and emotionally, tends to bring about a pattern of emotional disturbances which is
always at the root of anti-social or criminal behaviour. Such behaviour when found in
youngsters, is called juvenile delinquency...
The psychopathology of the juvenile delinquent and of the emotionally disturbed
non-delinquent is manifold because each youngster goes through the same
psychological development, although each one experiences it differently. Both may
be said to be fixated at one or more stages of their development.’ (1960:56 and 74)
In general, all psychoanalytical perspectives refer to human activity as motivated
by latent, rather than openly instrumental, reasons. The vital meanings for activity
are not those on the surface, which positivist approaches may discuss, but meanings
which lurk in the subconscious, and are below the apparent rational intentions of
the individual. These unconscious meanings are essentially symbolic and libidinal.
The language of psychoanalytic theory involves ideas of pleasure and fear
intermixed; play, dream, myth, scene, symbol, fantasy, representations, desire, the
death wish, the castration complex, penis envy, phallocentricity, the dialectic of
the sensuous and the rule bound, the fantasy of the mother and father, the symbolic
authority of the law, the domination of sovereignty, the dialectic of love and law. It
is a gigantic forest for the uninitiated.
Freud generally warns that our drives, our desires are always in conflict with
one another, our faculties are in a state of continual warfare, and our satisfactions
are fleeting and tainted by guilt. We desire success, but plunge into guilt as soon as
we achieve it.
What are the foundations of the contradiction which lie within the human spirit/
body? For Freud it is our basic sexual nature; modernity demands the suppression
of sexuality in the name of the civilising process. For others, it lies in the difficulty
we have in actually articulating into language the range of desires we experience.
No matter how hard we attempt to express our desires, we cannot bring them to
fulfilment in the language-bound methods of communication we are committed
to. In both cases tension is created which demands action: delinquency and crime
are consequences.
Many have said that there is little in Freud that is not found in Nietzsche. Freud
simply substituted sexuality for the will to power which Nietzsche argued was the
basic driving force of humanity. Writing in the 1990s, it is somewhat hard to fathom
the hatred Freud had of sexual prohibitions, since – compared to the 1940s and
1950s – late-modernity has granted increasing sexual freedom. Indeed, from a
Nietzschean perspective, liberal modernity has found it easier to grant sexual
freedom than the enjoyment of power.
344
In the Freudian perspective there is no utilitarian calculation that is innocent of

the libidinal. Classical criminology drew upon the picture Hobbes painted, whereby
the naturally aggressive drives of man are civilised in their rational subordination
to a powerful sovereign whose power is symbolised in the organisation of his
commands in law. But Freudian theory argues that the state can never be absolved
from these aggressive drives. The state is never fully rational. Beneath the apparently
rational, knowledge-bound discourse of the modern criminal trial and the penal
apparatus, lies a mass of conflicting desires, pleasures, inversions, scars, needs
and victimisations.
The rationality of the criminal process can never hope to do justice to the harms
of the body resulting from crime. While in policing and judging an unbridgeable
gap is created between articulate reason and mute force, between material practice
and the significations of ritual and discourse. A criminal justice system committed
to reason and calculation – committed to system efficiency – cannot face up to the
realm of the unconscious. The criminology of the surface (positivism), and the
criminology of rational calculation, cannot come to terms with the inarticulate
irrational.
Civilisation, the projects of modernity, the rule of law, are in a perpetual state of
tension. Modernity involves the conjoining of our basic narcissism and our
primary aggressiveness to projects of constructivism. Modernity may placate
our conflicts; insofar as it offers the image of the building of cities, of the
domination of nature, of the struggle to achieve a collective goal, then the death
wish which lurks within our aggressivity is tricked into the task of establishing
social order in the name of the future life, the future pleasure. The early modern
organisation of classical criminology amounts to a challenge to the self but the
legislation and coercion of classicism was complemented by the hegemony of a
social project. In this hegemony the legitimation of the social is partly the
identification of one’s own desires as represented in the social. Freud warns that a
society must ensure that the majority believe that the projects of the society are
reflecting their desires.
But a civilisation always experiences difficulties. The social order entails a
renunciation of instinctual gratification – the more civilised we become, the more
we lose close contact with our body in the tasks of rational calculation and
technological advancement, the greater the brutality and suppressed aggression
which lurks within. The more we embrace technological power, the greater the
possibility of self-hatred.
What if we slacken and reject the discourse of the project of modernity? If we
renounce modernity in favour of the privatisation of the collective? How will the
conflicting drives be harnessed to cooperative activity? In The Future of an Illusion,
Freud warned that no society can survive for long if its minorities are not drawn
into believing that they are participating in the culture and structures of the society.
If they do not believe that they either are, or will be at some stage in the future,
integrated then we cannot expect cultural prohibitions to be internalised among
345
the oppressed. Political power would cease to be hegemonic. Are we seeing this
process with the increase in white collar crime and in the creation of an underclass?
The political authorities do not appear to want to take seriously white collar crime,
seeking instead to create hegemony by intensifying the criminalisation of the
underclass. But can the political powers be certain that the energies of an underclass
will be taken in by the seductions of market induced pleasures, which they can not
hope to legitimately achieve; in the rave scene; in the drugs the underclass are
given by the lucrative drug trade; by sexual conquest? Can the powerful be certain
that the crimes of the underclass will continue to be largely committed by members
of the underclass on their peer group?
The overuse of law: law’s ability to create crime
As modernity developed, the civilising process (to use Elias’s phraseology) sought
to replace the coercion of law apparent in the power of the sovereign by the
hegemony of the social project. As we will argue in Chapter Seventeen, we would
expect the splitting of late-modern societies into a superclass, seduced by the market,
and an underclass, constrained by the coercion of the law, to face extreme challenges
to law and order. Perhaps post-modernity could survive if we destroyed many of
the present criminal laws, and launched radical programmes of localisation and
community education. If is clear from Freudian theory that the existence of law
creates a desire to transgress it, and that coercive policing, of its nature, arouses
resistance. How is this? Freudianism returns us to the symbolism of our first
experiences.
The first experiences of the child, of birth or food, are linked to the mother. The
mother is the supplier of warmth, of nutrition (breast feeding), of pleasure... she is
the only locus of existence, the focus of the void, the significant of the good... she
is the Good. The child wants to bond with the good, to know the good for eternity.
What is stopping it? For Freud it is the Father - the father is the original site of
prohibition, since the father possesses the mother which the child wants. The child’s
want of the mother is successfully labelled as incest. This is the original law (it
would, of course, amount to the appropriation of the property of the father), in
response the child wants to kill the father. We can note that structural anthropology
locates the whole development of civilisation upon the strength of this original
prohibition – since he cannot rely upon his mother and sisters for sex and breeding,
the male has to look outwards for sexual partners, and for the production of children.
Hence he must either steal the women of other men, or trade for them. The
prohibition against incest becomes the functional basis for economy – the spreading
outwards of the trading universe of the male.
The original desire for the mother is subjected to a prohibition, we are under an
obligation to refrain – but this does not destroy desire, it merely subjects it to the
power of guilt. Desire, prohibition, guilt... prohibition, guilt desire... once in motion
346
the circle moves in various ways. Prohibition causes desire, causes guilt, desire
interacts with guilt.
The desire to transgress is placed by Freud at the centre of culture. The murder
of the father is the foundational form of crime; it is the original desire which has
been criminalised.
In the hands of the French psychoanalytic writer Lacan we deconstruct the
desire to possess the mother which Freud saw as foundational – this is actually
only the signification of something deeper. The mother was the provider of that
which gave life – hence it is not the mother which is desired, but the life which the
mother signifies – put another way, the mother is the site which prevents death. It
is death which is feared, death which must be kept at bay – we do this through
prohibition. The role of prohibition, the role of law is to keep death within bounds.
To stave off death as long as possible. (Note: we are now into the realms of
classical liberal political theory, from Hobbes onwards through classical
criminology.) We create social order to stand as the bastion of life against death –
but, in so doing we encourage the instinct to transgress – the death instinct. Law
will, and must, be transgressed. What is the relation of the self to the law? Is the
self that commits crime merely the self that lacks self-control against the power of
desire? No, it cannot be reduced to such a simplistic arrangement. Instead self,
desire, other, death, command, obedience are only visible through a series of
reflections which feed off each other; they cannot exist separately, they are
constituted in interaction.
For liberals, to create a law means, by definition, that we have the freedom to
transgress it – it is upon this rock that guilt can be established. For psychoanalytic
theory the law creates desire – enacting a law which specifics that an activity is to
be refrained from amplifies whatever desire there is to perpetrate that activity. It is
in the nature of taboos to intensify the longings they forbid; to excite the very
concupiscence they frown upon.
An example: the prohibition on certain kinds of drugs. In our discussion of
labelling theory we noted the ironic consequences of this policy in the creation of
a vast illegal market with huge profits. The question here is would legalising these
drugs result in a decrease or increase in their use? We cannot be certain. The evidence
from the decriminalisation of soft drugs in Holland, seems to indicate, that for
native Dutch people, usage of soft drugs has decreased since decriminalisation.
Are there a range of activities in which different avenues of education and
(self)control could replace legal prohibition?
Certainly we should be aware that we overuse the criminal law. it is only one of
several possible ways of handling troublesome situations and perhaps the most
disruptive of social relations. But is there any alternative in late-modern societies –
can we be moderns without the law?
347
Direction Five: the latent power of existentialism within

criminology
The philosophy of existentialism is underdeveloped within criminology theory,

but it is only a short step from Matza, the culture of contingency, and our
understanding of the division of the self within late-modernity. The radical
philosophy of existentialism is the expression of the late-modern experience, it
starts with the realisation of the death of God, and, accordingly, the necessity for
us to make ourselves constantly anew. It is to this perspective that we now turn.
348
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CRIME AND THE EXISTENTIALIST DILEMMA
‘... throughout the modern era, the quest of the individual is for his self, for a fixed
and unambiguous point of reference. He needs such a fixed point more and more
urgently in view of the unprecedented expansion of theoretical and practical
perspectives and the complication of life, and the related fact that he can no longer
find it anywhere outside himself. All relations with others are thus ultimately mere
stations along the road by which the ego arrives at its self. This is true whether the ego
feels itself to be basically identical to these others because it still needs this supporting
conviction as it stands alone upon itself and its own powers, or whether it is strong
enough to bear the loneliness of its own quality, the multitude being there only so that
each individual can use the others as a measure of his incompatibility and the
individuality of his world.’ (George Simmel, 1971:219-23)
‘[For the criminal] thinking about crime is exciting. Committing the crime is
exciting. Even getting caught is exciting. Trying to figure out a way to beat the rap is
exciting.’ (Samenow, Inside The Criminal Mind 1984)
Combating the vertigo of freedom: the existentialist reconciliation in

sincerity and authenticity
Existentialist philosophy1 takes seriously the fact of God’s death and will not find
any solace in positivism and functionalism. For the French philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre:
‘The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not
exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible
heaven. There can no longer be any good a prior, since there is no infinite and perfect
consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must
be honest and not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men.
Dostoevsky once wrote “If God does not exist, everything would be permitted”; and
that, for existentialism is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God
does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to
depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without
excuse.’ (Quoted in Kaufmann, 1957:294-5)
Without God man must invent his own values; he must freely choose his destiny
and his social meaning. In the existentialist orientation the vertigo of freedom is
ever present; modernity breeds perpetual anxiety. The German theorist Heidegger
identified this as the essential human characteristic:
1 ‘It is, of course, contentious to write such a term. Existentialism is not a system: Existentialism
is of its nature irreducible to a clear cut social philosophy. However, existentialism is not nihilist.
Exactly the opposite – the void of existentialism is not to be filled by ideology, rather the onus is
placed upon the individual to avoid mistaking the temporary social “truth” of the groups with
actual, or ideal, truth. The individual must have recourse to his/her own understanding of the
requirements of being fully human.
349
‘Being-free for one’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and therewith for the possibility
of authenticity and inauthenticity, is shown with a primordial, elemental concreteness,
in anxiety.’ (1962:236)
It is not the environment which prevents freedom, but the refusal of being true to
oneself. The freedom to act is replaced by the ideas of spontaneous, or sincere
action which seeks to cope with the ambiguous concept of freedom. We bear
responsibility for our actions in the sense that we must think contemporaneously
to our actions. As moral-cultural creatures, mankind have an obligation (which
can be incurred or rejected) to remain attentive to the forms which experience (our
actions and their results) directly assumes. Existentialism demands we avoid
becoming dulled to the intensity of our life through familiarity, schematised through
intellectual or moral laziness, or standardised through desire for conformity or
habitual action. A free act is a significant act.
Put in another form: whereas negative freedom sees one as free when one is
released from something, positive freedom is an active conception. Positive freedom
is the freedom to do something. In the existentialist perspective we are free when
we have a clear and distinct idea of the causes of our own states, physical and
mental; thus we can take responsibility for our actions even when they are in
circumstances certainly not of our choosing.
My free actions are those actions of which I am the author. This is as much a
prescriptive standard for authenticity in modernity as a description. Kierkegaard
asks us to look on our lives as aesthetic projects, we must live so that our essential
spirit can recreate itself. He understands life as a process of affirmation and
reaffirmation, particularly centred around the life of the spirit; the spirit alone can
repeat itself, that is, renew itself in its permanence. Ethics are the process of
reaffirmation, duty and fidelity to the spirit of the activities of the self; this is the
true domain of choice and self-committal. In working out one’s dilemmas, we
should obey not the dictates of what is universally required (as in some categorical
imperative), but what is personally required in terms of being faithful to the values
which man has set for the type of person he most wishes to become. This links
freedom and necessity into our life seen as a project; an enterprise of self-discovery
and creation by becoming. We constantly go beyond that self; this moving beyond
our present self is the finest action of our self. The acts most essentially mine are
the actions of which I am the author: freedom is a kind of superior necessity – the
determination of the self by the self. In the positivist guise the self must act out the
script written by its position in the natural order of things in obedience to the
essentialism of that which he or she is; the self performs the actions which
correspond to the exact typology of the kind of rapist he is, of the exact type of
criminal that he or she is. But the essence of existentialist human nature is the
absence of an essence. For Sartre the central doctrine is that ‘existence precedes
essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point’ ([1947] in
Kaufmann, 1957:289):
‘If man, as the existentialist conceives of him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is
350
Crime and the existentialist dilemma
nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he
will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only
is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be
after this thrust towards existence.’ (1965:35-36)
Man is condemned to be free. This does not mean that we are alone in a world that
does not impose upon us through our past and the context of our dilemmas, no, we
inhabit a world full of pressures, but even within the chaos and multiplicity of
forces impinging upon us, we can manoeuvre enough so as to shape the key
elements of our course of action. The imperative of existential action is simple: we
must remain contemporary with our actions, seeking no refuge in a past of
efficient causes, or a future of retrospective justifications. To hide behind the
techniques of neutralisation, which Sykes and Matza uncover, is to discard the
burden of being human. When we avoid the essentialism of the naturalist premise,
when we move beyond positivism, freedom is not a thing nor an attribute of a
thing, otherwise we would merely possess it or not possess it (thus we can see the
need for positivism to differentiate and typologise individuals into types, and so
delineate the types of freedom each individual possesses). Existential freedom
resides in the (non-positivist) ontology of the human being, his processural nature
imbedded in the ambiguity and ultimate mystery of being. The organic, which is
rooted and ordered in time, is only a factor of reality. For existentialism action is
the focal site of human reality. The meaning we humans give to action is the
unveiling of human reality. By our acts – and the labels we apply to our acts – we
give ourselves meaning, we determine our reality. But to understand ourselves we
must keep ourselves some distance from our action: we must see both the
implications and the requiredness of a situation and the consequences of our
determinations. To hide either through reliance upon some organicism, or some
retrospective justification, or some immersion, is to escape into inauthenticity. For
existentialism, our actions express ourselves, not some conjunction of pre-existing
forces, not some set of contingently embodied activity.
Existentialism has a tension: it not only recognises experience as being something
immediate but stresses it ought to be immediate. It argues that any attempt to stuff
Kantian style rationality or positivist materiality into human experience is immoral;
such attempts deny freedom. Yet total immersion in immediacy loses meaning,
loses authenticity.
The optimistic ethos of criminological existentialism
The heading requires explanation. There is no officially defined criminological

existentialism: there should be.
Existentialist perspectures are an underdeveloped resource in criminology. One
full length book Katz (1988), uses what can be called a harsh existentialist account,
as does David Jones (1986) in his final chapter which offers an outline reading
based on the Nietzschean “Will be power”, while Sagarin and Kelly (1981) offer a
351
reading of existentialism to encourage personal responsibility in the face of the

bureaucratic which dominates modernity. Sagarin and Kelly interpret the message
of existentialism ethos as addressed to “those who have embraced bureaucratic
manipulations,” and those who “shun responsibilities not out of selfishness but
because they are confused about the limits of responsibilities, duty, obligation, and
rights, (1981:38). Various liberating or optimistic features flow from the existentialist
perspective.
• The individual is entrusted with his/her own individual decision-making
he/she should not surrender his/her sense of personal responsibility or
initiative to any social group
• “Truth” is not a given entity that can be possessed in its entirity. While the
search for truth is the goal, all people are too limited in time and
circumstances to ever possess objective truth. All positions are perspectives
– they have various consequences, various effects and various genealogies
– they must be accepted as an act of will, not as something imported from
outside.
• Existentialism stands opposed to all arguments of social or natural necessity
– the social world was our creation – mankind can change it.
• Existentialism turns against the numerical, the quantitative in favour of the
unique. In the numerical – for example classical 19th century utilitarianism
– Nietzsche and Kierkegaard argue the differences between the members
of a class, the distinctness of the human, can be ignored. Whenever an
individual human being can be treated as if he/she was a number,
dehumanisation is the result; herd, or crowd, morality operates. The
existentialist can only oppose.
Frankl, the Existential psychologist, tells of this incident about the operation of the
concept of law within a concentration camp:
‘It had been a bad day. On parade, an announcement had been made about the many
actions that would, from then on, be regarded as sabotage and therefore punishable by
immediate death by hanging. Among these were crimes such as cutting small strips
from our old blankets (in order to improvise ankle supports) and very minor “thefts.”
A few days previously a semi-starved prisoner had broken into the potato store to
steal a few pounds of potatoes. The theft had been discovered and some prisoners had
recognized the “burglar.” When the camp authorities heard about it they ordered that
the guilty man be given up to them or the whole camp would starve for a day. Naturally
the 2,500 men preferred to fast.’(Viktor Frankl, 1959:102).
The harsh end of criminological existentialism
Existentialism seeks out the meaning of things as they are in their full empirical
actuality – thus in understanding the human personality the emotions should be
analysed, not ignored as ‘accidental’ or inconsequential, therefore such emotions
352
as fear and dread, boredom and passion are at the core of activity not peripheral;
the results of this centrality to analysis are not always to our liking
In a justly famous section, Of the Pale Criminal from Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Nietzsche relates how the acts we call crime often involve the offender doing an
action in which he ‘judged himself’ and gave himself a ‘supreme moment’. Those
who staff the criminal justice agencies tend to ignore the meaning of the event and
action for the person committing it; they translate the living phenomenon into a
language removed from the heat and passion of the event:
‘But the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the
deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.
An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it: but he
could not endure its image after it was done.
Now for evermore he saw himself as the perpetrator of one deed. I call this madness:
in him the exception has become the rule.
The chalk-line charmed the hen; the blow he struck charmed his simple mind – I
call this madness after the deed.
Listen, you judges! There is another madness as well; and it comes before the
deed. Ah, you have not crept deep enough into his soul!
Thus says the scarlet judge: “Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to
steal.” But I tell you: his soul wanted blood not booty: he thirsted for the joy of
the knife!
But his simple mind did not understand this madness and it persuaded him
otherwise. What is the good of blood? it said. Will you not at least commit a theft too?
Take a revenge?
And he harkened to his simple mind: its words lay like lead upon him – then he
robbed as he murdered. He did not want to be ashamed of his madness.
And now again the lead of his guilt lies upon him, and again his simple mind is so
numb, so paralysed, so heavy.’
In committing the crime a private set of desires and interpretations were at play; a
private reality the public language, the language of criminology, will not
acknowledge. Who is this man asks Nietzsche? His reply denies essentialism and
evokes the contemporary descriptions of the left realists of the offender involved
with double victimisation:
‘A knot of savage serpents that are seldom at peace among themselves – thus they go
forth alone to seek prey in the world.
Behold this poor body! This poor soul interpreted to itself what this body suffered
and desired – it interpreted it as lust for murder and greed for the joy of the knife.
The evil which is now evil overtakes him who now becomes sick: he wants to do
harm with that which harms him.’
The legacy of Nietzsche demands we get into the rhythm of a self which makes a
‘positive’ action in defying the forest of signs surrounding the civilising process
and resorts to the love of blood, which seeks and experiences the dizziness of the
void. The harsh end of existentialism would point us towards reading crime in the
light of looking for a self which defies the civilising process. Sometimes the
results are upsetting: Connolly (1989) finds that pornography is the revenge of
353
civilised bodies. We are unaccustomed to accepting evil as fully human (I shall

leave evil undefined). Lombroso did not accept that it was human to enjoy
‘excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own
sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse,
tear its flesh, and drink its blood’. Lombroso looked away and saw only a
reversion to the non-human, the atavistic being who was an evolutionary
throwback.
Nietzsche wants us to see the positive side of the criminal action as it appeared
to the subjectivity of the actor. We may not wish to do so: (i) we may desire to side
with the victim; (ii) we may wish to speak a scientific language which is cleansed
of the metaphysics of evil; (iii) we may have learnt from the false romanticism of
the ‘radical’ criminologist of the late 1960s and 1970s who appeared to see the
criminal as a politically motivated fighter against the system. Of course the
criminal is not directly interested in his act to create a more just society – but he
may be attempting to achieve an act, a leap into action which gives power to his
being.
Sartre claimed that we had to work through the human setting and the human
subjectivity inherent in every statement and action – all human activities are
meaningful. Existentialism seeks to preserve the freedom of the individual self
from the domination of the administered world, the Weberian universe of
bureaucratic rationality and knowledge which sets out categories of law-like
generalisations. But how are we to understand the phenomenology of the criminal
act? What was criminology doing to the actuality of crime? For Nietzsche it
appears the logos of crime (criminology) was transforming the being of the
criminal into a thing, into a piece of reality which a discourse of science could
speak about and uncover the predictive elements (the hope of a technical science)
and so control. But this turns the criminal from an agent into a mere vessel for
other forces. Both the categorial moral laws of the Kantian position, and the
naturalism of Lombroso, turned away from the existential dilemma of the person;
both of these eliminated his individual significance and made the person a space
through which something else (the moral law, flows of determinism) passed.
Early modernity and the crime of passion
It was not such a long time earlier than Nietzsche’s writings that public punishment
often provided a festive occasion. Nietzsche complained of the systematic levelling
of the world: perhaps the crime of passion, regarded as quintessentially French,
serves as an example. Joelle Guillais argues that:
‘... nowadays, perpetrators of crimes of passion are relegated to the category of
“insane” and fade into the dreariness of everyday poverty. They are regarded as
failures, undeserving of any special attention unless they have committed
sacrilegious acts, such as cutting up and eating the flesh of their beloved one. In the
354
last century, lawyers presented them as decent individuals and “gently” rebuked
them. In the eyes of the law, they had one excuse: their passion, which affected their
will power. [They] made an impression on a public thirsting after powerful emotions
and bloody thrills. This very real violence fuelled their imagination. Everyone
regarded the defendant who was about to be judged not simply as a mentally sick
person, but as a true criminal, and they enthusiastically waited outside the courtroom
to see this man who was said to look just like any other. The public, ever eager for
something out of the ordinary, something sensational, perceived the criminal act with
a great deal of genuine emotion, for its theatricality exacerbated the tragedy of life.’
(1990:229-230)
Guillais interprets crimes of passion, even of the working class, as continuing
certain higher loyalties such as the concept of honour or defence of pride:
‘A crime of passion was in itself an honourable act, since it was an act of revenge
capable of making amends for the departure of one’s partner, for adultery, or for a
rejected marriage proposal; all these insults implied the loss of social dignity within
one’s circle.’ (1990:24)
A crime of passion was also a defence of power. Guillais highlights the fact that
the notion of sexual honour was equally grounded in symbols of woman’s purity
and a stake in the property/power relationship of patriarchal society. What is the
meaning of violence in these situations? A synonym of force and power, an accepted
part of the male make-up. Suffering an affront to one’s honour without hitting
back is thereby thought to be tantamount to admitting to a lack of virility. Virility
is signified in physical strength, courage, and an ability to take one’s drink. Thus
alcohol is not a causal agent for crime as the temperance movement argued, merely
a trigger mechanism. Crimes of passion of the working class occur in localities of
great poverty, where violence, both verbal and physical are commonplace. How is
the stability of individuals in conditions continually verging on the critical and
chaotic rightly to be assumed? Many men, facing these conditions, welcomed the
punishment of death or penal servitude:
‘... bowed too often by adversity; they wanted to break the endless chain of failure
and misfortune which bound them like a curse. In an explosion of revolt and confused
hatred, they exposed themselves to death through death. This meaningless act raised
them out of anonymity by allowing them at last to be heard.’ (1990:38)
But then these acts are not meaningless but full of the richness of tragedy. Are we
honestly to state their acts were a mere lack of self-control? How can the self be
brought under control when one’s heart is torn, when one’s pocket is empty, when
emotional tension and economic poverty cry out one’s abysmal failure to direct
the situation? In this situation crisis and confusion both act as consequence and
cause. Drift has given way to desperation; desperation to the determination to act.
Whatever the resultant act, it serves to take control of the moment.
Note that, whereas 19th century writers emphasised the horror of the deed,
modern criminology has rendered it mundane. Positive criminology turned to the
355
study of the offender and found what? The pitiful, the weak, the mundane. Nietzsche
predicted it:
‘A criminal is frequently not equal to his deed: he makes it smaller and slanders it.
The lawyers defending a criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful
terribleness of his deed to his advantage.’
(Epigrams 109 and 110, Beyond Good and Evil)
Modern criminology cannot speak of the existential love of crime as a powerful
determination by a self grasping for control. It cannot speak of the love of
debasement, of the seduction in imposing humiliation on another, of the rage of
the pre-modern self scourged when forced to accept a modernism he or she does
not understand, with little resources of self-esteem and self-worth to face alienation,
humiliation and the battles of the post-modern condition.
In some circumstances the offender is taking revenge against the civilising
processes of modernity. This notion of the offender as a rebel against modernity
has little to do with the idea of the Marxist rebel in class conflict. Our picture of
revenge and rebellion is of acts inarticulately aimed against discipline into the
established order of things. For those on the fringes of organised mainstream society
it is not just a case of being pushed around, of being dominated, but of being
disciplined into docility. Against normalcy their resources of resistance were more
a question of skiving off work, of cohabiting, of spending their wages on drink, of
wandering from job to job, thereby opposing the structure of mainstream moral
values and calling into question the Leviathan of state power over civil society. By
contrast, the violence so openly expressed in the crime of passion reveals the play
of power, and the will to escape. No wonder that many have been prepared to read
of these crimes and these offenders as of characters in a rich tapestry. A tapestry
which offers a reflection on the tragedy of the human condition and the deepness
of the mystery of morality; a mystery so deep that the word evil positions itself as
the gateway into its dialectics.
Modern criminology has turned away from this celebration of the depth of the
morality of everyday life. It has denied these festivals of cruelty, these
phenomenologies of the blood and the knife which point to the openness of human
character. It is almost impossible to read accounts of the great crimes in
criminology textbooks. Where are the accounts of the Holocaust, where are the
accounts of Stalin’s atrocities, of slavery, of government sanctioned torture?
When the numbers who have died as a result of the crimes of government make
the numbers who die as a result of street crimes pale into insignificance, why
(and how) does criminology continue to concentrate upon the terrain of
everyday street crime? Is it because to face up to these other events would reveal
the normalcy of the criminal? Would taking seriously the enormous extent of the
crimes of the powerful render problematic the labelling of the powerless as anti-
social and criminal? Moreover, what is the effect of the treatment by
criminology of the crimes of the everyday? While criminology seemingly
356
concentrates upon the crimes of everyday life (so-called street crime and crimes
of civil society) it turns these into statistical regularities and matters of
generalisations. The horror of the everyday is repressed. To a limited extent this
horror features in the tabloid press, but criminology must work to civilise, to
explain, to render transparent and thereby safe, a modern self which contains in its
mysterious depths the beingness of evil. Modern criminology has worked to
reassure us that the ‘normal’ person was not evil – crime was a result of deviancy
or pathology. Is this why the image of the psychopath reoccurs so often? Does it
not shuffle off unpredictability and unsociality into the guise of some other-than-
us and thus compartmentalise the image of danger, the image of the unknowable,
and dare we say it, of evil? How do we deny the ever-present (potentially) evil to
the beingness of our selves?
Tactic one: the beast within who can overtake us when we are weak or
asleep
The pre-modern world knew of possession by spirits. A spirit would enter into the
body of the person taking over his or her actions. For the ancient Greeks many of
their worst (and sometimes best) actions were when they listened to the
suggestions of the Gods; St Joan listened to her voices. In this way of
understanding our actions are not our own, we are vehicles of the others
intentions. In fun (as generations of Werewolf films tell us) or in philosophy, we
attribute to some other entity the origin of these actions. Of course, this offends the
existentialist, who demands that we take full responsibility for ourselves, but we
all know of the other.
Who has not experienced a fantasy of revenge or of rampant sexuality? Of
domination? What is the status of these fantasies, in which we throw off the bonds
of restraint, in which we become all powerful (or submissive). Those times which,
as Plato said:
‘... bestir themselves in dreams, when the gentler part of the soul slumbers, and the
control of reason is withdrawn. Then the Wild Beast in us, full-fed with meat and
drink, becomes rampant and shakes off sleep to go in quest of what will gratify its
own instincts. As you know, it will cast off all shame and prudence at such moments
and strike at nothing. In fantasy it will not shrink from intercourse with a mother or
anyone else, man, god or brute, or from forbidden food or any deed of blood. It will
go to any lengths of shamelessness and folly.’ (Republic 9 571c, quoted in Midgley,
1979:37)
What are we to make of this wild beast? Is it the uncivilised self? That which is in
us and lurks whenever the bonds of control loosen? Or are these fantasies actually
escape valves? Are they places where the beingness of evil resides so that it does
not come into the social (daylight) reality of late modernity?
357
Tactic two: the psychopath

One interpretation of Nietzsche’s will to power is to see in it a straightforward
domination of other people, even delight in tormenting them. We like to argue
that this is ‘certainly clearer, but false, except of psychopaths’ (Midgley:
1979:8).
Midgley reads Nietzsche as equating this fascination with power as a sign of
strength but, she argues, it can equally be a sign of weakness. Two points arise:
first, the notion of the psychopath may deflect our understanding that desires for
violence and cruelty are part, albeit repressed, of being human, instead making
such desires a symptom of not being truly human. Second, we may wish to
develop the idea that the infliction of pain – the desire to dominate – is a
consequence of a feeling of loss of power. That it is a consequence of the
existential perception of weakness, or of impaired masculinity, and thus we
witness the transformation of humiliation into rage, and, finally, the humiliation of
the objectified other.
Recognising the existential sensuality of crime

Texts which argue that the existential sensuality of crime be recognised are very
much a minor tradition in criminology.2 One recent and well received study by
Jack Katz (1988) dwells on the sensuality of crime and has done much to point the
way towards an existential tradition in criminology. Although he does not explicitly
use the existentialist paradigm, in Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual
Attractions of Doing Evil Katz is concerned to write in the appreciative mode and
to gain a grip inside the actors perceptions. Nonetheless, he is at pains to point out
that he is attempting empathy not sympathy. He, as indeed am I in presenting the
sometimes upsetting accounts which follow, is endeavouring to draw attention to
the lived attractions of crime, not to condone them.
Katz argues that social science has failed to convey what it:
‘... means, feels, sounds, tastes, or looks like to commit a particular crime. Readers of
research on homicide and assault do not hear the slaps and curses, see the pushes and
shoves, or feel the humiliation and rage that may build toward the attack, sometimes
persisting after the victim’s death.’ (1988:3)
Lost in theories stressing the instrumentality of crime and criminality as one or
other form of pathology, we do not understand that for adolescents shoplifting or
vandalism offers a thrilling experience. We fail to see what exactly are the attractions
of the commitment to gang-membership. We neither feel the reality of ‘cold-
blooded, senseless murders’, nor understand the human dynamics which are at
2 It is actually difficult to find secondary source material which conveys the lived experience of
committing crime. In the following discussion extracts are taken from several texts which do
provide accounts in the actors own words and from fieldwork the author has carried out on Social
Services Juvenile Justice teams where young people were interviewed and asked to describe
their experiences.
358
play in the actuality of the event. Few people have recognised the distinctive
attractions of robbery – apart, and it is a big apart, from the tradition of symbolic
interactionism. But this tradition often appears as an appendage to the dominant
approaches which draw their foundation from the material of statistical regularity.
The appreciative wing of the Chicago school laid down the challenge of explaining
the qualities of deviant experience. But largely this has not become incorporated
into the mainstream. There are some exceptions. The world of the football hooligan
has been sampled and conveyed. Allen and Greenberger (1978) point to the aesthetic
element of vandalism where vandals enjoy the visual, auditory, and tactile sensations
stemming from their creative conversion of material things. Instead of focusing on
the background of crime Katz seeks to understand the foreground, the emergence
of distinctive sensual dynamics. The range of sensual dynamics runs from
enticements that may draw a person into shoplifting to furies that can compel him
to murder. Bizarre things happen: during the My Lai massacre, after having killed
all those who were in the village, the American soldiers began to eat lunch. Two
young girls who were away returned, the marines who had killed their parents and
brothers and sisters offered to share their own lunch with them – the furies had
passed. (Kelman and Hamilton, 1989)
Katz suggests a way in which we can explain the weakness of criminology.
Criminology has focused too much on the materiality of crime and neglected what
Matza told us was central: infraction, ie the moral nature of the interaction. Katz
suggests that central to all the experiences are:
‘... moral emotions: humiliation, righteousness, arrogance, ridicule, cynicism,
defilement, and vengeance. In each, the attraction that proves to be most fundamentally
compelling is that of overcoming a personal challenge to moral – not to material –
existence.’ (1988:9)
For example, the impassioned killer in the act of killing may be escaping a situation
which he sees as inexorably humiliating. Not able to see how he can move with
self-respect from the current situation, he moves out of the mundane and leaps into
a course of action which embodies ‘through the practice of “righteous” slaughter,
some eternal universal form of good’.
Some earlier writings had focused on this theme. Luckenbill (1977) argued that
some crime is motivated by the desire to preserve individual or collective honour.
Thus, trying to maintain one’s sense of self, when insulted by another, can lead to
homicide. In their study of Chicano Gang violence Horowitz and Schwartz (1974)
argued gang violence was often triggered by the desire to defend the gang’s
collective honour and thereby protect the self-esteem of its members. Klemke (1978)
found that equal numbers in his sample of adolescent shoplifters stole for expressive
reasons, such as the pursuit of excitement, as for instrumental reasons (ie a desire
for the goods taken). This may take on the form of a game. Richards, Berk, and
Foster (1979) depicted middle class delinquency as a form of play, wherein the
delinquency fulfils needs similar to those catered for by other forms of leisure:
namely, adding interest to the daily routine, providing entertainment, learning new
359
techniques and skills and learning social rules. In lower class areas ‘joy riding’
offers a good time, risk, status among peers, prestige in dare-taking and learning
the skills of driving.
At the other extreme shoplifting is turned into a thrilling melodrama about the
self – apart from the goods taken, the getting away with it is a demonstration of
personal competence. The very fact of infraction adds to the excitement. Parker
found this challenge is especially apparent in some white collar crimes, for example
those involving computers:
‘A general characteristic of computer programmers is their fascination with
challenges and desire to accept them. In fact, they face the great challenge of making
computer systems do their bidding day in and day out. Telling a programmer that a
computer system is safe from penetration is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
The challenge of an unauthorised act often overshadows the question of morality.’
(1976:47-48)
Status may lead to a redefinition of self. Katz argued that in building a series of
robberies the individual redefines himself as a ‘badman’, creating a personal style.
Lejeune (1977) found that his sample of casual robbers stole to buy drugs and
clothing not only for the status the goods offered, but also, to enhance their standing
among peers, and to create a more exciting life.
For Katz the acts can be explained only through a theory of moral self-
transcendence. He argues that we have lost touch with the lived reality of evil, with
the fascination with evil that we, as moral creatures, have always had. Has
criminology in becoming scientific lost touch with humanity?
The existentialist message is roughly as follows: in setting out a positivism
which analyses the conditions of existence, we are in danger of forgetting that the
offender is an existential phenomenon. Our theorising becomes a process of
analytical reductionism which does not explain the existential reality of life. By
developing a criminology that talks the dry language of modernist control, strain,
learning, genetics or constitutionalism, we neglect the essentially moral struggle
that individuals wage with anomie, with alienation, with inadequacy, with
powerlessness, with the desire to possess, with the need to create themselves. Thus
we weaken our ability to grasp the reality of crime, both for the petty inadequate
street offender and for the apparently powerful corporate executive. What does
crime look like if we are to believe that crime is seductive? That the existential
beingness of the commission of crime takes up the body and exposes it to rushes of
excitement and adrenalin or to the mystical attractions of being possessed by a
dream?
The sensuality of stealing
One rather habitual offender who specialised in house breaking, seemed clear that
the sensuality of the experience might only be compared to sexual intercourse:
360
‘I begin to feel giddy and restless... I feel as if I have to do something. This feeling
becomes gradually more marked until I feel compelled to enter a house and steal.
While stealing I become quite excited, involuntary begin to pant, perspire and breath
rapidly as if I had run a race; this increases in intensity and then I feel as if I have to
go to the closet and empty my bowels. After its all over I feel exhausted and relieved.’
(Quoted in Hibbert, 1963:221)
A large amount of burglary is accompanied by the offender urinating or defecating
while on the premises. There is the symbolism of sacrilege but it is also because
the body is aroused. As another offender put it:
‘Stealing is a passion that burns like love... and when I feel the blood seething in my
brain and fingers, I think I should be capable of robbing myself, if that were possible.’
A juvenile who was on a supervised session of a Social Services Team, and who
had a history of shoplifting, described his experiences as follows:
‘Once I’d got over the initial fear it was a trip I needed when things got bad. I would
feel better from the time I knew I was going to take a go... The planning... well... it
wasn’t really planning, more a sense of building up anticipation... then the walk to the
store. I always wore special clothing... walked slow... I was more than me...’ (Morrison:
Fieldnotes)
For this adolescence the ritual of shoplifting offered the opportunity to be possessed
by a self-image greater than his mundane normalcy. While the actual event may
only take a short time the psychological preparation was a girding of the loins as
for a contest, and knowing the risks involved (he had been caught on more than
one occasion) his body took on the chemical stimulation of danger during the
event:
‘When I begin to walk for the door... I don’t know.. but I can never breath... I’m
holding my breath... As I walk through the door its almost suffocating, I know that’s
the total danger time... when I’m ten or so yards down the road I take a deep breath,
my head spins... It’s a total rush...’ (Morrison: Field-notes)
Lejeune (1977) saw in casual robbery ‘adventurous deviance’, all the more
pleasurable because of the risk of apprehension, although the individuals involved
worked to keep the risk to a ‘manageable level’. For another adolescent, the act of
shoplifting was an existential question of being and not-being, of presence and
transcendence:
‘They think they are watching you all the time. They aren’t... I’m invisible... I’m
there but I’m not there...
They think the camera sees everything... But I can see the light... I’m only being
watched when the red light is on... When I see there is no light sometimes I look right
at the camera when I take something.’ (Morrison: Field-notes)
This is a dare: control me if you can. It is showdown time.
When asked if he was daring the camera, the respondent replied, ‘I’m stuffing
them... stupid gits...’ When asked, ‘Who are they?’ he replied, ‘all of them... the
whole fucking lot...’.
361
One young man related the time he had lost the ability to carry through the
theft. He had gone to a major bookstore, even though he had little interest in books:
‘I slipped a book, real expensive, into my coat and then walked around the shop. That
part was good... I was playing at being at home. But it wasn’t really my scene. When
I went down the stairs to leave the guards were by the door. Normally I would have
walked through... I was sure that I hadn’t been seen, but I didn’t feel right. It [the
book] wasn’t worth it... I went around the shop for awhile... then I put it back on the
shelf...’ (Morrison: Field-notes)
When asked if he meant it was not worth enough money, he replied, ‘No... I mean
it wasn’t worth it... It wasn’t me... It wasn’t the sort...’. In other words a relation of
appropriate desire hadn’t been established with the object, the metaphysics were
wrong. In fact the bookshop appeared too middle class, which was part of the
reason for choosing it in the first place, but the quality of the experience was affected
both by the object and the foreign terrain. The environment that the event takes
place in has to fit the style of the person’s image for the event, otherwise things are
apt to go wrong. The act of shoplifting appears sensually highly gratifying when it
is the coming together of the inner self with an object worthy of desire in a setting
that serves as a theatre of style.
In Katz’s work the reports of students who had shoplifted for a sneaky thrill
were analysed. Although there was often no long term history of shoplifting, the
experience had given moments that lived in the consciousness. One student, who
had stolen a necklace, related:
‘Once outside the door I thought Wow! I pulled it off, I faced danger and I pulled it
off. I was smiling so much and I felt at that moment like there was nothing I couldn’t
do.’ (quoted, 1988:64)
The feeling was similar to that a serial sexual killer identified as he related why his
memory was so good for those particular events:
‘I have a shabby memory on things I don’t want to remember, and things that are
shocking or very vivid, I don’t forget. I trip on those for years.’ (Ressler, et al 1993:164)
The significance associated with the offending pattern may be consciously desired:
the identity of what Katz termed the badass formed. Here the person develops
himself through his engagement in tough situations. His focus is not on physical
destruction, or moral self-justification, but on the transcendent appeal of being
mean. The badass wants to attain public testimony to his badass status. When
asked about recent proposals by the Home Secretary which would make community
penalties more demeaning, more rigid, and supposedly tougher, one youth on
supervision was clear:
‘... doesn’t he [the Home Secretary] know what he’s doing? Putting out that these
things [community measures for young offenders] are getting tougher will not stop
anything.. It just raises the stakes... [If we] get it tougher here, we’ll give it tougher
there...’
Another youth, who was listening in, was specific:
362
‘They are thick... we can’t be frightened... not by fear... the excitements’ the trip...’
(Morrison: Field-notes)
These youths saw the reported moves to tougher sanctions as an inducement into
battle. Who did the Home Secretary think he was? The Sheriff of Tombstone? It
was a compliment to be thought of as so serious that newer, tougher measures, had
to be taken. It would be an achievement if they came to pass.
This idea of crime as the enhancement of power is something greater than
mere excitement. While a variety of writers have noted that excitement and
relief from boredom are motives to petty crime (Thrasher, 1927, 1963; Mayo,
1969; Belson, 1975; Csikszentmihalyi and Lawson, 1978), the idea of the will or
drive to power expresses another positive element in the activity. Moreover, it
may not matter if one is caught... the very fact of succeeding in the act has meant
that you have leapt over the hurdles of your immediate context. John Wilkes
Booth was upset that his behaviour when shooting the President of the US
(President Lincoln) in Ford’s Theatre in Washington was not reported in
courageous enough light:
I struck him boldly and not as the papers say; I walked with a firm step through
thousands of his friends; was stopped but pushed on.’ (Quoted in Hibbert, 1963:241)
For Al Capone (the Chicago gangster) the conditions are tough, he does not,
however, back away from the tasks but meets them head on:
‘I’m a businessman... Hell, it is a business. I’m thirty-two years of age and I’ve lived
a thousand... I can’t change conditions. I just meet them without backing up.’ (Quoted
in Hibbert, 1963:247)
And the badass is he who has transcended the mediocrity of the masses. As James
Spenser, a convict who having served time in Dartmoor went on to America so that
he might be taken for a first timer if caught again, explained his feelings after his
first successful buy with his new illicit earnings:
‘I took the Buick out by myself and drove around for a while... I looked at the men
and women walking alone on the sidewalk and I felt a high contempt for them all –
poor fish! Working themselves to death for starvation money! “Hell”, I said to myself.
“They’ve got no guts. They just work and work and work. And when they have sweated
for four months, they’ll have earned less than what I have in four hours”... If I have a
creed at all, I think Darwin summed it up for me in his “survival of the fittest”.’
The dream world becomes the reality. Thomas Wainwright referred to his crimes
as ‘speculations’; when asked how he could have poisoned his young woman
victim, he replied ‘I don’t know, unless it was because she had such thick legs’.
Time becomes nonlinear, when asked if he had any remorse about the men he had
killed, one American gangster replied: ‘Why the hell should I? They are dead ain’t
they?’
In the dream world revenge, humiliation, fantasy and reality become intermixed:
the body of one’s victims may remind one of the power one has.
363
As one serial sexual killer recounted the events after a double killing:
‘I drive up to my apartment with two murdered girls in my car. The trunk is a mess,
with one body stabbed to death. The other [body] is on the back seat. The landlord is
[at my apartment] with two friends I [drove] right up and they kept on talking and I
thought, wow, would they freak out if I just got out and opened my trunk and back
seat and just threw bodies out in front of them... I took the heads up to my room. I
could sit there looking at the heads on an overstuffed chair, tripping on them on my
bed, looking at them [when] one of them somehow becomes unsettled, comes rolling
down the chair, very grisly. Tumbling down the chair, rolls across the cushion and hits
the rug, bonk. The neighbour downstairs hates my guts. I’m always making noise late
at night. He gets a broom and whacks on the ceiling “Buddy,” I say, “I’m sorry for
that, dropped my head, sorry.” That helped bring me out of the depressions. I would
trip on that.’ (Ressler, et al, 1993:53)
Here the killer has exercised control over his environment, he has remained
unaffected by events which would shock and disturb the ordinary person. He is
tempted to announce his deeds to his landlord, to demonstrate how well his self-
consciousness is organised, how he displays the power of non-affectedness – how
well he has controlled the situation.
Street elites: aristocrat verses rabble
Katz suggests that for many gang members and street offenders, violence transforms
the mundaneness of their association into glorious combat. Violence committed in
the name of the gang gives out the image of sovereignty; it establishes the claim of
elite status in an aura of dread. Violence is one means of conjuring up this feeling
of dread. Katz quotes Robby Wideman:
‘Straight people don’t understand. I mean, they think dudes is after the things straight
people got. It ain’t that at all. People in the life ain’t looking for no home and grass in
the yard and shit like that. We the show people. The glamour people. Come onto the
street with the finest car, the finest woman, the finest vines. Hear people talking about
you. Hear the bar go quiet when you walk in the door. Throw down a yard and tell
everybody to drink up... You make something out of nothing.’ (1988:315, emphasis
added)
You make something out of nothing! In committing his crimes is Wildeman
following Nietzsche’s call to authenticity, obeying the cultural message embedded
as one of the deepest themes of modernity? Listen again to the words of Nietzsche:
‘Every human being is a unique wonder; they (the artists) dare to show us the human
being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone – even more, that in
this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating,
as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull. When a great
thinker despises men, it is their laziness that he despises: for it is on account of this
that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy
of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong to
the mass must merely follow his conscience which shouts at him: “Be yourself! What
364
you are at present doing, thinking, and desiring, that is not really you”.’ (Quoted in
Kaufmann, 1957:101-2)
Rape and sexual homicide
The legal category of rape covers an array of situational interactions. The sensual
dynamic of a rape, or of murder, may vary greatly; positivist attempts to uncover
the structure of the personality of the rapist have inevitably resulted in varying
typologies. One basic dilemma lies in the respective roles played by (i) the pursuit
of power, or (ii) sexuality. Traditionally, studies have varied in the extent to which
they see rape as a sexual crime (ie engaged in purely for sexual gratification) or
primarily power based (ie engaged in for the feeling of power achieved by the
rapist in getting the victim to do something he or she did not want to do, and the
resultant humiliation the victim experiences). Groft (1979) claimed the most
common type of rapist was the ‘power rapist’ who wanted to possess his victim
sexually rather than harm her to demonstrate mastery and control; the next most
common was the ‘anger rapist’, who discharged contempt and hostility towards all
women through the act of rape; least common was the ‘sadistic rapist’, who
eroticised aggression toward the victim, deriving gratification from her anguish
and suffering.
In the FBI report on Sexual Homicide the following extract relates an interaction
where the researchers identified resistance of the victim precipitated her being
killed to preserve a fantasy centred around control and domination:
‘We were upstairs and I was taking my clothes off. That’s when she started back
downstairs. As a matter of fact, that’s the only time I hit her. I caught her at the
stairs... She wanted to know why I hit her. I just told her to be quiet. She was
complaining about what time she would get home and she said her parents would
worry. She consented to sex... then I remember nothing else except waking up and her
dead in the bed.’ (Ressler, et al 1993:51)
Consent? Men often argue that the problem of consent does not arise in the sex
industry, because women enter voluntarily into prostitution and are paid money to
have their bodies sexually entered, filmed and put on display, or perform before
the cameras in the construction of pornography. Conversely, Catherine
MacKinnon has argued: ‘never mind that consent in sex... is supposed to mean
freedom of desire expressed, not compensation for services rendered.’ (1987:11)
The particular offender’s action pack of practical wisdom cannot see that consent
through fear is no consent – she, ought, after all to submit – men ought to be able
to control their environment, this is a moral injunctive. This woman ought to obey
the wishes of that which is more powerful, more central; he has the right to impose
this order of things and defend it against usurpers. The crimes of passion touched
upon earlier also illustrate this. Katz relates an incident where a man killed a
neighbour who was his good friend, and whom he suspected to be having an affair
with his wife. The grand jury refused to bring charges against the killer, therefore
365
this was never officially labelled as homicide, even though there was detailed
evidence given by the wife that the killing occurred when her husband discovered
the victim and herself engaging in sexual activities in a parked car outside her
home. (Katz: 1988:13-14) The jury understood the moral challenge and the moral
right of reaction.
The narratives of knowledge and control infuse the culture of modernity creating
a mind set wherein the world is a complex set of objects to observe and control.
Cultural messages help constitute an individual: our existential freedom is not
some asocial detachment but pragmatic existentialism. If the offender is he who
wages war on the civilising and disciplining tendencies of modernity, his are the
actions of neither a benign nor generous Don Quixote. Our interest in the
existentialist perspective is that it rescues the offender from his location in a set of
determinist forces, but we ignore the reality of social geography if in placing the
offender central we deny his or her location as the interlocutor of a plurality of
social and cultural forces. Following Althusser (1971:171), we may accept cultural
messages help constitute the individual as a concrete subject who has been ‘hailed
by’ or called to an ideological site where his subjectivity may be enacted.
The subject comes to a situation with a history and a set of social skills to
negotiate situations. In the following sections data is utilised which comes from an
in-depth study appearing in the Cambridge Studies in Criminology namely,
Understanding Sexual Attacks (West et al, 1978). This study drew upon accounts
of histories, circumstances and motives which a small group of extremely aggressive
offenders in prison related while undergoing psychotherapy for grade ‘A’ sexual
crimes. The offenders lives were characterised by unhappy childhoods, broken
homes, aggressive tendencies, numerous indications of psychological instability,
a variety of anti-social behaviour, relationships with women had been mostly
disastrous, and those who had undertaken marriages had generally failed to maintain
them. Many of the offenders were poorly educated and had drifted about the country
from job to job, many of them had committed sexual offences after imbibing large
quantities of alcohol or drugs or both. The victims range from under 14 years of
age to elderly married women, but mostly consisted of females in their late teens
or twenties. The majority of those who raped used violence to beat the victim(s)
into submission, and two thirds made use of some weapon or gun. As opposed to
rape in general the majority (four-fifths) of the offenders did not know their victims
before they attacked them, and, except in only three circumstances where the
offenders and victims had been drinking together beforehand, was there any
suggestion that the girls had in any way led to or encouraged a sexual advance.
The group discussion sessions involved slow and searching explorations of the
details and situation of some extremely serious crimes. What was at stake?
Reflexivity.
In recounting the adversities of early life, the researchers indicate how one
theme which predominated was the notion of troubled masculinity. All the offenders
seem to share to some extent feelings of inadequacy, confusion, anxiety or discontent
about their ability to fill the social and sexual requirements of the masculine role.
366
The common home background picture was of defective parental attitudes and
emotional turmoil in the home during upbringing. The homes had been places of
sometimes open emotional turmoil and unpredictable events.
In the discussions we can see a process of investigating social individuality, and
uncovering extreme states of existential denial and anxiety – who am ‘I’ and what
sort of person am ‘I’ The states of remorse engendered sometimes border on feelings
of having carried out injunctions to be a man, but instead of the process of
socialisation having constructed, or deposited, a phenomenon of mind and identity
as a structured entity inside the body of the person, an underdeveloped reflexivity
and confusing series of messages and interpretations arise rather than any self-
conscious calculation. At play are a whole series of emotional states and definitions
of belonging and not-belonging.
From the existential perspective these men were not often free: they were unable
to account for themselves to themselves. They appeared to experience a fear of
being summoned before some place of judgment and found inadequate, a feeling
which adds a huge weight to the quality of everyday life, a question of feeling
inadequately in control where an observer might conclude that the person had
adequate control. At stake is an intersection between the self and control.
We are not simply repeating our refrain that the free individual of the West is
the product of the social forces of modernity, or simply that even those who some
psychologists have labelled psychopaths (defined by being too self-contained and
unable to understand the relationships with others), cannot be seen in any atomist
form of human identity (see Taylor, 1985, for a general critique of the separatist,
individualist, or atomist, view of human identity). Rather, that the existentialist
points us to the problem that if genuine freedom is a matter of executing one’s own
actions, and living a life that is one’s own, then a factor is the ability to know what
one’s position is and how one’s actions relate to it, and accept our responsibility
for our actions. The problem for the existentialist is to develop a scientific picture
of human action; not human behaviour. The confident existential self-judge is the
person who had say, ‘Yes I alone did it, and in doing it, it became my act, I brought
it into existence’.
The dialectic of self-awareness and self-control
Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) locate the principal blame for low rates of self-
control in defective socialisation. From the existential perspective, the role of
socialisation is to equip the self with a sense of belonging to an identity, and a
sense of inner self which can serve as a partially unifying, although changing
resource, to map out a evolving pattern of intentionality to shape our lives. Without
this resource, a sense of self (including variable amounts of self-esteem and self-
worth), albeit however much this is simply taken for granted, the person is
continually threatened by a sense of being formless, meaningless, lost, disintegrated,
confused and shattered; life becomes constricted, tyrannised by anxiety, dread,
367
and panic. A secure sense of self, one so secure that we can take it for granted,
enables freedom of growth, joyful experimentation, self-development and creative
activity. Let us redefine the experiences of family and early socialisation in terms
of providing the self-to-be with resources to become. This may be practicable
(time spent reading with young children directly influences later reading abilities,
and probably IQ scores), or as influences on predictability (in particular, erratic
home discipline confuses), or in observing directional and purposeful activity (again
clearly influenced by not being able to understand the reasons for constraint, or
the purposes of punishment; children who cannot observe adults engaged in
employment), and the mediating of experiences which appear threatening to the
child. The initial sense of self is the gradual process of separation from the others,
the learning to negotiate some direction in one’s daily life, and a growing sense of
the world. Self-reflection is an ability which has to be constructed out of the
experiences of adolescence; self-degradation may become a form of threat to the
self; self-integrity, a factor of the ability of the environment to provide a suitable
terrain for projects of the self. The later, adult self, is a factor of all those little
choices that add up to the creation of the (non)secure existential self. In Matza’s
(1964, 1969) analysis people often drift into their deviant status. There is not an
occasion of one clear cut choice or rational calculation to disobey the rules – they
appear committed to the conventional order by feelings of pride invested in
conformity, and by a sense of shame or guilt at the thought of having done wrong
which they sidestep through techniques of neutralisation – rather, it is a process of
direction(less) in which gradually, a whole series of little choices add up.
The existential self is affected by (i) the grounding of home experiences and the
security and place to develop a self the home provided. The experiences of the
home are important for a well-developed sense of ontological security; the home
creates the conditions for emotionality; (ii) the cultural surrounds which imparts
the resources of basic values, these basic values change human behaviour into
activities. For Durkheim, when we act according to our basic values, we do not
experience this as any constraint, because these values are part of us; (iii) the range
of basic emotions experienced; emotions orientate or guide the will in choosing to
act, and then in choosing what actions to take. Emotions are not a subjective,
individual and socially separated experience, emotions arise in and influence the
outcome of social relations. Emotions are stimulated by cultural interpretation,
and enjoyed or down-played in social interaction.
The events which constituted these offences were social actions

embodying relations; actions mediated through culture and
emotions
The offenders’ narratives of their actions are filled with accounts of their situations,
cultural significations of women and emotions; emotions gave a readiness for action
368
and the emotions experienced reflect the situation and the interpretation of cultural
messages; the actions involve the body, acts of physical strength, acts of
interpersonal domination, sexual penetration, and, occasionally, the act of killing
another. In the following extract, the offenders’ account relates a mixture of hate
and attraction towards women, in which the victim becomes an object for power
and domination; the particular set of behaviour is not best seen as any response to
a particular sexual expression, of a set of instrumental behaviour, but as a social
relation among the men and between them and the victim. As the deed develops,
as power becomes unleashed, the harder it is for the situation to be controlled, and
it begins to control the offender:
‘We went out intentionally looking for girls. Each time we were drunk. It was towards
the end of the month, I believe, that we grabbed our first victim. She was walking
along the street with a carrier bag. We drove slowly by and asked if she wanted a lift.
She said “No”. I told Derek to slow up and that I was going to grab the bitch. When
she was about even with the car, I rushed her, grabbing her by the throat and telling
her to shut up or I would kill her. At that moment I felt like an animal, strong and sure
of myself. I dragged her onto the front seat, while she let out a few screams. I remember
her dropping her purse and the carrier bag before I got her into the car. She was
wearing a sweater and ordinary socks and high boots and she kept repeating “You
won’t kill me will you?” After a few minutes she quietened down and we drove out.
On the way, I kept telling her to be quiet or else my buddy, who had a gun, would kill
her.
I then told her I would help her to escape. As soon as the car stopped I would open
the door for her to run for her life, while I fought to hold Derek back. I had no
intention of letting her go, and I got a laugh, deep down, that she believed me. When
we finally did stop on a farm road she began to run a few yards. I let out a laugh and
went running after her. When I finally did catch her, I dragged her roughly back to the
car, asking her if she really thought I was such a fool as to let her get away. We made
her get into the back seat, and I was already sexually aroused for the degrading raping
of her. I wanted her to take everything off by herself, making her feel ashamed and
abused. We were on each side of her in the back seat, and Derek started telling her to
strip, giving her a few slaps, but she didn’t move. Suddenly I grabbed her by the
throat and started shaking her, feeling powerful and not wanting to stop. I said to her
something like “Listen you bitch, you start stripping now or I’ll kill you. Who do you
think you are?” I felt so strong, and in a way maybe I would have killed her, but she
kept croaking “all right, all right”, and Derek kept calling my name to make me let up.
After I let her go, I told her to get into the front seat to let me have first shot at her.
She slowly disrobed and I attempted to have intercourse, but due to the cramped
space and my state of drunkenness, I kept getting an erection and then losing it.
Finally, in rage and frustration, I got out and let Derek have a go. I waited only a
few minutes and became insanely jealous and selfish and told him now it was my
time again. This time I dragged her out of the car, both of us naked, and attempted
intercourse on the cold ground, but it was just like in the car. Finally, she got on top
of me and got the head of my penis into her. She kept rocking back and forth as my
penis got stronger. I didn’t like her on top of me, so I slowly rolled her over onto her
back, trying to keep my erection hard inside her. She was very tight and finally I
started to pump away. She kept repeating, ‘You won’t come inside me, will you’? I
kept telling her I wouldn’t, but the sexual feeling, the tightness of her, and her
369
pleading words, drove me wild and I let myself go inside her, knowing all the time I
would. We made her get dressed, drove her back, let her out, and made off.’ (West, et
al. 1978:115-6)
The rape may be an act of revenge against another woman who had caused his
masculinity to be brought into question; who had humiliated the offender in some
way. The victim becomes the object which rights the scale:
‘I was quite stoned and hallucinating somewhat, but I was aware of my purpose and
that the woman I was following was not Nancy [the girl who had deceived him]. But
I recall some flashes that left me wondering about that a few times. I used the gun that
I had stolen. I had her take her clothes off and I made her walk ahead of me on the
street for a few minutes. In one of the more severe hallucinatory periods, when I
had a flash for two or three seconds and suddenly saw the face of Nancy, I took a
shot at her. The girl thought it was intentional and almost became hysterical. I got
her onto a lawn beside a house and my clothes came off. I made her do a number of
sexual acts and then I committed the rape. I ran off as soon as I had my clothes on
again. I had distinct feelings of satisfaction at her reactions to being made to walk
naked in the street and to carrying out the sex acts, all obviously embarrassing and
humiliating for her, to the point of being aghast by it all. That was the primary
concern of mine, the purpose it was to serve. The rape was secondary. In fact, it took
me some time and a lot of trying to maintain an erection and reach a climax.’ (West,
et al 1978:117)
In another case the victim was a girl who had been flirting with, and sexually
teasing, the offender without allowing him to have full sex. The victim became the
focus for the powerlessness and frustrations felt by the offender. As he recounts
the narrative, the offender went looking for her with rape on his mind but events
took over:
‘I drove past the place where she lived and stopped under some trees. By now I had it
in my mind that I would like to rape her. I shut the car off and walked up to her door
and knocked. She came to the door and let me in. She was wearing pyjamas. I told her
my car wouldn’t start. There was something said then about me being so drunk. I
asked her if she would give me a hand. She said sure, and went into the bathroom and
changed. We walked down to the car. There was a tyre lever in the car and I got this
out, telling her I was going to use it to tighten up the battery posts. I asked her to look
for a flashlight which was somewhere under the front seat. She bent over and started
looking around. I lifted the lever and stopped. My mind was racing away on me. I
could see part of her backside above her low cut hipsters. It was like being on a high
diving board and afraid to dive, but there’s no stopping once you start. As she went to
stand up, I hit her. She slumped down without making a sound. I bundled her into the
car and drove off.
I thought to myself that I would have intercourse with her and I parked the car. I
had started to masturbate as we drove along. I had some trouble with an erection, but
when I got into a position it only took a few seconds. I don’t know if I realised that I
was having intercourse with an unconscious woman or not. Then she started to move
her arms. At this point my mind started racing again. I thought that she would tell
what happened and I would be caught. I thought to myself what would a man do who
was raping and killing a woman. I pretended to myself I was angry and I hit her on the
370
head a few times. I think I even swore at her, and I beat her on the stomach and breasts
with my fists. I listened to her heart and she was dead...’
[He drove on and dumped the body over the side of a wharf into the water.] ‘I
was exhausted and started to come down. I prayed, hoping there was a heaven and
that she would go there. I then drove home. I set the alarm for early in the morning.
I fell asleep and started to dream I was in a coffin and the boards were rotten and
water was dripping in and I couldn’t move. I woke up. It was only an hour since I
had gone to bed. I went into the bathroom and began to throw up. I was so sick I
couldn’t breathe and I thought I was going to die. I went back to bed and woke up
again at 7.30. I had to go and look at my car. I was sort of hoping it had all been a
nightmare. There was blood in the car, and then I was sure it was all real.’ (West et
al, 1978:118)
While events may take place when the offender has been drinking or taking drugs,
the effect of the drug cannot be viewed as causal. It merely triggers off a disregard
for the environment, the offender becomes in this respect more powerful and feels
able to control the environment:
‘It was about midnight and I had sobered up just a little. While parking the car outside
a restaurant I saw this good-looking blonde parking her car and I gave up my spot to
let her in. Inside the restaurant she was sitting alone, so I asked if I could join her and
she said sure. She was wearing a vivid coloured mini-skirt and was very good looking.
When she left I suddenly had the urge to molest and rape her. I followed her in the car.
I pulled up behind when she stopped outside her place and made a mad dash. Just as
she opened her driver’s door, I was there and told her I wanted to talk to her. She
didn’t want to come into my car, I had to choke her and drag her and threaten her to
get in. Even then I had to slam the door on her legs and feet several times, till she
couldn’t stand the pain, to make her bring her legs inside so that I could close the
door. I drove off out of town, knowing the cops would soon be following, but I wanted
to satisfy my craving...
I got her into the back seat and made her have a drink of the whisky I still had with
me, I got her laying across the seat completely naked and I entered her with no trouble
at all. Just as I started to feel good I noticed some headlights approaching. I felt it was
the police, but I didn’t care. I was still going to get my sex release, so I went at it again
and she started to moan as if she were enjoying it. I kept on and finally ejaculated
while the cops were banging on the windows. I was pulled out by the hair with my
jeans around my knees. I knew I would be in for a rough time.’
[After the arrest his mood was very different.] ‘I had terrible headaches and
nightmares of dying. I thought of hanging, but didn’t have the courage. Finally, I
swallowed a dose of lavatory cleanser...’ (West et al, 1978:120)
Thus the process of objectification may break-down and the reality of the victim
as a person brought home:
‘It was a late hour and I was drunk. I grabbed one girl right on the main street, but she
screamed and ran away. This was about 1.30 am. I caught a bus with the intention of
going home. After I got off the bus, I still didn’t have any intentions of getting a girl.
As I was on my way home, right on the main road, I noticed a young girl in a phone
booth. At that point the urge came to me to rape her. It didn’t matter to me what she
looked like or what she was wearing, the uncontrollable urge to rape her was there,
and I didn’t think about where I was or what would end up happening to me. I crossed
the street and walked by her once, and then came back to the phone booth. I told her
371
that I had a gun and that she was to come with me. She then hung up the phone and
told me I was bluffing, so I grabbed her and tried to pull her out of the booth. She
started screaming and scratched me on the face. Then I hit her a couple of times.
Then, at that point, she said okay. We walked over to a large truck in a parking lot and
got into the back of it. I then had intercourse with her. When I had done and got
dressed we sat and talked for ten to fifteen minutes. Then I decided to drive her home.
I am not sure why I wanted to drive her home instead of just running off. I told her I
was sorry for doing it, and maybe I wanted to try to make it up to her in some way.’
(West et al, 1978:119)
Another rapist planned to kill his victim, and was driving her to a deserted spot,
when she related how she was extremely depressed because her parents were dying
of cancer. The offender thought of his brother who also was dying of cancer and
empathised. He understood that she ‘already had it tough’ and dropped her off at a
restaurant. In another incident the victim drew the offender into her reality of pain
and humiliation:
‘I was drinking with a friend one evening. After we had a few rounds he left to go
elsewhere and I sat there for a few more rounds, as I was really beginning to enjoy
myself. Not long after he left, I began to feel angry and bitter as I had done before. I
then decided to try my car out to see if the garage had fixed it properly as I felt that
they had not done it in the way that they should have. Once I started driving again I
thought of picking up girls. I stopped and picked up three girls who were thumbing
a ride. There was very little conversation between us. I think perhaps that they were
scared of my driving. I let them off without any sort of incident happening. I then
saw three more girls hitch-hiking. I stopped and gave them a ride out of town.
When at first I began to threaten, they refused to do anything, but after I drove past
the point where they wanted to get off, they started to undress. I suppose they felt at
this time they had no choice, I should say that the two of them got undressed, the third
one became hysterical and started to cry. The others asked me to leave her alone, if
they would do what I wanted to do. I agreed to this and never bothered this one girl at
all.
The other two disrobed, while I drove the car. When we were parked off on a side
road, I began to fondle one girl, and then said to get in the back of the car. When we
got into the back, I started to fondle the second girl. I got her to lay back and was now
in the process of starting to have sexual contact with her, when she began to cry. This
caused me to think of other things other than sexual pleasure, and I immediately
stopped my actions. It was then that my conscience took over and I realised just what
I was attempting to do and how wrong it was. I proceeded to drive the girls home. I
felt really scared, not only for what I had done or tried to do, but for what I had
become, an animal in my own eyes. I dropped the girls off and went home. By the
time I got home the fears inside me had really sobered me up to the point of being
almost completely sober.’ (West et al, 1978:121)
In another incident the rage appears to be against women in general, a rage against
the very being of femininity. West relates an incident which took place after an
all-night drinking session The offender saw a woman walking along the street
early in the morning on her way to work, followed her and seized her with great
violence:
372
‘He pushed one hand into her mouth to stop her screams, causing her to choke
helplessly, and pulling several teeth out in the process. With the other hand he tore at
her genitals, ramming several fingers into her vagina. He wanted to get his whole
hand up to claw at her. Had he succeeded in doing so, he might have caused even
worse damage, as it was, she sustained internal injuries and was in hospital for three
days. At one point during the attack, when he was in the “sixty nine” position, he
bit savagely into her labia. The accompanying fantasy, which flashed back into his
mind again and again in the months that followed, was the satisfaction of destroying
the victim’s femininity. It was the attack on her genitals that mattered, the
remembrance of nearly choking her to death gave him no satisfaction.’ (West et al,
1978:116-117)
The offender recounted subsequent periods of depression and horror at his own
thoughts and actions. When he was caught, he put up no legal defence but felt like
being shut away and desired punishment.
Moral transcendence
Katz argues that one reason that homicide is concentrated among the lower class is
that many killings are a desperate attempt to rescue respectability; when there is a
convergent disrespect in a person’s occupational and intimate life the necessity to
defend challenges to one’s self-esteem, no matter how crazy or dysfunctional they
appear to others, is all the more pressing.
The closer we actually look at crime, at the performance of crime, at the living
event, the more ‘the moral emotions’ become vividly relevant. This perspective
stresses the righteousness of the criminal, his desire for freedom. As Paul Tillich a
theological existentialist described the desire and existential reality of
transcendence:
‘Man, in so far as he sets and pursues purposes, is free. He transcends the given
situation, leaving the real for the sake of the possible. He is not bound to the situation
in which he finds himself, and it is just this self-transcendence that is the first and
basic quality of freedom. Therefore, no historical situation determines any other
historical situation completely. The transaction from one situation to another is in
part determined by man’s centred action, by his freedom. According to the polarity of
freedom and destiny, such self-transcendence is not absolute; it comes out of the
totality of elements of past and present, but within these limits it is able to produce
something qualitatively new.’ (1963:303)
The actor has seized the moment; he has turned the trap of his position into an
occasion for transcendence. He has chosen to leap into activity; he has set in motion
a new course of events – he has exercised his freedom.
Can this perspective be combined with positivism? In Sexual Homicide:
Patterns and Motives, a study by the FBI’s behavioural Science Unit on sexual
killers based upon reading of records and interviews with 36 convinced and
incarcerated sexual murderers. Multiple problems existed in family structure,
373
substance abuse was a major problem; psychiatric disorders; for some a mix of
psychiatric disturbance and aggressive acts was present when the offender was a
child; half of the sample had family members with criminal histories; several
had problems in accepting the sexual activities of their parents for example,
observing the mother drinking and bringing home men for sex; there was
instability of home structure with only one-third of the men growing up in the
one location thus there was minimal involvement with a local community thus
reducing the child’s chances of developing positive, stable, relationships outside
the family that might compensate for family instability; in over half the cases the
paternal father had left the home before the boy was 12 and many complained of
a lack of feeling that a father figure that cared for them was present; over 40%
lived outside the home by the age of 18; for two-thirds the dominant figure during
childhood and adolescence was the mother and the men reported little involvement
with a father figure. The researchers suggest it was not absence on the whole
which accounted for the boy’s sense of non-involvement with his father but rather
the lack of ability on behalf of the father to project a positive self-image of
himself to his son and express positive regard for the boy; this set the stage for an
empty existence. The dominant impression conveyed by the men was of a poor
emotional quality to their family relationships, at the extreme this amounted to
hatred of the boy by the father, with the sample including attempts by at least
one father to kill the boy. Another common theme was sexual problems in
childhood, for example witnessing disturbing sex or sexual violence, sexual abuse
(just under half reported being sexually abused under the age of 12 (for example:
‘I slept [sexually] with my mother as a young child’, ‘I was sexually abused by
father from the age 14’). The individuals typically constructed a world of fantasy
amid imagery at odds with their ‘reality’; some of the men preferred sex only
with dead women. The interviewers suspected that of the 16 offenders who did
not report an age for first consenting sex, most never experienced consenting
‘normal’ sex. The authors accept some of Yochelson and Samenow’s argument
that criminal behaviour is a result of the way specific individuals think, but stress
background features which have caused these individuals to think in the ways
that they do and which sets up a criminal career. Fantasies are both reactions to
events and the experiencing of powerlessness in ‘real life’, and sites where the
men become strong. As one offender related:
‘My early adolescent deviant fantasies are importantly different than those following
my return from Vietnam. I was only the victim in those of adolescence; the deviant
fantasy expressions of rage and anger did not have the external objects, women and
society, until after Vietnam.’ (Quoted, Ressler et al, 1993:31)
The authors suggest a conceptual framework for understanding sexual homicide
with five interacting components: (1) the offender’s social environment, (2) child
and adolescent formative events, (3) patterned responses to these events, (4) resultant
374
actions toward others, and (5) the killer’s reactions, via a mental ‘feedback filter’,
to his murderous acts.
If these accounts appear extreme consider that everyday childrearing practices
are a question of importing social capital, social resources by which to play the
games of late-modern life. These extreme cases are the end points of a continuum.
Jeff is one example. His background:
‘Jeff (a pseudonym) was the youngest of three children, having an older adopted
brother and natural sister. The parents separated and divorced when Jeff was seven
years old, with both parents remarrying shortly thereafter. Jeff continued to live with
his mother even though the second marriage dissolved. He completed age-level work
until his senior year in high school when he was involuntarily withdrawn from school
because of excessive absenteeism and lack of progress. He was of average intelligence
and had aspired to attend college. He was athletically inclined and played league
baseball. He was outgoing, often attending social events, and had a close circle of
friends, both male and female. He saw himself as a leader, not a follower. At birth, it
is reported that he was an Rh baby and required a complete blood transfusion. He has
reportedly suffered no major health problems.
Jeff was sent out of state to a psychiatric residential facility following his first
felony of rape and burglary at age fourteen. During his 19 month stay he received
psychotherapy, and the discharge recommendation was that he live at home, attend
public school, and continue psychotherapy on a weekly outpatient basis, with his
mother actively involved in his treatment. He readily admitted to the use of alcohol
and drugs of all types from his early teen years. He worked sporadically throughout
his high school years as part of a program in which he attended school in the morning
and worked in the afternoon.’ (Ressler et al 1993:124)
His record consisted of a gradual escalation of criminal behaviour from petty larceny
at 12 and charges of disrupting school, through burglary and rape, into a series of
sexual homicides.
If Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) stress the mundaneness of crime and depict
criminality as a lack of self-control, what do they make of accounts which are full
of domination; which are full of careful planning and calculations; which display
the offender playing with his victims, who if they submitted were given no additional
orders but if they resisted were severely beaten then killed? Note the ‘moral
transcendence’ in the following account:
‘She faints and falls down on the floor. I pat her face. She wakes up, has a real
frightened look on her face and she starts to scream. I stick the gun to her head and
tell her if she screams I’m going to blow her head off. She asks what I want and I tell
her I want money and to rape her. She balked on that and said, ‘No white man doing
that to me.’ I’m thinking, she’s one of those prejudiced types. I backhanded her. She
whimpered. I told her to take off her clothes. She refuses. I cocked the trigger back
and she started hurrying up. And this time I’m feeling good because I’m domineering
over her and forcing her to do something and I’m thinking this prejudiced bitch is
going to do what I want her to do.’ (1993:129).
In concentrating upon the generalisations of positivism we blind ourselves to the
existential reality of the event. In the mundaneness of everyday life the individual
375
turns, presents a display, struts, asking the audience to understand and engage with
the symbols of evil – a symbolism fully understood by the young men who are
linked in the groups we often call gangs. What appears random and senseless
becomes understandable as a closely choreographed set of moves. Muggings, stick-
ups, robberies, contain an array of ‘games’ or tricks that turn victims into fools
before their pockets are turned out. Positivism turned against the pre-modern
discourse of good and evil, but crime is part of the refusal to play the modern
game. Crime can show us glimpses of the ‘other’ of modernity
Katz has called this a process of moral transcendence – the theory of this text is
slightly different it is, rather, the attempt to gain control of the self and the
environment. Listen again to the voice of the criminal, Charles Manson reflecting
on his state of mind before the Tate/LaBianca murders:
‘All I could focus on was, “What the fuck is happening here? One by one this fucked-
up society is stripping my love from me. I’ll show them!” They made animals out of
us – I’ll unleash these animals – I’ll give them so much fucking fear the people will be
afraid to come out of their houses!” These thoughts might sound like pure insanity,
but every abuse, every rejection in my entire life flashed before me – hatred, fury,
insanity – I felt all of these things.’ (1986:199)
If that is too extreme, then listen to a young man on Supervision from a Social
Services Juvenile Justice Team after persistent ‘joy-riding’ (taking cars without
permission and driving them recklessly):
‘Why do I do it... because I’m bored... everything is boring... life is a drag...’ (Morrison:
Field-notes)
Now listen to Adorno, one of the great critics of existentialism and the jargon of
authenticity:
‘The weaker the individual becomes, from a societal perspective, the less can he
become calmly aware of his own impotence. He has to puff himself up into selfness,
in this way the futility of this selfness sets itself up as what is authentic, as Being.’
(1973:293)
Adorno argues that the drive to authenticity, self-control and self-sustainability
desocietalises human subjectivity. The self becomes viewed as something which is
meant to be complete ‘in-itself’, but this turns ‘a bad empirical reality into a
transcendence’. The individual ‘who can no longer rely on any firm possession,
holds onto himself in his extreme abstractness as the last, the supposedly unloseable
possession’ (1973:116).3 The (a)moral transcendence will be the worst form of
existentialist authenticity.4 An individual may experience life as futile but creates a
mythology which turns impotence and isolation into strength. In his notebooks for
The Idiot written in the late 19th century, Dostoevsky described the increasing
weight given to the idea of the self and the pursuit of self-control as functions of
pride not morality. If society was to build up the idea of a self-contained human
self, responsible for controlling his or her actions by and for him or herself, society
376
would create a an uncontrollable idiot. Self-domination, self-control is therefore a

crucial aspect of the causal mechanism of crime – crime is the pursuit of self-
control in the face of the perceived chaos ‘out there’ – but it is a self-control
Dostoevsky rightly called ‘idotism’.
In The Possessed, Dostoevsky presented insanity, murder, arson and suicide as
consequences of individuals perceiving a loss of coherence in the surrounding
social structure. It was not impending doom, but the impossibility of being sure
there was a connecting thread, that was terrifying. As a consequence individuals
began to appreciate the experience of crisis and chaos for their own sake and for
the physical/psychological effect. Dostoevsky describes a group of young people
who find that a man has committed suicide in a hotel. It is suggested that each one
in turn goes in and observes the scene. As one of the group expresses it:
‘Everything’s so boring, one can’t be squeamish over one’s amusements, so long
as they’re interesting’ (1936:332).
For Katz the lived phenomenology of much crime is an investment of style into
an otherwise tedious existence. His perspective highlights in the careers of
persistent robbers men for whom gambling and other vices are a way of life, who
are ‘wise’ in the cynical sense of the term, and who take pride in a defiant
reputation as ‘bad’. In the lived sensuality behind events of cold-blooded
‘senseless’ murder, we witness:
‘... the power that may still be created in the modern world through the
sensualities of defilement, spiritual chaos, and the apprehension of vengeance.
Running across these experiences of criminality is a process juxtaposed in one
manner or another against humiliation. In committing a righteous slaughter, the
impassioned assailant takes humiliation and turns it into rage; through laying
claim to a moral status of transcendent significance, he tries to burn humiliation
up. The badass, with searing purposiveness, tries to scare humiliation off; as one
ex-punk explained to me, after years of adolescent anxiety about the ugliness of
his complexion and the stupidity of his every word, he found a wonderful calm in
making “them” anxious about his perceptions and understandings. Young vandals
and shoplifters innovate games with the risks of humiliation, running along the
edge of shame for its exciting reverberations. Fashions as street elites, young
men square off against the increasingly humiliating social restrictions of
3 Adorno correctly points to one feature of the discourse of authenticity which stems from the
economic conditions of late modernity: namely, the intensification in the process of defining
self-worth by property. Whereas the identity of the early modern may lie in the ability to control
property, the late-modern must invest in himself, must see himself as property. C.B. MacPherson
(1962) has analysed how deeply embedded this idea was – ie possessive individualism – the
liberal philosophy of early modernity. The existential ground of freedom in early modernity was
material possession. Today the ability to key into the system is the grounds; thus the individual as
a site of capital is the systematic foundation for existential security.
4 In choosing the criminal act for his supreme moment of power, of being, the offender betrays his
claim to uniqness; he loses himself in the cultural flows of frustration or consumer desire. In the
crime, the experience may be authentic, but the choice is based on non-authentic values.
377
childhood by mythologising differences with other groups of young men who

might be their mirror image. Against the historical background of a collective
insistence on the moral non-existence of their people, “bad-niggers” exploit
ethnically unique possibilities for celebrating assertive conduct as “bad”.’
(1988:312-313)
But what has criminology acknowledged? Most theories, such as Merton’s, have
concentrated upon explaining motivation in a generalisable form; but have they
contributed to the exorcism of evil from crime? Have these theories robbed crime
of the desire for power, of the lust, of the desire to humiliate, of the love of the
knife, of those things which Nietzsche warned that the criminal was about when
he did the act but could not acknowledge the reality afterwards? Have we developed
a sentimental criminology in the name of positivism?
Symbolic displacement
And so we fall into a trap. Because we ignore the sensuality of crime, we

believe that law and order politics can lower crime. We oppose the interactionism
of crime with the claims of rational deterrence. But how can adding to the
thrill of crime, since the game takes on an even greater risk (and even greater
buzz of adrenaline), reduce crime? We turn from the study of crime to study the
offender but do not study him in his interaction; we do not listen to the words of
crime, taste the fear and blood of crime, and so we reduce the possibility of a
logos true to crime down to one which touches only the epidemiology of the
pale criminal.
But you may ask are you not almost glorifying in irrationality? And suppose we
were to accept the logic of your position is it possible? Can we encounter power?
Can we share in the adrenaline of violence? In the kicks of blood, of the knife, and,
perhaps it is wrong to do so – is it not bordering upon pornography? What purpose
would it serve?
Truth is one purpose. Criminology has increasingly subjected its desire for
knowledge and wisdom to short-term research contracts providing managerial
information for the social control bureaucracy. Yet the late-modern context
displays a division of discourse – criminology talks a distanced, ‘rationalised’
logos while we are surrounded by a popular culture that portrays (non)crime
as a festival of violence. Surrounding us is an international mass culture with
the icons of Rambo, RoboCop, Mangum, etc. What is the function of all of this
violence, all of this killing, all of this sex, that we are surrounded by? Perhaps
the reproduction of violence, of lust, of rampant sexuality keeps the others
quiet. A century ago Henry David Thoreaux wrote that the majority of people
live their lives in quiet desperation: if their will to power was stimulated how
could the social order hold? So there must be a process of transposition: a
378
mass of films which usually only actually titillate (compare the superficiality
of Bitter Moon to the ending of Last Tango in Paris) provide this function
(Rambo, Superman, Blade Runner, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet...). Inside the
experience of watching these movies we are protected voyeurs of our darkest
hearts desires – let loose – in hyper-reality. In the midst of all of this violence,
what is the meaning of pain? Where is the reality of victimisation, of the civilised
use of (personal) power?
Without contextualising or positioning it, contemporary criminology, in the
guise of Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) understand the central feature of late-
modernity – the rock upon which this secular castle is built – the self. Self-restraint
will give the self coherence, render it predictable, render it suitable for order.
Modernity will take the pre-modern self cushioned by custom, tradition and shame,
positioned in the rigidity of mechanical solidarity, and convert it through the festival
of violent penology, through the celebration of an obvious power, into something
else. Into us.
We, the moderns, the successfully organised, civilized selves, the selves who
speak reasoned logos, men of intellect who once handed over our swords to Hobbes’
sovereign and were then civilized through reasoned discourse, and disciplined
through routinization when we forgot the lines. We are told that living together in
peace, the balance between the needs of society and those of the individual, will,
for modernity, be achieved by controlling passion through self-love and using
reason, the modern disciplines, to understand ourselves. But there is a risk: living
together in civilized peace seems to require the concealment from one another of
our raging, insatiable passions. The harmony of modern life will be an extension
of the peace within the self. But post-modernism seeks not equilibrium, but radical
plurality and dynamic transformation – the fate of the self is insecure in a context
where:
‘... reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality; it captures
every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream.’ (Baudrillard,
1983:152)
The accounts we have encountered in this chapter do not speak of peace. We have
entered the sort of world Peter Greenaway presents in The Cook, The Thief, His
Wife, and Her Lover, a world of violence, chaos, power and control, a world of
multiple realities, of fantasies, of over-determinations, but criminology texts do
not talk about this. Why? because they offer logos – reasoned speech – and so
criminology cannot talk about the existentialism of crime. It destroys crime,
packages it up for symbolic consumption – it washes the blood from crime and
renders it into materialism, into innovation, into a loss of self-control – and
renders itself at a distance from the very subject it is meant to know. Thus we risk
increasing crime, for our passions may not be constrained – sterilised – we may
379
need words and forms of analysis which understand the reality of passionate
action.
Conclusion: the message of existentialism?
Existentialism stresses the difficulty of being modern. As Sartre reads the

plight of the main character in Kafka’s The Trial we face a world which demands
that we control our destiny while from all around us chaotic forces impose. We
are condemned to act – all actions are against something and for something else
– the characteristic feature of human reality is similar to being perpetually in
court. To be free is to have one’s freedom perpetually on trial (Sartre,
1956:478).
What are we to make of this? What happens when one reads most texts that call
themselves criminological? We do not read much of the current existential
concerns of living and dying in the post-modern moment, of making do, being
free, bad faith, lies, deceptions, connecting dreams to realities, living lives that are
more real than the hyper-real. We do not read of the reality of drugs, of AIDS, of
confused identities, of the constant search for something to hang a sense of
wholeness on, of being subjected to a host of conflicting and overlapping
messages, of desperately searching for events or things that can provide a sense of
status. While the conservative criminology talks of the rational calculator, or the
person of low self-control, we do not read of the frustrated individual who wishes
to be authentic, who wishes to feel normal, but constantly feels ‘that the world is
full of crap’, or ‘the forces surrounding me are too big to understand’. These
concerns do not involve indifference, or the waning of humanity represented in a
depthless superficiality. The emotions of modernism – anxiety, alienation, self-
destruction, radical isolation, anomie, private revolt, madness, hysteria, and
neurosis, are not able to be subsumed into self-control. These emotions are
reflected in the increased incidence of alcoholism and drug addiction, homeless
isolation, the alienation of ethnic minorities, and self-destruction. To these
emotional forms of being are now added anger and fear; fear of the unknown and
the inability to control it, anger at the disenfranchised by those on the right; anger
in the underclass towards those in power. Is anger and fear, coupled with
existential anxiety, the only uniting forces in a society which understands that
MacIntyre was right? That nothing gives full legitimacy to our bureaucratic
rulers? Modernity promised more than it delivered. Today is powerlessness all-
pervasive? The post-modern moment senses that this world, out there and in here,
is out of control. It is not the Big Brother 1984 world of Weber and of George
Orwell that we now fear since the media is not speaking with one voice (contrast
contemporary American talk-back radio which is full of macho male angst with
TV which is full of politically correct panel discussions). Some of the ceaseless
380
flow of images and commentary on everyday life attempts to make this world
appear controllable, but other images show it clearly is not. Emotions are
stimulated and simulated, stress kept under control by valium and coke, tensions
and fears controllable by alcohol and hashish, heroin and ecstasy produce an
anxious euphoria. Euphoria promises to blot out the fears, in return for a moment
of peace. But in this hyper-strange world the only safe place is with the fantasies
inside one’s head, or a general theory which does not include the social. Here,
where reality no longer crowds in closure occurs, and a meaninglessness so well
understood is experienced as ‘a walking nihilism’. How can we have this
meaninglessness?
In contrast to Gottfredson and Hirschi, we followed Katz into the sensuality of
crime. We looked not for the mundaneness of crime but its extraordinariness – the
criminal is caught in a net of contingencies, and must fight to make something of
himself – the criminal is in danger of not possessing a self – hence the leap into
crime is the desperate attempt to exert control over his (non)self. To the existentialist
the criminal has made the wrong choice – as Tillich puts it:
‘One must ask: what is this self that affirms itself? Radical existentialism
answers: what it makes of itself. This is all it can say, because anything more
would restrict the absolute freedom of the self. The self cut off from
participation in its world, is an empty shell, a mere possibility. It must act
because it lives, but it must redo every action because acting involves him who
acts in that upon which he acts. It gives content and for this reason it restricts
his freedom to make of himself what he wants. In classical theology, both
Catholic and Protestant, only God has this prerogative: He is à sè (from
himself) or absolute freedom. Nothing is in him which is not by him.
Existentialism, on the basis of the message that God is dead, gives man the
divine ‘a-se-ity’. Nothing shall be in man which is not by man. But man is
finite, he is given to himself as what he is. He has received his being and with
it the structure of his being, including the structure of finite freedom. And
finite freedom is not aseity. Man can affirm himself only if he affirms not an
empty shell, a mere possibility, but the structure of being in which he finds
himself before action and (non)action. Finite freedom has a definite
structure, and if the self tries to trespass on this structure it ends in the loss of
itself. The nonparticipating hero in Sartre’s The Age of Reason is caught in a
net of contingencies, coming partly from the subconscious levels of his own,
partly from the environment from which he cannot withdraw. The assuredly
empty self is filled with contents which enslave it just because it does not
know or accept them as contents. This is true too of the cynic, as was said
before. He cannot escape the forces of his self which may drive him into
complete loss of the freedom that he wants to present.’ (The Courage To Be,
1952:151-152)
He has made himself into a criminal – he has became a subject of the crim-o-
logos, he has fallen into the circle of the label; he has failed to understand himself
(to place himself in a position where he could look at himself, and say, ‘yes, that is
me’). Instead he will become the object of the knowledges of normalcy, the
381
disciplines of psychology which will open out his soul and strip bare his motivation;
he desires to step out of the circle, but chooses the means of criminality. By the
opportunity that was presented, the denial of the control of the other, through the
criminal act he has taken control of the self, but this self is now to be controlled
and penalised by the power of others.5
5 What else could he or she have done? Controlled or mitigated scepticism; we can call this the
refusal of Hume. Scepticism towards the narratives of everyday life; the narratives which enforce
consumption, which stress a (returned) style. A scepticism which enables the individual to work
on the central thrust of becoming a modern within a modern civil society. Our domain?
• the strength of information and knowledge;

• the impact of the communication and transportation technologies (the mass media);
• the increased flow of information, imagery and cultural interaction does not make the late or
post-modern society more transparent or at ease with itself, but more complex, chaotic;
• the search for freedom
• division, segregation,... a chaos within which exits the possibilities for emancipation, for
choice, for authencity
However this is an emancipation available only to rhe truly modern.
The truly modern individual is the ideal of modernity: he who exercises self-control,
motivation. and flexibility. He who can be sure of himself and confident of his worth; but
who – in our conditions – can be truly that? Are we not located in a social terrain stratified
by gender, class and race?
382
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MODERNITY, GENDER AND CRIME: FROM THE

BIOLOGICAL PARADIGM INTO FEMINIST
INTERPRETATIONS
‘There’s not a woman on earth who would ever have had cause to complain of
my services if I’d been sure of being able to kill her afterwards.’ (The Marquis
de Sade quoted in Time Out, March 1994)
‘Sometimes I wake up and all I can think of is getting myself a penis... A real
big one. I’d like to strap it on under my pin-striped suit and then go off to the
office. That bulge under my suit... Then I’d feel safe...’ (A 30 year old woman
lawyer discussing conditions in the professional work-place of the 1990s
personal communication)
‘... women don’t know what they want... I fell for this one right... I really tried
to be the ‘new man’... considerate, listening like... the soft touch... treated her
fine and didn’t screw around. You know what?... She went and left me for a
right bastard... all macho.. lied to her all the time and screwed plenty of others
as well... I took it for a few months and then saw him in a pub. Knocked him up
proper... That’s why I’m here... He went to the police... assault they said! Fuck
women... fuck being nice...’ (Morrison, Field Notes: Transcript of interview
with Young Offender supervised by a Social Services Team)
Do women exist?
Do women exist? This is a rather obvious preliminary point for a discussion of

criminology and women. Perhaps it is not clear, it shall be rephrased.
‘Have women existed in modernity independently of male fears and

fantasies?’
Certainly women exist in male dreams and nightmares: the narratives warn that
women seduce, dispossessed of a penis they cannot know pleasure except through
male energy, hence they constantly wish to seduce the male from his reasoned
pursuit of sensibility, from the progressive tasks of modernity. In Politics and the
Arts, Rousseau warns that ‘never has a people perished from an excess of wine; all
perish from the disorder of women’. While wine just render men stupid the ‘disorder
of women’ contains a host of vices which can bring all government to an end
(1968:109). In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud warns that women are hostile
to and stand in opposition to civilisation (1961: Ch 4). Woman cannot achieve the
sublimation of the passions which the task of civilisation requires. In the 18th
century, Hegel criticised the actions of Antigione in the classical Greek drama for
opposing the right of the state with her own subjectivity; Hegel warned that the
community created an enemy for itself within its own gates with women.
383
Specifically, when women hold the reins of political power the state is at once in
jeopardy. (1949:496)
Thus, the wise men warned: women must be kept separate from the creative
sites of modernity. Women are the negative of the dominant male: the empty space
of patriarchy’s other, constitute by factors opposing the progressive. Women are
the body which the mind disowns yet needs (materialism), the purity which contrasts
to the necessarily active role of construction (the virgin), the nature which serves
as the fertility for culture (maternalism, menstruation), the night that comes after
day offering rest (the non-thinking) and sensuality (the whore), the bringer of
madness to reason (the site of hysteria).
Woman has been the ‘other’ of the criminal; absent in the official criminal
statistics she is the overlooked (especially in traditional criminological theories
where she is hardly discussed), or the one that is regarded with suspicion. This
absence is explained by the extremes of passivity (women don’t commit crime
because crime is a tough reality which woman have no power to engage), or total
power (behind every criminal is a manipulative woman: the man goes to prison,
the woman just spends his ‘take’). But raising the question of the treatment by
criminology of gender offers an entry into the core concerns of the status of women
and the project of modernity. Who, or what, determines the position of women in
the construction project? Can women exist independently of the male gaze,
independently of the way in which men have interpreted the biological constitution
of (non)women: a constitution which defined and limited her ontology, her
naturalness, her possibilities? How are women to become modern? What resources,
intellectual, personal and structural are required? What are the contours of a fully
modern woman? What would a modern woman’s body look like if it did not have
to conform to the specifications of the male gaze? What would the norms and
expectations of a woman’s everyday life be if they were not prefigured by male
power? What is the difference between the gaze of masculinity and that of
femininity? Would the liberated woman be man’s equal in committing crime?
Women in the construction of modernity
The first period of criminology was part of the construction process of liberal-
philosophical modernity. In this movement from status to contract, criminology
offered a discourse of control and administration. The utopian aspect of this early
phase of the project of a liberal society focused on the idea of human autonomy
and rational development, which was philosophically universal and without
boundaries in principle. Kant’s ideal of a global society, inclusive of all individuals
in an egalitarian form, was the philosophical dream of the Kantian (1957) project
of perpetual peace.
The process was realised to be socially dangerous; the building project was to
be a controlled project – it required the participation of those who were fully rational,
those who had a stake in the social body, who did not allow their labour or their
384
Modernity, gender and crime
bodies to be used by others. The empirical foundations of the good society could
not be articulated in philosophy, and were incompletely elaborated in practice.
The very notion of the contractual basis for liberal social structure provided an
incoherent intellectual means of setting boundaries, which were otherwise provided
by the setting of identities and assumptions drawn from observing activity. Thus,
in early modernity, as in ancient Athens, the law of property prefigured and
structured the living law of political participation. Possession of property was a
correlate of participation: ownership of land conferred the right to participate in
the political life of the (city)state or polis. Property helped constitute the identity
of the insider, of the citizen, set against the notion of the outsider, the other, the
subject. In a very real sense the other (the woman, the slave) were property, were
possession, were objects of a domination that was both power and responsibility;
they were things to be contained and the responsibility of the participant. Early
modernity laid out the foundations of a social formation which lived up to the
universalism and individualism explicit in the philosophy of the liberal project
only in a very restricted sense. The development of late-modernity, a development
characterised and enabled by the progressive splitting of social life into spheres
with their own criteria of success (economics, politics, ethics, art) meant property
could become the correlative for wealth alone, and thereby political participation
could be freed from the necessity of property. What was previously property (slaves,
women) could become included (and could themselves order property).
Boundary setting: modernity and the otherness of women
The conception of a humanity divided between the normal and the deviant, the
familiar and the other, involves a whole set of self-authenticating devices which
include, among others, the ideas of the rational and the insane, the orthodox and
the heretical, the male and the female. We have characterised modernity as a
construction project organised around the ideas of calculation, reason, knowledge
and the analytical approach to problem solving. The modern was to be free from
the entanglements of custom, tradition and status; a freedom to be rational,
calculating... scientific. In her overview of western philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd
highlights an idea of women’s inferior capacity to reason that stretched back to the
ancient Greeks, where Philo demarcated the male, who was ‘active, rational,
incorporal and more akin to mind and thought’, from the female, who, being closer
to nature, was ‘material, passive, corporal and sense-perceptive’ (1983:491). Women
have been viewed as entangled in a circle of sense and materiality caused by their
inescapable nearness to nature. While it tied women to a reproductive and nesting
role, nature gave males a freedom which enabled the intellect to develop the capacity
for abstract thought; the roles of social life reflected this. As Hegel put it in the
Philosophy of Right (Law):
‘Women regulate their actions not by demands of universality but by arbitary
385
inclinations and opinions. Women are educated – who knows how? – as it were by
breathing in ideas, by living rather than acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood,
on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion.’
(Quoted in Lloyd, 1983:511)
It fell to males to lay out the structure of progress; thus modernity continued a
process of gendering reality.
To say that reality has been genderised is not to claim that these ideas refer to
some fixed or natural ontology, but rather that they are a set of attitudes generating
or governing a relationship between a lived reality and some area of problematic
existence. The attitudes which defined who the subject of modernity was and was
to be, also defined the woman as too natural, too tradition bound, incapable of
being a fully fledged emancipated modern – the woman was the other of the man,
to inhabit a domestic space, a space protected by the domination of the masculine.
Who was the true bearer of modernisation? Read the masses of writings on
crime and social control – what does one find? Throughout these writings true
humanity appears identified with membership of a specific social class – citizen
and bourgeois. The question may now arise: if women are to become insiders – as
they have been doing for the last half a century or more – on what terms is their
incorporation? Who is it that will define the nature of modern women? For, if the
nature of the (non)modern woman has been previously defined by men, with what
resources of language and material can the nature of the modern woman be defined
(created)?
What has criminology said about all of this?
If positive criminology sought to uncover the constitutional condition of the

offender, women were noticeable by their absence. There have always been vastly
fewer women offenders (persons subject to the formal mechanisms and labelling
processes of social control) than men. For much of criminology, this did not seem
like a problem, theories were created based on explaining what was, in retrospect,
male crime rates; theories were not expressly gendered theories, but purported to
be theories of ‘crime’ and ‘criminality’. Recent revisionism has asked criminology
to become reflexive on this issue.
Much of criminology is concerned with the nuts and bolts of social control and
the maintenance of social groupings. The new criminological literature on gender
and crime is a part of the developing genre of sociological literature which explores
gender divisions, and the gender aspects of social institutions as diverse as the
family, education, political attitudes and participation, and crime.
Sociologists like to distinguish between: Sex, by which we mean a term that
refers to the biological characteristics of males and females; and gender, a term
that refers to those traits which are associated with men and women under the
terms the masculine and the feminine, but which are not biologically derived and
have a social rather than physical basis.
386
Statistical discrepancy in the commission of crime between men and

women
Most scholars agree that males commit more offences than females and their
offences are more serious than those of females. As Nagel and Hagan put it:
‘The relation between gender and criminality is strong and is likely to remain so.
Woman have traditionally been much less likely than men to commit violent crimes
and that pattern persists today... While the relative increase in women’s property
crime involvements is significant, female participation even in these crimes remains
far less than that of men.’ (1983:91)
Males account for the vast majority of those arrested for crimes involving force or
fraud, and the victim and self-report studies support the picture. Regardless of age
or type of crime male involvement is substantially higher than female. The official
picture for 1992 in England and Wales was as follows.
Individuals found guilty or cautioned for indictable offences per

100,000 people in the population
387
How the crime figures break down:
Indictable offences (tried in Crown Court)
Understanding the official statistics and criminal involvement
The gender difference in officially recorded crime has been described as so sustained
and so marked as to be perhaps the most significant feature in recorded crime
(with age the next). For England and Wales in 1992, 541,100 people were found
guilty or cautioned for indictable offences: 81% were men, 19% were women.
Men committed 10,300 indictable motoring offences; women 400. In 1992, for
sexual offences, the male-to-female ratio was 49:1, for burglary 36:1. Even in the
areas where women were most represented (theft, handling stolen goods, fraud
and forgery) men outnumber women by four to one.
As a consequence the criminalisation and penal involvement rate of men and
women is substantially different; a much higher per centage of males than women
are convicted or cautioned. Women offenders also have fewer previous convictions
than men and a higher proportion of women convicted are in fact first time offenders.
388
Several writers have denied the truth of differential involvement in

crime
One approach has been to deny that women are substantially less involved; the
most famous example of this is the work of Otto Pollak (1950) in The Criminality
of Women. Pollak’s tactic was to doubt whether the official statistics were in any
way an accurate reflection of reality for three major reasons.
• Female crime was masked by its relative invisibility, and since crimes of women
remain under-reported to a greater extent than do crimes of men, the official
sex differentials, as stated in the official statistics, are mythical. He concluded
that men and women commit about the same number of crimes, but that women’s
crimes – illegal abortion, prostitution, and shoplifting – were infrequently
reported. Furthermore, men are more often criminalised than women, as, for
example, certain offences in England and Wales can only be committed by men
by definition, such as rape. We can note, however, that newer definitions of
rape tend to be sex-neutral.
• Women are more prominent than men in the hidden figure. Pollak saw women
as inherently deceitful and cunning and so more able to conceal crimes. His
reasoning is interesting and obviously suspect: he argues certain natural features
of women’s existence cause them to become inherently deceitful. Specifically,
women and not men can fake organisms, women learn to conceal their
menstruation, and women withhold the truth of sexuality from their children.
Pollak calls upon the support of a number of female authors to reinforce this.
However, the issue of the male gaze (the strength of the ideology of the
masculine-feminine divide) is not addressed – if the dominant ideology holds
out certain things as natural, even women sociologists may perceive social reality
in this way. As ‘evidence’ concerning offences he points to the large dark figure
in abortion, theft and child abuse. Undoubtably, Pollak is picking his offences;
moreover, the assumption that the unreported figures of male crime are low is
not plausible. There are clearly large unreported figures in certain male
dominated offences – such as domestic violence and rape. A linked view is that
women instigate rather than perpetrate criminal acts and remain in the
background because of this. In the late 19th century, Lombroso and others had
depicted women criminals either as biologically underdeveloped, or especially
manipulative. Influencing every criminal man there was some woman who,
while remaining unseen, had helped to write the most startling pages in the
annals of crime.
• There was a ‘chivalry’ factor at work among members of the general public and
criminal justice personnel. Pollak argues that victims tend not to report female
offenders to the police, and that consequently, female offenders are more likely
to remain in the dark figure.
Because most criminologists neglected the study of women offenders, Pollack’s
portrait of the hidden female offender gained a certain credibility and was almost
389
the only authoritative view available in the 1950s. Well respected texts of the
1960s, such as Walter Reckless’ The Crime Problem (1967), seemed to accept his
line relatively uncritically. Both Pollak’s evidential base and his arguments have
been re-examined, and it is clear that in comparison with men, females commit
very few crimes, particularly serious ones. Consequently, both Greenwood
(1981), and Box (1983), felt able to conclusively state that it is images such
as Pollak’s of the ‘masked female offender’ which have been turned into
mythology.
Victim surveys and self-report tests support the official statistics
Victimisation surveys provide a view of public willingness to report female suspects

to the police. Surveying victimisation data throughout the 1970s, Hindelang (1971,
1979, and with Gottfredson and Garofalo, 1978) argued almost one-half of
‘traditional crime’ involving male offenders, and only one-third involving female
offenders were reported to the police. However, while women contributed far less
than men to serious crime, the most serious crimes committed by female offenders
were slightly more likely to be reported to the police. Box (1983:169) argues that
ironically women may be over-reported and over-represented in the official statistics,
because of the vast amount of unreported corporate crime, governmental and social
control agency crime, or organised crime – areas of crime that women have very
little opportunity to be involved with.
Most large scale comparison of the official statistics and victim surveys (such
as Smith and Visher, 1980) find an overwhelming similarity in both sets of data. In
general, the self-report and victimisation studies show a similar picture concerning
sex and violence in crime as those derived from official data for the same types of
crime (Box, 1983:167-69). Frances Heidensohn argues that if there is an
understatement in official statistics it is of the crimes done to women.
‘There is little or no evidence of a vast shadowy underworld of female crime hidden
in our midst like the sewers below the city streets. As we have become increasingly
aware in modern times, quite the opposite is true. There is a great deal of crime which
is carefully hidden from the police, from families, friends and neighbours. Much of
this takes the form of domestic violence, the abuse of children both physically and
sexually, incest and marital rape. The overwhelming majority of such cases involve
men, usually fathers and husbands injuring or abusing their wives and children.’
(1989:87)
Has there been leniency or chivalry by officials within the Criminal

Justice System in their dealings with women?
There have been a number of more or less sophisticated, statistically-based,

quantitative studies, designed to test whether chivalrous judges and prosecution
390
attorneys treat women offenders more leniently than men. Often these studies treat
women as a single category and do not differentiate for class, race or education.
(For a review up until the early 1980’s see Box, 1983.)
Some have been unable to reach a firm conclusion (Parisi, 1982; Gelsthorpe,
1989), some have found preferential treatment (Steffensmeier and Steffensmeier,
1980), others that they are treated more harshly (Smart, 1977; Chesney-Lind,
1973, 1978; Dominelli, 1984), others argue that there are no disparities or that
previous disparities are receding (Kempinen, 1983; Douglas, 1987), or that for
serious crimes there is a difference but not for lesser offences (Zingraff and
Thomson, 1984).
Farrington and Morris (1983) found that the lighter sentences passed on women
offenders are accounted for by basic legal considerations, such as the nature of
their offences and previous convictions. Similar findings explained the greater
proportion of females cautioned by the police.
However, domestic circumstances – in particular marital status – were important
additional factors. Heidensohn (1985) found support for the view that women are
doubly punished when their rule breaking is compounded by perceived role-
breaking. For Carlen (1985) imprisonment for women is more easily justified for
those regarded to have failed as mothers. In the US, Nagel (1981) found that divorced
or separated women were more likely to receive severe sentences.
Eaton (1986) argued that young females are far more likely to be institutionalised
than boys, because they are perceived to need protection. This supposed protection
is often given to young females who have not committed any serious delinquent
act, but are simply ungovernable, or unmanageable as far as their parents or teachers
are concerned. In exercising this parental concern, juvenile magistrates are often
transformed into stern parental surrogates, who lock up their naughty daughters
for behaving in ways that seek attention. It has been a relatively common argument
that the juvenile court has used its discretionary power in the service of traditional
sex-roles. The court appears to be less concerned with the protection of female
offenders, than the protection of the sexual status quo (Datesman and Scarpitti,
1980)
The Steffensmeiers’ (1980) argued that women who commit serious crimes
will be less severely sanctioned than men, since (i) judges do not want to separate
a mother from her children, because they view social reproduction as an important
female job; and (ii) judges, both in private and in public, have difficulty
conceptualising serious female crime, and prefer to believe that she didn’t really
do it, or wasn’t capable, or did it for love.
This line of argument argues that the dominant ideology of femininity creates
an image where women are not generally believed to be criminal. Hence a criminal
act is more likely to be viewed as irrational, or an emotional response to a passing
situation, and the woman is not really dangerous. The natural state of women is
believed to be rather passive and non-aggressive.
391
Box (1983) concludes that when the reality of chivalry and leniency is dissected
it reveals a series of beliefs which may tend to deflate the contribution women
make to serious crime. Conversely, when women do commit minor offences, they
are more readily seen as in need of a treatment response, and often put away for
their own protection; this contributes to the criminality of women through labelling
and the opening of deviant pathways.
Box notes that victimisation surveys provide an interesting window on the public
willingness to report females to the police. Hindelang (1979) found that the most
serious crimes committed by women were slightly more likely to be reported to
the police than male offender crimes and, if ‘chivalry’ did exist, then it was a
female virtue as females reported female offenders less than did males. Studies on
the reporting of shoplifters either by customers to store detectives, or by store
detectives to the police, and a study of traffic citations, were unable to locate any
evidence supporting the view that women were favourably treated. The offence
rather than the gender seemed to be the major determinant of social response. The
general conclusion appears to be that when the offence revealed ‘inappropriate
role behaviour’ the penal outcome tended to be harsher, thus supporting the view
that it acts to protect ‘traditional women’ by punishing those who are
unconventional.
The findings of the British work of Farrington and Morris were virtually
replicated in the US by Nagel and Hagan (1983), who concluded that women were
more likely to be released without bail, but that when bail was set there was no
difference by sex in the amount at which it was set. Sex was not found to make a
difference in the decision to prosecute a defendant, nor were there differences in
the use of plea bargaining, or in the likelihood of being convicted. In sentencing
they found a small but consistent leniency towards female defendants, even when
variables such as prior criminal record and the nature of the offence were taken
into account.
Other commentators have called for the studies to exercise a greater level of
differentiation in their analysis. For example, you may have to take into account
the tactical and symbolic interactions of the trial and demeanour of the defendant.
Women who exhibit behaviour that is socially defined as appropriate for women
are most likely to be treated leniently; older white women, who are apologetic and
submissive, are better placed than women who are young, black, and hostile
towards the authorities. Kruttschnitt (1982) argues that women who are
economically dependent on their husbands may be treated more leniently than
economically independent women, perhaps because judges think the courts need
not exercise so much formal social control over women who are controlled by the
men on whom they are economically dependent. Daly (1989) found the court
making decisions in light of effects on the children and family, rather than on the
woman herself.
British feminist scholars have tried to respond with more sensitive analyses to
catch effects which the methodologies using statistical correlations may not show
392
up. This, more theoretically inclined, type of analysis takes as its focus not a simple
male-female distinction, but how different categories of women are treated in the
criminal justice system. From Smart (1976) onwards, the argument is that it is not
women, per se, that are treated differently but women as they display their gender
roles, ie as successful, or otherwise, wives, mothers, or rebels. Hudson (1987:119-
21) argues that women who display the appropriate signs of the middle-class
feminine woman are likely to be treated more leniently than those who are working-
class, black, unmarried or in any other way perceived as obviously deviant. In an
earlier work she had argued that this process doubly caught young women displaying
deviant signs:
‘If something can be seen as a ‘phase’, as normal, albeit undesirable, youthful
behaviour, then the expectation is that increasing maturity will bring about its end;
but if a form of behaviour is regarded as gender-inappropriate then there are fears that
a girl is seriously disturbed, that she is not following the pattern of normal social and
emotional development, and the behaviour comes to be judged not by its own
seriousness in terms of consequences, social harm done, degree of delinquent
motivation, or any other common-sense notion of seriousness, but it comes to be
overblown as predictor of future, more serious trouble. Adolescence is, after all, the
status a teenage is moving out of, so that adolescent failings can be tolerated; but
femininity is what a girl is supposed to be acquiring, so that any signs that she is
rejecting rather than embracing the culturally-defined femininity are treated (by those
whose professional vocabulary enables them to read the signs and offer such
interpretations) as necessitating intervention and urgent resocialisation.’ (Hudson,
1984:43-4)
The agents of the criminal justice system have their own action pack for interaction:
the social constructions of sexuality, behaviour and gender inform, therefore, the
construction of the normal and deviant, defining who is properly a criminal woman
(see Worrall, 1990). These perceptions constitute signposts in the process of girls
‘growing up good’ in western societies (Maureen Cain, 1989).
The contemporary feminist position is trying to move beyond the leniency-
verse-severe treatment dichotonomy and pose the issue as one of the constructive
features of criminal justice as it relates to the constitution of the modern subject. In
other words, how can criminological theory face the issues of how law helps in the
social construction of the gender division of masculine and feminine?
A necessary task in this is the destruction of mythologies. Carlen describes her
own interpretation of feminism in this area:
‘... because they have collectively contributed to a demolition of certain sexist myths
concerning women’s lawbreaking and have called into question the more discriminatory
and oppressive forms of the social control and regulation of women, I shall... use
feminist very loosely to refer to all of those who, in writing of women lawbreakers,
have been concerned to remedy the wrongs done to women criminals by criminologists,
police, courts, and prisons.’ (1990:107; her emphasis)
A key example of this new type of analysis is the work of Eaton (1986) which
places the creation of social inquiry reports, pleas of mitigation, and the
393
assumptions of magistrates, within the broader context of social relations and

ideologies. The courts relate to both male and female defendants in the context of
the defendants’ families; but this builds upon the sexual inequality of the family;
thus, the operation of the ‘law’ reinforces the sexually stratified social order.
This type of analysis engages in critique and demonstrates the mythological
basis of much decision making; it is carried to its logical conclusion in the latest
form of demolition of sexist mythologies, namely deconstruction. An example is
Alison Young’s analysis of how the women protestors who camped around the
American necular war-head base of Greenham Common were portrayed in the
media (Femineity in Dissent, 1990). The media focused upon reports of the woman’s
bodily activity in the various incidents at the camp. At work was a form of policing;
a surveillance, dressage and disciplining. The Greenham women are presented as
in need of policing through the press invoking an image of a social body which has
unhygenic parts which require control by the police, moral reformers and by
hygenists. The press reports of their dirtiness, their unsanitary habits, their morally
defective values, in reality are replies to the women transgressing the ‘lines of
gender, territoriality, sexuality, familiarity’ and ‘the symbolic content of the
dominant discourse’. Would men have been so portrayed? What could be seen as
rational protest was rendered into another example of the hysterisation of women’s
bodies. Any critical impact that the women’s action could have gathered was
dissipated through recognising them as in need of censure for unfeminine activity.
Young is not asserting that this was a conscious action by the media. Instead we
are concerned with a ‘culturally unconscious level of a wish to condemn, a recourse
to gendered notions of reason/unreason, men/women, legitimate protest/hysteria’.
(1990:83-5)
Deconstruction can bring out the unconscious levels of demarcation and of
subordination and domination. But we might ask does not deconstruction need to
lead onto work which proposes, which aims to map out new territories, new forms
of gender and interactional policies for criminal justice?
What type of crime do women commit? And should we expect their

crime to increase?
Recorded statistics tell us little about the quality of crime, legal labels conceal a
wide variety of activities and so it is difficult to tell from them whether a woman’s
crime is less serious than a man’s. There have been some displays of common
sense over the years; apparently, women steal fewer items of aftershave than men!
Several studies found that the incidents committed by men differ from that of
women. Victims of women were most often related or the woman’s friends or
those with whom she has an affectionate relationship, and the majority of women
are convicted for attacks on their friends and neighbours for incidents which arose
out of domestic or romantic disputes.
394
The most common offence attributed to women is shoplifting. In 1985 nearly

50% of the women sentenced for indictable offences in magistrates’ courts were
shoplifters, compared with 10% of men. But research suggests that women are
over-represented in the shoplifting offences.
In an observation of shoplifting in selected stores, Buckle and Farrington (1984)
found that men are twice as likely as women to shoplift; out of 503 shoppers
observed, nine shoplifted – four men and five women. As a percentage of those
observed it was 2.8% men and 1.4% women. Are women more prominent in
shoplifting statistics because detectives and sales persons expect women to shoplift
and, because of preconceived notions of ‘menopausal’ or ‘kleptomaniacs’, observe
women far more closely? This obviously increases a woman’s chance of detection.
Campbell’s (1981) self-report studies support this view; in response to the
question have you taken anything from a shop when the shop was open?’ 12% of
girls and 28% of boys responded positively.
How did criminology traditionally account for this? One immediate suspicion
was the high shoplifting figures for women were simply a consequence of
opportunity. If modernity largely confined women to a domestic sphere then the
opportunities for crime would have been largely located in that arena. The major
activity which has been apportioned as being women’s is the taking care of the
home and shopping; therefore where they were allowed, they committed crime.
Thus, as the realm of women’s activities have recently expanded, it has become
almost an article of faith in certain quarters that the crime rate of women will
increase, and perhaps approximate with men, when they achieve ‘liberation’. The
liberated woman will be man’s equal in crime.
Why have there been so few theories on crime which are gender
specific?
Heindesohn (1989) proposes a number of reasons for the failure to examine the
obvious issue of gender involvement in crime:
• the study of crime was dominated by men, as Oakley (1982) had pointed out,
it was no accident that we talk of the founding fathers of sociology;
• commentators tended to equate gender wholly with sex and then only discuss
masculinity, leaving women as an assumed afterthought;
• male power predominated in academia and this was widespread and pervasive;
• women’s low and unspectacular crime rates, were harder to find and study
because they were so rare;
• female offenders fear the stigma and loss of reputation associated with their
offences more than their male counterparts and this makes them elusive as
subjects;
• one of the critical reasons for avoiding gender in the study of crime was the
crucial nature of gender for theory. In practice most theories of crime are based
395
on assumptions about gender, and those assumptions are asserted rather than
explained and explored only in relation to masculinity.
There has been an increase in the study of women and crime in recent years.
Campbell (1981; 1984) published two major studies of delinquent girls in gangs
which overturned a number of stereotypes about girls and their involvement in
gangs where violence was used. Shackladysmith (1970) depicted colourfully the
life of female gang leaders. Eleanor Miller (1986) provided a vivid portrait of the
life and work of a group of women street hustlers in Wisconsin.
Studies have also been compiled on the prison and penal policy. Women’s
experience of imprisonment has been put on the agenda. The results are not
conclusive. Lucia Zendner (1991), studied the role and practice of women’s
imprisonment in Victorian society, and suggested that women prisoners were not
punished as severely as men (and some preferred prison to the destitution and
prostitution they were forced into on the outside). While others, for example,
Dobash, Dobash and Guttridge (1986), argue that the regimes of women’s prisons
were more repressive.
The Offical Statistics have been analysed to reveal both a reflection of gender
relations and a gendered set of priorities concerning policing. There are offences
committed mainly by men against women and children in which they use their
power or force in the defence of traditional gender roles. This includes, wife beating,
rape, sexual assaults, sexual abuse, harassment. Many so-called sex linked crimes
are power, not sexually based. As Dobash and Dobash argue, differential
responsibility and marriage give the husband both the perceived right, and the
obligation, to control his wife’s behaviour; these provide both motives and
justifications for beating her.
Moreover, numerous studies have shown how violent crimes against women
are grossly under-reported (eg see Morris, 1987:160-192) – official agencies are
traditionally very reluctant to protect women from male violence. The police are
reluctant to intervene in cases of domestic violence and it was only recently that
marital rape became recognised in the UK. Stanko (1984, 1990) relates that the
dominate attitude in the police has been that we are even better off if they ‘kiss and
make up’ rather than if the police put him in jail. Heidensohn (1989) argues that
women face a double jeopardy: they are not protected against domestic violence
by the police and court system, but when they step beyond the normal image of the
feminine they face stigmatisation and labelling.
Criminological explanations were not set out as ‘arguments

explaining why men commit more crime then women’
We must first acknowledge how the advent of feminist orientations has changed
the way in which this issue has been conceived. Feminist criminology is a diverse
body of writings taking the critical view that the understanding of the criminality
396
of women and the role of gender in constituting deviance in general have all been
ill served by both traditional and new criminologists. In her 1982 review of
theoretical criminology Leonard was scathing:
Theoretical criminology was constructed by men, about men. It is simply not up to
the analytical task of explaining female patterns of crime. Although some theories
work better than others, they all illustrate what social scientists are slowly recognising
within criminology and outside the field; that our theories are not the general
explanations of human behaviour they claim to be, but are rather particular
understandings of male behaviour. (1982:1-2)
In Britain the emergence of feminist criminology is generally assigned to the
publication of Carol Smart’s Women Crime and Criminology (1976). Criminology
was taken to task for largely reflecting an uncritical attitude towards sexual
stereotypes of women and girls, largely confirming the ideologically determined
inferior status of women both in the normal, conforming world and in the world of
crime and delinquency.
She notes that the neglect of female criminality by the predominantly male
criminological profession had several undesirable consequences:
• the arrested development of the subject, leaving research in female deviance to
be thrown back to the earliest stages of criminological evolution;
• policies and attitudes towards female criminality were male dominated, and
there was an assumption that women were irrational, compulsive and slightly
neurotic. Not only were issues where women were the victims not taken
seriously (incest, domestic violence, the handling of rape), but there was no
provision for speaking of women’s experiences. Adolescent girls faced a higher
risk of institutionalisation than boys for non-criminal forms of sexual deviance.
Regimes in Holloway Prison confirmed the biological view, with therapy but
no vocational training for women;
• notions about women’s ‘nature’ had lent prominence to ‘sexual deviance’ as
the focus of inquiry appropriate to the study of female criminality. Thus
prostitution was more studied than rape. Cohen (1950) had assumed that female
delinquency consists of sexual delinquency or of involvement in situations
that are likely to spill over into overt sexuality. Gouldner (1977) states that
criminologists have portrayed the female deviant as a woman on her back,
rather than a women fighting back.
Another prominent feminist writer, Heindensohn (1968, 1985), argued that the
feminist critique of the study of crime had from its inception two main aspects: (i)
women were largely invisible in the literature on crime, and (ii) when they did
appear it was to be portrayed in ways which disturbed and marginalised their
experience. These two factors led to (iii) the avoidance of gender, as an issue, so
that the crimes of male criminality were presented as the crimes of all criminalities.
Feminist criminology began then, very much as a critique of mainstream
criminology. It has developed three other forms:
397
• Arguments to change the dominant notions of criminal justice practice; in

particular pressure groups pushed for higher sentences for rape, the use of new
defences, for example arguments over the provocation defence, and the handling
of women victims;
• Strategies changing the perception of victimisation, for example, the campaigns
over rape, incest, and domestic violence;
• The provision of general critiques of the forms and structuring of legal ideology
and the political forms of power in our societies, in particular, the argument
that political philosophy has been clearly masculine and phallocentric.
One impact has been for writers to accept that masculinity is at least as much of a
problem to be analysed and explained as femininity. In fact, it is logically an even
greater problem, since it is masculinity which is associated with crime and
delinquency, whereas femininity is linked to conformity. Masculinity has been
under-researched and under-discussed; in part because men are used to treating
themselves as the ‘norm’, and the central category, with women as a sub-category.
But if masculinity is no longer seen as the general and universal condition of the
human species, as a ‘norm’ upon which modernity is to be built, the ‘norm’ from
which femininity is a deviation, then we need to analyse the basis for the very
concepts of masculinity and femininity and the behavioural traits usually associated
with them. The traditional way of grounding gender differences has been to resort
to biology.
Biological and psychological explanations: a critique
Biological determinism constituted a strong theory of criminality of both sexes in

the 19th and 20th centuries. Lombroso (with Ferro, W, 1985) argued women were
‘atavistically nearer to her origin than the male’, and that her lesser involvement in
crime was due to her ‘piety, maternity, want of passion, sexual coldness, weakness
and an undeveloped intelligence’ (1895:105, and 151). While modern explanations
have shifted towards theories with a more sociological basis, biological determinism
continued to dominate theory and practice in explaining women’s crime. Morris
(1987:57-63) highlights the tendency of male criminology to explain female crime
as a consequence of disturbed sexuality; it was as if a rational woman offender
could not be accepted
In his review of the literature, Klien (1973) claimed that the path from biology
to the present was surprisingly straight. Several writers had referred to the relative
stability of the rates of crime involvement of man and women over a variety of
times and places as evidence of biological differences. Women’s lower rate of
criminal behaviour has been attributed to their affiliative nature, their physique
and lack of assertiveness, all of which were claimed to have a biological base.
In their huge text Wilson and Herrnstein ultimately relied upon a bio-social
398
foundation: ‘the best guess centres on the difference in aggression and perhaps
other primary drives that flow into the definition of sex roles’ (1985:124).
It is not surprising that women’s crime is often viewed as biologically based
since biology is commonly assumed to determine women’s lives generally. In
Freud’s view (1925), anatomy is destiny. But Biologists have pointed out that
neither chromosomes nor hormones determine what is defined as masculine and
feminine behaviour or attitude. Sex is not gender.
The effect of aggression and biology?
Maccomby and Jacklin (1974) believe the difference between men and women’s
aggression has a biological foundation. They claim four points:
• There is evidence that men are more aggressive than women in all human
societies. By contrast, social anthropologists, from Margaret Mead (1935)
onwards, have demonstrated the qualities that we think of as naturally masculine
and feminine, have been relative to some extent to time and place, and that in
some cultures both sexes have been aggressive or both sexes gentle.
• Differences in aggression are found early in life, when there is no evidence of
differential socialisation which have been brought to bear by adults. Others,
for example, Caplan (1975) argue socialisation starts from birth.
• Aggression is related to levels of sex hormones and can be affected by
experimental administration of these hormones. The level of testosterone is
argued as an explanation for violence in men. By contrast, Powers argues that
both men and women have male and female hormones in varying amounts,
and even in one sex the variation is great. Hormone levels also vary in each
person in moments of stress on different days and at different times of life.
Boys and girls have very similar hormone patterns before puberty yet differences
in aggression appear before them;
• Similar differences in aggression exist in all human primates. But Powers argues
there are wide variations among primates in all aspects of behaviour including
aggression.
Therefore each of Maccomby and Jacklin’s arguments can be countered (see the
discussion in Wilson and Herrnstein 1985:117-19), but a belief in the biological
basis for differences in aggression remains strong. Indeed Wilson and Herrnstein
conclude their discussion by saying that while aggression is often situationally
controlled, and the forms which it takes are shaped by learning, the durability,
universality and generality of the relative aggressiveness of males cannot plausibly
be blamed entirely on arbitrary sex roles. However, their discussion raises the image
of a range of primary and secondary reinforcers, and there are a large range of
interacting factors in any criminal event.
399
Sex role socialisation
Many writers have agreed that sex role socialisation is linked to criminality in such
a way that it accounts for the much lower rate of female crime. Carol Smart began
her 1976 analysis using a mixture of socialisation and role theory:
‘Girls are generally more closely supervised than boys, and are taught to be passive
and domesticated while boys are allowed greater freedom and are encouraged to be
aggressive, ambitious and outward going... both socialisation and the later development
of consciousness and self-perception does vary considerably between the sexes. As a
result of this girls are usually expected to be non-violent and so are not allowed to
learn how to fight or use weapons. Girls themselves tend to shrink from violence, and
look for protection rather than learn the skills of self-defence, hence few women have
the necessary technical ability or strength to engage in crimes of violence, armed
robberies or gang fights.’ (1976:66)
Differential socialisation prepares the growing child for different pathways in life.
Writing in 1976, Scutt presented a picture, perhaps now under stress, whereby
girls are encouraged to be passive and gentle and they are taught not to fight with
each other and their brothers. During childhood they are constantly reminded of
the role expected to be adopted in the future; ever-present is a mother who represents
the adult they will become. This is different for boys since their father is away
from home, at work, every day.
Both Smart and Scutt, however, are clear that role and socialisation theory can
only provide partial answers; consideration must be given to other factors. Many
writers draw upon an image of criminal activity that presents it as closely tied to
masculine behavioural traits. Boys are encouraged to be independent, self-
sufficient, brave and daring, able to take risks and to go for what they want. By
contrast, there is little in their upbringing to teach them to care, or to show that
they care. Boys are toughened against caring and attachment to enable mobility.
For Oakley the demonstration of physical strength, aggressiveness, achievement,
legal or illegal, are facets of the ideal male personality and also factors of criminal
behaviour. To become a proper man, the boy must lessen personal attachments and
sentiment, must be stalwart and brave, loyal to his mates and show little pity or
empathy for outsiders whose loss may be his gain. It is the man who is being
prepared for the job, the most vital thing in his life, the task of bringing home the
money and supporting the family – is crime a form of breadwinning when the
others are not available or appear too much of a burden? Is that not part of the
theory of differential opportunity? For John McVicar (a former offender who
served time for crimes of violence, now a sociologist) strength and physical
courage are vital factors by which young men build their self-esteem – the same
qualities which sustain many forms of criminal activity and loose groupings.
McVicar is clear that crime is not an attractive career for a women. She has not
been trained either physically or mentally to hold her own in the criminal
fraternity.
400
According to this image, criminality thus varies directly in proportion with the
socialisation into features of the masculine role. But are we taking about the
intensification of masculine traits or a defective socialisation? Is the person who
commits crime the extra-masculine, or one who has received a distorted
socialisation?
This has looked a promising line of inquiry, but there are two sets of
methodological difficulties with this view:
• What are the variables, and how would the forms of proper socialisation and
poor sex role socialisation be measured? Once this was agreed defective
socialisation and male/female delinquency would have to be documented by
measuring both variables and then discussing their inter-relationship.
• It assumes the subjective meaning of criminal activity to the offender can be
inferred merely by knowing their sex. Many writers appear to have made such
crass assumptions. Cohen (1955) portrayed girls as committing crimes because
they are preoccupied with boys, and boys were seen as committing crimes
because they are preoccupied with aggressive and competitive pursuit of
occupational and worldly success.
Certain studies have attempted to identify gender differences and relate them to
differing rates of involvement in delinquency/crime.
Shover et al, (1979) interfaced control theory, masculinity theory and the
differential delinquency of boys and girls. As a result of an upbringing in which
girls are touched, handled, and talked to more than boys, and in which conformity
and dependency are actively encouraged, girls are orientated towards finding self-
affirmation in love and acceptance of others, while boys are rewarded for
independent, objective achievements. The authors conceptualised gender roles as
identifiable behavioural expectations which people hold for themselves,
expectations about such matters as appropriate conduct or plans for the future.
They predicted positive relationships between traditional feminine expectations
and belief in the validity of rules and law and negative relationships between
traditional masculine role expectations and the latter. The results were consistent
with the view, that for both boys and girls the more traditionally feminine their
expectations, the greater their respect for the law and attachment to conventional
others (such as teachers and mothers), the less severe was their involvement in
property offences.
Thornton and James (1979) required respondents to state how far they perceived
themselves to possess the stereotypical masculine traits of aggression, independence,
objectivity and dominance, competitiveness and self-confidence. They conclude
that the findings showed little effect of masculine traits on delinquency behaviour
and that a movement towards masculine attitudes did not appear to increase a
persons propensity to engage in various forms of delinquency.
These studies attempt to integrate control theory and differential socialisation.
The original formulation of the control theory stems from Hirsch (1969) who
401
observed that adults attempt to overcome the problem of preventing their young
committing deviance by seducing them with affection and trapping them with
possessions and myths. People are introduced to conformity by becoming attached
to adults, by becoming committed to future conventionalities of activity and by
coming to believe in the moral superiority of conventional legal standards. To the
extent that adolescents are bonded in this way they remain insulated from the
temptations of deviance.
The theory sets out a mechanism for how adolescents get involved in delinquency
in the first place. It asserts that the more they are attached to parents and teachers,
the less they are likely to be involved with delinquent peers, their values, the
temptations that they offer, because they do not want to upset those whom they
love or fear. Also they can more easily resist the temptations, as being properly
socialised conventional adults, they do not perceive delinquency as fun or
advantageous.
The relevance of these ideas to explaining the small contribution of females, to
official rates of crime has been clear to a number of researchers, who show that the
social location of women contains more of those factors which act as constraints
on delinquent behaviour.
Hagan, Simpson and Gills (1979) conclude that women are over-socialised –
more specifically – over-controlled. Hagan draws upon the classical sociology of
Weber and recent work on the sociology of law by Donald Black. Weber’s (1947)
analysis specifies that the distinction between a public realm of production
(populated by males), and a domestic realm of consumption (the realm of women
and the family) is fundamental to capitalism, while Black (1976) specifies an inverse
relation between the state and family-based systems of social control. The
stratification of work and domestic arrangements, into public and private spheres,
makes women the instruments of informal social controls. Females are more closely
supervised than men and the burden of that job falls on mothers; therefore women
find themselves encapsulated in the nuclear family and less free to explore the
temptations of the world beyond.
Hagan (1987) developed this theory into a structural theory of opportunity,
control and socialisation. The answer to the different rates lay:
‘... in the social organisation of the world of work, the stratification system, and the
different means to control men and women.’ (1987:268)
Structurally women are more restricted in their entry into the world of work, men
are more commonly ascribed to the public arena (ie, the world of work/production)
and women to the private sphere (ie, the home). One consequence of this restriction
of women is to make them less available for the public ascription of criminal and
delinquent statuses. Hagan is clear that ‘both crime and work are sexually stratified’.
This is backed up by Auld et al’s (1986) analysis of drug dealing which argued the
reasons for girls not becoming involved in heavy drug dealing were economic as
well as cultural; a product of the males’ wish to dominate this irregular economy.
402
Historically, the development of a complex division of labour required by

industrialisation and large scale trade and commerce, developed a differentiation
between informal and formal agencies of social control – a decline of influence of
local groupings, such as kinship groups, and the prominence of state sponsored
system of segregative control – to cover the arena of work and public spaces.
Private spaces, the domain of the family and largely the terrain of women, remained
subjected to informal systems of control. The new forms of work, and the experience
of social life in public spaces, required and brought into being a new form of social
control, namely, ‘crime control’, operationalised in modern forms of criminal justice.
In the main, men have been the daily objects of this control, since they were the
subjects moving most readily into the new and more public areas of work. For
Hagan:
‘... the result was to subject men increasingly to the formal control of the emerging
criminal justice system, while leaving women to the informal social control of the
family... two well established statistical regularities – the exclusion of women from
the ‘race’ for stratification outcomes and less crime among women – have as a common
source patterns of informal social controls involving women, which are established
and perpetuated within the family.’ (1987:268-9)
Hagan’s concept of informal social controls extends beyond the family to include
activities of peer and work groups – importantly it includes the pressures which go
to create femininity rather than masculinity. Additionally, Hagan argues,
females are not only the objects, more often than males, of informal social
control, but also the instruments. Specifically, mothers exercise control over
children while daughters, more than sons, are the objects of this control.
Analysers of child-rearing practices have, until recently, been united in saying
that ‘women are the primary socialisers’. In the construction of gender roles
for the children certain ‘requirements’ of each role are instilled in the developing
child. As Udry sees it:
‘... by age three, the boy will begin to perceive that some new requirements go with
being male. Males are not supposed to be passive, compliant, and dependent but on
the contrary, are expected to be aggressive, independent, and self-assertive.’
(1974:53)
Hagan believes the family, and the controls exercised therein and outside, help
constitute the social complex of power-structure wherein gender relations are
established, maintained, perpetuated, and otherwise reproduced. The traditional
family of organised modernity is that of the patriarchal family – the ideal type of
which is a husband who is employed in a position of authority over others, and a
wife who is not employed outside of the home – this family will tend to reproduce
daughters who focus their futures around domestic labour and consumption,
contrasted with sons, who are prepared for participation in direct production. A
specific type of social-psychology will be encouraged in each. The relationship to
control lies in the fact that aggressiveness, independence, and assertiveness connote
freedom (or the absence of control) more than restriction. In this relationship
403
‘criminal and delinquent behaviour are recognised as pleasurable, if not liberating.

Crime and delinquency can be fun.’ (1987:271) Thus women define risk-taking
less positively than men; women define involvement in crime and delinquency
less positively than men; women are therefore less likely to be involved in criminal
and delinquent behaviour than men. Women are systematically ‘over-socialised’;
women are kept in a restricted world vis à vis the world of work and public space
‘through a socialisation sequence that moves from mother to daughter in a cycle
that is self-renewing’. While some commentators argue (i) there is a new breed of
violent, aggressive women offenders; or (ii) behavioural differences between the
genders are diminishing; or (iii) as the opportunities for womens participation in
the world of work increase they will become more frequently the subject of the
agents of formal social control, and therefore patterns of crime will become more
alike, Hagan points to the increasing ‘double burden’ women face. Participation in
some new kinds of work do not relieve them of responsibilities for child-care;
alternatively, the relief of some upper class women is at the expense of employing
underclass home help; thus the home-based concentration continues and male and
female rates of criminality are likely to remain quite different for some time to
come.
There have been attempts to integrate structural theories, differential
socialisation, differential association and opportunity theories. Johnson (1974)
found that the low rate of delinquency amongst women was, at least in part, a
reflection of their social location – they were more controlled and supervised by
their parents, more willing to accept conventional values, and less influenced by or
involved with delinquent peers. Female friends are more home than street centred,
and play a protective role; consequently female peer groups reinforce
dependence, compliance and passivity by thus keeping down the frequency of
female encouragement into delinquency. For Ronald Akers (1977) control theory
should be integrated with social learning. Socialisation leads to a choice of social
bonding and friendship networks which create constraints diminishing the
opportunity to commit delinquency. It is not just the presence or absence of
opportunity but:
‘... a person will participate in deviant activity... to the extent that it has been
differentially reinforced over conforming behaviour and defined as more desirable
than, or at least as justified as, conforming alternatives’. (1977:58)
Although people may have a motive to deviate they may be unable to do so simply
because they had no opportunity. Opportunity theories highlight the sexism of
crime in that the attitudes and beliefs of established criminals see women as
emotional, unreliable etc. ‘Organised crime isn’t an equal opportunity employer.’
Several commentators have argued that men who inhabit the world of crime, prefer
to walk with, and associate with, and do business with, other men. They see their
crimes as too hard and dangerous for women; when women are recruited, it is a
sexual and supportive role they play.
404
Is there an increase in female crime? Does the liberation of women

necessitate that they become as criminal as men?
It is argued that if the social position of women changes in such a way that they
come to share the same privileges and resources as men – if they become more
powerful – then it follows that there should be a convergence between the sexes in
the frequency and pattern of crimes they commit. Therefore does emancipation
mean that females will commit more serious crimes?
In the 1930s, Bishop (1931) was warning that the fight for emancipation had
been mostly won but was it worth it? The cost of victory was the savage taste of
disappointment:
‘... women of this country were never in a more unhappy state than they are today...
many more women have become criminally minded during the past years than ever
before.’ (1931:3-4)
By 1950 Pollak could almost rejoice, in telling us that voices:
‘... ever since the 1870s, have predicted that the progressing social equalisation...
would lead to an increase in the volume of female crime.’ (1950:58)
Radzinowicz and King (1977:14-15) argued when women took over some of the
traditional male roles in Germany during the Second World War, female crime
rates rose to almost equal those for males. The rates dropped back to the pre-war
levels when the women returned to their traditional female roles. Clifford
(1976:125-132) argued in Japan the rates of female crime have increased as
women entered the labour market, married later and became more like men in the
roles they played.
In a book entitled Sisters in Crime, Freda Alder (1975) stated that female
criminologists had seen the darker side of the women’s movement in recent years.
She asserted: ‘Women are indeed committing more crimes than ever before. Those
crimes involve a greater degree of violence.’ (1975:3) Certainly, the number of
women subject to custodial punishment is increasing, for example, between 1970
and 1980 the average daily population of women in custody almost doubled from
around 800 to 1,500. (HMSO Criminal Statistics 1981) Mostly variations of
opportunity theory were put forward in explanation: for Simon (1975) it was simply
to be expected as a function of both expanded consciousness, as well as occupational
opportunities that women’s participation role and involvement in crime would
change and increase.
However, this portrayal of changing female crime does not enjoy consensus
amongst all writers. Some deny any positive relationship between female
emancipation and crime, while others assert that contemporary women are
committing more masculine crimes, more violent crimes, and more serious crimes.
Steffensmeier claimed:
‘The new female criminal is more a social invention then an empirical reality and that
the proposed relationship between the women’s movement and crime is, indeed,
405
tenuous and even vacuous. Women are still typically non-violent, petty property
offenders.’ (1980, quoted in Box, 1983:192)
Adler’s Sisters In Crime presumes that crime has been a male activity and that the
modern woman desires to become like a man – why?
Adler had presented a picture of new independent women who now took on
traditional masculine qualities of assertion, aggression and independence in their
deviant roles, as well as in their new involvement in business. Thus she claimed
the new prostitute was better educated, better accepted, and more independent of
men; women were more inclined to use illicit drugs and to pursue sources of supply
into illicit channels; and they are becoming as eager as men to reach out for thrills
rather than just relief. Hence Adler’s view is of the new woman who wants both
the joys and pleasures of modernity as well as bearing the burden: the crimes of
the new woman will be crimes of desire and not crimes of desperation or relief. Yet
Adler’s analysis seems to fall into the trap which MacKinnon argued women may
find in their quest to be modern. Specifically that ‘women can’t fuck their way to
freedom’ (1987). For MacKinnon it is not the women’s movement that has told
women to become as men, but the ideology of control and domination central to
capitalist modernity.
MacKinnon (1982, 1987) builds upon a Marxist perspective in which
understanding power, domination, alienation and the pursuit of a true future state
of social relations are clear themes. She suffers, in turn, from many of the same
faults that have befallen earlier marxist analysis, namely, she appears to assume a
truth for her theory that transcends the others, she claims the possibility of a true
essence of women which we are unable to presently consider, and insists on the
totality of male domination throughout the social order.
For MacKinnon the first site of domination lies in the male appropriation of
women’s pre-social natural sexuality, an appropriation which constitutes woman
as the object of male desire. Thus women’s sexuality in society is structured into
an objectification of the male gaze rather than a consequence of natural or true
forms. Gender formations are structured on the basis of this; ultimately the power
which constitutes the structure of gender relations and the domination of women
by men is the power of visualising and defining the nature of women’s sexuality
and thus gender (1982:515). Out of this difference, out of the structure of interaction
in the mode of activity of sexuality, comes a domination through difference:
‘Difference is the velvet glove on the iron fist of domination. The problem then is not
that differences are not valued; the problem is that they are defined by power. This is
as true when difference is affirmed as when it is denied, when its substance is
applauded or disparaged, when women are punished or protected in its name.’
(1987:219)
As with Marx we cannot look at the behaviour of the oppressed, of the hungry, as
the behaviour of natural man, for MacKinnon we cannot look at any of the behaviour
of women under contemporary conditions as the truth of their gender. Women’s
406
subordinate set of gender roles does not correspond to any extra-social natural
division but has its ‘truth’ only as a creation of social processes:
‘Gender is what gender means. It has no basis in anything other than the social reality
its hegemony constructs. The process that gives sexuality its male supremacist meaning
is therefore the process through which gender inequality becomes socially real.’
(1987:149)
We cannot trust the present perceptions of women, of femaleness, since these have
the meaning and the form which has been given and been allowed, by the male
dominated processes of social reality. As a consequence:
• Women cannot trust the state – even the supposed neutral liberal rule-of-law
state is the embodiment of the male gaze. The secret of this domination, the
key to its success, is the hegemonic belief that the structure of the liberal rule
of law state actually prevents domination. By creating such an image of
impartiality the rule of law is blind to the fact that it operates to reinforce
structural inequalities which pre-exist the appeal to law and which inhere also
in the jurisprudence of the law. For if the subjects of the law come to the law as
citizens, as the rights bearing creatures of modernity, the subject of the women
as rights-bearer is male-identified and male constructed. To claim the protection
of the law is to claim the protection of something already established in the
male point of view – to enforce the abstract law is to enforce that which has
been constructed in the male view. The liberal rule of law state is the rule of
men under the guise of the rule of law – its power intensified through the
hegemony of subterfuge.
• Not only is the state not to be trusted but the very notion of equality is suspect
– instead one must ask ‘equality as what?’ If women want to claim equal rights
are they not claiming only the right to be viewed as men under the gaze of the
male state?
MacKinnon’s (1989) argument is at the level of hegemonic understandings, the
social inequality which existed in the traditional patriarchical social order has not
been destroyed by the legal rights offered by liberalism. The equal protection of
the law would be just if women were actually equal before the law – if the liberties
of the social body were evenly distributed – but they are not. Women are thus in a
terrible bind: to become fully functioning moderns they renounce the restraints
which kept them in the position of subjugated women, but this means their identity
will be constituted in the gaze of men. In desiring to be modern will they become
as men?
What is the empirical evidence in criminology?
Alder’s analysis was flawed in its primary example of the ‘black sister’. Adler
assumed that the structural role of black women in the US had condemned them to
407
be stronger, more aggressive and, hence, more liberated that their white counterparts.
The fact, she argued, of their higher crime rate was thus a prediction of things to
come generally. But black women are more easily seen as extremely vulnerable,
as doubly victimised (by racism and patriarchism), as facing serious demands.
Their crime may be a tactic of survival rather than freedom.
Those studies which try to prove a causal connection between emancipation
and female crime by merely documenting the historical overlap between these two
social events are fatally flawed. The methodological question, analytically as well
as philosophically, is ‘what is female liberation?’
Steffenmeiser tried to analyse the matter concerning crimes of violence, but
concluded that female crimes of violence against the person have increased
absolutely but not relatively to the male rate, whereas female property offences
have increased faster than the male rate. He was sceptical:
‘The new female criminal is more a social invention than an empirical reality and that
the proposed relationship between the women’s movement and crime is indeed tenuous
and even nonexistent. Women are still typically, non-violent, petty property offenders.’
(1978:580)
Fox and Hartnagel (1979) in Canada, asked how could one measure the time period
of liberation? They suggested the rate of labour force participation, educational
involvement, fertility and ‘being single’ as indicators of female emancipation and
correlated these against female criminal convictions; their conclusion was one of
increase in rates of criminal convictions.
Smart (1979), Box (1983), Box and Hale (1983), and Carlan (1987), point to
other factors which may provide a common explanation embracing the increase in
male crime rates, specifically, the growing economic marginalisation of large
groups of women. Let us be under no illusion: the liberation of the new woman
may be of the upper and middle class and occur at the expense of the double bind
of the marginalised (perhaps the icon of this is the career women in the US who
can only be the new successful woman because she can employ various home help
at very low wages who are other women... particularly members of ethnic
minorities).
There may also be a change of ideology whereby the other members of the
public expect new tough women. Traditionally, statistics show higher rates of
violence among men than women and it is commonly believed that men are more
aggressive than women. However research and self report studies reveal a
different result. For example, Campbell (1986) asked a sample of schoolgirls
about their experience of fighting – all admitted to having been involved in a fight
but only a few had been involved with interaction with the police over it. The
majority of them rejected the statement ‘I think fighting is only for the boys’.
Box and Hale (1983) concluded that the liberation movement per se had no
direct effect, either on crimes of violence, or property offences; most of the increase
in female convictions for violence seemed to be explained by changes in social
408
labelling practices; that is, the public being more willing to report female offenders,
the police to prosecute, and judges to convict. In this sense female liberation, may
have had an indirect effect, as the behaviour of the public, police and justice
personnel is influenced by their image of female crime and, if this has changed
recently – because of portrayal in the media and publicised link between liberation
and violent aggressive crimes – then what is believed as real, becomes real in its
consequences. The relative increase in female conviction rates for violent offences
is then a self fulfilling prophecy, rather than a reflection of any real change in
female propensity to crime.
Who are the women who are taken into prison? A class-sensitive analysis tends
to see them as marginalised (a sizable portion of women in British prisons are
ethnic minorities many of whom were arrested for petty drug trafficking). The
major factor accounting for the increase in property crime seems to be economic
marginalisation. As women become economically worse off, largely through
unemployment, and inadequate compensatory levels of welfare benefits, so they
are less able and willing to resist the temptation to engage in property offences
as a way of helping to shelter financial difficulties. Critics, such as Carlan, argue
that we should look to increasing female marginalisation, brought on by the
changing structure of British industry, and a government (headed for a
considerable time by a woman) determined to restore the family with a full time,
non-working mother, to find the causes for the reduction in the sex differentials of
property offences.
The problematising of masculinity in post-modernism
To some extent this is a feature or consequence of the incorporation of women into

the mainstream of late-modernity; how has this occurred? Early modernity
involved the philosophical conception of equality and universality, at the same
time as a social structural categorisation and differentiation operated at the level of
class and gender within the western nation state, and ethnicity aided in separating
out the ‘other’. Two processes are at work to allow participation in late-modernity:
(i) increased participation in the public sphere; (ii) changing forms of gender
relations in the domestic sphere. Both processes are clearly influenced by
technological changes with different patterns of ‘skill’ required in newer forms of
production. The structures which we publicly proclaim, the so-called constitution
of the society, are dependent upon the networks underlying them and which make
them possible. The core of the domestic relation has been the conjugal one, in
which men control women by virtue of being their spouses. This control is direct
in that men had the right of disposition over the labour, the bodies and the children
of women, a right existent in fact and law. In the early 19th century the
combination of the right of men to freely direct the labour of conjugal partners as
if they were chattels, and the severe constraints of the form and consequences of
409
biological reproduction (little birth control, a high death rate in pregnancy and
childbirth), positioned women in the most marginal and worst paying
employment. Participation of women in the public sphere was extremely limited.
Employment was as domestics (domestic servants, governesses, home teachers),
participation in non-domestic production was either unskilled in factories or
womanised (eg as a midwife, nurses), mostly under the direction of men (textiles,
clothing, food, doctors).
The 20th century saw the breakdown of formal barriers to woman’s
participation. This involved the removal of legal barriers on female participation
in the public sphere (voting, representation, equal pay for equal work, gender
discrimination outlawed), and a greater freedom in domestic gender relations
(specifically, divorce became easier, abortion became decriminalised, attempts
were made to control domestic violence). Technological developments removed
several so-called natural connections, for example, the advent of cheap and
effective birth control (condoms, the pill) as well as advances in medicine
destroyed the traditional linkage between sexuality, reproduction and death (about
a fifth of all child-births in the 19th century resulted in death). While Giddens
(1992) demonstrates that changes in the technology of birth control affect
sexuality – creating what he terms a ‘plastic sexuality’, able to be a site of pleasure
and meaning of and for itself – in turn enabling a democratisation of the domestic
relations, the advent of post-industrialisation, and the rise in new technologies,
have rendered obsolete the connection between physical power and labour. Even
the women’s movement can be seen as directly a factor of technological changes
(Huber, 1976).
Feminists argue that partriarchy is maintained today through social
arrangements indirectly securing men’s interests, giving men market advantages
before and above women, and hegemony in personal relations between the sexes.
Male control is achieved through the process of social reproduction. There is still
control of the means of material subsistence by men in families which is used to
constrain women within domestic roles; the cultural representations of gender
and role models emphasises a set of idealisations which are functionally and
hierarchically differentiated; men practise covert forms of discrimination in
public contexts; the incorporation of women into the systems of production and
service industries has been into segmented labour markets with separate career
structures. As MacKinnon and others have stressed, the specification of the job
is usually as the male has previously done it, hence, if it is to be available to a
woman, the woman must do it as the male does it; thus female careers have
largely been structured in terms of male characteristics, without arrangements for
interruptions for childbirth, and without provision for day-care facilities for
children.
While men maintain a privileged position the socio-cultural movements of late
modernity, however, in particular the feminist movement, are on such a scale as to
constitute a social revolution: ‘Feminism was, and has remained, the greatest and
410
most decisive social revolution of modernity.’ (Heller and Feher, 1988:144) A

social revolution is a process from within, a cultural transformation. Experiences
which give rise and foundational support to a female culture, hitherto marginalised,
cannot be contained within segregated bounds. The feminist claim to set out a
right to articulate perspectives covering half of the world population compromises
not just the language of modernity, but that of all other cultures. The culture of the
anti-modern (as in fundamentalist religions are often not the neglect of the equality
of feminine, but the denial of the feminine as human relegating it to the status of
the merely natural).
Lengermann and Wallace summarised these developments as they impacted
upon the US:
‘A widely ranging increase in female participation in the labour force, to a rate of
over 50% in 1980 and an estimated level of about 60% in 1990.
A movement of women into traditionally male occupations at both working and
middle class levels. Much female labour force participation is in service sector/caring
occupations but this is principally in the public arena rather than the domestic arena.
(Internal labour market segmentation between managers and secretaries is the most
resistant form of occupational segmentation.)
Women’s increasing participation in formal political structures, through holding
representative offices.
An overall increase in the extent of educational participation and attainment by
women although some fields of higher education (science and engineering) remain
resolutely masculine.
A trend towards reduced family size indicating an increased level of control by
women over their own procreative capacities and reduced domestic chores.
A redistribution of domestic duties in the family. One form of this redistribution
is the increasingly prevalent single-parent family in which a single adult carries
out all domestic duties. Another is redistribution between the genders in dual-
income households, although the redistribution of housework towards men is very
limited.
Legislation affecting access to employment, relative rates of pay, and increased
opportunity for men in divorce and child custody cases.
The removal of explicitly sexist content in educational materials, governmental
and legislative documents, and the mass media.
The development of male liberation and masculine consciousness raising groups.’
(1985:195-231)
This has been interpreted by some commentators to amount to a crisis of
masculinity:
‘... many men feel themselves to be involved in some kind of change having to do
with gender, with sexual identity, with what it is to be a man. The ‘androgyny’ literature
of the late 1970s spoke to this in one way, the literature about the importance of
fathering another... It seems clear enough that there have been recent changes in the
constitution of masculinity in advanced capitalist countries, of at least two kinds: a
deepening of tensions around relationships with women, and the crisis of a form of
heterosexual masculinity that is increasingly felt to be obsolete.’ (Carrigan et al
1985:598)
411
Does this amount to a crisis in the hegemony of masculinity?

Are these changes social or structural in character or are there also changes in
the differentiation of cultural meanings? In other words is the binary opposition
masculine-feminine still rigid or is there a development of androgyny? Is there a
coming together of masculine and feminine ‘personality types’ into an androgynous
type? Or are masculine and feminine types or ideals of thought becoming freed
from gender, ie from the relationship with a body, and available for anyone to use
(identify with)?
The criminological fear is that the new woman will incorporate the worst of
both worlds. Epitomised in recent films such as Fatal Attraction and The Last
Seduction, she will use both the power of masculinity and the sexual power of the
body, seduction means she will vivaciously possess the phallus. Is there a sea
change? Or a series of sites of crisis, located in ex-working-class locations
precipitated by unemployment, retraining which is into ‘women’s employment
(computer operators, office administrators), failed marriages, sexual inadequacy,
the rise of the gay movement, wayward teenage children?
We have indicated the post-modernist argument that consumption power, rather
than location in the relations of production, determines status, therefore it should
not matter whether you earn your money as a keyboard operator or a miner, the
more the money and the style of goods purchased, the higher the status. It is not
the body but the suit, or the Rolex, or the BMW. However, we are not supposing
such totalisations. The crisis of masculinity may be part of the breakdown of the
security of an opposition based on domination-submission, an opposition which is
breached in the process of individualisation (in which gender is only one
characteristic of the person) and emancipation. Gender identity is only one aspect
of the tools of self-belief and self-expression, the advent of late- or post-
modernisation opens up the possibilities of a playful choice... but may also doom
to a deep existential crisis those who do not have the resources, both personal and
financial, to play the game. The progressive politics of personal relationships can
turn into the resentment of the dispossessed – masculine rage. Domestic violence,
used in the past as an assertion of the right to control, may be an expression of the
desperate need to regain control of a self which is no longer in the terrain that it
once was.
Questioning the post-modernist turn
Many feminists seem to welcome post-modernism. If there is doubt as to the

permanence of structure, if the naturalist premise is finally bankrupt, if we see
social identities as cultural products, then surely women will find the space to
(re)constitute themselves freely?
But the sceptics ask, with what? What discursive resources can you be sure of if
everything is deconstructable? Why should feminist positions be somehow
412
privileged? Nancy Hartsock is suspicious of the timing of the post-modern condition

and reads in it a conservative destabilising effect of woman’s powers of articulation:
‘Why is it, exactly at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin
to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than as objects of
history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? Just when we
are forming our own theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about whether the
world can be adequately theorised? Just when we are talking about the changes we
want, ideas of progress and the possibility of ‘meaningfully’ organised human society
become suspect?’ (1987:196)
Counter to this the role of a new range of theorising must work on three levels:
• The epistemological task of countering the appeals to common sense and
tradition which are espoused to climb out of the void made more visible by the
post-modern condition and deconstruction. We need work on the intellectual
foundations of a new order of gender and participation, a new sensitivity to
pleasure and pain.
• The practical tasks of (i) deconstructing the myths of past practices and images
which constrain both women and men, as well as (ii) engage in a practical
politics of policing priorities, refuge centres, victim support and so forth.
• To continue the process of modernist construction – to create new images of
interaction and equality.
Can a criminological theory of rational conformity, which does not

reduce femininity to passivity or over-control, be developed?
Let us first ask what is the fear of the new woman who is as a man? To what extent
is it a fear of the possibility of the feminine? How does the feminine contrast with
the legacy of De Sade; who is regarded as the father figure of modern
pornography?
The Sadian heritage is simple. Down play at all times the role of women and
their connection with birth and their capacity as mothers. As De Sade has her
father inform Eugenie when demanding she wreak revenge upon her mother:
‘Be unafraid, Eugenie, and adopt these same sentiments; they are natural: uniquely
formed of our sires’ blood, we owe absolutely nothing to our mothers. What,
furthermore, did they do but co-operate in the act which our fathers, on the contrary,
solicited? Thus, it was the father who desired our birth, whereas the mother merely
consented thereto.’ (De Sade, 1966:207)
To become free women must reject the role of mother, must sow up the very bodily
passages through which they came into the world. The loss of the mother is the
first step in becoming autonomous.
Some modern writers have joined in this. Ascher (1979:2 discussed in
Brodribb, 1992) points out how De Beauvoir used the spirit of De Sade to argue
that women would find authenticity in crime, in murder. The act of crime would be
413
the source of genuine transcendence, woman would join in the acts of

separateness, and other-than-joined-to-others, that males took for granted.
Women would turn away from the experiences of immanence and the bloody and
the dirty biological reality of their labouring and giving birth. They would cleanse
their minds of the reality of morning sickness, or the weight of the pregnancy, of
the linkage to another, of their necessity to place another before themselves. Such
facility prevents the attainment of a self-directioness that promotes power.
‘One becomes self-directive when one comes to regard the universe as one’s own
to control, to consider oneself to blame for its faults and to glory in its progress,
to regard the entire earth as territory for one’s domination.’ (De Beauvoir,
1974:793)
The safety of the reproductive function was interpreted by males as requiring women
to keep to the camp. The male became the warrior and hunter, involved in a dance
with the kill and the chance of death. For De Beauvoir:
‘... he proved dramatically that life is not the supreme value for man, but on the
contrary that it should be made to serve ends more importantly than itself. The worst
curse that was laid upon woman was that she should be excluded from these warlike
forays. For it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the
animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that
brings forth but to that which kills.’ (1974:72)
In return, Ascher argues, women have often thanked him. They have provided
encouragement to kill and an appreciative audience. Sometimes they have asked
the male to kill, at other times they have participated vicariously in male violence:
never have women universally asked for a system of female values to be placed in
opposition to male values.
Rational conformity?
Are there female values which can serve as a basis for a theory of rational
conformity? Do women have a greater stake in general conformity, perhaps related
to their collective experience of relative powerlessness?
In the work of the psychologist Carol Gilligan (1982), the conception of self
and world revealed is one of relationship rather than domination. On the basis of
comparing in-depth interviews between men and women, concerning moral
dilemmas and views on life, Gilligan claims to find women’s identity is defined in
the context of relationships and judged by a standard of responsibility and care.
One of her subjects describes being alone or unconnected as ‘like the sound of one
hand clapping... there is something lacking’ (1982:160). In contrast, male self-
descriptions, while speaking of attachments, were characterised by adjectives of
separation:
‘[I]nvolvement with others [was] tied to a qualification of identity rather than to its
realisation. Instead of attachment, individual achievement rivets male imagination,
and great ideas or distinctive activity defines the standard of self-assessment and
success.’ (Ibid: 163)
414
Gilligan claims that women reason in a different voice being directed by an ethic
of care and responsibility, as opposed to rational reasoning and separateness. Are
these poles total? What is the growth of a person and what is maturity? For Gilligan
true maturity for both sexes would be to move away from the absolutes with which
they are associated. That is, men must move away from the absolutes of rights,
truth and fairness, to a realisation of differences between other and self, and a
recognition that multiple truths exist. Similarly, women must move away from the
absolute of care, and recognise a claim for equality and rights that transforms their
understanding of relationships and their definition of care.
The American feminist Robin West argues that male legal theorists exhibit a
specific form of reasoning, because they experience the world firstly and
fundamentally as separate, autonomous individuals. The foundation of all traditional
and critical masculine jurisprudence is a ‘separation’ thesis. By contrast, women:
‘... are not essentially, necessarily, inevitably, always, and forever separate from other
human beings... [but]... are in some sense ‘connected’ to life and to other human
beings during at least four recurrent and critical material experiences: the experience
of pregnancy itself; the invasive and ‘connecting’ experience of heterosexual
penetration, which may lead to pregnancy; the monthly experience of menstruation,
which represents the potential for pregnancy; and the post-pregnancy experience of
breast-feeding.’ (West, 1988:2-3)
Women reason out of a ‘connectedness’ which men cannot experience. This other
experience of women provides the basis of an alternative to legal theory which
through the presuppositions of the separation thesis has become ‘essentially and
irrevocably masculine’. (Ibid: 2)
Can we read a form of consciousness to women different from men which
affects their rational calculation? In other words is there a rational reason for
conformity? Consider again Adler’s thesis that liberation was causing women to
be more criminal. Her argument was backed up by the official criminal statistics
on the sex ratio of black offenders in the US. Adler argued that this ratio was much
smaller than for white offenders, in other words, there was a greater involvement
of black woman in crime, since for Adler in a ‘grimly sardonic sense the black
female has been liberated for over a century’. Adler interpreted the position of
black women in America, where they had often been the sole breadwinner in a
family as one which had made them independent. ‘Aggressiveness, toughness,
and a certain street-wise self sufficiency were just a few of the characteristics
necessary for the black woman to shepherd her beleaguered flock of children,
siblings, and consorts through the wastelands of educational, social, financial and
cultural deprivations.’ (1975:140-142) Adler’s thesis was problematic. She assumes
that woman’s liberation has given women an intense competitive instinct; the
liberated woman is more assertive, more aggressive, in short, more masculine. She
also presumes that the woman’s liberation movement has opened up structural
opportunities for women to offend, since women now occupy many more roles in
the workplace. Adler assumed that crime is a male activity, both appealing and
prestigious. And she presumed that women would want to emulate men. She appears
415
blind to any of the writings by black women expressing the subjectivity of their
position.
By contrast, Ngaire Naffine combines the work of Carol Gilligan with insights
gained from control theory, to construct an idea of a non-masculine woman
demonstrating a high commitment to conventional relationships and conformity.
For Ngaire Naffine:
‘... the type of conforming woman who exemplifies the ethic of care may indeed be a
stout character. She may believe in the equality of the sexes, she may be strong and
assertive, but she may nevertheless take seriously her social duties. What appeared to
Adler to be an obvious reaction to independence, women testing the criminal waters,
becomes an irrational act to the woman who is conscious of her place in a network of
social responsibilities.’ (1987:132)
Is it too bizarre to suggest that the early experiences and socialisation of girls,
results not so much in passivity, but in a responsibility, partly based on an
understanding that the collective experience of historical powerlessness helps
constitute? What is the reality of the conforming woman? She may be a housewife
and mother, who also juggles paid employment, and spends time looking after an
ailing parent. This ‘ideal type’ woman may be entirely involved and engrossed in
conventional life. She may be literally run off her feet. She may be subjected to a
multiplicity of demands and expectations; but she may also be actively concerned
about the effect of her behaviour on her loved ones, particularly her dependant
children. Her experiences, both vicariously, and actually, in child birth and the
nurturing of children, may provide her with a powerful attachment to the
conventional order, since she knows only too well – in her vulnerability – of the
consequences of the breakdown of the order. The injunction to responsibility, to be
an upright citizen, is strong. This ‘ideal type’ is not suggesting an over-socialised,
or over-controlled, person. Instead of passivity, unthinking compliance, or weak
dependency, we have the rational understanding of social bonding. The law abiding
woman is actually a powerful female persona. For Naffine:
‘Law abiding women are not vapid, biddable creatures, clinging helplessly to
conventional society. Instead, they are, to use Hirschi’s description of conforming
men, responsible, hard working, engrossed in conventional activities and people, and
perfectly rational in their calculation not to place all this at risk by engaging in crime.’
(1987:131)
What then of the future? It lies to be constructed. Is the future a mixture of the
feminine and masculine? And what of our guiding metaphors of the building project?
If modernist constructionism founded on the rigidity of suppressing the other (the
woman, the black) lies undercut, then perhaps we should dream of a building
founded on the mystery of difference and otherness. Undoubtably, it would not be
a tower.
416
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNDERCLASS
‘At the end of the eighteenth century, people dreamed of a society without
crime. And then the dream evaporated. Crime was too useful for them to dream
of anything as crazy – or ultimately as dangerous – as a society without crime.
No crime means no police. What makes the presence and control of the police
tolerable for the population, if not fear of the criminal? This institution of the
police, which is so recent and so oppressive, is only justified by that fear. If we
accept the presence in our midst of these uniformed men, who have the exclusive
right to carry arms, who demand our papers, who come and prowl on our
doorsteps, how would any of this be possible if there were no criminals? And
if there weren’t articles every day in the newspapers telling us how numerous
and dangerous our criminals are?’ (Michel Foucault, 1980:7)
The arrival of the underclass
By the late 1970s conservative American writings were identifying a

problematic stratum of American society which was claimed to be a product of a
misguided welfare system that had ‘created a new caste of Americans – perhaps
as much as one-tenth of this nation – a caste of people free from basic wants but
almost totally dependant upon the state, with little hope of breaking free’
(Anderson, 1979:56).
The term first entered public prominence at the hands of Ken Auletta, a New
York journalist, in 1982. He argued that while most people officially classified as
poor in America, overcome poverty after a generation or two, a sizeable number
(perhaps 9 million) do not assimilate. Auletta mixed together a range of ‘losers’
into a loose category of an underclass which constituted ‘both America’s peril and
shame’ (1982: xvi -xviii). The reviews were mixed, for example, Fox:
‘The underclass, or synonyms for it, has a long history as a useful abstraction. The
word caricatures a segment of humanity and provides a license to exempt them...
from the same standards and opportunities as the rest of us... Auletta speaks for
numerous relatively prosperous Americans who seem to need an underclass. Racists
and conservatives need one to explain the inadequacies of affirmative action. Advocates
of social scientism – of variations on the venerable theme of a culture of poverty –
need one to explain the genealogy of intergenerational misery... proponents of an
underclass have wanted us to believe that American society was endangered by
unassimilable creatures who suffered defects in both their heredity and their
environment.’ (1982:62)
An ambiguity as to who comprises the ‘underclass’ has continued in the more
scholarly literature which took up this term. Whilst in the US it has come to refer
predominately to the black inner-city population concentrated in areas of extreme
417
deprivation and virtual social apartheid the term ‘underclass’ has more universally
become popularised as a loose categorisation containing those individuals who
commit most of the traditional street crime and provide the cause of contemporary
urban riots; most frequently in analysis in the US (Glasgow, 1981; Auletta, 1982;
Murray 1984; Lemann, 1986; Wilson, 1987; Katz, 1989; the media coverage of
the Los Angeles riots of 1992), and applied to Britain (Murray, 1990, 1994; and
from the left: Dahrendorf 1985, 1987; Pahl 1988; Fields, 1989; Saunders 1990;
Mann, 1990, but note arguments for rejecting the term in Macnicol 1987, 1990;
Gallie, 1988; Dean and Taylor-Gooby, 1992) and applied in Japan (Schoenberger,
1990), while trends in underclass development have been argued in New Zealand
and Australia.
Although the term has entered into widespread use there is debate as to whether
it is so value laden as to be unusable.1 As two writers critical of the term have
stated:
‘Perhaps the really dangerous class is not the underclass but those who have propagated
the underclass concept... Because it is so ill-defined and sloppy the underclass can
mean whatever the user intends it to mean.’ (Bagguley and Mann, 1992:118)
Three reasonably coherent conceptual schemes, each with specific political and
social flavours have, however, developed:
• a tradition which looks for discernable features either of the constitution of the
members (such as low IQ) or immediate culture (a culture of poverty tradition);
• a social structural argument cast in terms of social and spatial processes of
post-industrialisation or post-modernism which links the development of the
underclass to changes in employment opportunity and skills level; and
• a class and power analysis which sees the underclass as partially, at least, cased
by conservative retrenchment of welfare provisions in a time of economic
recession and a change in attitudes of the well-off working class to the less
fortunate.
1 A note on sociological definition: the traditional definition of class stemming from the work of
Marx and Weber has been by differential location in the system of production. Using this
perspective Runciman argues:0 00
‘The term must be understood to stand not for a group or category of workers systematically
disadvantaged within the labour market... but for those members of British society whose
roles place them more or less permanently at the economic level where benefits are paid by
the state to those unable to participate in the labour market at all.’ (1990:388)
Thus ‘underclass’ denotes those neither engaged in, nor able to participate in gainful productive
work (officially at least, as Murray and others argue some may be engaged in the so-called grey
or black economy). Newer forms of identifying social stratification attempt differentiation in
terms of consumption cleavages, or life chances. These methods have little difficulty in applying
the term ‘underclass’ to the very poor, irrespective of whether they are in the labour market and
enjoy a minimal set of consumption opportunities, social prestige, and life chances.
418
Contemporary social stratification and the development of the underclass
1 The radical right’s tradition of constitutional or cultural features

aided by mistaken social policy as explaining the emergence of the
underclass
Perhaps most vocal of the contributions to the underclass debate is the set of
conservative, or radical right, anti-welfare writings which have been loosely based
upon the culture of poverty tradition and a recently renewed interest in
constitutional factors. In the US this revitalises discussions held in the 1960s on
race, the causes and implications of urban poverty that resulted from the
Moynihan report (which had found black families trapped in a ‘tangle of
pathology’), and on Oscar Lewis’s writings on the culture of poverty. The
rediscovery of urban poverty and inner city decline by radical right philosophy in
the late 1970s and 1980s was, however, rooted in both a social and political
context (Charles Atherton, 1989). It provided (i) a critique of the cost that middle
class taxpayers were bearing in financing social welfare measures; (ii) a claim that
welfare states are both ineffectual and counterproductive and, (iii) as Charles
Murray (1984) argued in Losing Ground, a radical abolitionist stance in which the
entire federal welfare system, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC),
Medicaid, Food Stamps, and unemployment insurance should be abolished
because it is counter-productive and inimical to the social good. Welfare
undermines the sources of social solidarity. Berger and Neuhaus (1977) argued
that the provision of welfare is deemed to destroy ‘mediating structures’ or ‘those
institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large
institutions of public life’. Government had marginalised religion, taken
traditional responsibilities from neighbourhoods, the family no longer had control
over the education of their children, and voluntary social service had been
destroyed by professional bureaucracy. Public policy should change to defend,
rather than undercut such structures (1977:2-6) In the US, Murray has been the
most prominent and clear cut writer from the right on the underclass, consistently
arguing that it is the task of small-scale voluntary associations to build
communities, and that ‘much of what central government must do first of all is to
leave people alone’ (1988:297).
Radical right advocates argue that the relatively high tax rates of advanced
welfare states also reduce profit margins and thus impede entrepreneurial incentives
to invest and produce. Eventually, the demand of welfare recipients for more benefits
outstrips the capacity of a market economy to provide these benefits without losing
its competitive edge. As a Times reporter claimed:
‘At its present levels, the welfare apparatus has simply become too expensive for
most governments, and their taxpayers. Across Europe, social security systems are
grappling with fiscal crisis, in part because ponderous, costly bureaucracies have
mushroomed to administer a vast array of programs that sometimes neglect the
essential to serve up what is merely desirable. Bloated beyond its architects’ intent,
welfarism is threatening bankruptcy in some countries.’ (Painton and Malkin,
1981:32)
419
In Losing Ground, Murray (1984) identified the underclass by a type of behaviour

among sections of the poor; specifically welfare dependency and petty crime. This
behaviour was not some perverse irrationality, but a rational reaction to the changed
environment provided in advanced welfare states; individuals simply reacted to
the unintended incentives provided by the social policy of welfare to those remaining
poor. As Murray put it:
‘A government’s social policy helps set the rules of the game, the stakes, the risks, the
pay offs, the trade offs, and the strategies for making a living, raising a family, having
fun, defining what ‘winning’ and ‘success’ mean.... The most compelling
explanation for the marked shift in the fortunes of the poor is that they continued to
respond, as they always had, to the world as they found it, but that we – meaning the
not-poor and un-disadvantaged – had changed the rules of their world... The first
effect of the new rules was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short
term in ways which were destructive in the long term. Their second effect was to
mask these long term losses to subsidise irretrievable mistakes.’ (1984:9)
Although some commentators claim it is relatively easy to demonstrate that writings
of the right on the underclass neglect the long and contested history of this concept
(Macnicol, 1987). Murray’s work deliberately harps back in its analysis to the
grand tradition of interested observers who reject the specific language of social
theory in order to convey the human reality of social processes. Murray locates
himself within the images and warnings which Alexis de Tocqueville had given in
his Memoir on Pauperism written in 1835 after a visit to England (Drescher, 1968).
De Tocqueville had described England as the ‘eden of modern civilisation’ finding
a multitude of sights to make ‘the tourists heart leap’. Paradoxically he argued that
‘one-sixth of the inhabitants of this flourishing Kingdom live at the expense of
public charity’. Furthermore, while England displayed a greater concern for the
problem of poverty than any other country in Europe, the relative wealth of England
actually caused a perception of poverty where the poor were actually relatively
well-off.
Moreover, whilst it was a ‘moving and elevating sight to observe England
continually examining itself, probing its wounds, and undertaking to cure them’,
its effort to use the surplus of its wealthy to relieve the misery of the poor was
doomed to create unfortunate effects. By ignoring a basic fact of human nature –
that man had a ‘natural passion for idleness’ – guaranteeing the population a means
of subsistence as a legal right relieved the poor of the obligation to work.
Furthermore, the fact of receiving poor relief via a public institution, and as a
result of legal categorisation, had the effect of publicly acknowledging the individual
recipient’s inferiority. This right, as opposed to private charity, publicised and
legalised the inferiority of whole groups. It amounted to institutional degradation.
By comparison individual charity was both more efficient and more humane: ‘it
devotes itself to the greatest miseries, it seeks out misfortune without publicity and
it silently and spontaneously repairs the damage’. Public measures were only
suitable for certain categories, such as the relief of infants and the aged, the sick
420
and the insane, or as a spontaneous, temporary measure in times of disaster. Granting

a legal right, however was a recipe for future doom.
In carrying on this tradition, much of the appeal of the radical right’s analysis is
the fact that their writing deliberately engages and draws upon ‘common sense’
perceptions of the current state of society; as his critics point out Murray’s definition
of underclass seems to be based upon ‘innuendos, assertions and anecdotes.’
(Walker, 1990)
But these small-scale human narratives demonstrate to Murray that underclass
refers, not to a degree, but rather a type of poverty which ‘normal’ citizens can
understand and react to.
‘I grew up knowing what the underclass was; we just didn’t call it that in those days.
In the small Iowa town where I lived, I was taught by my middle class parents that
there were two kinds of poor people. One class of poor people was never even called
“poor”. I came to understand that they simply lived on low incomes, as my own
parents had done when they were young. There was another set of poor people, just
a handful of them. These poor people didn’t just lack money. They were defined by
their behaviour. Their homes were littered and unkept. The men in the family were
unable to hold a job for more than a few weeks at a time. Drunkenness was
common. The children grew up ill-schooled and ill-behaved and contributed a
disproportionate share of the local juvenile delinquents. British observers of the 19th
century knew these people. To Henry Mayhew... they were the “dishonest poor”.’
(1990:1)
Here again, we are consciously returned to notions of the ‘undeserving poor’ of
Victorian writers, which is an image which finds easy support in letters and
journalistic accounts in the popular press (Murray’s article first appeared in the
Sunday Times magazine 26 November 1989, and the Sunday Times has
subsequently run special features on the underclass. See the coverage of the Los
Angeles Riots, May, 1992; and ‘Wedded to Welfare’ 11 July 1993, as well as
articles contributed by Murray on his return to Britain in May 1994).
In his first analysis of the UK, Murray (1990) claimed a small, but growing,
underclass by quoting rates of illegitimacy, violent crime and the drop-out rate
from the labour force. Such analysis can in part be dismissed as a product of the
ecological fallacy whereby the attributes of a shared space are believed to imply
shared attributes among individuals occupying that space. Moreover, Murray’s
methodology is scientifically suspect. His use of illegitimacy, for example, as a
criterion for measuring the underclass has come under considerable criticism.
Illegitimacy is defined as a child being without two parents and legally without a
father from birth and is more concentrated amongst the lower social classes than
the rest of society. For Murray a jointly registered birth signals a stable relationship.
The decline of joint registration is concentrated in the lower social classes and
points to a growing number of children being raised in one parent families;
predominantly without a father present. This Murray claims is a predictive factor
of future crime. Even if economic circumstances are similar, Murray argues, the
children of single mothers do much worse than those of two parent families and
421
will develop a reliance upon welfare. Others are not so convinced. In responding
to his article, Joan Brown criticised Murray’s use of misleading statistics. She
states that single mothers tend to spend shorter periods on benefit than divorced or
widowed mothers and often marry and introduce a new father into households
quicker than other groups, thus escaping welfare. Habitual criminals are, in Murray’s
terms, classic members of the underclass. They are invariably young because: ‘As
males get older, they tend to become more civilised.’ This is a key empirical fact
which other writers of the right in American criminology (specifically, Gottfredson
and Hirschi, 1990) also rely upon. Murray states that while the number of young
male teenagers has decreased in the 1980s, violent crime has increased – the
implication is clear, violence is principally concentrated in a subsection of youth
and adults, a section which escapes the civilising tendencies of proper socialisation
and which is increasing and actually being encouraged by misguided welfare
provisions.
While aware of increasing unemployment Murray argues that Britain’s
unemployment figures include an unknown but probably considerable number of
people who manage to qualify for benefit, even if, in reality, very few job
opportunities would tempt them back to work. To his critics the social pathologies
of the members of Murray’s underclass are based upon pure speculation or personal
prejudices: while he claims he does not wish to attribute blame the implications of
his work appear to be that the underclass are to blame for their responses to welfare
and the rest of society need no longer feel any responsibility towards the poor
(Walker, 1990).
Whilst Murray is keen to find common ground in any opponent who will use
the notion of underclass, he disputes writers, such as Frank Fields, claims that
inequality has increased during the last decade under the free market economics of
Thatcher and Reagan. He claims that the relevant policies have changed very little
under Thatcher declaring ‘let us think instead in more common-sense terms’. For
Murray the root cause of the underclass is that social policy has altered how young
people make sense of the world. For example, the social stigma and severe economic
hardships which single parent mothers faced before the 1960s have, according to
Murray, been swept away. Young women want to have babies (partly to enjoy the
unquestioned love of another) and the benefit system allows them to do so without
dire consequences. Moreover, solo parents are now in a better position to find
housing since they will move onto the priority list for Local Authority
accommodation. It must, however, surely be accepted that for a single mother on
benefit, economic hardship is not a thing of the past, and there still remains for
many a social stigma attached to illegitimacy.
Murray goes on to postulate that crime has become safer through (i) low clear-
up rates, (ii) the decreasing likelihood, even if caught, of being convicted, (iii) less
severe penalties coupled with a reluctance by courts to impose prison sentences.
The implications for criminology are clear: ‘Swiftness, certainty, consistency and
comparative severity of penalties’ are needed.
422
For Murray all these social problems interconnect with one another. In order to
tackle the issue of the rise in violent crime, other social issues need to be
addressed. Murray suggests a radical decentralisation and localisation of social
control operations. He argues for the need for self-government by local
communities with control over criminal justice, education, housing and benefit
systems. They should be free to create their own values and those who do not hold
to these localised community values should be allowed to move out of that
particular area. In our discussion of the city, however, while we have recognised
the need for localisation we have stressed that so much of the reality of the city is
determined by outside economic factors. Locality has also been shown in the past
to be harsh and unjust: punishing and excluding those judged deviant. Murray’s
solution may well replace the tyranny of the welfare state by a far fiercer tyranny
of various unfettered corporate or neighbourhood welfare states.
To those who claim radical left intellectual status, such as Bagguley and Mann,
‘the underclass is the ideology of the upper class’ (1991:125). For these writers,
the concept of the underclass is part of a fundamentally ideological socio-political
conception of contemporary social processes, and a vital rhetorical device for an
attack upon welfare. The readings of the radical right distort the complexity of
contemporary social structure in the name of popular individualism.
The three ideologies of (a) economic individualism, (b) cultural traditionalism,
and (c) authoritarian populism are at the centre of the radical right’s world view.
The central ingredients of the case against the welfare state are the issues of
responsibility, efficiency, freedom, and prosperity. The movement contends that
the welfare state is a governmental institution, managed by a liberal or socialist
elite, which has weakened traditional values of hard work, responsibility and
sobriety, created a large and inefficient bureaucratic state welfare apparatus,
intruded excessively into the private lives of citizens, diminished choice and
individual preferences, and harmed economic productivity and growth.
The radical right’s critique of the welfare state is decidedly populist and sectarian.
Government welfare programmes are blamed for a breakdown in mutual obligations
between and within groups, a lack of attention to efficiencies in the way programmes
are operated and benefits awarded, the induced dependency of beneficiaries on
programmes, and the growth of the welfare industry and its special interest groups,
particularly professional associations. Radical right thinkers believe that the welfare
state erodes individual responsibility and initiative. Rather than alleviate destitution,
welfare state programmes induce dependency and the proliferation of a culture of
poverty. By fostering ‘dependence’ on welfare, beneficiaries of the social services
need not work hard, save, or act in a responsible manner. The radical right sees the
underclass in terms of crime and ungovernability, of promiscuous self-indulgence,
of a culture in which rational self-control is lacking, and explains its arrival as a
consequence of the unconditional social programmes offered by the welfare state
which do not obligate beneficiaries to behave conventionally in order to receive
benefits. To the right, the underclass is the ironical result of the projects of modernity
423
designed to attain social solidarity in modern western industrial states (Murray,

1984, 1989, 1994).
This attack is also linked to wider assaults on the welfare state seen as
economically detrimental to a market economy since it uses up taxes, monies needed
by the private sector for capitalisation. At the same time as the right talk of the
underclass development, supply-side economic discourse justifies for the well off,
middle and employed working class, substantial reductions in their direct payment
tax obligations (although indirect taxation may well increase squeezing the less
well off the hardest) which cuts the amount of transfer payments members of the
‘underclass’ are entitled to.
Radical right advocates argue that the present level of tax transfer payments
reduce profit margins and entrepreneurial incentives. Welfare demands become
self-perpetuating destroying the possibility of a competitive edge to welfare
states. The operation of a welfare state, moreover, demands an increasing
intrusion of the state into private life, and becomes, in effect a harbinger of
totalitarianism: paternalistic and anti-libertarian. This argument maintains that
any state which has the power to shift resources from one group to another
exercises a form of economic tyranny. Instead of the social-democratic-liberal
approach which emphasises the rights of the poor, the radical right focuses on the
rights of those coerced into subsidising the poor. The welfare state has,
furthermore, in their view, lost sight of basic social values (for America – see
Gilder, 1981). According to these critics, the welfare state has failed to reinforce
the work ethic; the goal of self-sufficiency, self-support, and self-initiative; the
importance of intact families (Mead, 1985); the fiscal responsibility of parent to
child; and the notion of reciprocity – the belief that recipients have a social
obligation to perform in return for receiving assistance. The new right’s solution,
therefore, is to replace dysfunctional (liberal) values with functional
(conservative) values: delayed gratification, work and saving; commitment to
family and to the next generation; education and training; self-improvement and
self-control; and the rejection of crime, drugs, and casual sex (Institute for
Cultural Conservatism, 1987:83).
The radical right believes that the family is the basis of correct socialisation and
the focus of welfare functions. These functions can only be preserved if the family
is defended and strengthened as the basic institution in Western society. In the US
the Institute for Cultural Conservatism (1987) laid out a programme for defending
family life. Firstly, the traditional nuclear family must be restored and one parent,
the mother, should remain in the home permanently to raise children. Secondly,
the incidence of divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, and pre-marital sex
must be reduced; these as part of a crisis in moral standards are identified as a
major cause of social decline in the western industrial nations. Thirdly, it is necessary
to reinstate certain values on which stable families depend, including responsibilities
to and for offspring, disapproval of extra-marital sex, and reverence for life, both
before and after birth. The legal system can play an important role by defending
424
the legal control of parents and in presuming the reasonableness of parental action.
Legislative, administrative and judicial actions which work to undermine the
traditional family, must be avoided, and economic conditions developed to enable
stable nuclear families to be self-sufficient. In short the government should not be
indifferent to the form of family existence, but rather actively support and recreate
the traditional form of the immediate, nuclear family. If a particular nuclear family
is unable to be self-sufficient, members of the extended family, friends and
neighbours should be the preferred sources of assistance. Often such support is
‘informal’, a classic example being the American custom of community barn raising.
The supposed advantage of such activities is that they reinforce existing social ties
and make assistance a highly personal affair. Whereas, however, to the needy,
immediately known to neighbours, support is prudently offered, to the non-
conformist or one who is foreign, the stranger, there is little rationale for providing
aid.
The radical right’s image of the future of civil society
Murray (1994) later argued a radical split was developing in Britain between ‘new
Victorians’:
• educated and working in professional occupations;
• incomes above the level at which considerations of tax or benefit changes
determine whether they have children;
• less mesmerised by careers than in the past; more concerned about children
and community;
• free sexual expression less of a priority;
• revived interest in religion and spiritual matters;
• renewed concern for concepts such as fidelity, courage, loyalty, self-restraint
and moderation;
• less inclined to divorce. The new Victorians were opposed by a ‘new rabble’:
• low-skilled working class, poorly educated;
• single-parent families are the norm;
• largely dependent on welfare and the black economy;
• high levels of criminality, child neglect and abuse, and drug use;
• impervious to social welfare policies designed to change their behaviour;
• will not enter legitimate labour force when times are good, and will recruit
more working class people when times are bad;
• children attend school irregularly and pose discipline problems;
• large and lucrative market for violent and pornographic films, television and
music.
For Murray, given current welfare conditions: ‘In the low skilled, working class,
marriage makes no sense’. However, widespread illegitimacy is bad for children
425
and catastrophic for social organisation. Its increase ensures a deterioration of

lower-class culture because the next generation will know no other way to live.
Young males are:
‘ “essentially barbarians” who are civilised by marriage. That image has become all
too literal in the american inner city, where male teenage behaviour is often a caricature
of the barbarian male: retaliate against anyone who shows you the slightest disrespect
(“disses” you). Sleep with and impregnate as many girls as possible. Regard violence
as a sign of strength. To worry about tomorrow is weakness. To die young is glorious.
What makes these attitudes so disturbing is not that they describe behaviour, but that
inner-city boys articulate them as principles. They are explicitly the code they live
by.’ (1994:12)
Murray is clear: ‘under the scenario I have painted, British Civility is doomed.’
Better employment prospects will not stem the changes, the only solution is to
phase out benefits for unmarried women altogether:
‘The welfare of society requires that women actively avoid getting pregnant if they
have no husband, and that women once again demand marriage from a man who
would have them bear a child. The only way the active avoidance and the demands are
going to occur is if the childbearing entails economic penalties for a single women...
Babies need fathers. Society needs fathers... The stake is the survival of free institutions
and a civil society.’ (Ibid: 13)
It is only through marriage that members of the underclass could learn the
responsibilities which fully socialise them into the civilised state. Without
responsible fathers as role models, personal responsibility cannot be properly learnt.
2 The social democratic thesis of the underclass as a

consequence of post-industrialisation
This position concerns the role of structural changes, in particular economic changes
with regard to lowering employment opportunities, and the lack of interventionist
government policy to cope with this. From this perspective, the underclass is a
recent phenomenon which is caused by transformation into a post-industrial society,
and made worse by a lack of both understanding and coherent government policies
to deal with these transformations.
In the US it is associated with the work of William Wilson, predominately in his
The Truly Disadvantaged (1987). To Wilson the main cause for the formation of
the underclass was fundamental changes in the economy, which resulted in
prolonged joblessness in certain segments of the lower class, particularly the black
population. These economic changes had a spatial structuring effect on the city
resultant from a diminishing of the traditional manufacturing sector, the
development of higher skilled employment opportunities, and the shift of
employment from the inner cities to the suburbs. Blacks living in the inner city
were disproportionately affected by the contraction of unskilled, blue-collar work,
426
and lived too far from the suburbs to compete for the jobs being created there. The
middle class, black residents who could compete for the new jobs left the inner
city neighbourhoods, thus removing an important social buffer which in the past
had prevented black unemployment from leading to an underclass. With the removal
of the black, middle class, social institutions such as the church, schools, stores
and recreational facilities found it difficult to survive, and with the disappearance
of basic role models went the idea ‘that education is meaningful, that steady
employment is a viable alternative to welfare, and that family stability is the norm,
not the exception’ (1987:56). With the movement out of the inner city of the black,
middle classes, the social milieu became progressively more demoralising, with
chronic joblessness, welfare dependency, female-headed families, crime and drugs
becoming accepted as ‘a way of life’; as this way of life becomes established an
underclass is created (Ibid: 57).
Wilson’s account is distinguished from the culture of poverty accounts, in that,
while he does not deny the real effects of a set of cultural attitudes he,
nevertheless, does not claim individuals come to constitute an underclass because
of their prior possession of dysfunctional values, such as laziness or an inability to
delay gratification. These traits are, rather, the result of the personal effects of
economic dislocation and social isolation. Social isolation is structurally
determined; it does, however, create localised perceptions and beliefs, local
narratives which are criminogenic. But Wilson denies that these attitudes lead the
underclass to be self-perpetuating as conservative theorists appear to claim. If
proper policies and real opportunities are created these attitudes can be turned
around:
‘... unlike the concept of the culture of poverty, social isolation does not postulate that
ghetto-specific practices become internalised, take on a life of their own, and therefore
continue to influence behaviour even if opportunities for mobility improve. Rather, it
suggests that reducing structural inequality would not only decrease the frequency of
these practices; it would also make their transmission by precept less efficient.’ (Wilson,
1990:186)
While both Wilson (1987, 1990, 1991) and Kasarda (1990) argue a new
‘disorganised’ ghetto of an underclass has superceded the relatively organised
poor areas, in his 1991 Presidential Address to the American Sociological
Association, Wilson argued that the term underclass was so overladen with moral
overtones that the phrase ‘ghetto poor’ should be preferred. This group is largely
the result of a mismatch between the social location of labour and demand, and
effective social policies can have a huge impact. For Wilson, racially constructed
divisions or class are not so important in the contemporary labour market which is
skills driven; the social structure will take up candidates of any race if they possess
the skills. Racial and structural disadvantage, however, may be responsible for de-
skilling or hampering the attainment of skills which the labour market requires.
Radical policies of retraining and employment placement could begin the ascent
out of ghettoisation.
427
The task, however, is huge. Hacker (1987 following points drawn from
Feldman 1993:247-50) provided a dramatic summary of the scale of the social
changes and reality of social isolation and impacted deprivation. By the mid
1980s:
• More than 60% of black infants are born out of wedlock. Almost as many
black families are headed by women. A majority of black children live with
their mothers (in absent-father households). These figures are three to five
times those for white Americans and three times those for blacks of only one
generation earlier. In previous generations most black households had been
headed by two parents.
• There are huge black/white differences in youthful sexual activity, pregnancies
and births, even when education and income are controlled: 75% of black
females begin sexual activity before 18 as compared to 50% of whites. There
is also a difference in the use of contraception (significantly less among sexually
active black girls than their white counterparts). As a result 40% of black girls
have become pregnant by the age of 18, as against 20% of whites. This 2:1
disparity becomes 4:1 for births to unmarried girls aged 15-19. By 18, one in
every four unmarried black women is a mother, and this increases to 40% by
the early 20s. Almost all unmarried black (and white) mothers aged 15-19
keep and raise their babies. The reasons are diverse but religious prohibitions
may play a large part. If young, black, American women used abortion to a
similar extent to their Japanese or Russian counterparts, the teenage birth ratio
would be considerably lower. The outcome of all this is that over half of all
black women who have had families have never been married. The relative
proportion for white women is only one-seventh.
• The fastest growing group is the three-generation household (a mother, often
teenaged, with one or more children, sharing a small crowded apartment with
her own mother, a grandparent in her thirties). The extended family, which
provides a wider base of support, is less evident than in the past. Between 1970
and 1987 black, multi-generational households increased threefold. Most of
these young mothers dropped out of school to bear and care for their babies.
Fathers, often equally young, drop by from time to time.
• All of the above applies to over one half of young, black, women, half of
whom in turn had no wish for early and unmarried motherhood. The behaviour
of young, black men is a key factor. Only 39% of black men aged 25-34 are
married and live with their wives as compared with 62% of whites. (And at
least 20% of this age group is missed by census takers, implying a lack of
settled jobs, even settled addresses. Of those black men the census reaches,
less than half have full-time jobs.)
• In 1986, approximately the same number of white and black single mothers
were below the poverty line (about 1.3 million in each case). But blacks form
only 12% of the population. And there are differences between the two
428
impoverished groups: whereas of the white mothers, 46% had only one child,
71% of the blacks had two or more. And twice as many white as black mothers
received support payments (from fathers).
• Overall, white and black poverty groups seem two distinct populations. More
than two-thirds of families among the black poor are headed by women, as
against one third of whites. And lower-income whites are more likely than not
to be elderly couples and to live in non-metropolitan areas.
• In 1954, over 75% of black men had full-time jobs. By 1986, this was true of
only 40%. Many jobs formerly held by black men are now the province of
black women. More black women are employed than are black men, and more
finish school – they hold two-thirds of all the professional-level jobs occupied
by blacks (the comparable figure among whites is 48%). If black women can
avoid early motherhood, they are much more likely than black men to finish
high school with the literacy and good diction employers expect. For black
males raised in segregated neighbourhoods, as many are, prowess in the streets
counts for more than anything else, and there is a disdain for jobs that pay only
‘chump change’, They see themselves as native-born Americans: parking cars
and washing-up in restaurants are thought suitable for immigrant Hispanics
and Asians – not for blacks.
• The respective graphs for family income (in 1986) differ markedly: black
families form a pyramid with a majority receiving under $20,000; that for
whites is more like a Greek cross, with families on $35,000 outnumbering
those on less than $20,000. Although only 10% of white families had less than
$10,000 per year, this was true for 30% of blacks. Moreover, this poorest group
tended to consist of single mothers among blacks, but elderly couples among
whites.
• The majority of blacks still live in all black neighbourhoods as opposed to
integrated ones (over 90% in Chicago, 75% in New York). Even the newest
minority groups are less segregated. In one poll only 12% of blacks preferred
segregation, as against 86% whose preference was for a more equal mix. In
response to black entry into a formerly all white area, whites stay and new
ones even enter as long as the black population is below 8% of the total. But
when it reaches 20%, at least one-quarter of the whites leave and no new ones
enter. This phenomenon of white flight leaves the neighbourhood all black or
nearly so. Equally important is the departure of better-off blacks to new
locations. Those left behind lack role models of steady employment and family
stability.
The conservative reaction to these statistics is to blame the state for providing
policies which aid such a social transformation, instead we should return the task
of socialisation (and hence the fight against criminality) to stable families.
Gottfredson and Hirschi hinted that the high crime rate of the black, American
citizens could largely flow from faulty child rearing practices. Given that their
429
theory argues the origins of criminality of low self-control are found in the first six
or eight years of life, during which time the child remains under the control and
supervision of the family or a familial institution,they provide the central image of
‘responsible adults committed to the training and welfare of the child’ (1990:273).
In looking for an explanation the criminologist ‘should focus on differential child-
rearing practices and abandon the fruitless effort to ascribe such differences to
culture or strain’ (Ibid: 153). Thus we are led away from a truly general theory of
crime into a localisation of the self – the politics of individualism lead us away
from the need for the attempt to provide a social structural theory on underclass
development. We cannot doubt that the concentration of contemporary black child-
rearing (ie since the 1960s) in the underclass phenomenon implies a sharply reduced
capacity for effective child-training; our related factors do not relate to ethnicity as
such, but to their location in a social stratification with both relative and absolute
deprivation, as well as geographical segregation. Teenage parenthood is most
pronounced in segregated settings, in which schools, housing and acquaintances
are almost entirely within one’s own race. The American underclass is a separated
condition:
‘Being black and poor is a very different condition from being white and poor... white
youths across the country from inner Boston to rural Arkansas commit crimes, drop
out of school and become parents in their teens... in most cases, however, those who
do so are not typical of their areas or neighbourhoods, which tend to be solidly working-
class.. few white districts are predominantly poor in the way so many black sectors
are... It is social and cultural isolation – a climate whites never really know – which
more than any other single force encourages the early siring and bearing of children
without thought for the future.’ (Hacker, 1987:33)
While the conditions of such obvious social apartheid do not exist in Britain a
somewhat similar warning of dire future conditions, unless concerted social policy
is not effectual, is found in the works of Ralf Dahrendorf (1985, 1987) and Frank
Fields (1989).
For Dahrendorf, instead of the ‘immiseration’ of the working class and their
greater and greater exploitation which Marx predicted, divisive class conflict was
transformed into progressive activity via the ‘institutionalisation of the class
conflict’ which centred around the meaning of citizenship. The development of
19th and 20th century western societies witness a change in the political status of
individuals from subjects to citizens. Citizenship has come to mean the possession
of legal rights, choice, participation, a decent income and mobility (both
geographically and socially). In advancing industrial societies both the
opportunities and the social risks involved in mobility have expanded to an
unheard-of measure. The expansion of opportunities changes the picture of social
existence for much of the working class, and for many of them it leads to entry into
a newly enlarged middle class.
430
Via the process of the institutionalisation or democratisation of the class struggle,

social changes developed which gave rise to a new correlation of citizenship and
social class. The result is the emergence of a large category of democratic citizens,
who may describe themselves as middle class, and who benefit from the system.
Thus a category of two-thirds, possibly three-quarters, of all citizens of modern
free societies have a common interest in the maintenance of political institutions
which guarantee economic growth and social peace. Their divergent interests are
relatively minor and, when subjected to a class analysis, in large part the majority
is one class with all the internal distinctions and differences which have always
been characteristic of classes – it is the majority class.
Those who are left out are implicated in the crisis of the welfare state or, as
Dahrendorf calls it, ‘the social state’. Drawing on Frank Fields analysis of ‘groups
in poverty’, Dahrendorf sees these as the unemployed, the old, the low paid, single-
parent families, sick and disabled people, single women with aged dependents,
and poor people in institutions. They have little in common except that most are
dependent upon transfer payments. They are the most vulnerable to curbs in public
expenditure and public transportation, or to rises in value added taxes and the cost
of housing. They are those least able to defend themselves as the state reduces its
benefits.
Dahrendorf recognises a new boundary ‘between the majority class and those
who are being defined out of the edifice of citizenship’ (Ibid: 98).
Economically the situation is different from any previous class relationship in
that this new class is not in a relationship of exploitation with a superior class, it
does not constitute a reserve pool of labour. The Marxist class analysis proposed
classes which are locked into each other, and thus are needed for the long term
survival of each other. The concomitant result was, that when economic recovery
took place, it would without question bring large numbers of the unemployed back
into the labour force. Conversely:
‘... today, this is no longer the case. The majority class can live perfectly well,
including new cars every three or four years, holidays in Spain, annual real increases
in wages and salaries, and relaxed debates about where the cuts in social expenditure
should fall, without unemployment ever falling much below 10 per cent. There are
those who are in and those who are out, and those who are out are not needed.’ (Ibid:
102)
The tradition, which Dahrendorf writes owes much of its recent sociological
weight to the analysis of T H Marshall (1977) on citizenship and social class,
began in the 1950s. In effect Marshall claimed that the welfare state developed as
the solution of the tension between capitalism and democracy. Marshall
positioned the modernist development of post-war Britain in a narrative of class
and citizen rights developments. Whereas traditional and pre-industrial societies
sustained clearly differentiated structures, modern industrial societies required a
freer social structure to facilitate a free market. To maintain the allegiance of the
431
population equal and common legal rights had to be granted similar to those
contained in the American Bill of Rights. These freedoms from arbitrary state
power distinguished citizens from subjects. While early liberalism sustained a
universe of what philosophers call negative freedoms, in its 19th century form it
developed a normative theory of individual freedom which lead to actual social
practices. Positive freedoms, for example, the winning of adult suffrage, brought
another set of demands, namely that such suffrage has real effect and political
institutions function openly. Marshall interpreted the process of change embodied
in the legislation passed in Britain in the period 1944-1948, as creating a whole set
of social rights and obligations. These acts sought to give citizens the right to a
basic standard of education, health, food and shelter, adding positive freedoms to
the philosophical and political freedoms won earlier. The crucial consideration is
that these freedoms are interdependent. The capacity to benefit from the absence
of arbitrary state power depends upon citizens possessing reasonably good basic
living standards. These rights or entitlements, if and when they can be fulfilled,
however, carry obligations to participate in the democracy, to obey the law and to
contribute to the common purse. The arguments of the radical right in recent times
appear to play down the interdependence between the different aspects of
freedom. This has resulted in the 1980s in the attempt to downgrade or deny the
validity of social rights and positive freedoms, and insist instead that legal and
political rights are fundamental.
In Losing Out, Fields (1989) argues that four forces have brought about the
underclass in the UK: unemployment; the widening of class differences; the
exclusion of the poorest from rising living standards; and a change in public attitude
towards those who have not succeeded.
For, perhaps, 40 years following the Second World War, full employment
brought about a greater degree of equality in income distribution. Conditions
changed during recent years, so that while for those employed this state of affairs
has continued, those out of work have suffered downward mobility. As a
consequence increasing class divisions have broken up the sense of ‘common
citizenship, whereby each of us feels we belong to the same society’ (1989:3).
The poor have not gained from the rising standards of living of the rest of
society for benefit levels have merely been protected from rising prices. The
individualist ideology of the Thatcher years has resulted in a change in attitudes
towards those on the bottom rung of society. The solidarity of the working class
has, according to Fields, been replaced by a ‘drawbridge’ mentality whereby those
working class people who have benefited during the last decade do not wish others
to follow their success. Fields sees the difficulties of the Labour Party in finding a
‘coalition of voters with common interests’ as a reflection of this phenomenon
(Ibid: 4).
The long-term unemployed, single-parent families and elderly pensioners live
under a ‘subtle form of political, social and economic apartheid’ (Ibid: 4). Fields,
however, warns of oversimplification; not all of the members of these three groups
432
can be said to be members of an underclass. How these factors affect an individual

depends upon his psychological make-up and his surrounding environment. By
comparison, the American underclass situation is clearly linked to a form of social
apartheid. A CBS/New York Times poll taken at the time of the 1992 riots in Los
Angles found that less than half of the respondents reported having spent an evening
in the previous three to four months with a friend of another race. Neighbourhoods
are highly segregated by race and ethnic background, and although the highest
level of intergroup contact is in the workplace this rarely takes place on the basis
of equality (Barbanel, 1989).
3 The class thesis that the underclass is partly a creation of a

redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich in the 1980s
The more Marxist British analysis of Kirk Mann (1992) places the underclass in
terms of a specific position in the social division of welfare; a class conflict over
resources; the requirements for a reserve army of labour; and spatial processes of
marginalisation which has seen a transference of wealth from the less well off to
the richer sections. The images of the undeserving, wasters and loafers, are
ideologically effective in creating a distance between sections of the working class
and thus preventing comprehensive programmes for social change (Bagguley and
Mann, 1992).
In the US, Mike Davis writes of the 1980s as characterised by a process of
‘overconsumption’ located within ‘an increasing political subsidisation of a sub-
bourgeois, mass layer of managers, professionals, new entrepreneurs and retainers’.
In the tax and welfare cuts of the first Reagan administration, low-income families
lost around $23 billion in income and federal benefits, while high income families
gained more than $35 billion. A split-level economy has developed obvious to
even magazines such as The Economist and Business Week: ‘with the masses of
the working poor huddled around their K-Marts and Taiwanese imports at one
end, while at the other there is a (relatively) ‘vast market for luxury products and
services, from travel and designer clothes, to posh restaurants, home computers
and fancy sports cars’ (Davis: Prisoners of the American Dream, 1986: quoted in
Callinicos, 1989:162).
While it is tempting to adopt a theory of pluralism as characterising contemporary
social relations, the class specific nature of economic policies adopted throughout
the 1980s should not be avoided. The language of disinflation, increasing
productivity and rationalisation should not blind analysis to the real effects resulting
from increasing unemployment, the reduction in the security of employment, the
reduction of employment benefits and working conditions.
Undoubtedly, welfare provision has decreased dramatically in the US. In New
York City, for example, the actual value of welfare payments declined by about
one-third between 1978 and 1988; as the rules changed the number of recipients
433
declined by about 6% between 1970 and 1982, and by about 10% from 1983 to
1988. (Fainstein, et al 1992:140) During the same period assistance for larger
households declined substantially.
Avoiding responsibility by reference to global recession

In Britain the underclass concept arrived later; it was fashionable for a time to
talk of the working class as becoming middle-class (the embourgeoisement of
the working class) and the victory of the Conservative Party in 1979 as evidence
of the absolute and relative decline of the working class (Offe, 1985). This belief
lay behind a new political party of the middle ground forming in the early 1980s.
The Social Democratic Party was founded to cater for a new middle class,
which it seemed, was to occupy a vast middle ground stratified only by skills
and the ability to be flexible. As Raphael Samuel described it, this salaried
middle class:
‘... distinguishes itself more by its spending than its saving. The Sunday colour
supplements give it both a fantasy life and a set of cultural cues. Much of its claim to
culture rests on the conspicuous display of good tastes, whether in the form of
kitchenware, “continental” food, or weekend sailing and cottages. New forms of
sociability, like parties and “affairs” have broken down the sexual apartheid which
kept women and men in rigidly separate spheres.
Class hardly enters into the new middle class conception of themselves. Many of
them work in an institutional world of fine gradations but no clear lines of antagonism.
The new middle class have a different emotional economy than that of their pre-
war predecessors. They go in for instant rather than delayed gratification, making a
positive virtue of their expenditure, and treating the self-indulgent as an ostentatious
display of good taste. Sensual pleasures, so far from being outlawed, are the very
field on which social claims are established and sexual identities are confirmed. Food,
in particular, a postwar bourgeois passion... has emerged as a crucial marker of class.’
(1982, quoted in Callinicos, 1989:162-3)
Membership of this class was seen to have its own ideology: your worth no longer
depended on birth or accumulated capital but on education, social skills and
adaptability: high learning curves were the new requirement. The key example
was the ability to handle the computer, to learn skills for software and hardware
which would become obsolete before you had actually fully managed them. A
new form of social solidarity was expected to come into play.
But the SDP’s appeal was obscure; embourgeoisement did not result in an
expansion of reasonability and tolerance but rather a splitting apart – fear of the
new rabble and a ‘go for it’ mentality – in a desocialisation of the social which was
epitomised in the rhetoric of privatisation which went beyond mere economic
configurations into the perception of sociality itself. The failure of the appeal of
the SDP illustrated that the new middle class was by no means a coherent body but
was identified as a class only through a strained idea of position within the means
of production. Fortunes varied: managerial employment in the private spheres, in
the Service Businesses of Banking and Insurance, denoted large bonuses and quick
434
money, while employment in the Public Services of Health and Education saw
retrenchment. By the mid-1990s fortunes had been made and lost, while the Public
services continued to decline.
Throughout the western world during the late 1970s and 1980s the myth of
recession loomed large. In Britain disastrous economic decisions by the
Conservative government in the budgets of 1981 and 1982 greatly reduced demand
and radically cut government spending at a time when Keynesian economics
required a logic of increased spending – the Neo-Chicagoan economic ‘experiment’
(the neo-classical approach) destroyed nearly 20% of Britain’s manufacturing base
in a few years – the subsequent reinflation of the late 1980s which resulted in a
false boom could only suck in imports and perpetuate a boom and bust cycle.
Unemployment soared, although it appeared to be kept in check by altered methods
of calculating the figures and North Sea Oil revenues financed a growing Social
Security budget rather than investment.
But there was no world recession. Economies boomed in the Far East and
China, Brazil and latterly in India. As Paul Kellogg (1987) points out, at the same
time as the politicians of the West cried out the need to wage war on welfare, and
lower the regulatory protections on working conditions, economies in the
developing world were expanding their industrial and manufacturing bases
sometimes by multiples; employment in manufacturing in South Korea, for
example, showed a growth of 2,500% between 1956 and 1982, in Brazil
between 1970 and 1982 by 212%. Between 1977 and 1982 the industrial
working class in the 36 leading industrial countries increased in numbers from
173 to 183 million, including the year 1982 which was widely regarded as the
worst recession in the post-Second World War period seeing millions of
redundancies in the west.
If the reality of world ‘recession’ is largely the consequences of shifting growth
patterns (this would be even more obvious if Purchasing Power Parity provided
the method for calculating GDP rather than the present methodology where all
internal GDP figures are translated into the equivalent in American dollars;
presently building a four bedroom house in New Delhi counts less than a studio
flat in central London) the growth of the fabled service industries was also largely
mythical. The growth in part time employment took large numbers off the
unemployed lists, but offered low wages and minimal or no protection. Part-time
labour intensified the stratification of labour by class, gender and race.2
As welfare cuts took hold women with children were occupying a range of
part-time employment. The gains of the well publicised, professional woman usually
required at least one home help working for minimum wages, often drawn from
the ethnic minorities.
The underclass concept denotes the reality of a new social dialectics:
2 A standing joke of the 1980s went as follows: ‘Q: What do you say to a black man who has got a
job in Regan’s America?... A: I’ll have a big Mac and medium fries.’
435
overconsumption versus deprivation; freedom and existential angst for the super-
class versus ghettoisation for the emerging underclass. The growth of Yuppie culture
verses the inevitable resentment of the have-nots who saw their position being
worsened at the same time as they were made the object of scorn – singled out as
the cause (due to ‘their reluctance to work’, and, ‘demands for a high minimum
wage’) for economic decline.
The underclass and criminology
While we must be aware of the rhetorical weight of the term ‘underclass’, we can
agree with other overviews of the debate (for example, Jencks and Peterson, 1991)
that point to a set of processes through which a substantial category of persons
exist, and are being recreated, that are well outside the mainstream in terms of
their participation in everyday work and responsibilities. Exhibiting high rates of
deprivation, involvement in crime and drug abuse, this social phenomenon provides
fertile ground for many of the traditional themes of criminological theory to analyse,
for example, family socialisation, neighbourhood development, peer group
involvement, cultural imagery and success measures. While this is the traditional
grist for criminological concerns there is a more abstract range of concerns which
can be discerned by placing the underclass concept in the context of post-
modernism.
The underclass and post-modernism
Much of the underclass debate has focused upon the political implications of the
various writings and the empirical adequacy of the concept. The debate as to
empirical adequacy is inconclusive, indeed it is almost impossible to satisfy. In
large part this is because of the openness or unboundedness of the concept of the
underclass. As Hughes (1989) points out in American studies which argue for a
more complex situation than the paradigm of moral individualism, the empirical
data employed has failed to withstand ‘culture-of-poverty’ interpretations while
the level of generalisation involved has equally failed to recognise the spatial
reality of ‘the isolated deprivation of the “impacted ghetto” ’. To conduct a
properly scientific study, Hughes argues, economic geography needs to
reconstitute the phenomena in terms specific to its tools and terrain. But the very
unboundedness, or sloppiness, of the underclass concept may indicate that what is
actually at stake with its acceptance is a more non-scientific or metaphysical
phenomena. In short, rather than a creature of empirical social science, the
underclass concept may only make sense when viewed as part of an intellectual
struggle defining the true nature of modern humanity. Three themes predominate:
(i) the underclass as an entity of narratives on social progress; (ii) the underclass
436
and the metaphysics of contingency; (iii) the underclass and the dialectics of
social participation and control.
Narratives of modernity and social progress

The enlightenment made it possible to conceive of society as an artifact which
could be transformed and developed by human endeavour. Thus, until recently,
both liberal and conservative accounts could explain the development of social
welfare as a humanitarian and progressive creation of modern, advanced, societies.
According to these narratives, even the current American system of welfare (and
certain other related ideologies) can be traced back to Elizabethan Poor Law
(Friedman, 1968). The right builds its understanding of the underclass on a reading
of the ‘growth of welfare’ narrative. It accepts the liberal, whig, narrative of the
creation of modern welfare as providing progress out of the poor laws but with a
difference.
Historically, images of the poor have been divided into the ‘worthy’ or
‘deserving’ (for instance, orphans, or the handicapped without family) and the
‘unworthy’ or ‘undeserving’. Around the beginning of the 19th century a new
doctrine emerged that related poor relief to the threat of over-population; Thomas
Malthus attacked the English Poor Law, and was, for a time, successful in having
it revoked. He proceeded from the position that people were ‘inert, sluggish, and
averse from labour unless compelled by necessity’, and noted that the then extant
Poor Law provided for family allowances based on the number of children. In the
Malthusian view, this practically encouraged the poor to be prolific. In addition,
the scientific ‘laws’ of classical economics emerged, uniformly pointing to the
negative consequences of ‘encouraging sloth’ by aiding the poor.
All of this came to a head in Britain in 1834; the Poor Law was amended to
become the New Poor Law, which established the workhouse as the principal means
of assisting the poor. The workhouse was deliberately designed to be as unpleasant
as possible, so as to remove any possibility that people would be encouraged by
charity to abandon their work. Those on public assistance were stigmatised severely
by, as a contemporary put it:
‘... imprisoning (them) in workhouses, compelling them to wear special garb, separating
them from their families, cutting them off from communication with the poor outside,
and, when they died, permitting their bodies to be disposed of for dissection.’ (Quoted,
Hirschman, 1989)
What the whig accounts lay stress upon is not the issue of absolute poverty, but
rather the development of a sensitivity towards poverty when social wealth was
flourishing. This issue ‘poverty amid plenty’ received publicity with Robert Hunter’s
book Poverty in 1904 (Coll, 1969). But conservative voices, such as that of the
sociologist William Graham Sumner, were already issuing warnings in terms similar
to those of the right in the 1980s:
‘The humanitarians, philanthropists, and reformers... in their eagerness to recommend
the less fortunate classes to pity and consideration forget all about the rights of other
437
classes... When I have read certain of these discussions I have thought that it must be
quite disreputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite unjust to
go one’s way and earn one’s own living, and that the only admirable person was the
good-for-nothing. The man who by his own effort raises himself above poverty appears,
in these discussions, to be of no account. The man who has done nothing to raise
himself above poverty finds that the social doctors flock about him, bringing the
capital which they have collected from other classes.’ (What Social Classes Owe to
each Other, 1900; Quoted in Messner, 1966)
In the whig accounts the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s stimulated
dramatic action by federal governments in the US and Canada which laid the
foundation for the modern welfare state which was further improved as societies
grow in economic and social strength. However, in the late 1970s and throughout
the 1980s the liberal narrative of welfare growth, while accepted as the historical
picture was subjected to withering attack by the new right as counter-productive.
It hardly needs saying that the whig account of humanitarian progress has been
undercut from the left as well. Piven and Cloward (1971) have pointed out the
cyclical nature of poor relief in modern societies. They advance considerable
evidence for the thesis that only when times are economically harsh – and large
numbers of vocal, articulate persons are unemployed – does relief even begin to
approach adequacy. In prosperous times, conditions of welfare are tightened and
provisions are made even less generous.
Much of the critical perspective of the centre and left against the right’s use of
the underclass notion, although correctly claiming that the underclass is a concept
which only makes sense when it is viewed as coming out of a narrative tradition,
misses the point. The point is not that the controversy which the term arouses
lessens our ability to do methodologically correct social science; nor is it that the
underclass notion is so loaded that anyone who uses it soon slides into a culture-
of-poverty framework – these are important issues – but writers who try to take
these seriously and evade the term neglect the very moral power which the
underclass notion brings. To Wilson (1991) the moral issue is how to avoid falling
into a ‘blame the victim’ position, while continuing to stress the explanatory and
empirical issues involved in the combination of marginality in the labour market
and the fact that their economic position is uniquely reinforced by their social
milieu. A different form of moral issue is at stake when we see the underclass as a
post-modern phenomenon; as a consequence of the failure of modernity to deliver
the implicitly (and often explicitly) promised just society.
The underclass, the end of modernity and the existential metaphysics of

contingency
What makes the underclass phenomenon different from the desperate status of the
poor in the 18th and 19th centuries? Or even the poor of the inner cities in the
earlier parts of this century? Some differences are clearly observable:
‘Although the black ghetto neighbourhoods of the mid-twentieth century were typically
very poor, they did not have the high rates of joblessness, welfare dependency, teenage
438
pregnancies, out of wedlock births, female-headed households, drug abuse, and violent
crime which now characterise so many black ghettos today.’ (Boxill, 1991:579)
Other differences are harder empirically to discern. However, the existential position
of everyday life in the 1990s, with mass communication, club and street fashion,
the pleasure drive, and the cultural measures to be authentic and modern, cannot
be ignored in analysis. Moreover, when the Economist placed a photograph of two
African-American children on its cover under the caption ‘America’s Wasted
Blacks’, its message was simple:
‘The slums in America’s great cities are shameful. They are a damning indictment of
the richest country in the world... The nation now has a quarter of a century’s worth of
anti-poverty experiments to draw upon... Poverty persists despite these efforts.’
(Economist, 5 April 1991).
The point is that it very much matters that the underclass arrived after the modern
war on poverty. The mood of much of the writings is post-modernist, in the sense
that there is pessimism as to the project of modernity. In particular, there is a
refusal by the right to accept that any public programmes can work any longer.
Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for the New York Times, sees this reflected
in the social geography of life in New York city:
‘Human anguish is surely more visible on the streets of New York than ever before.
But the illness that affects the cityscape is not only a matter of human suffering. In a
broader sense, the city is only rarely these days a place of hope or promise or glory. It
is not merely that it is harsh and dirty, for New York has always been harsh and dirty.
It is that it has become so indifferent to the very idea of the public realm, to the notion
that the city is a collective, a shared place, a place that is in the most literal sense
common.’ (Goldber, 1989: quoted in Fainstein, et al 1992:138-9)
Moreover, common to many accounts of the underclass (Field, Mann, Murray,
Dahrendorf) is the implicit acceptance that the underclass is a direct result of
previous government policy; whether due to the creation of the welfare state, the
failure to develop post-industrial strategies, or rejecting social justice in favour of
free-market, supply side economic theories. The implicit message given to the
members of the underclass is that there is nothing natural in their position, it is
rather a creation of society; their life and their suffering is a contingency. The
message at the same time as they are made the scapegoat for economic decline is:
‘You could just as well have been born the son or daughter of a white wealthy
individual’. The individuals who comprise the underclass are faced with the post-
modern condition in a number of ways in which an awareness of contingency or
radical unnaturalness is dominant:
• in the structural position in relation to work in a post-fordist (post-industrial)
era where employment has been exported out to other nations willing to allow
what Mike Davis has called ‘bloody Taylorism’ (for example the absence of
fire escapes which ensured that the fire in a toy factory in Thailand in 1993
killed more than 250);
439
• in the anti-traditionalist and anti-naturalist foundational ontologies, that is the

argument wherein their position is shown as simply the result of ‘frozen politics’
and past social decisions;
• the problematic nature of individual identity; specifically, while the answer to
the question ‘who am I and how am I to behave?’ could traditionally have been
answered in terms of the narratives of everyday life (ie narratives told externally
to the self), those narratives which specified the individual’s gender, work,
place, family, class, and past, modernity has turned into temporal guides rather
than truths; placed the burden of identity onto an abstract self to create
continually anew (ie self-reflexive). Thus identity becomes a burden as much
as a refuge, providing only the weakest of ontological security and little
protection against the demands of consumerism and the dialectics of angst-
desire.
The dialectics of social class, participation and social control

The underclass is, therefore, a new phenomenon distinguishable from any other
group of ‘poor’ or ‘surplus labour’ in modernity. In contrast to the members of
early modern poor groups, or even dangerous classes, there is no recourse to
narrative notions of progress (such as Marxism, or the reformist idealism of a
Comte) to tell these groups that ‘your time will come’. Moreover, the desperation
of the underclass condition is most pronounced when viewed ‘against the
narratives of modernity’ and, in particular, takes on a threatening aspect because
of the nature of the balances which sustain civil society in late modernity. Civil
society comprises, in part, a system in which various features act to manage
conflict aided by processes of participation which guide the interaction of social
and self-control. Namely:
• the institutionalisation of the class conflict via the introduction of legitimate
working class organisations (trade unions, political parties of the moderate
left) which have specific institutional methodologies for attaining class related
ends;
• the incorporation of ‘oppressed groups’ (women, ethnic minorities,
homosexuals) via institutional recognition of their social participation in their
abstract (legal-rational) forms (ie bearers of ‘rights’ and subjects of anti-
discrimination legislation);
• the civilising of modern society via the monopolisation of violence and taxation
in the hands of the state (the police/military complex) and the rational self-
control of the population. As we have seen in the analysis of Norbert Elias, the
civilising of the individual and the civilising of the state are thus co-dependent.
• the provision of economic resources by means of transfer payments and
insurance contributions to sections of the population marginalised from
employment participation;
440
• general cultural significants of status and self-worth become connected with

market production and consumption power. Transfer payments enable a basic
subsistence level of consumption and rhetorically serve to relocate recipiants
back into consumption opportunities at a later time (for example, when they
are re-employed).
The underclass phenomenon threatens these processes in various ways, namely:
• institutionalised features of class conflict, such as trade unions and political
parties, do not cover their situation. The dialectics of apathy/irrelevance result;
• oppressed groups become marginalised or the features of incorporation become
distorted, for example, the feminisation of work may allow black women some
employment opportunities while condemning black males to unemployment.
Such work is likely to have low levels of job security or opportunities for self-
esteem;
• resistance by the underclass tempts the police complex into coercive responses
thus revealing the structure of coercion behind the civilisation of the state;
• the reality of non-employment, and the devastation of the family, changes
socialisation processes which may reverse the civilising process; an
incompatibility of social messages (via the mass communications network)
complicate and place conflicting demands upon the process of creating an
authentic individual identity; and differential opportunities for self-creation
and expression may result in emotions of resentment and revenge and the desire
for domination;
• legitimacy becomes increasingly a problem, since modernity undercuts
previous legitimation systems but the post-modern anti-naturalism, anti-
foundationist metaphysics cannot provide (even in systems theory) any
suitable legitimation process for the underclass to accept. Thus, contingency
impacts as a criminogenic factor (for why should the present rules of the
game be played with, that is, lawful conduct be regarded as a necessity for
underclass life, if the arrangements have no legitimacy or naturalness?). The
experience of deep inequalities, bereft of the security of naturalness and cast
in the light of contingency, create not alienation (for what is there to be
alienated from?) but resentment. This question of the emotionality of the
post-modern condition provides the material for other discussions, but here
we may accept Nietzsche’s warning that the emotion of the repressed in the
post-modern condition cannot be seen within the rationality of meaningful
dialectical engagement, but rather as the absence of meaningfulness. The
rage of the deprived is vengeance on anything which links to the excesses of
the advantaged. How can there be a way to make people content, or reconcile
them either to the advantages of others, or the disadvantages of themselves,
when the narratives of legitimacy have become subjected to the trope of irony,
and one’s position in the seemingly arbitrary and chaotic array of life chances,
sacrifices, rewards and benefits, understood as just that, arbitrary and
contingent?
441
Against this there has recently been a desperate attempt to reinstate a functionalist
and positivist account of the underclass. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein
(1994) in The Bell Curve draw connections between ethnic IQ scores and the
underclass. In effect the social-structural segregation of the underclass is turned
into a cognitive underclass. Their picture is of a society in which IQ and social
skills determine one’s position within the social stratification; a meritocracy which
is currently distorted by positive discrimination and attempted social engineering.
Positive knowledge declares stable IQ differences between mongoloids 110,
caucasoid 100 and negroid (American blacks) 90. Thus we would expect more
blacks to be in the underclass, naturally. Instead of aspiring they should tone down
their aspirations and realise they can be happy playing football (this was Wilson
and Herrnstein’s preferred solution in Crime and Human Nature (1985)). Smarter
people get more rewards in the economic sphere; they deserve more, but there are
other realms.
Critics of The Bell Curve have argued along four lines: (i) declaring a stark and
intractable gap between intellectual abilities of black and white Americans is a
political act; (ii) the data relied upon is extremely suspect; (iii) the logic of their
argument points to even more detailed subdivisions (among white, among racially
mixed) which they do not engage in; (iv) the conclusions of the book – that no
social policies can affect IQ – do not follow from the analysis. Since if large amounts
of IQ differences are environmental, the policy differences could partly remedy
this.
Conclusion
The concept of underclass has aroused considerable controversy, and proved

difficult to empirically pin down into a settled set of circumstances. Whilst it has
had little impact upon criminological writings considerable potential exists. Its
potential is not to be seen in purely positivistic terms of adequacy to data, but in
seeing the very unboundedness of the concept as a product of its moral overtones.
The concept of the underclass is both a social scientific term, which may
inadequately reference a complex set of social processes, and a moral term,
denoting a structure of marginalisation, and non-participation, in the processes
and achievements of late or post-modernity. While it does not appear to have been
properly analysed within criminology and incorporated into criminological
paradigms, we should not forget that social responses are occurring. There may be
some appreciation (ie discourse which seeks to articulate the experience of the
members of the underclass and communicate this to us superclass members), but
there is also target hardening, differential policing and the use of the criminal
justice system to contain members of the underclass. The underclass has become
material for an expanding prison industry (Christie, 1993; Morrison, 1995b).
Accepting the underclass as a usable concept has implications for the rest of
criminological and sociological explanation. The underclass will serve
442
symbolically as the focus for superclass fear (we can see this in terms of the
current ‘wars’ on drugs which tend to become wars on underclass members who
trade or use drugs) and reinforce the current moves to abandon all ‘social projects’
in favour of economic projects, and the primacy of economic discourse for
discussion of social issues. The victory of economic discourse flies in the face of
the apparent failure of economics to deliver on its promises. In Britain, the fact
that economic discourse has operated as the master discourse since the late 1970s
has not resulted in a vibrant economy, or the betterment of the less well off (as
trickle down economics promised), but rather social polarisation and economic
stagnation. Its only victory is to successfully render social issues as ‘externalities’,
not able to be included in the primary parameters of discussion.
However, if we use a backdrop of modernity, we can draw a link between the
development of self-control and the monopolisation of violence into the hands of
the nation states (where it resides in the police and military). The ability of urban
civil society in modernity to become free from the constraints of religion, status,
and cast hierarchies, and the ability of individuals to become socially and thus
creatively mobile, has depended upon the ‘pacification’ of civil society. Economic
well being as well as the symbolic value of believing in a just society require
strategies of incorporation rather than exclusion and containment. Neglecting the
social processes that may be creating the underclass risks much of the gains of
modernity itself. Here criminological theorising demonstrates itself as providing a
reading of general social forms, but, more than that, the discourse of the
underclass may serve for a post-modern criminology to retrace the steps to the
beginnings of modern social theory, that is to moral social theory.
Postscript: A note on the Los Angeles Riots of 1992
The riots of Los Angeles were the first post-modern riots. They concerned the
possibility of allocating blame when reality was questioned. The world appeared
shocked when a jury, comprised mostly of whites, acquitted four Los Angeles
policemen filmed beating a black motorist, Rodney King, after he had been seen
racing through a red light, and led police on an eight mile chase reaching speeds of
110 miles per hour. Within hours of the acquittal Los Angeles was witnessing the
worst riots in US history. The Daily Telegraph of 4 May 1992 reported 46 dead
(mainly young black and hispanic males); 2,116 injured; 9,400 people arrested;
5,273 buildings destroyed or heavily damaged by fire; and more than $600 million
worth of damage. In an effort to contain the riots President Bush mobilised 6,000
national guards and dispatched 1,000 federal law officers; special weapons teams;
riot police from the border patrol, the prison service and the FBI in support. While
a brigade of 2,500 infantrymen with armoured personal carriers, and 1,500 marines
assembled around the city.
Socially the 1980s had seen a decline in the relative standing of California –
wages had declined especially amongst the poor. Nationally, between 1973 and
443
1990 the average yearly income of black, high school graduates decreased in real
terms by 44%. Latino earnings fell by 35% (The Guardian, 2 May).
The prosecution occurred against a background of persistent charges of police
malpractice, and complaints that the police were more interested in staging media-
covered round-ups of suspected gang members in black neighbourhoods than
dealing with the real policing problems of those areas. The violence and abuse of
civil liberties involved in the raids tied in with media hype of the war on drugs and
gangs, but the effect was to encourage black animosity to the police, since many
blacks and Latinos saw these clean ups as attempts to appease white residents. In
1990 more than $11 million had been paid out in law suits against the police.
Many of the complaints however, came to nothing when brought before a police
review board dominated by officials from the police hierarchy. Most of the
complaints were not able to provide sufficient evidence to support criminal charges
against officers of the law. The Rodney King case was welcomed because it seemed
to have cast-iron evidence – the brutality long alleged against the police was in this
instance captured live on video tape. When either five-second flashes or nearly
two minutes of grainy video tape, in which Mr King was struck 56 times with
night-sticks and repeatedly kicked, was shown on television, it elicited outrage
from all sectors of the public including the Oval office. Tom Bradley, the black
mayor of Los Angeles, was plain speaking: ‘This is something we cannot and will
not tolerate.’
The officers involved protested their innocence claiming they acted in self-
defence. In the prosecution that followed the defence attorneys were determined
to move the case out of the Los Angeles area. They succeeded in having it set in
Simi Valley, a small rural community 100 miles north-west of Los Angeles; Simi
Valley has a black population of 2%, while Los Angeles county has 10.5%. Perhaps,
more importantly, the 100,000 residents of Simi Valley had virtually no experience
of the kind of urban violence that is routine in Los Angeles, and little exposure to
its racial tensions; there were the objects of community policing rather than the
military policing of south central Los Angeles. The jury consisting of six men and
six women, comprised 10 whites, an Hispanic and an Asian.
In court the defence tried to reduce the horror of the video-tape to a less emotional
level. It was helped by the fact that the victim had previous convictions for robbery
and was on parole after serving a sentence for an armed robbery. The prosecution
did not call King. Darryl Mounger, the lawyer for one of the defendant police
officers, claimed: ‘If he had got in the box, we would have showed that he had
used make-up to exaggerate his wounds, puffed out his cheeks to make his face
look more bruised, and lied in his statements to the press. We all agreed that the
beating was terrible and brutal, but the jury had to find they did something unlawful
and wrong.’
Although the television had screened at most two minutes of film, the actual
film lasts nearly seven minutes. It opens with Mr King standing by his car, lurching
towards the police. Defence lawyers argued that this showed he was uncooperative
and potentially dangerous. As it turned out, he was drunk.
444
At one point, after being beaten, King tries to rise from the ground, the lawyers
isolated these frames of the film, contending that he was controlling the action by
acting aggressively and not staying motionless on the ground.
In the US, the standard procedure for a motorist stopped by the police is to
emerge from a stopped car with hands up. It is vital, even for a simple speeding
offence, to show police that you are unarmed, especially after a wild drive through
streets used as a night-time hunting ground by armed street gangs. This must be
taken as the context for the pent-up rage by the Los Angeles Police Officers towards
a black man following an eight-mile chase at speeds of up to 110 mph. Nevertheless,
even the husband and wife police team that initiated the high-speed pursuit, testified
that the actions of at least one of their fellow officers were inexcusable.
The prosecution may have made a mistake in not calling Mr King, who, in the
jurors eyes, remained always a vague and shadowy video image. From their
perspective there were sensible reasons. If called he would have had to answer
why, after the car chase, he did not immediately surrender, as did his two black
companions, who were unhurt. He would also have been seen to be a large man,
and questioned about his past, which included a spell in prison. Prosecutors say he
did not testify because he had only a vague recollection of the incident. Tactically,
by keeping him off the stand, it was easier to cast him in the role of an entirely
innocent and victimised citizen.
The video film became the focus of defence attention. The opening of the film
shows Mr King stumbling towards the officers, falling when hit by an electronic
stun gun, and then getting up to charge one officer, who, by all accounts, was the
most aggressive man on the police team. A juror interviewed by the Los Angeles
Times said: ‘I know the film was horrible, but there’s a lot more to it than the film,
and a lot more to it than the small pieces that were shown on TV. The film does not
show all of the things that went on before.’ The juror said that if Mr King had
submitted to the orders of the officers as they tried to arrest him, the beating would
never have happened. ‘He refused to get out of the car. His two companions got
out and complied with all the orders and he just continued to fight. So the police
department had no alternative. He was obviously a dangerous person, of massive
size and threatening actions... The police used everything they had at their
availability.’
By cutting and isolating images on the video, the defence neutralised the frenzy
of violence captured therein and managed to dehumanise Mr King. In addition,
some of his injuries, they claimed, seemed to have been caused when he hit the
ground; in particular, had the break of the bones in his face occurred when he fell
for the first time on to the pavement? When defence lawyers reviewed the flurry of
blows, they repeatedly stopped, or slowed the tape to show that police were either
missing their victim, or retreating, in possible fear, from the man.
The prosecution produced evidence that showed conflicting testimony from
the different police officers involved and even got some policemen to testify that
excessive force had been used. The defence argued that the police action was
445
appropriate in dealing with a dangerous man. The jurors spent a week meticulously
examining the evidence. ‘It was not a snap decision by any stretch of the
imagination’, said one. ‘He was just not as damaged as you’d expect after seeing
the small clip of video on television.’ Only one member of the jury seemed torn
with doubt about the verdict. The woman rang a chat show in tears, saying she had
argued for conviction of the accused because ‘they could not take away what my
eyes saw.’ However, she eventually agreed to acquit three of the four accused on
all charges and find the fourth guilty of only a minor charge.
One of the jurors explained why the video was not enough to convict the
policemen. ‘When I first saw the video, I was appalled. But after you sat through
the trial with all the evidence, the witnesses, everything that was said – the video
too – you had to see what was going on. Had Rodney King gotten out of his
vehicle, as he was ordered to do, and complied with the policemen’s orders, nothing
would have happened to him.’
The pictures of Mr King lurching towards the officers were interpreted by another
juror as extremely threatening: ‘The cops were afraid he was going to run or even
attack them. He had not been searched, so they didn’t know if he had a weapon. He
kept going for his pants, so they thought he might be reaching for a gun.’
One of the accused said he was certain Mr King was on PCP; a drug that is
claimed to make an addict almost uncontrollable. Mr King, in fact, was not taking
the drug. But, as the defence said, the issue was a matter of perception – the question
was what were the thought processes of the police officers? As one Prosecutor
complained after the verdict: ‘They continually emphasised the size of King, his
erratic behaviour and the fact that everything was happening so quickly. In effect,
they were telling the jury: “Don’t believe what you see on the video tape – believe
instead the evidence of the officers. They are not lying – the camera is”.’
Mr King’s abnormal behaviour, and unsteady gait, was referred to as being
‘animal-like’ and ‘inhuman’. Combined with rarely referring to Mr King in court
by name, this tactic appears to have persuaded the jury to believe that the police
honestly thought they were dealing with some sort of monster. As a prosecution
lawyer put it: ‘Their strategy worked in part because the jury was ready to believe
the police officers’ version of what happened, and, in part, because they presented
their case very well. The defence lawyers virtually achieved the impossible, and
made 12 people disbelieve the evidence of the own eyes’ (Mr Correio).
Three of the officers said they believed Mr King was under the influence of the
drug PCP and that they were only using ‘managed and controlled force’, as set out
in police regulations, to subdue him. The fourth took a different tack acknowledging
that the incident had ‘got out of control’, and insisting that he stepped in to try to
stop the violence. Although he appeared on video to be stamping on Mr King, he
was, he said, merely trying to hold him down with his foot to prevent further
violence.
In the face of this defence deconstruction of the filmed ‘reality’, ‘common sense’
came to the jurors – yes, the police could be taken to have believed that King was
446
on some miracle drug giving him (a large black) almost superhuman strength.
Instead of the filmed reality of police brutality and oppression, Mr King was a
menacing, superhuman beast who had a ring of armed police fearing for their
lives.
The trial and subsequent riot was a site where various images and narratives of
behaviour intersected. For Henry Louis Gates: ‘That jury was more afraid of the
potential of being mugged by some hypothetical black male than it was of the
abuse of the Constitution, of civil rights.’ For Jim Sleeper: ‘We’re at the dividing
line now, where perception becomes reality, where the prophecy becomes self-
fulfilling. The fact that the looters are out there doing the rioting only confirms
what people have decided: this is what the cops are there to protect us from.’
(Time, 11 May 1992:35)
In a Washington Post-ABC News survey 68% said the verdict was wrong, the
break down was 64% of whites and 92% of blacks. Asked whether the King case
demonstrated that blacks were discriminated against in the judicial system, 78%
of blacks agreed against only 25% of whites (The Independent, 4 May).
Perceptions of the fairness and reasons for the verdict varied by race. Bradely,
the black Mayor of Los Angeles speaking immediately after the verdict stated
plainly: ‘The system has failed us. The jury’s verdict will never blind what the
world saw, what we saw.’ While for Maxine Walters, the Congresswoman for South
Central Los Angeles: ‘There is no logic to this. It is pure racism.’ The riots are the
natural reaction to outrage and despair over ‘an incomprehensible decision’ (both
quotes, The Times, 1 May).
As the riot progressed Bradely obviously became unable to appreciate, let alone
control, events. It was clear that, although he was black, he was middle class and
unable to communicate with the rioters. For their part the comments of many of
the individuals involved in the disturbances demonstrated how foreign the political
leaders of the state appeared. The attitude to Pete Wilson, the white Republican
Governor of California, was contemptuous: ‘He’s a joke. He already cut our welfare
– now he wants to starve us to death’ (The Guardian, 2 May):
‘For some the resulting riot was a consequence of the system’s bias being clearly
exposed. The Rev Bennie Newton, who saved a Hispanic motorist from a mob by
throwing himself over the unconscious body, said the violence was “brought on by
frustration, disillusionment, bitterness, anger – and most of all betrayal.”’ (The
Independent, 2 May 1992)
As reporters tried to speak to participants, resentment became the common emotion
apparent in the statements of the residents as well as looters. ‘None of this would
happen if they gave us proper justice – look around, you see foreigners who come
here and take jobs and business opportunities from people born in the USA. Me,
I’d like to start a business too, I’d like to go to college and be a lawyer, but because
I’m black, no one will lend me the money, no way.’ Frustration mixed with
resentment: ‘This is not just us taking apart our community – everybody is pissed
off. We have tried to be peaceful but that didn’t work.’ Another: ‘We are taking
447
this all the way to Beverly Hills.’ Reports were full of colourful language: many of
the rioters were said to have ‘hissed venom at the rich’ (quotes in The Daily
Telegraph, 2 May, 1992)
To The Sunday Times, resentment explained some of the logic of the attacks
and destruction of buildings, for example, the torching of a video shop owned by
a Korean. The blacks were seen to resent:
‘... the more ambitious Korean immigrants who have worked hard and managed to
prosper. The resentment has been fuelled by American Asians moving into black
areas to open their shops and who do not live in the ghetto or share the poverty of the
ghetto. Tensions between blacks and Koreans flared after a woman store owner was
given a probation sentence the year earlier for shooting dead a black teenage girl who
allegedly stole a can of drink from her shop. A hit song by the rap star Ice Cube warns
Korean merchants to treat black customers with respect or ‘we’ll burn your store
right down to a crisp’. Koreans in turn, make no secret of their belief that blacks are
lazy and criminally inclined.’ (The Sunday Times, 3 May 1992)
The riot was in part a bizarre carnival. As one participant shouted while loading a
shopping trolley:
‘Hey man, lets party. Take it. It’s free. It’s ours. Take the whole shop, man. Let’s kill.’
(The Sunday Times, 3 May 1992)
But style was important: ‘LA Gear isn’t really cool. Tonight I’m going back to get
me some Nikes’ (25 year old, black looter who had taken 20 pairs of shoes).
Visualising reality
The riots were screened world-wide. They were also screened to the participants.
One could look outside the window, or at the TV screen. On the second night of
the riots the decision was made by one of the leading television channels to stop
the almost constant coverage and screen the final episode of The Cosby Show. It
raised a debate: was it a stroke of common sense in the midst of overreaction, an
attempt to show that the riots were an abberation of normalacy? Or was it insensitive
and evidence of the vast gulf between media portrayal (of successful black, middle
class life) and social reality (the black underclass)?
What was happening? What was the message? While the black and Hispanic
underclass having inhabited a locality unemployment, drug-addiction, and with
extreme gang-warfare were witnessing and participating in the riots, while more
than 9,000 were being arrested, the cultural fantasy system underpinning the
American Dream worked through the portrayal of the leading middle class, black,
professional family. What greater contrast and questioning of the reality of the
communication network could there be than this (obscenity?)?; while the inhabitants
of a world of alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, drug addiction, illness,
homelessness, elderly helplessness, apathy, chronic unemployment screamed their
resentment (‘what else can we do until they build schools in this area instead of
448
prisons?’), while the existentialist freedom of the criminal event operated, each
could connect up to the hyper-reality of the American Dream.
The riot as an indicator of the post-modern future?
For Jessie Jackson the events were symptomatic of the absence of any public project
to build American cities into a social space: ‘We need a plan. There is a plan to
rebuild eastern Europe, there is a plan to help Russia, but we have no plan to
rebuild the cities of America’ (The Guardian, 2 May 1992). For many, it was simply
the future, arrived early. The signification that modernity was over.
449
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BUILDING CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORY IN

POST-MODERNISM
‘Inherently inferior organisms are, for the most part, those which succumb to
the adversities or temptations of their social environment and fall into anti-
social behaviour... it is impossible to improve and correct environment to a
point at which these flawed and degenerate human beings will be able to succeed
in honest social competition.’ (Hooton, Crime and the Man, 1939:388)
‘The dismantling of the Welfare State is essentially a process of “putting
moral responsibility where it belongs” – that is, among the private concerns
of individuals. It spells a hard time for moral responsibility; not only in its
immediate effects on the poor and unfortunate who need a society of
responsible people most, but also (and perhaps, in the long run, primarily) in
its lasting effects on the (potentially) moral selves. It recasts “being for
Others”, that cornerstone of all morality, as a matter of accounts and
calculation, of value for money, of gains and costs, of luxury one can or
cannot permit. The process is self-propelling and self-accelerating: the new
perspective leads inevitably to relentless deterioration of collective services
(the quality of the public health service, of public education, of whatever is
left of public housing or transport), which prompts those who can to buy
themselves out from collective provisions – an act which turns out to mean,
sooner or later, buying themselves out of collective responsibility.’ (Bauman,
Postmodern Ethics, 1993:244)
This text has presented a narrative of criminology’s theoretical development through
modernity to post-modernism; the story has not been simple, and there are,
undoubtedly, competing versions. What, however, cannot be doubted is the
complexity and ambiguity of our contemporary social context. How shall we face
this ambiguity? To some social observers post-modernism denotes a crisis of
confidence which threatens to undercut the tremendous advances of modernity.
We inhabit the future the philosophers of the enlightenment dreamed of; yet feel
we can no longer dream of a truly modern social solidarity. Certain commentators
even blame the very idea of a normative social project itself for the new tensions
threatening our sociality. Murray (1988) and others argue our problems of social
order are attitudinal; a matter of the failure of individuals themselves to assume
moral responsibility and enter into social interactions which do not rely upon force
or fraud. Murray demands we do not deny that even the worst-off in modern western
societies enjoy a standard of living beyond the dreams of their Victorian
counterparts; if, therefore, the problems are of relations between people, late- or
post-modern social problems do not require the state to take responsibility. We
must rather seize back the moral task from the state. At present ‘we’ do not take
sufficient trouble over the variety of social interactions and networks a healthy,
spontaneous, social solidarity would require; the decline of family life is one
symptom. To the writers of the right, in the name of a social construction project,
451
modernity has stripped the self of moral responsibility: ‘functions that people as
individuals and as communities are able to carry out on their own should be left to
them to do as individuals and communities.’ (1988:272)
But what of social distance in late-modernity? What of the chains of mediation
which obscure the morality of the social; which make it easier for the individual to
act in an inhuman manner; and easy for the state to forget the reality of social
interdependence? Not only does the scale of problems involved in the growth of
the underclass and globalisation (including the globalisation of organised crime
and multi-national corporations) make this argument to leave individuals, and the
groups they form, alone to get on with their lives appear naive, but it poses the
question: in whom, or what, has responsibility for articulating, and taking
responsibility for, the increased range of social suffering the destruction of a public
normative project might well involve.
Articulating private concerns has often been the domain of the novelist and
poet while the novelist or poet has no other public responsibility than to write,
great writing offers social solidarity: it confers upon the reader some insight and
interweaves strands of the human condition. But the distinction between private
and public concerns is problematic a disciplinary discourse such as criminology
has a public responsibility – one of seeking to articulate perspectives and truths of
the human condition in such a way as to make problems, issues and consequences
become more apparent. Harold Pepinsky and Richard Quinney (1991: ix) argue
for a new form of ‘peace-making criminology’, which seeks ‘to alleviate suffering
and thereby reduce crime’. Suffering is partially the flipside of doing, the
consequence of (non)action. It is clearly visible in the conditions of the underclass;
in sexual and personal victimisation located in the imbalances of personal power
throughout society; in the imbalance of power existing between consumers and
large corporations which withhold information concerning their products, or
maintain faulty products; in drug companies which charge inflated prices for
cheaply produced drugs while failing to invest in forms of medical research which
may show their products to be of dubious efficacy; it particularly operates in the
philosophical and economic suffering created when a substantial section live in
relative poverty while a few assume huge wealth. Suffering is part of the essence of
crime – the victimisations which the rational logos of criminology has not
sufficiently conveyed. Criminology has supported the power to legislate and
organise: while social order in modernity responded to the power to legislate and
organise – dissembedding humans from their location in custom and status into
categories of human objects recognisable and relatable according to their
functionally specific traits – the catch cry of post-modernism might be that social
order is problematic. The great enterprises of legislating for the common good or
of mapping social space, of engaging in a positivistic criminological enterprise
locating the identities of the normal and the deviant, the sane and the insane, the
criminal and the upright citizen, have been undercut. Social space cannot be
located and mapped with certainty – it cannot be easily ordered – ambivalence and
452
Building criminological theory in post-modernism
confusion have caught out the projects of founding the human construction of
modernity. Has criminology therefore no right to exist? Is all the action merely a
mirage – a frenzy of professionals who no longer have a coherent project to work
within. At least one contemporary criminologist, Colin Summner (1994), thinks
that the mainstream sociological version has died. His Sociology of Deviance text
is subtitled: An Obituary. Perhaps, however, what has died is the form of
theorising developed around the categories of structural progress and the nation
state, which saw social problems as internal to societies, and power as the
instrument of the state. Increasingly, instead of the nation state providing the
framework, both analysis moving upwards from the minute to those of the truly
global interact; analyses of global boundaries and of macro-sociological
processes – such as modernity and post-modernism – which seek to address issues
of the human condition are required. Theories of the socially specific must be in
dialogue with general theorising. Yet we should be aware of the countervailing
forces which we have noted throughout this text, and the analysis of Lyotard can
serve as a final reminder.
Lyotard and the death of modern social theory
The French writer Jean-François Lyotard is credited with the classic text of post-
modernism, The Postmodern Condition (1984). On the surface, a report on the
impact of computer technology on the field of knowledge, The Postmodern
Condition is a critique of modernist science which raises a host of questions
concerning our conduct of, and expectations for, science under post-modernism.
In particular, Lyotard is concerned with the legitimation of knowledge through
narratives – or everyday and scientific language games – and how this affects the
social bond. There are three stages to his critique:
• Modernity was underpinned by a faith in certain grand narratives – particularly
those of progress, self-advancement and emancipation – which linked with
narratives given by father figures of social theory – such as Marx, Durkheim
and Weber – concerning the ability of truth and science (such as positivism) to
provide foundations for the structuring of society and identify the direction for
progressive social development (such as the dialectical advancement of
humanity). These narratives can no longer serve as anchoring points in the
post-modern condition; we have developed an incredulity towards meta-
narratives.
• Modernity became dominated by two methodologies for conceiving of society
as a totality:
(a) structural functionalism, or the idea that society forms an organic functioning
whole with each entity able to be placed within the overall picture (the
traditional picture of criminological theorising); or
(b) critical theory in the legacy of Marx, which rests on the principles of class
453
struggle and advancement through opposition. This, however, turned out

to be as functionalist as the first model and has failed. As a result:
• While capitalism has succeeded, we face a crisis of legitimation which is
most apparent in the status of scientific knowledge; this crisis of legitimation
threatens to engulf modern society – it defines the post-modern condition.
While legitimation is problematic the market dominates; even truth becomes
a matter of saleability – knowledge has been turned into a commodity. The
Industrial Revolution demonstrated that without technology there could not
be modern wealth, and wealth enabled technological development. As a result
of this wealth-technology-wealth-technology spiral, ultimately science
became a commodity. Investment was required for a new technical apparatus,
more effective technical apparatuses gave greater profit, which enabled greater
investment. In this process ‘a portion of the sale is recycled into a research
fund dedicated to further improvement. It is at this precise moment that science
becomes a force of production, in other words a moment in the circulation of
capital’ (1984:45). Science cannot be seen as a pure enterprise dedicated to
the pursuit of truth; it becomes a productive activity, judged by its ability to
generate money. This performative criteria replaces the enlightenment drive
for truth.
Research in universities is increasingly a question of ‘soft money’, or piecemeal
research contracts. Grants from corporations and government departments finance
research and thus direct the production of information, of knowledge bytes;
pragmatic considerations, tied to quite specific requirements, dominate. We can
no longer think of society as a normative, construction project; it becomes a
collection of localised language games interacting within a market context. It
becomes impossible to paint a picture of the whole, without falling into one or
other of the discredited traditions. Lyotard tells us not to worry since ‘we have
paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole’ (Ibid: 82). Instead, we
should do battle with the narratives, deconstruct and help articulate the
unpresentable, and allow subdued voices to come to the surface. We should embrace
the demise of modernity with joy, conduct life as one great party, enjoy diversity,
wonder at complexity, and marvel at how intelligent we are. Except – as we
criminologists realise only too well – not all are invited to the party.
Lyotard asks us to be seduced by the rhetoric of a new pure modernity; the
performability of language games shall be their only criterion of inclusivity or
exclusivity – this is the image of the perfect meritocracy – of course, the criteria of
demarcation becomes skill and performability; a new form of knowledge-power
relationship. Reflexivity catches even Lyotard: while he relates the decline of the
meta-narratives, his own text is itself a meta-narrative of the rise and decline of
meta-narratives.
454
Does post-modernism imply the impossibility of constructing a

general theory, or even of integrating different theories?
The normative utopia of modernity sought for an organised social structure

constructed by man’s co-operative efforts. Modernity (re)constructed social order
out of a reflexive (non)understanding of the void underlying human existence: to
structure means to counter-balance randomness, to ensure predictability. The tools
were knowledge and power. A strong society needed to control those who betrayed
it: punishment was just in that it was not a defence of the illusions of metaphysics,
or arbitrary political judgment, but part of the body of knowledge of society and
man’s place within it. The well adjusted citizen – the socialised individual – was to
be one who understood what the society stood for, understood the necessity for
rules for the social game, and played by the rules. The desire for individual
advancement resulted in an increase in performability and skills in the practices
which the rules delineated – the desire of the individual to better him or herself
enriched the society. Social theory kept randomness, kept contingency, under control
by claiming to uncover structure, rather than engage in practices of destruction
and construction. And to a large extent this ideology has worked, but we now
realise, with Unger (1976), that social theory is in a sense both metaphysical and
political. It takes stands on issues of human nature and human knowledge for
which no ‘scientific’ elucidation is, or may ever be, available. We can no longer
deny that the development and fate of social theory is inseparable from the fate of
society.
‘The progress of theory depends upon political events. The doctrines theory
embraces are ideals as well as descriptions: the choices theory must make are
choices among conceptions of what society ought to be as among views of what it
is. These choices are neither arbitrary nor capable of logical or empirical proof.
They build upon speculative conceptions of the requirements of social order and of
the demands of human nature, conceptions that are informed by historical
knowledge but which cannot pretend to follow necessarily from it.’ (Roberto
Unger, 1976:267)
Classical criminology aided the construction of early modernity, laying out a
structure for legitimating the legislative drive and the use of crime as a central
conception of management linked with the growing centralising political power of
the nation state; criminology then became part of the positive project, the great
enterprise of creating knowledge capable of legitimating organised, bureaucratic
modernity; it developed various positive strategies, ranging from consensual
functionalism to critical functionalism. For much of this century, within
traditional criminology, the idea of law reflecting social consensus kept the
proponents of critical theory largely at bay (beyond the walls of the liberal-
capitalist-urban complex), and the intimate connection between labour and capital
gave rise to a ‘fordist’ style of urban life, easily understandable as a functionalist/
positivist complex. The beginnings of post-modernism, perhaps identified first
with a concern with the multi-functional properties of language, may be seen with
455
labelling theory, which, highlighted the concepts of process and censuring as

identifying the deviant. While bureaucracy could use critical theory as a body of
ideas which it could use as a metaphysical enemy, or raid, as appropriate, labelling
theory demonstrated the plurality and contingency of the very bureaucracy that
supposedly provided welfare and security. At the same time, social structural
changes of a global nature made control of economies and cultural imagery
difficult; the divorce between labour and capital, captured by the label of post-
industrial society, robbed society of its innermost social relationship – it seemed
impossible to believe any more in simplistic consensus. But, in reply, simplistic
theories appeared to gain ground. The solution to increasing complexity, diversity,
and plurality, became for many a retreat into common sense or managerialism;
into denying the need to theorise totality, while taking comfort in easier, more
apparent entities or geographies.
There is, possibly to be expected, a large amount of sense in common sense
criminology: common sense involves making it more difficult for crime to occur
to you by target hardening and listening to opportunity theory; this amounts to
privatising social space by walling off the expensive estates; by concentrating
crime among the underclass; by giving more resources to the police at the expense
of education or child rearing centres; by investing in greater technologies of
surveillance and tracking the easily identifiable criminals; by building more
prisons as drug rehabilitation clinics are closed; above all, perhaps, by rejecting
diversity in favour of working and living with people who look and feel like
oneself – of controlling the plurality of post-modernism by a neo-tribalism.
Theoretically, in the face of epistemological diversity, realism became the name of
the game. Contemporary criminology is largely realist in working for the contracts
available or concentrating on the crimes which confront the senses: street crime
and the obvious offender. Conflict theory, or left idealism – as it came to be termed
– was relegated, probably with some justification, to the realm of idealist utopia;
while left realism, in America in the guise of writers such as Mike Davis and Elliot
Currie, and in Britain Jock Young and others, sought a foundation in the real
concerns of working class people. In most works grand theorising became only a
mirage; it became fashionable to comment that if one wanted to do criminology
one should have a general theory, but, after some nebulous comments concerning
the development of a short-term time horizon as characterising our contemporary
times (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985), or ‘our commitment to liberty, our general
prosperity, our child-rearing methods, our popular values’ (Wilson: 1985 251), or
self-control (Gottfredson and Hirschi: 1990), the writers invariably returned to
measures concerning the control of individuals committing the most obvious
crimes. Additionally, the state no longer needed sociology or criminology to
determine techniques of control; those citizens who were in were seduced, and
played their ever moving roles as consumers; those who were out were becoming
the grist of the repressive mill, and we already knew their characteristics, so what
had criminology to offer? And where criminology could potentially matter – in the
456
study of global tendencies, in the uncovering of real social harms – who would
pay? The state no longer had any interest in ‘true’ general theories.
But why should attempts at general social theory cease to be coherent simply
because things have become vastly more complex? Why should the project of
knowledge and power be surrendered to the market and we accept the dictum of
localised individuality?
First consider some of the plurality of theoretical perspectives that modernist
criminology has left us. True to David Hume’s dictum that the key to social theory
was understanding human nature, criminological theories differ according to their
conceptions of human nature social order. Eleven structures of criminological theory
can be presented as follows.
457
Eleven structures of criminological theory Table 2
458
Each theoretical structure appears to maintain purity and logical coherence at

the expense of empirical exposure. Apart from existentialism – which may be an
exception – each obeys the dicta of modernity: build a citadel, develop firm
foundations and construct a coherent framework upon this. Are they mutually
exclusive or can they be integrated? Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) maintain that
integration is difficult, since theories construct world-views of their own; instead
we must build a coherent theory on its own terms.
For Gottfredson and Hirschi a general theory should
• attend to the everyday reality of crime;
• keep faith with the insights of classical criminology; and
• keep faith with the positivist project. These authors resolve the traditional
clash between classical criminology and positivism by claiming classical
criminology is a control theory of crime, whereas positivism sought to explain
criminality. The scope for a general theory was reduced, however, since to
the authors
• crime was a mundane event of everyday life, and the entity to be explained
(crime) was as reflected in the criminal statistics. Thus complex and corporate
crimes, the crimes of the powerful, the whole extraordinariness of much of
crime were simply overlooked;
• classicism became an explanation of offence explanations. There was no
discussion of the reflexivity of classical criminology, ie the issue of social
justice was ignored; while
• positivism became the search for offender explanations, resolved by the notion
of differential self-control as a result of varying socialisation practices.
Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory is a limited, rather than a general theory of
crime. Not only does it have no discussion on the nature of social order, or the
legitimacy of law, it offers little feel for the historical contingency of the self and
the contemporary context. While we are offered an image of criminality as caused
by faulty socialisation, we are not offered any definition of the role of
socialisation. Daily life is left at an unproblematic level instead of presenting it
inside macro-sociological processes: conversely for us, daily life consists in sets
of rules, resources, identities, activities, purposes, localities, capabilities,
(un)certainties, (mis)understandings, projects, legitimations and moralities which
are the result of a series of historical contingencies. Thus criminality is not some
natural identity, but the (sometimes temporary, sometimes developmental) result
of processes.
The construction of secure identities is inherently part of the process of
constructing social order. The complexity of late-modern social order in post-
modernism renders the idea of a safe and ‘unproblematic’, natural, personal
identity an anachronism. In response to post-modernism, the late-modern western
state denies responsibility for its space. To a large extent it can do little other; but
in its rhetoric, it denies that space is social, it denies that the self is always
constructed socially and acts socially. Instead we witness the privatisation of
459
social space. Such privatisation can enable individuals personally to utilise

resources in a more efficient way, or offer new opportunities for voluntary
cooperation, but this appears to occur at the expense of social tensions and
solidarity which require that the reality of interdependency is acknowledged. Only
a truly sociological imagination can aid in our understanding and guide projects.
Without this how can we have any faith that the privatisation of the social
networks internal to the nation state will mean the growth of extra-national bodies,
and the increasing self-awareness and reflexivity and control exercised by the self
over the self’s projects and life plans? On the contrary, in contemporary Britain
and the US, we witness a rhetoric which decries international agreements, and
denies any basic necessity or responsibility for interfacing and mediating the
range of social processes which constitute individuality. The voices of the right
claim that only by leaving the underclass to their own devices can a sense of
personal responsibility be (re)created. Gottfredson and Hirschi demonstrate the
impossibility of positivistically locating the criminal, while privatising the very
concept of criminality – what greater example of privatisation can we find than the
argument that the solution to crime lies in self-control, and that self-control is the
result of the processes of socialisation of familial institutions without any
contextualising of this process?
If post-modernism comes out of modernity, then who are we?

Where are we? How do we make sense of criminological ‘reality’?
Who are we? We are the result of the contingencies of our history and the
construction process of modernity. We are the product of an over-determination of
social forces. The ideal of personal identity in modernity is the modern self,
independent of gender, class, and race, creating a selfhood as a personal project.
The ultimate aim for the social project is a socially differentiated order with multiple
roles and aspirations, dreams and desires, but in which people are located and
interact on the basis of their desires, preferences, aspirations, needs... without
exploitation, oppression, victimisation, without the need to subject the other to
crime... yet gender, class and race do matter.
Gender, race, and class-social geography help constitute the (non) modern
identity. Contingency means that any diagram of the structures of criminological
theory – suitable for post-modernism – cannot be one which presupposes a firm
foundation; instead variable patterns of constitutionalism must be visualised. A
start has been made by Martens (1993, himself drawing upon an earlier article by
K Sandquist and reproduced in Bottoms, 1994).
460
If we are to be faithful to the project of positivism, then we are concerned to

understand the offender and the creation of his or her constitution; the advance
this type of diagram offers is that we can see the interaction of local and wider
policies. Each ring is itself mobile; the components impact upon each other. For
example, the qualities of the dwelling, and the residential district, provide
opportunities and stresses for both mother and father. The personalities of the family
interact with social structures over time; ideologies, cultural messages, notions of
the self, flow through various of these structures and the political and cultural
surrounds impact in a variety of ways. Dannefer (1984:100) suggests the failure of
most traditional theories of the self and socialisation, is their ‘ontogenetic’ approach
which down-plays the ‘profoundly interactive nature of self-society relations’, and
the variability of social environments.
The diagram cannot be static in time, it must allow for modernity itself. The
constitution of modern individuals requires an historically specific social ecology
and social control.
461
How can social arrangements appear just in post-modernism?

How can social order be legitimate under the culture of
contingency?
Traditionally, social arrangements attain legitimacy when they appear to reflect a

natural order. Weber’s typology distinguishes the static nature of legitimacy based
on tradition and custom (the Indian caste type) to that of legitimacy based on
rational discussion, agreement and formalised procedure (legal-rational).
Sociology has aided in legitimising modern social arrangements through
reinforcing the conception of modern society as freeing itself from the remnants
of the pre-modern feudal system and becoming the reflection of a structural-
functional complex. Social theory which stresses meritocracy, jurisprudence
which holds out law as rational, coherent and well principled, aids legitimacy by
sustaining the imagery of a functioning system working for modern aims. This is
rendered problematic by post-modernism. Late-modern legitimacy works in a
different fashion:
Self-control and disciplinisation

A crucial aspect of social control is socialisation. Socialisation is the incorporation
of mechanisms of predictability and repetitive behaviour in the actor without
obvious recourse to the coercion of the state; modern actions are deemed rational
actions, that is a specific form of social action in which actors can explain their
actions by reason defined by the pursuit of an understandable goal or as fitting the
norms (rules) of behaviour. Instead of social control as represented by
socialisation into the fixed pattern of beliefs of a mechanical solidarity, the social
control of organic solidarity was a dialectic, or interaction, of self and socialising
context, with self and social control being two aspects of the same process.
This process has intensified, and while it denotes the social creation of the
autonomous self for late-modernity, it occurs in the problematic conditions of
post-modernism.
Hegemony
A Marxist term which implies that control in today’s democratic societies is
exercised by the elites’ hegemony on the production of meaning. The critical
impact of post-modernism’s picture of the irrationality of many legitimacy
strategies is constrained, since the possible subversive role of the media and
discourses of disruption is defused by structuring (non) communication so that the
messages would not radically disrupt the hegemonic ideology of society. The idea
of hegemony was used in the 1950s and 1960s to sensitise us to the processes of:
• the centralisation of the responsible media, eg the corporatisation of newspapers,
television;
• the marginalising and rendering non-sensical the messages of the dissent media;
462
• the standardisation of the public with prefabricated, standard motives for

important action, eg consumption;
• multiplicity of non-important messages, eg style, fashion, personal scandals.
Hegemony is more complex in post-modernism; it is a process which is almost a
mirage of itself. It exists in post-modernism as a consequence of the increasing
diversity of knowledge bytes and perspectives; while such diversity means it is
difficult to give an overriding substantive justification to policy which ensures
consensus, it is also difficult to sustain a critique which stops policy.
Late-modern political and social decision-making remains the rule of

experts
Late-modern democracy depends upon apathy. A full discussion of social issues in
the culture of contingency and the over-supply of information would be difficult to
steer into consensus. Hence while we keep a facade of discussion, involvement
and political influence needs to be confined to the reasonable and rational; the
‘others’ are distanced and rendered unable to perceive the worth of involvement.
Privatising social space looks like it returns power to localities, it looks like it
empowers individuals at the expense of bureaucracies – which both anarchists and
libertarians claim oppress – but amounts to a de-socialising of space which threatens
to unleash multiple sites of oppression, small scale and ubiquitous.
Under post-modernism substantive legitimacy is not crucially

important: the appearance of legitimacy resides in procedure
One aim for knowledge in modernity was to make society visible to itself – to
enable reflexivity. It is the ideal of the open society, or the transparent society,
where knowledge reflects reality. Conversely the post-modern perception of
knowledge holds knowledge, scientific truths, to be a matter of procedure – what
we defend as truth is a result of the best effort(s) we can make in the search for it,
but it is always limited to our efforts and procedures, hence it is never absolute.
Thus decisions made by experts are human, and not linked to some extra-human
scientific guarantee. Decisions made by experts are always a result of holding
some factors relevant and others irrelevant. If the criteria of relevance changes, the
outcome of the decision changes – the legitimacy of the decision, the justice of the
distribution of costs and benefits, becomes a result of the criteria of relevancy; and
this is ultimately a question of drawing boundaries. In other words it is deeply
political. It is a matter of saying we hold these factors to be relevant and these not
to be – but this is not how rational-legal legitimacy is presented: it is presented as
if it had to be this way, as if this outcome follows naturally. What then is the
present law in post-modernism founded upon? Classical criminology founded it
upon certain narratives of social development, and utilitarianism as the revealed
ethics of nature, what can post-modernism found law upon? Answer: it does not
need foundations since it can create it own legitimacy in procedural correctness.
463
This, properly understood, is Weber’s point: modern legal-rational authority does

not need substantive legitimation, only formal legitimation. Thus we can make
any activity or omission a crime – crime still exists where there is no legitimate
social purpose to such legislation. The objectivism of this naturalist paradigm is a
mirage – a rhetoric which obscures reality. It is because of this very non-
availability of some natural objectivism that law becomes increasingly important.
Law does not need foundations – law can become autopoietic – hence law
provides a strong post-modern foundation; it is pure pragmatism. How do we
resolve the crisis of pure rationality? We engage in practical rationality, ie we act.
We legislate. We can continue to do so. The crisis engendered by post-modernism
can be countered by legislation (including de-legislation ie decriminalisation) and
policing.
This de-legitimising of legitimacy requires a psychological frame. Easton (1965)
adopted a system’s approach to political authority arguing that a political system
will appear legitimate if (a) it reflects the ethnic and cultural identity of the nation,
and (b) it meets the needs and interests of the population. Both of these factors
may become more difficult in post-modernism, resulting in the state losing faith in
its ability to manage many of the ‘progressive’ tasks it adopted in modernity, and
the populace losing faith in the rational, political structure. The ‘rational’ political
system will be followed as long as the social goods are provided which meet the
needs and interests of the populace.
Social justice, positionality and the emotions of post-modernism
Positionality – social geography – is a crucial factor in drawing up the discourses

of justice and social theory. The practical reality of justice has usually been the
justice of the victors. Criminology has neglected the vast crimes which the victors
have not labelled. Common to both the later Marx and Nietzsche, was the
argument that a great deal of what we call the philosophy of social justice, or the
sociology of structural functionalism, is the ascription of the labels ‘just’, ‘natural’
or ‘functional’ to arrangements that are phenomena of power which victimise,
neglect, marginalise and discipline others. As left realism points out, we err when
we attribute the phenomena of the criminal act to the offender alone, for the self is
located in social networks. Conversely, right realism uses an idea of ‘reactive
attitudes’. Reactive attitudes are emotional states aroused when we observe the
actions of others or groups of others, whom we consider are agents acting within
the same moral framework that we inhabit, and capable of diverse activity; we get
angry when they commit crime because we treat them as fellow moral creatures.
When harm is caused by accident our anger decreases, since we realise no moral
blame is attributable – Right realism claims positivism appears to run counter to
these moral reactions, since it sometimes argues the offender is not responsible for
his or her actions (cf the Kantian argument of Strawson, 1974, on how deeply
464
embedded these moral reactions are). Right realists assert it is correct to get angry
over crime. In their analyses, crime is not simply a social problem, it is a matter
calling for the expression of anger and we rightly ask for revenge; to act otherwise
would be to deny our involvement in moral communities.
But this anger is not the only emotion which gains ground in post-modernism.
Resentment, as defined by Denzin (1984:224-8) is the self-poisoning form of self-
hatred which arises from the systematic repression of certain emotions, including
envy, pride, anger, and the desire for revenge and self-conquest. Denzin believes it
to be the predominant post-modernist emotion. It moulds all of the above emotional
states into a pervasive view of the world. This emotion, which builds on revenge,
hatred, malice and joy at another’s misfortune, reflects an underlying self-hatred
and lack of self-worth. It develops an emotional mood systematically produced by
those social structures, including the social democracies, which espouse the equality
of rights for all, while permitting wide gaps between expectations and what is in
fact achievable. These social structures ‘engender resentment on the part of the
young, the elderly, women, the handicapped, the sexually and morally stigmatised,
and members of racial and ethnic minorities’ (Denzin, 1984:226). Resentment is
greatest when self, or group, injury is experienced as destiny and beyond one’s
control. When powerlessness and hopelessness are great, resentment increases. In
such moments the other is transformed into an object deserving of revenge and
violence.
Denzin argues that the cultural logics of late capitalism amplify and increase
resentment. The continual circulation of commodified fantasies stressing erotic
beauty, wealth, masculinity, achievement, happiness, successful love
relationships, and joyous, free selfhood make it clear that for many these states can
never be attained. Existential anxiety, fear, and hatred feed on these conditions;
violence towards self and others is thereby produced. The impact is particularly
acute in the US; for over half of the African American population an
overwhelming part of life in post-modernism consists of these conditions (West,
1988:277).
In the Nietzschean analysis, resentment flows from two sources:
• rage against the human condition with the inevitability of death for us all: we
can calls this existential resentment. Whilst pre-modern religious structures
offered solace in the after-life, in modern conditions we can find no
transcendental purpose for suffering and death; and
• from the institutional arrangements which impose victimisation, suffering and
injury on some for the benefit of others. We can call this civic resentment. The
culture of contingency magnifies both sources of resentment setting up a fund
of emotionality which can prove destructive.
465
How can a form of social justice be constructed that copes with the
culture of contingency?
To quote the spirit of Weber again: human beings need a meaningful cosmos. If an
individual becomes radically uncertain as to his or her identity, inaction and social
paralysis results. What is the result if a nation has no means of ensuring that the
existential feeling of inclusivity is achieved? The appeal of the new common sense
of new right realism is to simple certainties and an uncomplicated cosmos.
Herrenstein and Murray (1994), for example, attempt to placate both forms of
resentment among the black underclass: by arguing that lower I.Q. is the reason
for their greater burden of suffering in everyday life, the authors try to down-play
contingency, provide a naturalism to legitimise disparity, and sooth the existential
crisis. For Murray the members of the underclass should simply change their
aspirations to more realistic levels: they should, in other words, deny their modernity.
The utopia of modern organisational ‘social or positive’ justice, lay in the
expectation that modernity could ultimately show us who or what everyone –
women, men, blacks, homosexuals, jews, criminals, the mentally ill – actually or
‘really’ are. When we knew the basic truths of the human condition the just society
could be created and stabilised. But the world discovered by science has not become
a place of stable identities and essential objects whose secrets are known for all
time, but rather a set of techno-objects, of experimental results, of commodities
and images. Counterpoised to this unstable world is the nostalgia for the world of
familiar, solid, unitary, stable and ‘authoritative’ reality. Can a justice which is
fluid and a question of procedure be argued for? An argument that while we can
not have a stable state of justice we can act justly? Lyotard (1985), without a touch
of irony, calls this Just Gaming.
Is a post-modern justice a question of mobility, of striving for the just even
though one realises that no one particular social arrangement is just? Is the just
arrangement that result which is to be accepted if it is the best that we can achieve,
given the conditions?
Without a continuing narrative of modernity,Just Gaming

becomes just gaming
This image of a Just Gaming depends upon building upon the projects of the
enlightenment, but the voices of both the right and far left cry out that modernity
lies exhausted... empowerment, it is said, is a question of more money in one’s
pocket. Without the dream of the social, what is to be the reality of everyday life,
what are we to do? We simply game. We seduce, we offer, we accept, we take, we
play, we game – the social becomes a site of games connected only by the market
and those who have the skills enjoy everyday life – for the others, a quiet (and
sometimes not-so-quiet) terrorism awaits. Skills are differentially distributed and
466
rewarded: and a special set of skills are required to negotiate the post-modern
condition.
Institutions also game: the central tactic of defending white collar crime is simple
– make it appear so complicated that no one can follow it and thereby allocate
responsibility. Commentators of post-modernism, such as Baudrillard (1990),
remind us that we increasingly live in a world of symbols where they have their
own exchange value, not only different from their use value, but contradictory to
it. Thus when in order to assess criminal liability, the American Government asked
the multinational Exxon for a general report on all its activities throughout the
world, the response was 12 volumes of 1,000 pages each, which would take any
prosecution team years of work to read, yet alone analyse. The request for
information delivers us into the impossibility of useful information. Exxon game
with the request for information and thus the old structure of knowledge mirroring
nature, and thereby apportioning liability, is incapable of fruition.
Gaming is different for the underclass. Harrison’s Inside the Inner City (1985)
paints a grim picture of a bleak world of immediate existence for those who live on
benefits. In the charity Campaign Against Poverty’s Decade of Despair a basic
rate pensioner writes:
‘When you are poor, you have to be extra good at managing, extra good at self-
discipline, extra good at economising, extra good at managing without and extra good
at dealing with constant crisis, stress and frustration. Few of us are extra good. The
rich aren’t.’ (Quoted Fainstein, et al, 1992:146)
Is post-modernism the collapse of any drive towards social

individuality; are we mere modular components?
Lefebvre (1984), in his Marxist influenced analysis of everyday life, claimed the
failure of modernity lay in the alienation we experience as we understand our
powerlessness to influence the world in which we live; our search for moral
guidelines for our conduct and belief finds meaninglessness; our search for
commonality founders upon our experience of isolation from others and
estrangement from ourselves. Modern society must have meaning beyond the games
of consumption to offer coherence and – as John Stuart Mill earlier – Lefebvre
offers it in the production of autonomous, thinking, feeling individuals able to
experience their own desires and develop their own life-styles. This is a utopia
which links desires of both right and left. Critics, however, ask; ‘has the modern
project of individual autonomy been subordinated and subsumed by the market-
defined and market-orientated freedom of consumer choice?’ (Bauman, 1987:189).
Post-modernism, moreover, does not mean the end of bureaucracy; there is a new
form of organised structuring. Ernest Gellner (1994) presents the image of modular
man. Modular man is a similar idea to that of modular furniture:
‘The point about such furniture is that it comes in bits which are agglutinative: you
can buy one bit which will function on its own, but when your needs, income or space
467
available augment, you can buy another. It will fit in with the one acquired previously,
and the whole thing will still have a coherence, aesthetically and technically. You can
combine and recombine the bits at will.’ (1994:97)
With traditional furniture you buy the complete unit in one go. Endeavouring to
combine one piece of modular furniture with traditional furniture is risky and
usually results in an eclectic, incoherent mess. Traditional man fits a particular
social structure; he is like a piece of furniture vividly marked by a given style. He
simply does not blend with men of a different cultural mould. Throughout history
men have not been modular, rather they have inhabited a segmentary society in
which their actions make sense and have subjective meaning only as part of the
totality. Modernity created in the West a civil society with tolerance, diversity,
opportunity, chance, unexpected events, contingency and the preparedness to
perform a variety of tasks. Civil society exists with a social order forged through
links both effective and flexible, specific and instrumental. Modular man:
‘... is highly variable, not to say volatile in his activities. He is modular because he is
capable of performing highly diverse tasks in the same general cultural idiom, if
necessary reading up manuals of specific jobs in the general standard style of the
culture in question.’ (Ibid: 102)
Modular man games: he attends an employment interview and convinces the panel
that he can do the job. He may lie in over-stating his experience – seduce the panel
with his performability – but the seduction is also a promise to perform further. He
has asserted that he is capable of an amazing, indeed bewildering, diversity of
tasks. For Gellner:
‘It is his emergence or reproduction which is the crucial problem of Civil Society.’
(Ibid: 102)
This idea of the modular man is a variation of the capabilities expected of our late-
modern self – modernity has (ideally) a form of selfhood which developed the
sense of inwardness; it is an interiorised self; a self with a developed memory (the
key to identity for Hume); a self which has learned to plan today for its future (the
rational self of Weber; a self of delayed gratification); a self which has learned to
relate to the world as a terrain of commodities, and to treat itself as a commodity
worth investing in (the drive to education, to gain degrees etc); a self which has
learned to organise itself as an agent of self-interest; a self which has learned to
read its soul as an object of knowledge and freedom; a self which has learned to
monitor its impulses, its desires so they can be directed and redirected into
purposes which cohere with each other fitting into the structures and games of the
social; a self which has learned the interiority of the rules of the social, to abide by
the norms; a self whose increased interiority and coherence enables it to develop a
sense of guilt (as opposed to shame), and renders it capable of being held
responsible for actions which are now viewed as pertaining, and for all practical
purposes (for the practical rationality of Kantian judgment – the courtroom) as
originating, with itself (his actions, his crimes) and subjected to his control (his
criminality).
468
But this is also a self that has learned to judge its success by its ability to use the
market and to attain the commodities the market exchanges. The late-modern self
is a consuming self, a self which returns to the status driven emblems of the pre-
modern, but while the pre-modern self fitted into his or her emblems by the status
location of his or her birth, the culture of contingency makes the status of the late-
modern self, the accumulation of the emblems of status, a matter of personal
choice. So this self, located in post-modernism, claims he or she provides style to
his or her life; claims that in accumulating and using commodities before they can
become a bind, that he or she is free. But in turning the individual’s needs for
personal autonomy, self-definition, authentic life and personal development into
the systemic process of the need to possess, and consume market-offered goods,
the self may prove weak to the very task of self-definition and personal autonomy
that appear the goal. Surrender to the market and to the image of the self-
regulating system, is the failure of the enlightenment project, and in the self
amounts to a resistance to becoming truly modern. The (all-too) social self thus
renders itself susceptible to mental illness, crime, drug-taking, delinquency and
the emotionality of resentment.
The ideal late-modern self fits a variety of late-modern games; our

modular man possesses social capital: is criminality a function of
social capital?
To game successfully one needs capital. Post-modernism creates and demands

new forms of capital. Today, capital is not just money, it is also a range of individual
factors – such as IQ and personality traits and social skills such as tolerance levels,
the ability to handle stress in a non-violent way, the ability to articulate and
communicate ideas and experiences. The aim of criminological positivism has
been to locate the roots of the perceived behavioural consistency of delinquents
and adult offenders in a stable tendency (criminality) towards offending and other
forms of troublesome behaviour. If one assumes that ‘there exists a single syndrome
made up of a broad variety of antisocial behaviours arising in childhood and
continuing into adulthood’ (Robins and Ratcliff, 1980:248), then finding its
foundation solves the issue of criminality. Critics of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s
thesis of self-control, for example, Nagin and Paternoster (1991), identify an
assumption of population heterogeneity in an underlying propensity to crime
established early in life and which remains stable over time. The varying forms of
labelled ‘anti-social behaviour’, especially drug-taking, reckless behaviour causing
accidents (particularly while driving), are read as expressions of the same underlying
trait or propensity. But, as labelling theory highlighted, continuity may be for a
variety of reasons, and embedded in a range of processes in which individual traits
or propensities are only one factor; this is most clear when we place the processes
which labelling theory alerts us to within an awareness of social structures, structural
469
disadvantages and diminished life chances. Additionally, it may be that early

delinquent behaviour indirectly affects later criminal offending by reducing the
range of informal links and informal social controls. For Gottfredson and Hirschi
(1990), the connection between early delinquency and adult crime is the underlying
propensity. Similarly, Herrenstein and Murray (1994) hold that as individuals sort
themselves out in their life courses, where they end in the various niches of the
social structure is a result of underlying propensities or traits (personality, IQ, self-
control). Other features, such as the experience of unemployment or location in
social geography, are regarded as spurious and largely consequent upon the
individual-level differences which are either inherited or caused by family-school
processes at an early age (see, for example, Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990:154-
168).
Much of the empirical work of traditional criminology gains in depth when we
re-analyse it allowing for the changing requirements of socialisation and the
development of late-modernity. In Crime in the Making: pathways and turning
points through life, Sampson and Laub (1993) use the concept of ‘social capital’
to develop a theory of informal social control based on a re-analysis of data created
by the longitudinal studies involving 1,000 individuals carried out by the Gluecks
in the 1940s and 1950s. They concluded that the causes of crime within the Glueck’s
study lay ‘in structural disadvantage, weakened informal social bonds to family,
school, and work, and the disruption of social relations between individuals and
institutions that provide social capital’ (1993:255).
Family and social structural factors interact: although many studies indicate
that low income, unemployment and under-employment increase the risk of
family disruption (for example, Currie, 1985; Wilson, 1987; Sampson 1987) the
tendency in previous criminology (for example, Burt (1925), and the Gluecks,
1940, 1968) was to see social context and family factors as somehow separate.
This demarcation was mirrored in the public-private distinction embedded in
political philosophy and legal thought. While a more thoroughgoing interactive
approach must be accepted we can also see that a tendency towards staticity was
inbuilt in previous theorising. For example, for much of this century, the notion of
the appropriate social role was the idea through which sociology linked social
structure and individual constitutionality; successful socialisation in large part
was learning the social personality, the expectations and norms, appropriate for
this or that role prescribed for you by your place in the social structure. In post-
modernism the relatively well established foundations of viewing society, self,
and community constructed within the context of industrialism have been
radically shaken, if not toppled completely. Under the relative consensus existing
in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and still harboured after today, socialisation and
childrearing practices emphasised concepts of belonging, and saw the
development of the self as a process enabled and restrained by location in
relatively coherent and integrative practices. Positivist criminology subjected to
analysis those individuals appearing to fail to integrate into the structure of
470
normalcy. Such analysis must change in a post-modernism which downgrades

notions of social order based on foundations and functional coherence, in favour
of a more process-based, fluid and action-orientated model. When we
acknowledge that social processes involve both individual characteristics such as
personality traits and IQ tolerance levels, and social structural factors such as
family disruptions, poverty, underclass in interaction, a considerable range of
variables converge, interact and constitute each other.
Neither, in searching for explanations for crime in individual traits, can
personality forms and self-control be separated out from the life course and the
changing patterns of daily life, since the various forms of crime are structured by
social opportunities to commit or refrain from crime, differential reactions by
concerned agencies/individuals and the criminal justice system, the constraints
imposed by ageing and the networks of social ties which change, weaken, or
intensify feelings of belonging and bonding to significant others. Processes of
informal social control vary in their effects across different parts of social
geography and from childhood to adulthood. The important institutions of
informal and formal social control vary across the life span and in individual
locations. We have noted, for example, that women have been more the object of
informal social control centred on the family and home than men, who have been
more the subjects and objects of formal control. Such informal control need not be
seen as imposed from outside but may consist in large part of internalised
expectations and attitudes. The previous discussion of the ethics of responsibility
alerts us to the idea of informal social control as also being the acceptance of
responsibility, of the social ties of love and nurturing, which may serve to defy the
utilitarian demands to commit crime. Across the life span, individuals vary in their
contact with, and experience of, family, school, peer groups, neighbourhood
environment, contact time with concerned ‘others’, institutions of higher
education or vocational training, employment, love affairs and understanding of
the other sex and other racial groups. They vary, additionally, in their contact with
welfare and juvenile justice system officials, police and the adult criminal justice
system. While a central feature of the social control perspective is that of crime
resulting from the weakening of individuals’ bonds to society and near groups
(family, school), as such bonds decrease the tendency is to require the formal
social control network to increase surveillance, demand conformity and
incarcerate those offending; yet social control from a constructivist perspective is
the ability of a social group to create itself, regulate itself according to desired
principles, norms and values and to make the norms and rules effective through
socialisation. The dream of the classical criminologist is to achieve such a
coherent and rationally structured whole – that is a social justice; post-modernism
renders the whole complex and ambiguous. The weakness of neo-classicism is to
return to justice without the social.
Faced with the absence of a coherent and well structured modernity, life in
post-modernism can be a grand adventure. Surrounded by a multiplicity of images,
471
in a terrain devoid of the ultimate markers of certainty, armed with the injunction
to create oneself, both the late-modern individual and the late-modern society are
engaged in a journey into the unknown. If individual and social happiness is the
goal, the search for happiness occurs in a condition where the boundaries of the
possible and the imaginable constantly recede. This is an adventure only partially
possible to a very small number of the elites of past generations. Late-modernity
declares that it is now open to us all, rather it is imposed on vast numbers who may
not have the resources to benefit, who may not be able to play, who lack the resources
to make oneself and to voyage within post-modernism – economic, human and
social capital. We traditionally acknowledge that those who do not have enough
economic capital have lesser life chances, we now understand that the conditions
of post-modernism demand more and greater sophistication in social skills and
technical ability – we can call this human capital; we can see that personality,
flexibility, tolerance, and self-esteem are also required, and these come for
individuals from their relationships with others. The quality and effects of these
relationships we can call social capital. Thus social capital is the result of investments
in personal relationships, the experiencing of being loved, valued, appreciated,
desired, supported, tutored, trusted, relied upon, and the myriad other forms of
deep human interaction and dependency; qualities most clearly visible in the total
dependency of the new born child, and, when appropriately mediated, characterises
all forms of social life thereafter.
The three forms of capital – economic, human and social – interact. One aspect
of social capital is the experiencing of love and human resources, for example,
time and attention, as a child. Individuals vary in the amount of attention they
receive as (potential) individuals. No two children are treated exactly the same.
Currently, many parents, for example, spend more time reading to their baby
daughters then they do to their sons. Since school performance is highly focused
around literacy (reading/writings skills), they are, albeit unwittingly, devoting
more social capital towards constructing daughters who will preform better at
school than sons. Socio-economic disadvantage, or a shortage of economic capital
(associated, for example, with parents who must work extremely long hours and
cannot afford a child-minder), means a reduction in the amount of social capital
invested in the child. We would expect, therefore, poverty and disadvantage to
have strong indirect effects on crime, irrespective of direct effects. Social relations
between individuals – child and parent(s), teacher-student, friends, employer-
employee – at any stage in the life course, are a form of social investment or social
capital. Social capital derived from strong social relations (or strong social bonds),
is first experienced as a child within the family, and thereafter apparent, in
differing forms, as an adolescent at school, among peer groups and ‘significant
others’, among colleagues and employers at work, and among fellow members of
sporting teams. These experiences, if positive, augment the self, strengthening the
psychological resources individuals can draw upon as they move through life and
strongly supporting their sense of self-worth, self-esteem and self-confidence.
472
Social capital is a factor in the construction of social solidarity. Durkheim’s

message of social solidarity in organic conditions was of the variety of such relations
and the expectation that if they were experienced with an appreciation of
interdependence, then individuals would value such interaction and understand
the interconnectedness of modernity. Interdependent social bonds flow from the
increasing division of labour, complexity of tasks and life networks; the experiencing
of interdependent social bonds increases social capital and requires personal
investment in social relations and institutions (as well as social values: the
maintenance of deep social relations with individuals of a range of ethnic and
social groups amounts to a practical adherence to the principles of tolerance and
multi-ethnicity). Social capital can be affected by social policy since social capital,
for example, social ties embedded in work and family institutions, flows from
experiences and relations between people in socio-economic situations and is
affected by social stratification, ideologies and gender concepts. It can be directly
affected by criminal justice policies of incarceration and punitive control which
serve to undermine the various forms of informal social control; thus criminal
justice can cause crime.
A final end-word? Beyond post-modernist doubts?
Where are we? Where do we go? What is the nature of this journey? As long as we
keep asking these questions we are moderns – obsessed with the task of
understanding (our)selves and contexts – obsessed with the task of building an
immanence, a place to reside, and giving ourselves a presence to grace it.
To make the work the place for a modern, rational, autonomous self, man killed
the transcendental presence of the God(s) that previously set the contours of the
natural. We were to fill the world with the structures and forms of new buildings,
bounded by the phenomena of the true nature and society. Firm contours, firm
knowledges, secure societies; criminology took on a task, that of giving advice to
the powerful concerning social control and understanding crime. We have traced
its journey through modernity into post-modernism; among the themes it played
with were the twin demands of liberty and discipline – of sociology and moral
theory – of empiricism and normative theory. Universal values stand off against
the claims of parochial localities; communal desire humanises the abstractness
and distance of the universalistic concept.
Because its knowledges were twined with power, criminology has mainly been
the discourse of the socially powerful – it has not been helped by the narrowness
of its concerns with official crime. Modernity was ruthless in its construction
process; it was founded in part on what we now call crimes against humanity – on
slavery, on the extinction of indigenous populations, on broken treaties, on
extortion – but because it moved under the narratives of progress these events
473
were called part of the civilising process. While the crime of genocide has never
been prosecuted, the concept of crimes against humanity was created by the
victors after a world war, and we now consider no conduct of humans an immunity
beyond law: beyond crime.
What are the limits of our discourse? If criminology were to remove itself from
official power all and everything becomes talked about. Today, the voices of law
and order, of the anger of the super-class, calls upon criminology to provide more
and better information for social control. Social order is under stress world wide:
Pessimistic commentators claim a new empire of fortress Europe, North America,
Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Australia and certain other countries seems certain to
face a new barbarism outside its walls. Within its walls our cities begin to radically
divide – the underclass threatens. When we look around we seem surrounded by
crime while it becomes difficult to tell the important from the unimportant.
Modernity destroyed to create – power ensued – but no settled structure ensued.
Structures we now understand as meditations, as techo-rods, as blends of knowledge
and power, as hybrids – nowhere do we build using pure materials, pure humanity,
pure selves, pure natural forces. Thus the late-modern world takes on the appearance
of hyper-reality; its forms the creation of a world where the attribution of value
gets even more difficult to ascribe, where we are surrounded by signs, perspectives;
where nothing is pure essence and everything is other-than-essential.
Now, in that process we call post-modernism, we search for commonality, for
social solidarity. Modernity set in train the very processes that created the modern
self, and now offers only the warning that the self must control itself. But the self
needs guidance, needs the touch of the transcendent. Must it be condemned to
dream and to dreams alone? In the Gay Science Nietzsche warned of our fate: we
would know we were dreaming, but go on dreaming. Currently we fool ourselves
that deconstruction, demystification, so strips the Emperor of his clothing that the
world will simply right itself. Another dream...
The dialectic of life is of the mind, the body and our dreams. At one point, as
Christ lay dying, previous narratives told of the violence and vulnerability which
underlies the human spirit – christians, henceforth, knew of the transubstantiation
of the body and blood of Christ. The foundation of divine purpose... but we now
know we are of the flesh and blood of mortality. Humanity is its own secret; its
own foundation. We cannot dream of other than us... we are mystery enough.
Perhaps Brian Patten recognised this in his poem A Drop of Unclouded Blood
wherein he thought:
‘of these cities floating fragile
across the earth’s crust
and of how they are in need
of a drop of magic blood
a drop of unclouded blood.’
Patten dreamed of purity, of an essence for:
‘children adrift in their temporary world
474
beneath their dreaming is a drop of blood

refusing the sun’s heat
a drop of blood more pure than any other blood.’
This search for purity is not a refusal of hope, or progress, nor reaction, for this
blood reflects the dialectic of the particular and the universal.
‘I need to sever all connection with the habits
that make the heart
love only certain things
I need a drop of magic blood for that
a drop of unclouded blood.’
Blood comes in many forms – the spilling of human blood pre-dates the concept
of crime modernity constructed – but it takes new meanings in post-modernism. If
the Los Angeles riots were the first post-modern urban riots, then the conflict in
Ex-Yugoslavia is the first post-modern war. Racked by multiple perspectives and
competing interest domains, its tragedy is the destruction of the hope for democratic
plurality; the turning away from the building of a vibrant society of interaction and
individuality; from constructing identities whether Bosnian-Serb, Bosnian-Muslim,
or Bosnian-Croat, that are modern. The international community, faced with the
prospect of making a stand on a normative orientation to post-modernism, has lost
itself in double dealing and cynical hypocrisy; the words crime and criminal become
used and abused. I am told of a Serbian soldier who was tenth in line to gang-rape
a Bosnian-Moslem woman. As the person who was eighth penetrated the beaten,
unconscious, mutilated, semen-soaked body, this soldier could take it no longer,
and placing his rifle against her prostrate head, he blew out her brains. The Bosnian-
Serb authorities, apparently, thought him a perfect scapegoat, he was to be charged
with rape and murder, and proposed for the War Crimes Tribunal – but others
spoke of the ‘reality’, and no action took place. Another unreported crime, another
action to be forgotten; another event criminology finds difficult to talk about. Was
he a criminal, or was he just a man who had belatedly found his humanity? Are the
real criminals those powers that stood by allowing this conflict to continue? And
what is the role of those who said the truth was too difficult to ascertain?
We talk, we analyse, we argue; we lose our selves in our doubts – but we also
suffer, kill, love, despair. Our need is for discourses which move between the forms
and structures of the big and the small, of the powerful and the victims; for a
criminology which mirrors self-doubt, not as a reason for despair, but as the
grounding for continual (re)construction. Doubt is essential to creation; self doubt,
ambivalence as to the human condition is the foundation. The fact that we doubt
all is not grounds for inaction, but evidence of the actions of moderns searching
for a better humanity, conscious of contingency and their social fragility; conscious,
that is, of their modernity and the very fragility and imcompleteness of its
constitution.
475
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrahamsen, D (1944) Crime and the Human Mind, New York: Columbia
University Press
Adler, F (1975) Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal, New
York: McGraw Hill
Adorno, T (1973) The Jargon of Authenticity, Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University
Press
Akers, Ronald (1977) Deviant Behaviour: A Social Learning Approach, Belmont,
Calif: Wadsworth
Allen, V and and Greenberger, D (1978) ‘An Aesthetic Theory of vandalism’,
Crime and Delinquency, 24
Allsop, JF and Feldman, MP (1975) ‘Extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism
and anti-social behaviour in school girls’, Social Behaviour and Personality, 2
Althusser, Louis (1971) Lenin and Philosophy, New York: Monthly Review Press
Amdur, RL (1989) ‘Testing casual models of delinquency: A methodological
critique’, Criminal Justice and Behaviour, 16
Anderson, M (1979), Welfare, Palo Alto: Hoover Institute Press
Arblaster, Anthony (1984) The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell
Arendt, H (1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New
York: Viking Press
Ascher, C (1979) ‘On Encountering the I and the We in Simone de Beauvoir’s
Memoirs’, in The Second Sex - Thirty Years Later, New York: New York
Institute for the Humanities
Atkinson, JM (1971) ‘Societal Reaction to Suicide’, in S Cohen (ed), Images of
Deviance, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books
Auld, J, Dorn, N and South, N (1986) ‘Irregular work, Irregular Pleasures: Herion
in the 1980’s’, in Roger Matthews and Jock Young (eds), Confronting Crime,
London: Sage
Auletta, K (1982) The Underclass, New York: Random House
Austin, J (1832) The Province of Jurisprudence Determined and the Uses of the
Study of Jurisprudence, London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson
- (1873) Lectures on Jurisprudence or the Philosophy of Positive Law 4th ed
(1885, 5th edn), edited by R Campbell, London: John Murray
Austin, RL (1977) ‘Commitment, neutralization and delinquency’, in TN Ferdinand
(ed) Juvenile delinquency: little brother grows up, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage
Barbanel, J (1989) ‘How despair is engulfing a generation in New York’, New
York Times, April 2
477
Bibliography
Bachman JG & O’Malley, PM (1978) Youth in transition, Volume VI: Adolescence

to adulthood: Change and stability in the lives of young men, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press
Bacon, Francis Collected Works, Vol 3
Bacon, R and Eltis, W (1978) Britain’s Economic Problem: Too Few Producers,
London: Macmillan
Bagguley, P and Mann, K (1992) ‘Idle Thieving Bastards? Scholarly
Representations of the ‘Underclass”, Work, Employment & Society, Vol 6,
No1
Bahr SJ (1979) ‘Family determinants and effects of deviance’, in WR Burr, R Hill,
FINye & IL Reiss (eds), Contemporary theories about the family: research-
based theories, Vol1, New York: Free Press
Barnes, Harry E, and Teeters, Negley K (1951) New Horizons in Criminology, 2d
ed New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc
Bartol, CR (1980) Criminal Behaviour: A Psychosocial Approach, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Baudrillard, Jean (1981) For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St
Louis: Telos Press
- (1988) Selected Writings, Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press
- (1990) Fatal Strategies: crystal revenge, New York: Semiotext(e)/Pluto Press
Bauman, Zygmunt (1987) Legislators and Interpreters, Cambridge: Polity Press
- (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press
- (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge: Polity Press
- (1993) Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell
Baxter, James K (1980) Collected Poems, Wellington/Oxford: Oxford University
Press
Beccaria, Cesare ([1764] 1963) On Crimes and Punishments, Henry Paolucci trans
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Also
- ([1764] 1986) On Crimes and Punishments, David Young trans Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing
Becker, Howard (1963) The Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New
York: Free Press
Beirne, Piers (1993) Inventing Criminology: essays on the rise of ‘Homo
Criminalis’, Albany: State University of New York Press
Bell, D (1979) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York
Belson, William (1975) Juvenile Theft: The causal Factors, London: Harper &
Row
Benedict, Ruth (1946) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese
Culture, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
478
Bibliography
Benson, ML (1985) ‘Denying the guilty mind: Accounting for involvement in a

white-collar crime’, Criminology, 23
Bentham, J (1982) A Fragment of Government and an Introduction to the Principles
of Morals and Legislation, J Barns and H Hart, (eds) London
- ([1791] 1843) ‘Panopticon or Inspection House’, in the Collected Works of
Jeremy Bentham, J Bowring (ed), London
Berger, P, Berger, B, and Kellner, H (1974) The Homeless Mind, New York: Vintage
Books
Berman, M (1983) All That is Solid Melts into Air, London: Verso
Bernard TJ (1987) ‘Structure and control: Reconsidering Hirschi’s concept of
commitment’, Justice Quarterly, 4
- (1987) ‘Testing Structural Strain Theories’, Journal of Research in Crime
and Delinquency, 24
Berns, Walter (1979) Capital Punishment, London: Basic Books
Bernstein, Richard, J (1986) ‘Rethinking the Social and the Political’, in
Philosophical profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode, Oxford: Polity Press/
Basil Blackwell
Bishop, C (1931) Women and Crime, London: Chatto and Windus
Black, Donald (1976) The Behaviour of Law, New York: Academic Press
- (1984) ‘Crime as Social Control’, in Toward a General Theory of Social Control:
Vol 2: Selected Problems, Donald Black, ed, London: Academic Press, INC
Blackstone, William ([1765-9] 1973) Commentaries on the Laws of England, G
Jones (ed), London
Blumenberg, Hans (1983) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press
Bock, KE (1980) Human Nature and History: a response to sociobiology, New
York: Columbia University Press
Bonger, Willem (1936) An Introduction to Criminology, London: Methuen
Bottoms, Anthony, E (1994) ‘Environmental Criminology’, in Mike Maguire, Rod
Morgan, and Robert Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology,
Oxford: Clarendon Press
Bowlby, J (1944) ‘Forty-four juvenile thieves’, International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 25: 1-57
- (1946) Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-Life,
London: Baillière, Tindall, & Cox
- (1951) Maternal Care and Mental Health, Geneva: World Health Organisation
- (1979) The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds, London: Tavistock
Bowlby, J and Salter-Ainsworth, MD (1965) Child Care and the Growth of Love,
Harmondsworth: Penguin
479
Bibliography
Bowlby, J, Ainsworth, MD, Boston, M, and Rosenbluth, D (1956) ‘The effects of

mother-child separation: a follow-up study’, British Journal of Medical
Psychology 29
- (1982) ‘Physical appearance and criminality’, Current Psychological Reviews
2: 269-81
Box S (1971) Deviance, Reality and Society, London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
- (1983) Power, Crime and Mystification, London: Tavistock
Box S and C Hale (1983) ‘Liberation and Female Criminality in England and
Wales’, British Journal of Criminology 23
Boxill, Bernard, R (1991) ‘Wilson on the truly Disadvantaged’, Ethics, Vol 101
Braithwaite, J (1981) ‘The myth of social class and criminality reconsidered’,
American Sociological Review, 46
- (1989) Crime, Shame, and Reintegration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- (1991) ‘Poverty, Power, White-Collar Crime and the Paradoxs of Criminological
Theory’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, January
- (1992) ‘Reducing the Crime Problem: a not so dismal criminology’, Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 25
Brennan, T and Huizinga, D (1975) Theory validation and aggregate national data
(Integration Report of the Office of Youth Opportunity Research, Boulder,
Co: Behavioural Research Institute
Brenner, H (1971) Time Series Analysis of Relationships Between Selected
Economic and Social Indicators, vol 1: Texts and Appendices, Washington,
DC: US Government Printing Office
Brodribb, Somer (1992) Nothing Mat[t]ers: a feminist critique of postmodernism,
Melbourne: Spinifex
Buckle, A, and Farrington, D (1984) ‘An Observational Study of Shoplifting’,
British Journal of Criminology, 24
Burgess A (1962) The Clockwork Orange, London: Heinemann
Burt, C (1925) The Young Delinquent, London: University of London Press
Cain, Maureen (1989) Growing up Good: Policing the Behaviour of Girls in Europe,
London: Sage
Callinicos, Alex (1989) Against Postmodernism: a Marxist Critique, Polity Press
Campbell A (1981) Girl Delinquents, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
- (1984) The Girls in The Gang, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Caplan, P (1975) ‘Sex Differences in anti-social behaviour: does research
methodology produce or abolish them?’, Human Development, 18
Carby, H (1987) ‘’On the threshold of woman’s era’: lynching, empire and sexuality
in black feminist theory’, in H Gates (ed), Figures in Black, Oxford: Oxford
University Press
480
Bibliography
Carlen, P (1983) Women’s Imprisonment, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

- (1985) Criminal Women, Oxford: Polity Press
- (1990) ‘Women, crime, feminism and realism’, Social Justice, 17 (4)
Carlen, P and Worrall, A (eds) (1987) Gender, Crime and Justice, Milton Keynes:
Open University Press
Carrigan, Tim Connell, Bob and Lee, Lohn (1985) ‘Toward a New Sociology of
Masculinity’, Theory and Society, 14(5)
Cernkovich, S (1978) ‘Evaluating two models of delinquency causation’,
Criminology, 16
Cernkovich, S, and Giordano, P (1979) ‘Delinquency, opportunity, and gender’,
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 70
Chadda, Parminder (1992) ‘Southall’, in The Popular Front of Contemporary Poetry
Anthology, London: Apples and Snakes
Chambers, I (1986) Popular Culture: the metropolitan experience, London
- (1987) ‘Maps of the metropolis: a possible guide to the present’, Cultural
Studies, 1, 1-22
Chapman, JR (1980) Economic Realities and the Female Offender, Lexington,
Mass: Lexington Books
Chesney-Lind, M (1973) ‘Judicial Enforcement of the female sex role’, Issues in
Criminology, 8
- (1978) ‘Chivalry Re-examined: Women and the Criminal Justice System’,
in LH Bowker (ed) Women, Crime and the Criminal Justice System, Lexington,
Mass: Lexington Books
Christiansen, KO (1977) ‘A preliminary study of criminality among twins’, in S
Mednick and KO Christiansen (eds) Biosocial Bases of Criminal Behaviour,
New York: Gardner Press
Christie, Nils (1977) ‘Conflicts as Property’, British Journal of Criminology, 17
- (1981) Limits to Pain, Oxford: Martin Robertson
- (1993) Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style?, London:
Routledge
Cicourel, Aaron, V (1968) The Social Organisation of Juvenile Justice, New York:
Wiley
Clarke, A and Clarke, A (eds) (1976) Early Experience: Myth and Evidence,
London: Open Books
Cleckley, H (1964) The Mask of Sanity (4th edn), St Louis, Mo: CV Mosby
- (1976) The Mask of Sanity (5th edn), St Louis, Mo: CV Mosby
Clifford, W (1976) Crime Control in Japan, Lexington, Mass: DC Heath
Clinard, M (1968) Sociology of Deviant Behaviour, New York: Rinehart and
Winston
481
Bibliography
Clinard, MB, & Abbott, DJ (1973) Crime in developing countries: A comparative

perspective: New York: Wiley
Cloward, Richard A and Ohlin, Lloyd E (1960) Delinquency and Opportunity: A
Theory of Delinquent Gangs, Glencoe, III: Free Press
Cohen, Albert K (1955) Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, New York:
Free Press
- (1965) ‘The Sociology of the Deviant Act: Anomie Theory and Beyond,’
American Sociology Review, 30
Coll, Blanche D (1969) Perspectives in Public Welfare: A History, Washington:
DC: United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
Collins, H (1982) Marxism and Law, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Colman, Alice (1985) Utopia on Trial: Vision and reality in Planned Housing,
London: Hilary Shipman
- (1988) ‘Design Disadvantage and Design Improvement’, The Criminologist
- (1989) ‘Disposition and Situation: Two sides of the Same Crime’, in DJ
Evans and DT Herbert, eds, The Geography of Crime, London: Routledge
Colvin, M, & Pauly, J (1983) ‘A critique of criminology: Toward an integrated
structural Marxist theory of delinquent production’, American Journal of
Sociology, 89
Comte, Auguste (1974) The Positive Philosophy, New York: AMS Press Inc
Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders Report (Butler Report) London:
HMSO, 1975
Connolly, W (1988) Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Cortes, JB and Gatti, FM (1972) Delinquency and Crime: A Biopsychological
Approach, New York: Seminar Press
Cotterrell, Roger (1989) The Politics of Jurisprudence: a critical introduction to
legal philosophy, London: Butterworths
Cressey, DR (1960) ‘Epidemiology and individual conduct: A case for criminology’,
Pacific Sociological Review, 3
Csikszentmihalyi, M and Lawson, R (1978) ‘Intrinsic Rewards in School Crime’,
Crime and Delinquency 24
Curran, DJ (1984) ‘The myth of the ‘new’ female delinquent’, Crime and
Delinquency, 30
Currie, E (1985) Confronting Crime, New York: Pantheon
Danneter, Dale (1984) ‘Adult Development and Social Theory: A Paradigmatic
Reappraisal’, American Sociological Review, 49
Dalgaard, OS and Kringlen, E (1976) ‘A Norwegian twin study of criminality’,
British Journal of Criminology 16
482
Bibliography
Daly, K (1989) ‘Rethinking Judicial Paternalism: Gender, Work-Family Relations

and Sentencing’, Gender and Society, 3
Datesman, S K, and Scarpitti, F R (1980) (eds) Women, Crime and Criminal Justice,
New York: Oxford University Press
David, O, Hoffman, S, Sverd, J, Clark, J, and Voeller, K (1976) ‘Lead and
hyperactivity Behaviour response to Chelation: a pilot study’, American Journal
of Psychiatry 133
Davis, Mike (1990) City of Quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles, London/
New York: Verso
Dahrendorf, Ralf (1979) Life Chances, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
- (1985) Law and Order, London: Stevens & Sons
- (1987) ‘The erosion of citizenship and its consequences for us all’, New
Statesman, 12 June
De Beauvoir, Simone (1974) The Second Sex, New York: Basic Books
Dean, H and Taylor-Gooby, P (1992) Dependency Culture: the explosion of a
myth, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf
Denzin, Norman K (1969) ‘Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnomethodology: A
Proposed Synthesis,’ American Sociological Review, 34
- (1991) Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary
Cinema, Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Dobash, R P, Dobash, RE, and Gutteridge, S (1986) The Imprisonment of Women,
London: Basil Blackwell
Dolan, B and Coid, J (1993) Psychopathic and Antisocial Personality Disorders:
research and treatment issues, London: Gaskell
Dominelli, L (1984) ‘Differential Justice: domestic labour, community service and
female offenders’, Probation Journal, 31
Donzelot, J (1979) The Policing of Families, New York: Pantheon
Dostoyevsky, F (1936) The Possessed, New York: Modern Library
Douglas, Jack (1967) The Social Meanings of Suicide, Princton: Princton University
Press
Downes, David and Rock, Paul (1988) Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the
Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking, 2nd ed Oxford: Oxford University
Press
Drescher, S (1968) Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, New York
Dugdale, R (1910) The Jukes, New York: Putnam
Dupaquier, J (ed) (1983) Malthus Past and Present, London: Academic Press
Durkheim, Emile (1951, 1966 [1897]) Suicide: A Study in Sociology, John A
Spaulding and George Simpson (trans), Glencoe, III: Free Press
483
Bibliography
- (1965) The Rules of the Sociological Method, Solovay, S and Mueller, J

(trans), Catlin, E (ed) New York: The Free Press
- (1933) The Division of Labour in Society, New York: Macmillan
Dworkin, Ronald (1986) Law’s Empire, London: Fontana Press
Eagleton, Terry (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Basil Backwell
Easton, D (1965) A Systems analysis of political life, New York: Wiley
Eaton, M (1986) Justice for Women? Family, Court and Social Control, Milton
Keynes: Open University Press
Edell, Abraham (1955) Ethical Judgement: The Use of Science in Ethics, New
York: The Free Press
Elias, N (1978 [1939]) The Civilizing Process, vol 1: The History of Manners,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell
- (1991) The Society of Individuals, Oxford: Blackwell
Elliott, DS, Ageton, SS, and Canter, R (1979) ‘An integrated theoretical perspective
on delinquent behaviour’, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 16
Elliott, DS, & Voss, H (1974) Delinquency and dropout, Lexington, MA: DC Heath
Engels, F ([1845] 1958) The Condition of the Working Class in England, WO
Henderson and WH Chaloner (Trans and ed), New York: Macmillian
- (1973 [1884]) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, New
York: International Publishers
Erikson, Kai T (1962) ‘Notes on the Sociology of Deviance’, Social Problems, 9
Erlanger, HS (1980) ‘The allocation of status within occupations: The case of the
legal profession’, Social Forces, 58
Estabrook, A (1916) The Jukes in 1915, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of
Washington
Eysenck, HJ (1964) Crime and Personality, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul
- (1970) Crime and Personality (2nd edn), London: Granada
- (1973) The Inequality of Man, London: Temple Smith
- (1977) Crime and Personality (3rd edn), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Eysenck, HJ and Eysenck, SBG (1968) ‘A factorial study of psychoticism as a
dimension of personality’, Multivariate Behavioural Research (special issue):
15-31
Eysenck, SBG, Eysenck, HJ, and Barrett, P (1985) ‘A revised version of the
psychoticism scale’, Personality and Individual Differences 6
Eysenck, SBG and McGurk, BJ (1980) ‘Impulsiveness and venturesomeness in a
detention centre population’, Psychological Reports 47
Fainstein, S, Gordon, I, and Harloe, M (eds) (1992) Divided Cities: New York and
London in The Contemporary World, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
484
Bibliography
Farnworth, M, and Leiber, MJ (1989) ‘Strain theory revisited: Economic goals,

educational means, and delinquency’, American Sociological Review, 54
Farrington, DP (1982) ‘Longitudinal analyses of criminal violence’, in ME
Wolfgang & NA Weiner (eds), Criminal violence, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage
Farrington, DP and AM Morris (1983) ‘Sex, Sentencing and Reconviction’, British
Journal of Criminology, 23
Farrington, DP, Ohlin, LE, and Wilson, JQ, (1986) Understanding and Controlling
Crime: Toward a New Research Strategy, New York: Springer-Verlag
Feldman, MP (1977) Criminal Behaviour: A Psychological Analysis, Chichester:
Wiley
- (1983) ‘Lay Theories of delinquency’, European Journal of Social Psychology 13
- (1993) The Psychology of Crime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Ferri, E (1913) The Positive School of Criminology, Chicago
- (1917) Criminal Sociology, J Kelly and J Lisle (trans) Boston: Little, Brown
Fields, F (1989) Losing Out: the emergence of Britain’s Underclass, Basil Blackwell:
Oxford
Finestone, H (1964) ‘Cats, kicks and colour’, in Becker, HS (ed) The Other Side,
New York: Free Press
Finnis, J (1980) Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Fischer, John (1945) ‘India’s Insoluble Hunger’, Harper’s Magazine, 190
Foucault, Michel (1963) Naissance de la clinique, Paris: PUF English Translation,
The Birth of the Clinic, New York: Pantheon 1973
- (1965) Madness and Civilization, New York: Pantheon
- (1975) Surveiller et punir, Paris: Gallimard English translation
- (1978) Discipline and Punish, New York: Pantheon
- (1978) The History of Sexuality, vol 1, An Introduction, trans New York:
Robert Heurl
- (1979) ‘On Governmentality’, I & C, 6
- (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-
1977, Gordon, C (ed), New York: Pantheon Books
Fox, D (1982) ‘Review of Auletta, The Underclass’, Social Policy, 13 (2)
Fox, J and Hartnagel, T F (1979) ‘Changing Social Roles and Female Crime in
Canada’, Review Canadian Sociology and Anthropology, 16
Frankl, Viktor E (1959) From Death Campt to Existentialism, a Psychiatrist’s Path
to a New Therapy, Ilse Lash (trans), Boston: Beacon Press
Freud, S (1925) ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction
between the sexes’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 19, London: Hograth Press
- ([1930] 1961) ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in The Standard Edition of
485
Bibliography
the Complete Psychological Works, J Strahey (trans), vol 21 London: Hogarth

Press
Friday, PC and Hage, J (1976) ‘Youth Crime in Postindustrial Societies: An
Integrated Perspective’, Criminology, 14
Friedman, Lawrence M (1968) Government and Slum Housing: A Century of
Frustration, Chicago: Rand McNally
Friedman, M (1962) Capitalism and Freedom, London: University of Chicago
Press
Fromm, E (1941) Escape from freedom, New York: Rinehart
Galasgow, D (1981) The Black Underclass, New York: Vintage Books
Galbraith, John, K (1992) The Culture of Contentment, London: Penguin
Garfinkel, Harold (1956) ‘Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies’,
American Journal of Sociology, 61
Garland, David (1985) Punishment and Welfare, Aldershot: Gower
- (1990) Punishment and Modern Society, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Garolafo, R (1914) Criminology, R Millar (trans) Boston, reprinted Montclair,
1968
Gath, D (1972) ‘High intelligence and delinquency - a review’, British Journal of
Criminology, 12
Gatrell, VAC (1994) The Hanging Tree: execution and the English People 1770-
1868, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Gaylin, W (1982) The Killing of Bonnie Garland, New York: Simon and Schuster
Gaylord, Mark S and Galliher, John F (1988) The Criminology of Edwin Sutherland,
New Jersey: Transaction Books
Geertz, C (1980) Negara: The theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali Princeton,
NJ: Princton University Press
Gellner, Ernest (1994) Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, London:
Hamish hamilton
Gelsthorpe, L (1989) Sexism and the Female Offender, Aldershort: Gower
Giddens, Anthony (1989) Sociology: a brief but critical introduction, London:
Macmillian
- (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press
- (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: self and society in the late modern age,
Cambridge: Polity Press
- (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in
Modern Societies, Cambridge: Polity Press
Gilder, G (1981) Wealth and Poverty, London: Buchan and Enright
Gilligan, C (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press
486
Bibliography
Giordano, PC and SA Cernkovich (1979) ‘On Complicating the Relationship

between Liberation and Delinquency’, Social Problems, 26
Glueck, S, and Glueck, ET (1940) Juvenile Delinquents Grown Up, New York:
Commonwealth Fund
- (1960) Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press
- (1956) Physique and Delinquency, New York: Harper and Row
- (1959) Predicting Delinquency and Crime, Cambridge Mass: Harvard
University Press
- (1968) Delinquents and nondelinquents in perspective, Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press
Goddard, HH (1914) Feeble-Mindedness Its causes and Consequences, New york:
Macmillan
- (1921) Juvenile Delinquency, New York: Dodd, Mead
Goffman, E (1968) Asylums, New York: Anchor
- (1969) Where the Action Is: Three Essays, London: Allen Lane
Goldberger, P (1989) ‘Why design can’t transform cities’, New York Times, June
23
Goldstein, AG, Chance, JE, and Gilbert, B (1984) ‘Facial stereotypes of good guys
and bad guys: a replication and extension’, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society
22
Gordon, Diana (1991) The Justice Juggernaut: fighting street crime, controlling
citizens, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
Goring, C (1913) The English Convict, London: Darling and Son
Gottfredson, Micheal and Hirschi, Travis (eds) (1987) Positive Criminology, New
Park, CA: Sage
- (1990) A General Theory of Crime, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
Gould, SJ (1981) The Mismeasure of Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Gould, GC (1976) Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, New
York: GP Putnam’s
Graef, Roger (1992) Living Dangerously: Young Offenders in Their Own Words,
London: HarperCollins
Greenwood, V (1981) ‘The Myth of female Crime’, in A Morris and L Gelsthorpe
(eds), Women and Crime, Cambridge: Cambridge Institute of Criminology
Groth, A Nicholas (1979) Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender, New
York: Plenum Press
Grygier, T, Chesley, J, and Tuters, EW (1970) ‘Parental deprivation: a study of
delinquent children’, British Journal of Criminology 9
487
Bibliography
Gunn, J, Robertson, G, Dell, S, and Way, C (1978) Psychiatric Aspects of

Imprisonment, London: Academic Press
Guttmacher, M (1973) The Mind of the Murderer, New York: Arno Press Habermas,
J (1976) Legitimation Crisis London: Heinemann
- (1979) Communication and the Evolution of Society, London: Heinemann
- (1985) Modernity - an incomplete project, in H Foster (ed), Postmodern
Culture, London: Pluto
- (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press
Hacker, AC (1987) ‘American apartheid’, The New York Review, Dec 3
Hagan, FE (1986) Introduction to criminology: Theories, methods, and criminal
behaviour, Chicago: Nelson-Hall
Hagan, John (1987) Modern Criminology: crime, criminal behaviour and its control,
New York: McGraw-Hill
Hagan, J, Simpson, J an Gillis, A ‘The Sexual stratification of social control: a
gender-based perspective on crime and delinquency’, British Journal of
Sociology, 30
Hall Williams, JE (1982) Criminology and Criminal Justice, London: Butterworths
Hamilton, JR (1985) ‘The special hospitals’, in L Gostin (ed) Secure Provision: A
Review of Special Services for the Mentally Ill and Mentally Handicapped in
England and Wales, London: Tavistock
Harris, Anthony (1977) ‘Sex and Theories of Deviance: Towards a Functional
Theory of Deviant Type-Scripts’ American Sociology Review, 42
Harrison, P (1985) Inside the inner city, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Hartsock, Nancy (1987) ‘Rethinking modernism: minority vs majority theories’,
Cultural Critique, 7
Hart HLA (1955) ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ in Philosophy Review, 64
- (1961) The Concept of Law, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: an inquiry into the origins
of Cultural Change, Cambridge Mass: Basil Blackwell
Hawley,C and Buckley, RE (1974) ‘Food dyes and hyperkinetic children’, Academy
Therapy 10: 27-32
Hay, D (1975) ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in D Hay, P Linebaugh,
EP Thompson, et al, Albion’s Fatal Tree, London: Allen Lane
Hayman, R (1978) De Sade: A Critical Biography, London: Constable
Hayashi, S (1967) ‘A study of juvenile delinquency in twins’, in H Mitsuda (ed)
Clinical Genetics in Psychiatry, Tokyo: Igaku Shoin
Hegel, GWF (1949) The Phenomenology of Mind, JB Gailie (trans), London: Allen
& Unwin
- (1952) The Philosophy of Right, TM Knox (trans), London:
488
Bibliography
- (1971) Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: Part III, trans by W

Wallace, with Zusatze, trans by AV Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(trans), New York: Harper & Brothers
Heidensohn, Frances (1968) ‘The Deviance of Women: A Critique and an Enquiry’,
British Journal of Sociology, 19
- (1985) Women and Crime, London: MacMillian
- (1989) Crime and Society, London: MacMillan Education
Heller, Agnes and Feher, Ferenc (1988) The Postmodern Political Condition,
Cambridge: Polity Press
Hepburn, JR (1976) ‘Criminology: Testing alternative models of delinquent
causation’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 67
Herbers, John (1981) ‘Fear of Crime Leads in Survey of Reasons to Leave Big
Cities’, The New York Times, May 16
Herrenstein, RJ and Murray, Charles A (1994) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and
Class Structure in American Life, New York: Free Press
Hibbert, C (1963) The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment,
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Hill, D and Pond, DA (1952) ‘Reflections on a hundred capital cases submitted to
electroencephalography’, Journal of Mental Science, 98
Hindelang, MJ (1971) ‘Age, Sex, and the Versatility of delinquent Involvements’,
Social Problems, 18
- (1973) ‘Causes of delinquency: A partial replication and extension’, Social
Problems, 20
- (1979) ‘Sex Differences in Criminal Activity’, Social Problems, 27
Hindelang, M J, Gottfredson, Micheal R and Garofalo, James (1978) Victims of
Personal Crime, Cambridge, Mass: Ballinger
Hindelang, MJ, Hirschi, T, and Weiss, JG (1981) Measuring delinquency, Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage
Hindelang, MJ and Weiss, JG (1972) ‘Personality and self-reported delinquency:
an application of cluster analysis’, Criminology 10
Hirschi, T (1969) Causes of Delinquency, Berkeley, Calif: University of California
Press
Hirschi, T and Hindelang, MJ (1977) ‘Intelligence and delinquency: a revisionist
review’, American Sociological Review 42
- (1987) ‘Lay explanations of delinquency: global or offence-specific?’, British
Journal of Social Psychology 26
Hirschman, Albert O (1989) ‘Reactionary Rhetoric’, Atlantic Monthly, 263
489
Bibliography
Hobbes, Thomas ([1642] 1949) De Cive, or The Citizen, ed S Lamprecht, New

York
- ([1650] 1889) The Elements of Law, F Tonnies (ed), London
- ([1651] 1950) Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and power of a Common-
wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, New York/London: Everyman’s Library (Also
Penguin ed)
Hochschild, A R (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling,
Berkeley: University of California Press
Holzner, Burkhart, and Marx, John H (1979) Knowledge Application: The
Knowledge System in Society, Boston: Allyn & Bacon
Hooton, EA (1939a) The American Criminal: An Anthropological Study,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
- (1939b) Crime and the Man, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press
Horowitz, Ruth and Schwartz, Gary (1974) ‘Honor, Normative Ambiguity and
Gang Violence’, American Sociological Review 39
Howarth, E (1986) ‘What does Eysenck’s psychoticism scale really measure?’,
British Journal of Psychology 77
Howells, K (1983) ‘Social constructing and violent behaviour in mentally abnormal
offenders’, in J Hinton (ed) Dangerousness: Problems of Assessment and
Prediction, London: Allen and Unwin
Huber, Joan (1976) ‘Toward a Socio-Technological Theory of the Women’s
Movement’, Social Problems, 23
Hudson, B (1984) ‘Femininity and Adolescence’, in A McRobbie and M Nava
(eds) Gender and Generation, London: Macmillan
- (1987) Justice Through Punishment: A Critique of the Justice Model of
Corrections, London: Macmillan
Hughes, Mark, A (1989) ‘Misspeaking truth to power: a geographical perspective
on the ‘underclass’ fallacy’, Economic Geography
Hulsman, L (1986) ‘Critical Criminology and the Concept of Crime’, Contemporary
Crises 10/1
Hume, David ([1739] 1978) A Treatise on Human Nature, Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Hurwitz, S and Christiansen, KO (1983) Criminology, London: Allen & Unwin
Ingold, Tim (1986) Evolution and Social Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Institute for Cultural Conservatism (1987) Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New
National Agenda Washington, DC
Jackson, Bruce (1969) A Thief’s Primer, New York: Macmillan
490
Bibliography
Jacobs, J (1962) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books
Jacoby, Susan (1985) Wild Justice: the evolution of revenge, London: Collins
Jager, Bernd (1975) Theorizing, Journeying, Dwelling, Duquesne Studies in
Phenomenological Psychology, Volume 11, Giorgi, C Fisher, E Murray (eds),
Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press
James, J and Thornton, W (1980) ‘Women’s liberation and the female delinquent’,
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 17
Jameson, F (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New
Left Review, 146
Jencks, C (1984) The language of post-modern architecture, London
Jensen, GF (1972) ‘Parents, peers, and delinquent action: A test of the differential
association perspective’, American Journal of Sociology, 78
Jensen, GF, and Eve, R (1976) ‘Sex differences in delinquency’, Criminology, 13
Johnson, RE (1979) Juvenile delinquency and its origin, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Jones, David (1986) History of Criminology: A Philosophical Perspective, New
York: Greenwood Press
Jones Gareth (ed), (1973) The Sovereignty of Law: Selections from Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England, London: Blackstones
Jordon, W (1982) ‘First impressions: initial English confrontations with Africans’,
in C Husband (ed), ‘Race’, in Britain, London: Hutchinson
Kant, Immanuel (1957) The Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
- ([1795] 1957) Perpetual Peace, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill
- (1929) The Critique of Pure Reason, Hampsire: Macmillan
Kappeler, Susanne (1986) The Pornography of Representation, Cambridge: Polity
Press
Katz, Jack (1988) Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing
Evil, New York: Basic Books
Katz, Leo (1987) Bad Acts and Guilty Minds: Conundrums of the Criminal Law,
Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press
Katz, M (1989) The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on
Welfare, New York: Pantheon Books
Kaufmann, Walter (1957) Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York:
Meridian Books
Kelman, Herbert C, and Hamilton, V Lee (1989) Crimes of Obedience, New Haven/
London: Yale University Press
491
Bibliography
Kelsen, Hans (1967) The Pure Theory of Law, M Knight trans Berkeley: University
of California Press
Kitsuse, JI and Dietrick, EDC (1959) ‘Delinquent boys: A critique’, American
Sociological Review, 24
Klein, D (1973) ‘The Etiology of Female Crime: A Review of the Literature’,
Issues in Criminology, 8
Klemke, Lloyd W (1978) ‘Does Apprehension for Shoplifting Amplify or Terminate
Shoplifting Activity?’, Law and Society Review 12
Kohlberg, Lawrence (1981) The Philosophy of Moral Development, San Francisco:
Harper & Row
Kornhauser, R (1978) Social Sources of Delinquency, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press
Kotlowitz, Alex (1991) There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys
Growing Up in the Other America, New York: Doubleday
Kranz, H (1936) Lebensschicksale kriminellen zwillinge, Berlin: Julius Springer
Krier, R (1987) ‘Tradition-modernity-modernism: some necessary explanations’,
Architectural Design Profil, 65
Krige, J (1980) Science, Revolution and Discontinuity, Hassock, Sussex: Harvester
Press
Kruttschnitt, C (1982) ‘Women, Crime, and Dependency: An application of the
theory of law’, Criminology 19
- (1982) ‘Respectable women and the law’, The Sociological Quarterly, 23
Lange, J (1929) Verbrechen als Sochicksal (Crime as Destiny), Leipzig: Verlag
Laqueur, T (1987) ‘Orgasm, generation, and the politics of reproductive biology’,
in C Gallagher, and T Laqueur (eds), The Making of the Modern Body Sexuality
and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press
Lea, John, and Young, Jock (1984) What is to be done about Law and Order?
London: Penguin (Rev ed London: Pluto, 1993)
Lefebvre, Henri (1984) Everyday Life in the Modern World, New Jersey:
Transaction
Lefort, Claud (1988) ‘Reversibility: Political Freedom and the Freedom of the
Individual’, In Democracy and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press
Legras, AM (1932) Psychese en criminaliteit bij twellingen, Utrecht: Keminken
Zoon NV
Lemann, N (1986) ‘The Origins of the Underclass’, Atlantic Monthly, June - July
Lemert, Edwin M (1951) Social Pathology, New York: McGraw-Hill
- (1964) ‘Social Structure, Social Control, and Deviation’, in Anomie and
Deviant Behaviour, Marshall Clinard (ed) New York: Fee Press
492
Bibliography
- (1972) Human deviance, social problems and social control (2nd ed),
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Lengermann, Patricia M and Wallace, Ruth A (1985) Gender in America Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Leonard, E B (1982) Women Crime and Society: a critique of Criminology Theory,
London: Longman
Levinas, Emmanuel (1988) The Provocation of Levinas Rethinking the Other, R
Bernasconi, and D Wood (ed), London: Routledge
Levi-Strauss, C (1966) The Savage Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- (1978) Myth and Meaning, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Lewis, Oscar (1959) Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty,
New York: Basic Books
Lindblom, Charles, E (1990) Inquiry and Change The Troubled Attempt to
Understand and Shape Society, New Haven: Yale University Press
Linquist, CA, Smusz, TD, and Doerner, W (1985) ‘Causes of conformity: An
application of control theory to adult misdemeanant probationers’, International
Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 29
Liska, AE (1971) ‘Aspirations, expectations, and delinquency: Stress and additive
models’, Sociological Quarterly, 12
Little, A (1965) ‘Parental deprivation, separation and crime: a test on adolescent
recidivists’, British Journal of Criminology 5
Lloyd, Genevieve, (1984) The Man of reason: ‘Male’ and Female’ in Western
Philosophy, London: Methuen
Lofland, John (1969) Deviance and Identity, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Lombroso, C (1911) Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, Boston: Little Brown
Lombroso, C and W Ferrero (1985) The Female Offender, London: Fisher Unwin
Loomis, SD, Bohnert, PJ, and Huncke, S (1967) ‘Predictions of EEG abnormalities
in adolescent delinquents’, Archives of General Psychiatry 17
Luckenbill, David F (1977) ‘Criminal Homicide as Situated Transaction’, Social
Problems 25
Luhmann, Niklas (1986) Love as Passion, Cambridge: Polity Press
Lyons, David (1984) Ethics and the Rule of Law, London
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
Manchester: Manchester University Press
Lyotard, Jean-François and Thebaud, Jean-Loup, (1985) Just Gaming, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press
Maccoby, E E, and Kacklin, CN (1974) The Psychology of Sex Differences,
Stanford: Stanford University Press
MacIntyre, A (1962) ‘A Mistake about causality in social science’, in Plaslett and
493
Bibliography
WG Runciman eds, Philosophy, Politics, and Society, Second Series, Oxford:

Blackwell
- (1981, 2nd ed 1985) After Virtue: a study in moral theory, London: Duckworth
- (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London: Duckworth
MacKinnon, CA (1983) ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Towards
Feminist Jurisprudence’, Signs, 8
- (1987) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge Mass:
- (1989) Toward a Feminist theory of the State, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press
Macnicol, J (1987) ‘In pursuit of the underclass’, Journal of Social Policy, 16,
293-318
- (1990) ‘Nightmare on easy street’, The Times Higher Education Supplement,
29 June, 15
MacPherson, CB (1962) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Mannheim, Hermann (1965) Comparative Criminology, 2 vols, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul
Manson, C (with N Emmons) (1986) Manson: In his own words, New York: Grove
Press
Marshall, TH (1977) Class, Citzenship and Social Development, Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press
Martens, P L (1993) ‘An Ecological Model of Socialisation in Explaining
Offending’, in DP Farrington, RJ Sampson, and P-O H Wikstrom, eds
Integrating Individual and Ecological Aspects of Crime, Stockholm: National
Council for Crime Prevention
Marx, Karl (1964) The economic and political manuscripts of 1844, trans M
Milligan, (ed) DJ Struik, New York: International Publishers
- (1975) ‘Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy’, in
Earl Writings, Q Hoare, ed R Livingstone and G Brown trans New York:
Random House
Marx, Karl and Engles, F (1978) The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C Tucker, ed
2nd ed New York: Norton
Matseuda, RL (1982) ‘Testing control theory and differential association: A casual
modelling approach’, American Sociological Review, 47
Matza, D (1964) Delinquency and Drift, New York: Wiley
- (1969) Becoming Deviant, Englewod Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall
Mawson, AR and Jacobs, KJ (1978) ‘Corn consumption, tryptophan, and cross-
national homicide rates’, Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry 7
494
Bibliography
Maxwell, Nicholas (1984) From Knowledge to Wisdom, Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Mayhew, H (1862) London Labour and the London Poor, London: Griffin Bohn
Mayo, Patricia E (1969) The Making of a Criminal: A Comparative Study of Two
Delinquency Areas, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
McBride, WL, 1972 ‘Noncoercive Society: Some doubts, Leninist and
Contemporary’, in Pennock and Chapman, Coercion, Chicago: Aldine-
Atherton (NOMOS XV)
McCandless, BR, Persons, WS III, and Roberts, A (1972) ‘Perceived opportunity,
delinquency, race, and body build among delinquent youth’, Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 38
McCord, W and McCord, J (1964) The Psychopath: An Essay on the Criminal
Mind, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold
McEwan, AW and Knowles, C (1984) ‘Delinquent personality types and the
situational contexts of their crimes’, Personality and Individual Differences 5
McGurk, BJ (1978) ‘Personality types among normal homicides’, British Journal
of Criminology 19
McGurk, BJ and McDougall, C (1981) ‘A new approach to Eysenck’s theory of
criminality’, Personality and Individual Differences 2
McGurk, BJ and McGurk, RE (1979) ‘Personality types among prisoners and prison
officers - an investigation of Megargee’s theory of control’, British Journal of
Criminology 19
McKenzie, RD (1925) ‘The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human
Community’, in Park, RE, et al, The City, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press
Mead, George Herbert (1934) Mind, Self, and Society, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press
Mead, L (1986) Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship New
York: Free Press
Mead, M (1935) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, New York:
William Morrow
Mednick, SA Gabrielli, WF, and Hutchings, B (1983) ‘Genetic influences in
criminal behaviour: evidence from an adoption cohort’, in KT VanDusen and
SA Mednick (eds) Prospective Studies of Crime and Delinquency, The Hague:
Kluwer-Nijhoff Publishing
Meier, RF (1983) ‘United States of America’, in EH Johnson (ed), International
handbook of contemporary developments in criminology: General issues and
the Americas, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press
Merton, Robert (1938) ‘Social Structure and ‘Anomie”, American Sociological
Review, 3
495
Bibliography
- (1957) Social Theory and Social Structure, New York: Free Press of Glencoe
- (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure, (enlarged ed) New York: The
Free Press
Messner, H ed (1966) Poverty in the Affluent Society, New York: Harper & Row
Messner, SF (1982) ‘Poverty, inequality, and the urban homicide rate: Some
unexpected findings’, Criminology, 20
- (1984) ‘The ‘dark figure’ and composite indexes of crime: Some empirical
exploration of alternative data sources’, Journal of Criminal Justice, 12
Michalowski, Raymond (1981) Order, Law and Crime: Introduction to Critical
Criminology, Glenview, Il: Scott, Foresman
Midgley, Mary (1979) Beast and Man: the roots of human nature, London: Methuen
Milgram, S (1970) ‘The Experience of Living in Cities: A Psychological Analysis’,
Science 167
Mill, John Stuart (1970) ‘On the Subjection of Women’, in Essays on Sex Equality,
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Chicago: Chicago University Press
- (1962) ‘On Liberty’, in Mill Utilitarianism, London: Fontana
Miller, Eleanor (1986) Street Women, Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Miller, WB (1958) ‘Lower Class Culture as a generating milieu of gang
delinquency’, Journal of Social Issues, 14
Mills, C Wright (1959) The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press
Montagu, MF Ashley (1941) ‘The Biologist Looks at Crime’, Annals of the
American Academy of Social and Political Science, September
Morgan, Patricia (1975) Child Care: Sense and Fable, London: Temple Smith
- (1978) Delinquent Fantasies, London: Temple Smith
Moriyama, T (1993) ‘Crime, Criminal Justice and Social Control: Why Do We
Enjoy a Low Crime rate?’, paper presented to the British Criminology
Conference, Cardiff
Morris, Alison (1987) Women, Crime and Criminal Justice, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Morris, Terence, (1957) The Criminal Area: A Study in Social Ecology, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul
Morrison, W Douglas (1895) ‘Introduction’, in Caesar Lombroso, The Female
Offender, London: T Fisher Unwin
Morrison, WJ (1994) ‘Criminology, Modernity and the ‘Truth’ of the Human
Condition: Reflections on the Melancholy of Postmodernism’, in Nelken, D
(ed) The Futures of Criminology, London: Sage
- (1995a) ‘Modernity, knowledge, and the criminalisation of drug usage’, in I
Loveland (ed) The Limits of Criminalisation, London: Sweet and Maxwell
- (1995b) ‘Modernity, imprisonment and social solidarity: notes on a bad
relationship’, in Roger Mathews (ed) Prisons 2000, London: Routledge
496
Bibliography
Moyer, KE (1976) The Psychobiology of Aggression, New York: Harper & Row
Mukherjee, SK and RW Fitzgerald (1981) ‘The Myth of Rising Female Crime’, in
Mukherjee and Scutt (eds) Women and Crime
Mukherjee, SK and JA Scutt (eds) (1981) Women and Crime, Sydney: Australian
Institute of Criminology with Allen & Unwin
Mullings, Beverly (1991) The Colour of Money: the impact of housing investment
decision making on black housing outcomes in London, London: The
Runnymede Trust
Murray, C (1984) Losing Ground, New York: Basic Books
- (1988) In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, New York: Simon
and Schuster
- (1990) ‘The British Underclass’, The Public Interest, 99
- (1994) ‘The New Victorians and The New Rabble’, The Sunday Times, 29 May
Nagel, I (1981) ‘Sex Differences in the Processing of Criminal Defendants’, in
Morris, A and Gelsthorpe, L (eds), Women and Crime, Cambridge: Institute
of Criminology
Nagel, I and Hagan, J (1983) ‘Gender and Crime: Offense Patterns and Criminal
Court Sanctions’ In Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, Vol 4,
M Tonry and N Morris eds Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Nagin, D and Paternoster, R (1991) ‘On the Relationship of Past and Future
Participation in Delinquency’, Criminology, 29
Naffine, Ngaire (1987) Female Crime: The Construction of Women in Criminology,
Sydney: Allen & Unwin
Newman, O (1972) Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design,
New York: Macmillan
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1888) The AntiChrist, in (1968) The Portable Nietsche Walter
Kaufmann (trans and ed), New York: Viking Press
- (1966) Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann (trans), New York:
Random House
- (1886) Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche
- ([1888] 1969) Ecce Homo, Walther Kaufman (Trans and ed) New York: Vintage
- (1882) The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann, trans New York: Random House
- ([1887] 1969) The Genealogy of Morals, Walther kaufmann and R J
Hollingdale (trans), New York: Vintage Books
- (1878) Human All Too Human, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche
- ([1886-88] 1968) The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale
(trans and eds), New York: Random House
Oakley, A (1981) Subject Women, Oxford: Martin Robertson
O’Brien, Mary (1981) Politics of Reproduction, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul
497
Bibliography
Offe, Claus (1985) Disorganised Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press

Offord, DR (1982) ‘Family backgrounds of male and female offenders’, in J Gunn
and DP Farrington (eds), Abnormal Offenders, Delinquency, and the Criminal
Justice System, Chichester: Wiley
Orcutt, JD (1987) ‘Differential association and marijuana use: A closer look at
Sutherland (with a little help from Becker)’, Criminology, 25
Packer, H (1968) The Limits of the Criminal Sanction, Stanford: Stanford University
Press
Pahl, RE (1988) ‘Some remarks on informal work, social polarization and the
social structure’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 12,
247- 67
Parisi, N (1982) ‘Are Females Treated Differently? A Review of the Theories and
Evidence on Sentencing and Parole Decisions’, in NH Rafter and EA
Stanko (1982) Judge, Lawyer, Victim, Thief: Women, Gender Roles and Criminal
Justice, Northwestern University Press
Park, Robert E (1952) Human Communities, Glencoe: The Free Press
- ([1916] 1969) ‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human
Behaviour in the Urban Environment’, in Classic Essays on the Culture of
Cities, Richard Sennett (ed), New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts
Parker, Donn B (1976) Crime by Computer, New York: Scribner’s
Parsons, Talcott, (1954) Essays in Sociological Theory, rev ed Glencoe, Ill: Free
Press
Patten, Brian (1992) Love Poems, London: Flamingo/HarperCollins
Paul, GL (1969) ‘Outcome of systematic desensitization II: Controlled investigation
of individual treatment, technique variations and current status’, in CM Franks
(ed) Behaviour therapy: Appraisal and status, New York: McGraw-Hill
Pearce and Tombs, (1989), ‘Realism and Corporate Crime’, in Issues in Realist
Criminology, London: Sage
Peckham, M (1962) Beyond the Tragic Vision: the Quest for Identity in the
Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Pepinsky, Harold, and Quinney, Richard (eds) (1991) Criminology as Peacemaking,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Pfohl, S (1977) ‘The ‘discovery of child-abuse”, Social Problems, 24: 310-214
- (1981) ‘Labelling Criminals’, in Law and Deviance, Laurence Ross (ed),
London: Sage
Phares, EJ (1984) Introduction to Personality, Columbus, Ohio: Charles E Merrill
Piaget, Jean(1965) The Moral Judgement of the Child, New York: The Free Press
Pick, Daniel (1989) Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c 1848-1918,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
498
Bibliography
Piven, FF and Cloward, RA (1971) Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public
Welfare, New York: Vintage
- (1982) The New Class War, New York: Pantheon
Podolsky, E (1955) ‘The Chemical Brew of Criminal Behaviour’, Journal of
Criminal Law, 45
Polk, K, Adler, C, Bazemore G, Blake, G, Cordray, S, Coventry, G, Galvin, J, and
Temple, M (1981) Becoming adult: An analysis of maturational development
from age 16 to 30 of a cohort of young men (Final report of the Marion County
Youth Study), Eugene, Or: University of Oregon
Pollak, O (1950) The Criminality of Women, New York: AS Barnes
Poole, ED, and Regoli, RM (1979) ‘Parental support, delinquent friends, and
delinquency: A test of interactional effects’, Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology, 70
Popper, Karl (1968) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson First
published 1959 Expanded version of Logicik der Forschung, 1934
Pound, R (1930), Criminal Justice in America, Dacapo Paperback, Brown
University, 1957 [1930]
Quay, HC (1987) ‘Intelligence’, in HC Quay (ed), Handbook of Juvenile
Delinquency, New York: Wiley
Quinney, Richard (1974) Critique of Legal Order, Boston: Little, Brown
Quinney, Richard, and Wildeman, John (1977) The Problem of Crime: A Critical
Introduction to Criminology, New York: Harper and Row
Rada, RT (1978) ‘Classification of the rapist’, in RT Rada (ed) Clinical Aspects of
the Rapist, New York: Grune and Stratton
Radzinowicz, Sir Leon (1948) A History of English Criminal Law and its
Administration from 1750, Vol 1, London: Stevens & Sons
- (1966) Ideology and Crime, London: Heinemann
Radzinowicz, Sir Leon and Hood, Roger (1986) The Emergence of Penal Policy
in Victorian and Edwardian England (Vol 5 of A History of English Criminal
Law and its Administration from 1750), London: Stevens & Sons
Radzinowicz, Sir Leon, and King, Joan (1977) The Growth of Crime: The
International Experience, New York: Basic Book
Raine, A and Venables, PH (1981) ‘Classical conditioning and socialization - a
biosocial interaction’, Personality and Individual Differences 2
Rankin, J (1977) ‘Investigating the interrelations among social control variables
and conformity’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 67
Rawls, John (1972) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press
499
Bibliography
Reckless, Walter, C (1967) The Crime Problem (Fourth ed), New York: Meredith
Publishing Company
Rees, L (1973) ‘Constitutional factors and abnormal behaviour’, in HJ Eysenck
(ed) Handbook of Abnormal Psychology, London: Pitman Medical
Reiss, AJ and Rhodes, AL (1961) ‘The distribution of juvenile delinquency in the
social class structure’, American Sociological Review, 26
- (1964) ‘An empirical test of differential association theory’, Journal of
Research in Crime and Delinquency, 1
Ressler, RK, Burgess, AW, and Douglas, JE (1993) Sexual Homicide: Patterns and
Motives, London: Simon & Schuster
Richards, P, Berk, R, and Foster, B (1979) Crime as Play: Delinquency in a Middle
Class Suburb, Cambridge, Mass: Ballinger
Rime, B, Bonvy, H, and Rouillon, F (1978) ‘Psychopathy and nonverbal behaviour
in an interpersonal situation’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87
Robins, L (1966) Deviant Children Grown Up, Baltimore, Md: Williams & Wilkins
Robins, LN West, PA & Herjanic, BL (1975) ‘Arrests and delinquency in two
generations: A study of black urban families and their children’, Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 16
Robins, LH and Ratcliff, KS (1980) ‘Childhood Conduct Disorders and Later
Arrest’, in The Social Consequences of Psychiatric Illness, Lee N Robins et
al, (eds) New York: Brunner/Mazel
Robinson, Sophia, M, (1936) Can Delinquency Be Measured?, New York: Columbia
University Press
Rogers, CR (1951) Client-centered therapy, Boston: Houghton Miffin
Rorty, Richard (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press
- (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Rosanoff, AJ, Handy, LM, and Plesset, I (1941) ‘The etiology of child behaviour
difficulties, juvenile delinquency and adult criminality with special reference
to their occurrence in twins’, Psychiatric Monographs (California) No 1,
Sacramento Department of Institutions
Rose, Nikolas (1990) Governing the Soul: the shaping of the private self, London:
Routledge
Rosenbaum, JL (1987) ‘Social control, gender, and delinquency: An analysis of
drug, property and violent offenders’, Justice Quarterly, 4
Roshier Bob (1989) Controlling Crime: The Classical Perspective in Criminology,
Open University Press: Milton Keynes
Rossi, A (1982) Architecture and The City, Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell
500
Bibliography
Rothman, David J (1980) Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its
Alternatives in Progressive America, Boston: Little, Brown
Rousseau, J-J (1968) Politics and the Arts: A Letter to M D’Alembert on the Theatre,
ABloom, (trans) Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press
R owe, C and Koetter, F (nd) Collage City, Cambridge, Mass
Runciman, W (1990) ‘How many classes are there in contemporary British
society?’, Sociology 24 (3)
Rusche, George and Kirchheimer, Otto ([1939] 1968) Punishment and Social
Structure, New York: Columbia University Press
Rutter, M (1972) Maternal Deprivation Reassessed, Harmondsworth: Penguin
- (1981) Maternal Deprivation Reassessed (2nd edn), Harmondsworth: Penguin
Sade, Marquis de ([1797]1968) Juliette, A Wainhouse trans New York: Grove Press
Sagarin, E, and Kelly, RJ (1981) ‘Morality, Responsibility and the Law: An
Existential Account’, in H Laurence Ross (ed) Law and Deviance, London:
Sage
Saint-Simon, Henri Comte (1952) Selected Writings, FMH Markham (ed), Oxford:
Basil Blackwell
Samenow, Stanton, E (1984) Inside the Criminal Mind, New York: Times Books
Sampson, Robert, J (1987) ‘Urban Black Violence: The Effect of Male Joblessness
and Family Disruption’, American Journal of Sociology, 93
Sampson, Robert J and Laub, John H (1993) Crime in the Making: pathways and
turning points through life, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press
Santos (1977) ‘The Law of the Oppressed: A Construction and Reproduction of
Legality in Pasargada’, in Law & Society Review, Vol 12
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956) Being and Nothingness, Hazel Barnes, trans New York:
Philosophical Library
- (1965) The Philosophy of Existentialism, New York: Philosophical Library
Saunders, P (1990) Social Class and Stratification, London: Routledge
Schoenberger, K (1990) ‘In Japan’s Worst Slum, Angry Underclass Feels a Nation’s
Prejudice’, Los Angeles Times, 30 October
Schoenthaler, S and Doraz, W (1983) ‘Types of offenses which can be reduced in
an institutional setting using nutritional intervention’, International Journal of
Biosocial Research 4
Schur, EM (1971) Labelling deviant behaviour: Its sociological implications, New
York: Harper & Row
Schwendinger, Herman, and Schwendinger, Julia (1970) ‘Defenders of Order or
Guardians of Human Rights?’, Issues in Criminology, 5
Scott, A (1988) Metropolis: From the division of labour to urban form, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press
501
Bibliography
Scull, AT (1976) ‘Madness and Segregative Controls: The Rise of the Insane Aslum’,
Social Problems, 24
- (1977) Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant - A Radical
View, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
- (1979) Museums of Madness: The Social Organisation of Insanity in Nineteenth-
Century England, London: Allen Lane
Scutt (1976) ‘Role conditioning theory: an explanation for disparity in male and
female criminality’, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology,
Vol 9
Selin, Thorsten (1938) Culture, Conflict and Crime, New York: The Social Science
Research Council, Bulletin No 41
Sellin, Thorsten (1977) ‘Beccaria’s Substitute for the Death Penalty’, in SF Landau
and L Sebba (eds), Criminology in Perspective, Massachusetts: Lexington
Books
Sharpe, S (1976) Just Like a Girl - How girls learn to be women, Harmondsworth:
Penguin
Shavit, Y, and Rattner, A (1988) ‘Age, crime, and the early life course’, American
Journal of Sociology, 93
Shaw, Clifford R, with Frederick M Zorbaugh, Henry D McKay, and Leonard S
Cottrell (1929) Delinquency Areas: A Study of the Geographic Distribution
of School Truants, Juvenile Delinquents, and Adult Offenders in Chicago,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Shaw, Clifford R, and McKay, Henry, D (1931) Social Factors in Juvenile
Delinquency, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office
- (1942) Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press
Shaw, Clifford R (1966, reissue) The Jack-Roller, Chicago: Phoenix
Sheldon, WH (with the collaboration of SS Stevens and WB Tucker) (1940) The
Varieties of Human Physique, New York: Harper
- (with the collaboration of SS Stevens) (1942) The Varieties of Temperament,
New York: Harper
- (with the collaboration of EM Hartl and E McDermott) (1949) Varieties of
Delinquent Youth, New York: Harper
Shils, E (1981) Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Short, JF (ed) (1968) Gang Delinquency and Delinquent Subcultures, New York:
Harper & Row
- (1953) Science and Human Behaviour, New York: Macmillan
Shott, S (1979) ‘Emotion and social life: a symbolic interactionist analysis’,
American Journal of Sociology, 84 (6)
502
Bibliography
Shover, NS Norland J James, and W Thornton (1979) ‘Gender Roles and

Delinquency’, Social Forces, 58
Silverman, IJ and S Dinitz (1974) ‘Compulsive Masculinity and Delinquency: An
Empirical Investigation’, Criminology, 11
Simmel, Georg ([1903] 1969) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Classic Essays
on the Culture of Cities, Richard Sennett (ed) New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts
Simmel, Georg (1971) On Individuality and Social Forms, Donald N Levine (ed),
Simon, RJ (1975) Women and Crime, Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books
Singer (1973) Democracy and Obedience, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Sinha, M (1987) ‘Gender and imperialism: colonial policy and the ideology of
moral imperialism in late nineteenth century Bengal’, in M Kimmel (ed),
Changing Men New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, Newbury
Park, CA: Sage
Skinner, Quentin (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Sluckin, W, Herbert, M, and Sluckin, A (1983) Maternal Bonding, Oxford:
Blackwell
Smart, C (1976) Women, Crime and Criminology, A Feminist Critique, London:
Routledge
- (1979) ‘The New Female Criminal: Reality or Myth?’, British Journal of
Criminology, 19
- (1990) ‘Feminist approaches to criminology’, in L Gelsthorpe and A Morris
(eds) Feminist Perspectives in Criminology, Milton Keynes: Open University
Press
Smith, DR, Smith, WR & Noma, E (1984) ‘Delinquent careers-lines: A conceptual
link between theory and juvenile offenses’, Sociological Quarterly, 25
Smith, D and Visher, C A (1980) ‘Sex and Involvement in Deviance/Crime: A
Quantitative Review of the Empirical Literature’, American Sociological
Review, 45
Smith, T (1990) ‘The Obligation to Obey the Law: A New Theory and an Old
Problem’, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, vol 28 no: 4
Soper (1985) ‘The Obligation to Obey the Law’, in Gravison R (ed), Issues in
Contemporary Legal Philosophy - the Influence of HLA Hart, Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Spector, M (1981) ‘Beyond Crime: Seven Methods to Control Troublesome
Rascals’, in Law and Deviance, Laurence Ross (ed), London: Sage
Spierenburg, Pieter (1984) The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the evolution
503
Bibliography
of repression: from a preindustrial metropolis to the european experience,

Spiro, Melford E (1968) ‘Culture and personality’ in International Encyclopedia
of the Social Sciences, 17 vols New York: MacMillan and Free Press
Stack, S (1983) ‘Homicide and property crime: The relationships to anomie’,
Aggressive Behaviour, 9
Stanko, E (1984) Intimate Intrusions, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
- (1990) Everyday Violence, London: Pandora
Staples, R (1982) Black Masculinity: The Black Male’s Role in American Society,
San Franciso: Black Scholar Press
Steffensmeier, DJ (1978) ‘Crime and the Contemporary Woman: An Analysis of
Changing Levels of Female Property Crime, 1960-1975’, Social Forces 57
- (1981) ‘Assessing the impact of the women’s movement on sex-based
differences in the handling of adult criminal defendants’, Crime and
Delinquency, 26
- (1982) ‘Trends in Female Crime: It’s Still a Man’s World’, in BR Price and
NJ Sokoloff (eds) The Criminal Justice System and Women, New York: Clark
Broadman
Steffensmeier, D and RH Steffensmeier (1980) ‘Trends in Female Delinquency:
An Examination of Arrest, Juvenile Court, Self Report and Field Data’,
Criminology 18
Strauss, Leo (1953) Natural Right and History, Chicago/London: The University
of Chicago Press
Strawson, PF (1974) Freedom and Resentment, London: Methuen
Sumner, Colin (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary, Buckingham:
Open University Press
Sumner, Graham (1906) Folkways, Boston: Ginnand Co
Sutherland, E (1924) Criminology, Philadelphia: JB Lippincott
- (1926) ‘The Biological and Sociological Processes’, Papers and Proceedings
of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, 20
- (1937) The professional thief, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
- (1949) White Collar Crime, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc
Suttles, G (1968) The Social Order of the Slum, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Sykes, GM and Matza, David (1961) ‘Delinquency and Subterranean Values’,
American Sociological Review, 26
Szasz, T (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness, New York: Harper and Row
Tannenbaum, Frank (1938) Crime and the Community, New York: Ginn
Tappan, PW (1947) ‘Who is the criminal?’, American Sociological Review, 12
- (1960) Crime, Justice and Correction, London: McGraw-Hill
504
Bibliography
Taylor, Charles (1985) ‘Atomism’, in C Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences,
Taylor, Ian (1994) ‘The Political Economy of Crime’, in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan
and Robert Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Taylor, Ian, Walton, Paul, and Young, Jock (1973) The New Criminology: for a
Social Theory of Deviance, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Taylor, L (1984) Born to Crime: the genetic causes of criminal behaviour, London:
Greenwood Press
Thielicke, Helmut (1969) Nihilism: Its origin and nature - with a Christian Answer,
New York: Schoken
Thomas, WI (1907) Sex and Society, Boston: Little, Brown
- (1923) The Unadjusted Girl, Boston: Little, Brown
Thomas, WI, and Znaniecki, Florian (1958) The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America: Behaviour Problems and Programs, New York: Alfred A Knopf
Thompson, WE, Mitchell, J, and Dodder, R (1984) ‘An empirical test of Hirschi’s
control theory of delinquency’, Deviant Behaviour, 5
Thornberry, TP, Moore, M, and Christensen, RL (1985) ‘The effect of dropping
out of high school on subsequent criminal behaviour’, Criminology, 23
Thornton, WE and J James (1979) ‘Masculinity and Delinquency Revisited’, British
Journal of Criminology, 19
Thrasher, Fredrick M (1927, 1963) The Gang: a Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago,
Tierney, K (1982) ‘The battered women movement and the creation of the wife
beating problem’ Social Problems, 29
Tillich, Paul (1963) Systematic Theology, Vol III Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press
Title, CR, Burke, MJ and Jackson, EF (1986) ‘Modelling Sutherland’s theory of
differential association: Toward an empirical clarification’, Social Forces, 65
Tittle, CR, Villemez, WJm & Smith, DA (1978) ‘The myth of social class and
criminality: An empirical assessment of the empirical evidence’, American
Sociological Review, 43
Tonnies, Ferdinand ([1877] 1955) Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und
Gesellschaft), CP Loomis (trans) London
Tonore (1981) ‘Must we Obey? Necessity as a Ground of Obligation’ BA Law
Review, vol 67
Trotha, Trutz (1974) Jugendliche Bandendelinquenz, Stuttgart: Verlag
Udry, JR, (1974) The Social Context of Marriage, Philadelphia, Lippincott, Uhlman,
Thomas and Darlene Walker
505
Bibliography
Unger, Roberto (1976) Law in Modern Society, New York: Basic Books
- (1987) Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task: a critical introduction to
Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Vold, George B (1958) Theoretical Criminology, New York: Oxford University
Press
Vold, George B and Bernard, Thomas J (1978) Theoretical Criminology, (2nd ed)
(1986) New York: Oxford University Press
Voltaire, FMA De (1901) Works, Vols 1 - 42, New York: ER Dumont
Voss, HL (1964) ‘Differential association and delinquent behaviour’, Social
Problems, 12
Wagner, Peter (1994) A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline, Routledge:
London/New York
Walker, A, (1990) ‘A Poor Idea of Poverty’, The Times Higher Education
Supplement, 17 August, 16
Walker, Nigel (1977) Behaviour and Misbehaviour: explanations and non-
explanations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Walter, Glenn G (1990) The Criminal Lifestyle: patterns of serious criminal conduct,
Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Walvin, J (1982) ‘Black caricature: the roots of racialism’ in C Husband (ed),
‘Race’, in Britain, London: Hutchinson
- (1982) A Child’s World: A social history of English Childhood 1800-1914,
Harmondsworth: Penguin
Walzer, M (1983) Spheres of Justice: a defence of Pluralism and Equality, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell
Warren, MQ (1983) ‘Applications of interpersonal-maturity theory of offender
populations’, in WS Laufer and JM Day (eds), Personality theory, moral
development, and criminal behaviour, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books
Webber, Storme (1992) ‘To be a woman in New York City’ in The Popular Front of
Contemporary Poetry Anthology, London: Apples and Snakes
Weber, Max (1947) The Theory of Social and Economic Organisations, trans, by
Talcot Parsons and A Henderson, New York: Free press
- (1984) ‘Legitimacy, Politics and the State’, in W Connolly ed Legitimacy
and The State, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
West, DJ (1982) Delinquency: Its Roots, Careers, and Prospects, Cambridge Mass:
West, DJ and Farrington, DP (1973) Who Becomes Delinquent?, London:
Heinemann Educational
- (1977) The Delinquent Way of Life, London: Heinemann
506
Bibliography
West, DJ, Roy, C and Florence L Nicholas (1978) Understanding Sexual Attacks,
London: Heinemann
West, R (1988) ‘Jurisprudence and Gender’, University of Chicago Law Review,
55
Whyte, W F (1943) Street Corner Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Wiatrowski, MD, Griswold,DB and Roberts, MK (1981) ‘Social control theory
and delinquency’, American Sociological Review, 46
Widom, CS (1976) ‘Interpersonal conflict and cooperation in psychopaths’, Journal
of Abnormal Psychology, 85
Wiles, Paul (1971) ‘Criminal Statistics and Sociological Explanations of Crime’,
in Crime and Delinquency in Britain, W Carson & Paul Wiles (eds), London:
Martin Robertson
Wille, W (1974) Citizens who commit murder, St Louis: Warren Green
Williams, Katherine (1994) A Textbook on Criminology, London: Blackstone Press
Wilson, James Q (1975, rev ed 1983) Thinking About Crime, New York: Basic
Books
Wilson, James Q and Herrnstein, Richard J (1985) Crime & Human Nature: the
definitive study of the causes of crime, New York: Simon & Schuster
Wilson, W J (1987) The truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and
Public Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
- (1990) ‘The Underclass: issues, perspectives and public policy’, Annals
(AAPSS), 501 (January)
- (1991) ‘Studying Inner-City Social Dislocations: the Challenge of Public
Agenda Research’, American Sociological Review, Vol 56
- (1994) ‘Citzenship and the Inner-City Ghetto Poor’, In Bart van Steenbergen
(ed) The Condition of Citizenship, London: Sage
Wolfgang, Marvin (1960) ‘Cesare Lombrosso’, In H Mannheim, (ed), Pioneers in
Criminology, London: Stevens
Wolfgang, Marvin and Ferracuti, Franco (1967) The Subculture of Violence: towards
an integrated theory in criminology, London: Social Science Paperbacks
Wolfgang, Marvin Savitz, L, and Johnston, N (eds) (1970) The Sociology of Crime
and Delinquency, New York: Wiley
Wootton, B (1959) Social Science and Social Pathology, London: Allen and Unwin
- (1963) Crime and The Criminal Law, Hamlyn Lecture Series, London: Stevens
and Sons
Worral, A (1990) Offending Women: Female Lawbreakers and the Criminal Justice
System, London: Routledge
Yochelson, S, and Samenow, SE (1976) The criminal personality: VolI A profile
for change, New York: Jason Aronson
507
Bibliography
- (1985) The criminal personality: Vol II The change process (reved), New
York: Jason Aronson
- (1986) The criminal personality: Vol III The drug user, New York: Jason
Aronson
Yoshimasu, S (1961) ‘The criminological significance of the family in the light of
the studies of criminal twins’, Acta Criminologiae et Medicinae Legalis
Japanica 27
Young, Allison (1990) Femininity in Dissent, London: Routledge
Young, Jock (1986) ‘The failure of Criminology: the need for radical realism’, in
R Matthews and J Young (eds) Confronting Crime, London: Sage
- (1987) ‘The Tasks of a Realist Criminology’, Contemporary Crises, 11
- (1992) ‘Ten points of realism’, in Young, Jock and Matthews, Roger (1992)
Rethinking Criminology: the realist debate, London: Sage
Zedner, L (1991) Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England, Oxford:
Clarendon Press
Zukin, S (1992) ‘The City as a landscape of power: London and New York as
global financial capitals’, in L Budd and S Whimister (eds), Global Finance
and urban living: the case of London, London: Routledge
508
INDEX
Abrahamsen, D 344 Berman, Marshal 25

Action rationale, of actions 293-5 Bernard, T 290
Adler, F 405-6, 407-8, 415-6 Bernstein, Richard, J 96
Adoptees 136 Bishop, C 405
Akers, R 151 Black, Donald 102-3, 402
Alienation 45-47, 467 Blacks, images of 194-6
Allsopp, JF and Feldman, MP 147 Blood
Ambivalence 1-4, as transcendental inspiration 474
Amdur, RL 185 as split in crime 475
Analyticism 215 Blackstone, William 6-7
Andelman 240 Blumenberg, Hans 83
Anomie 54, 58-9 Body, ideas on 194-7
Aquinas, St Thomas 80-81 Bonger, Willem 9
Arendt, H 203, 206 Booth, Charles 241, 247
Ascher, C 413-4 Borgstrom, CA 135
Atherton, Charles 419 Bowlby, John 142-44
Atkinson, JM 60 Bowlby, J and Salter-
Auletta, Ken 417 Ainsworth, MD 142
Austin, John 42, 72, 78, 84, 86, Box, S 179, 390, 391, 392, 408
88, 89, 101, 103-106, 123, 166 Box, S and Hale, C 408
Austin, RL 184 Boxill, BR 439
Authority, types of 43-4 Braithwaite, John 3, 154-5, 178, 317
Authorisation, as factor in crimes of Brennan, T and Huizinga, D 178
obedience 207-8 Broca, Paul 195
Average man, idea of 167-8 Brodribb, Somer 413
Brown, Joan 422
Bachman, JG and O’Malley, PM Buck v Bell 205
Bad science, Hooton’s work as Buckle, A, and Farrington, DP 395
an example 129, 185 Bull, RHC 137
Bagehot 199 Bureaucracy 193
Bagquley, P and Mann, K 418, 423, 433 crimes of 203-10
Bahr, SJ 179, 184 development of new forms in
Barnes, Harry E, and Teeters, post-modernism 467
Negley K 189 Burt, C 470
Barnes, Julian (Before She Met Me) 233-35
Bartol, CR 146 Cain, M 393
Baudrillard, Jean 309-11, 314, 319, 321, Calas, Jean, death of 87-88
466-7 Callinicos 33, 433
Bauman, Zygmunt 4, 34, 82-3, 100, Campbell, A 395, 396, 408
197-99, 204, 206, 212-3, 451 Capital, as essential to build
Baxter, James K the successful late-
(The Woman in the Bus) 1, 215 modern self 469-73
Beccaria, Cesare 72-74, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, economic 472
96-103, 117, 168, 198 social 472
Becker, H 11, 152, 192, 249, 318, 321, human 472
322, 323, 326 Carby, H 195
Beirne, Piers 87-88, 167-8 Cavlen, P 391, 393, 408, 409
Bell, Daniel 3, 257, 297 Carringan, T Connell, R and Lee, J 411
Benson, ML 342 causal factors/correlations,
Benedict, Ruth 277 distinctions between 120, 134
Bentham, Jeremy 72, 74-76, 78, 84, 86, Cernkovich, S 185
89, 90, 91, 92, 101, 123, 168, 201 Cernkovich, S and Giordana, P 178
509
Index
Chadda, Parminder (Southall) 261 modern identity 300-1

Chambers, I 258 the contingency of the normal
Chesney-Lind, M 391 as defining the post-modern
Chicago School’s attempt to develop condition 302-306
a science of the city 243-9 and the sense of justice 306-8
Chivalry, as a factor in criminal justice effect upon ideas of social
Pollak’s thesis 389 justice 315, 462-7
testing of 390-4 effect upon creating
Christianson, KO 135 social theory 460
Christie, Nils 192, 213, 338, 443 Control theory (Hirschi) 183-88
Cities Control, theories of crime
changing forms of their study with Eysenck 144-150
and development 237-72 Correction/appreciation,
as the product of distinction between 327
market forces 249-52 Cotterrell, Roger 78
as a site of communication 253-55, Cressey, DR 153
257-61 Crime control/due process models 91
as the site of new social divisions Crime
and polarisations 255-7 analytical features of 22
as developing post-liberal definition of 6-7
spaces, the case of Los Angles 267 relationship to language 5, 118
other radical post- the absence of an essential
modern cities 271-2 nature 64, 116
Civilising, process 113-4 as the creation of modernity 102
in Hart 107-9 study of 3
in Bauman 197-9 as normal in society 57, 155
in Elias 199-202 as a natural phenomenon 174,
Civilisation, reflexive with Garofalo 126
questioning of 202-3 as a natural problem
Clarke, A and Clarke, A 143 similar to disease 9-10
Classicism or the classical school as result of biological inferiority,
of criminology 8, 71-114, 212, in Lombrosso 124-5
Cleckley, H 156-7, 158 in Hooton 129-30
Clinard, MB 11 as body type in Sheldon 130-33
Clinard, MB and Abbott, DJ 152 with specific reference
Cloward, R and Ohlin, L 179, 276, 284-8 to women 398-400
Cohen, Albert 281-4, 285, 287, as the result of good 181
323, 397, 401 links with fear, trust and
Cohen, Stan 76 predictability 239-40
Coleman, Alice 251-2 as expression of double
Coll, BD 437 victimisation 265
Colvin, M and Pauly, J 186 Crimes of obedience 205-9
Commodities, Crimes of passion 354-7
in Marx 45-7 Criminality,
as readable signs of the self 317 distinguished from crime 20-21
as unable to satisfy the self 318, as a thought process 341-3
468-9 Criminal statistics 168-171
Comte, Henri August 116-7, 165, 167, 190 attempts to complement 171-3
Constitutional studies, Gottfredson as dominating criminological
and Hirschi’s critique of 137 discourse 174-5
Contingency 298 Criminology
as a cultural factor constituting history, images of 7-8
510
Index
meaning of 5 Descartes, R 29, 41, 223

positive 117, 470 Desire 182-3, 276,
See criminological positivism criminology has only worked
subject matter 6 with simple models of 314
of modernity 23 in the analysis of Thomas 315
and social structure as interacting with contingency 315
of modernity 37-9 as interacting with material
as written by men 395-8 consumption to produce felicity 316
peace-making 452 as linked with labelling to
Criminological positivism 115-235 produce the irrational games
Criminological texts of law, desire and death 343-6
presentation of 7 Determinism, in Kant 224-7
Crips and Bloods 270 hard/soft distinguished 328
Critical legal studies 105 Detroit, as an example of a city in
Cultural conflict 274-5, 294 post-industrial decline 256
Culture Development of self theories 458
as constituting the medium of Differential Association 150-55, 458
human action 273, 296, 297-9 Discipline 45, 63, 75, 462
of modernity 273-96 Disciplinisation, knowledges of 193-214
and post-modernism 297-318 Dobash, RP, Dobash, RE,
as restraining crime by offering and Gutteridge, S 394
strong cultural prohibitions 274 Dolan, B and Coid, J 155-6, 157
the case of Japan 277-81 Domination, in Weber 43-4
as criminogenic 281 in MacKinnon 406-7
as constituting desire under Dominelli, L 391
capitalism 275-6, 297 Douglas, Jack 60, 327-8, 391
of shame and guilt 279 Downes, D and Rock, P 168, 283
idea of working class culture Drift theory 332-4
in Miller 288- 91 Drugs policy, ironic
Hirschi’s critique of 291-2 consequences 334-5
Culture of contentment 1, 111, 211 Dugdale, R 134
Currie, E 144, 241, 470 Durkheim, Emile 37, 54-60, 93, 123,
129, 167, 174, 176, 182, 187, 229-32,
Dahl, Robert 111 275, 281, 297, 298, 306, 314, 315,
Dahrendorf, Ralf 39, 418, 430-2, 439 317, 338, 453
Dalgaard, OS and Kringlen, E 135 Dworkin, Ronald 77
Daly, K 392
Dannefer, D 461 Easton, D 464
Darwin, Charles 210 Eaton, M 391 394
Datesman, SK and Scarpitti, FR 391 Elias, Norbert 38, 199-201, 346, 440
David, O et al 136 Elliott, DS Ageton, SS and Canter, R 179
Davis, Arthur 332 Elliott, DS and Voss, H 179
Davis, Mike 266-71, 433 Engels, F 49, 240-1, 247, 250
De Beauvoir, S 414 enlightenment 44, 61, 79, 81-3
De Sade, The Marquis 383, 310, 383, 413 Erikson, Kai 324
De Tocqueville, Alexis 420 Erlanger, HS 179
Dean, H and Taylor-Gooby, P 418 Esterbrook, A 134
death, of modern social theory 453-5 Eugenics 204-5
deconstruction 17 Everday life
dehumanisation, as factor in categories of as basis
crimes of obedience 208-9 of theory 216-8
Denzin, Norman 322 as the site of analysis
511
Index
for Hart 218-9 Gatrell 89

as rich and complex 219-222 Gaylin, W 342
narratives of, in Hume 223-4 Gaylord, MS and Galliher, JF 150
in Kant 224-8 Gellner, Ernest 51, 306
as increasingly requiring Gelsthorpe, L 391
a high degree of socialisation Gemeinschaft/gesellschaft,
and social capital 232-5 distinction 26-7, 237-8
Existentialism 291, 348, 349-82, 458 General theory of crime 216
Eysenck, HJ 144-49 Giddens, Anthony 221, 232-35, 239,
Eysenck, HJ and Gudjonsson 147, 149 249, 327, 410
Eysenck, HJ and Eysenck, SBG 145, 147 Gilder, G 424
Eysenck, SBG and McGurk, BJ 147 Gilligan, Carol 414-5, 416
Glasgow, D 418
Fainstein, et al 433, 439 Glazer and Moynihan 246
Family Studies 133-4 Glueck 143
Farrington, DP 152 God, death of 4-5, 17, 18, 19, 71-2, 84, 166
Farrington, DP et al 134 Goddard 140
Farrington, DP and Morris, AM 391, 392 Goffman, E 45, 222, 336, 337
Feldman, MP 137, 143, 146, 148, 428 Goldber 439
Female liberation, as Goldstein, AG et al 137
cause of crime 405-9 Gordon, Diana 174, 338
Ferri, Enrico 126-8 Goring, Charles 125
Fields, F 418, 422, 430-2 Gottfredson and Hirschi (A General
Firestone, H 316 Theory of Crime) 20-22, 118-9, 133,
Fisher, J 274 137, 139, 215, 216, 232, 422, 456,
Fishkin, James 111 459-60, 469
Foucault, Michel 63, 85, 89, 119, 139, Gould, SJ 195, 196
187, 189, 191-4, 196-7, 201, 202, 221, Gouldner, AW 397
222, 337 Greenwood, J 390
Fox, D 417 Grendon Underwood, HMP 159-162
Fox, J, Hart N, and Agel, TF 408 Grygier, T et al 143
Freud, S 344-6, 383, 399 Guerry, AM 119
Friedman, LM 437 Gunn, J et al 161
Friday, P C and Hage, J 186-7 Guttmacher, M 119
Fromm, Eric 206
Furnham, A and Henderson, M 143 Habermas, J 34, 35, 237
Hackel, E 204
Gaming Hacker, AC 428-30
as the reality of late-modern Hagan, FE 342
social life 466-73 Hagan, John 402-3
as requiring various kinds of Hagan, J, Simpson, J and Gillis, A 402
capital 469-73 Hagel, F 28, 72, 321, 330, 383, 385
Gangs, study of, Hall Williams, JE 143, 171
in Thrasher 281 Hamilton, JR 156
in Cohen 281-4 Harrison, P 467
in Cloward and Ohlin 284-7 Hart, HLA 107-109, 112, 114,
in Miller 288-91 218-219, 222
Galbraith, John K 1, 111, 211 Hartsock, Nancy 412-3
Garfinkel, H 338 Harvey, David 251, 258-259
Garofalo, Raffaele 126 Hawley, C and Buckley, RE 136
Garland, David 122, 123, 310 Hay, Douglas 89
Gath 140 Hayashi, S 135
512
Index
Heidegger, M 350 Ingold, T 210

Heidensohn, Frances 390, 391, 395, 396 Institute for Cultural Conservation 424
Heller, A and Feher, F 301, 410 interactionism 22, 60
Hepburn, JR 185 IQ and crime 139-42
Herd mentality 69 Irony
Herrnstein, R, and Murphy C (The ironic outcomes of labelling 334-7,
Bell Curve) 470 as linking to the idea
Hill, D and Pond, DA 136 of contingency 336-7
Hindelang, MJ 184, 390, 392 as linking to the idea of collective
Hindelang, MJ, Hirschi, T and representation 337-8
Weiss, JG 185
Hindelang, Gottfredson, Jacobs, Jane 251
and Garofalo 20-21, 390 Jameson, F 258
Hindelang, MJ and Weiss, JG 147 Jenckes, C 258
Hirschi, T 153, 179, 183-7, 291, Jenckes and Peterson 436
292, 315, 402 Jenkins, Iredell 109, 10
Hirschi, T and Hindelang, M 140 Jensen, GF 185
Hirschman, AO 437 Jensen, GF and Eve, R 184
Hobbes, Thomas 49, 71, 78, 81, 84, 89, Johnson, RE 152
92, 100, 117, 165, 190, 199, 223, 316, Johnson, RF 179, 184
347 Jones, David 80
Hochschild, AR 294 Jordan, W 194-5
Hollin, CR and Howells, K 143 Jurisprudence 48, 85, 462
Holmes, Justice 205
Holocaust 202-3, 205 Kafka, Franz 336
Holzner, B and Marx, JH 336 Kant, Immanuel 28, 108 210, 224-228,
Honderich, Ted 109-110 307, 343, 384
Hooton, AE 129-30, 451 Kappeler, Susanne 296
Howarth, E 145 Kasarda 427
Hse, LKG et al 136 Katz, M 418
Huber, Joan 410 Katz, Jack 351, 358-60, 362, 364-5, 373,
Hudson, B 393 376-81
Hughes, Mark 436 Kaufman, W 349
Hulseman, Luke 193 Kellogg, P 435
Human nature Kelman, H and Hamilton, V L 205-9
openness of 57-58, 65-66 Kelsen, Hans 96, 97
attempt by Hume to found a Kempinen 391
source of 223-4 Kesey, Ken 336
Hume, David 28, 74, 81, 84, 117, 223-4, King, Rodney, trial of 443-8
228, 457 Kitsuse, JI and Dietrick, EDC 179
Hutcheson, Francis 81 Klein, D 398
Hurwitz, S and Christianson, KO 134 Kornhauser, R 179, 246-7, 287
Hybrids, social 91-2, 116, 120, 217 Kranz, H 135
Hyper-reality 310-13, 319, 338-40 Krier, R 251
in Los Angles riots 444-9 Krige, J 34
Kruttschnitt, C 392
Identity, modern 299-301
Imprisonment 76, Labelling theory 189, 321-28, 458, 469
Individual 27, 30-32, 56, 57, 66-8 connection with idea of
as taking control in the interactional process 321-6
culture of contingency 343 as leading to the idea of the
individuality, discourse of 36-37 existential self 327, 348
513
Index
Lange, J 135 Mackinnon, C 406-7

Laqueur, T 196 Macnicol, J 418
Law MacPherson, CB 377
conflict, model of law and society 14-15 Malthus, Thomas 105-6
consensus, model of Mann, K 418, 433
law and society 13 Marshal, TH 431
pluralist, model of Martens PL 460-1
law and society 13-14 Marx, Karl 23, 32, 33, 45-54, 64, 68, 72,
as an autopoietic system 94-5, 101 101, 187, 209, 222, 240, 303, 309, 317,
the overuse of law as 418, 430,453
creating crime 346-7 Marxist/left idealist theory 458
Learning theory Masculinity, crisis of 235, 409-12
in Eysneck 145-50 Maternal deprivation 142-44
in Sutherland 150-4 Mastueda, RL 185
Le Bon, G 127, 196 Matza, David 91, 245, 249, 260,
Lea, John 262 321, 328-34
Lefebure, Henri 181, 311-3 Mawson, AR and Jacobs, KJ 136
Lefort, Claude 37 Maxwell, Nicholas 11, 23
Legal order as reflecting the national Mayhew, Henry 241-3, 247
order of things 93 McCord, W and McCord J 157
Legal regulation, liberal idea of 93 McEwan, A W and Knowles, C 147
Legality/positivism, complementary McGurk, BJ 148
nature of 123-4 McGurk, BJ and McGurk, RE 148
Legitimation 78-9, 80-2, 93, 100, 276, McKay, Henry 150, 244, 246
380, 462-4 McVicar, John 400
Lengermann, PM and Wallace, RA 411 Mead, George, Herbert 322-3
Lewis, Oscar 248, 290, 419 Mead, M 399
liberalism 30, 39 Mead, L 424
Legras, AM 135 Medrick, SA, Garbrielli,
Lemert, EM 179, 287, 305, 324-5 WF, and Hutchings B 136
Leonard, E 397 Meir, RF 342
Liberation, discourse of 35- 7 Merton, Robert 59, 175, 213, 273, 275,
Lindblom, C 175 291-2, 301, 305, 314
Lloyd, Genevieve 385-386 Messner, H 438
Locke, John 81, 110, 223 Messner, SF 178
Lofland, John 326-7 Meta-narratives,
Lombroso, Cesare 8, 115, 117, 124-6, incredulity towards 453
128-9, 133, 198, 389 Midgley, Mary 357
with Ferro, W 398 Mill, John Stuart 53, 200, 201, 202 318
Los Angeles Miller, E 396
as the post-modern city Miller, Walter 281, 288-291, 294
of quartz 266-71 riots 443-9 Milligram, S 220
Loom, J SD et al 136 Mills, C Wright 299
LHL, Alan 143 Mirror of nature thesis 118
Luhmann, N 221 Modernity 25-39
Lyons, David 109 Durkheim’s model of 230-32
Lyotard, JF 33, 308, 453-4 Modernity and the
social control idea 121-4
Maccomby, E E, and Jacklin, CN 399 Modular man 467-9
Machiavelli, N 165 Montagu, Ashley 130
Macintosh, M 251 Moral emotions 359-60
NacIntyre, Alasdair 6, 33, 81, 84, 93, 120, Morgan, P 143, 216
209-10, 229-30, 253, 277, 299, 306 Moriyama, T 277-81
Morris, A 396, 398
514
Index
Morris, Terence 198, 245 Patten, Brian (A Drop of

Morrison, WP 128 Unclouded Blood) 474-5
Morrison, WJ 2, 316, 334 Pavlovian conditioning 146
Moyer, KE 136 Pepinsky, H and Quinney, R 452
Moynihan, D 290-1 Phares, EJ 148
Mullings, B 256 Peckman, M 4
Murray, Charles 215, 309, 418, 420-26, Pick, D 198
439, 451-2 Piven, FF and Cloward, R R 438
Murray, C and Plato 357
Herrnstein, Richard 140, 422 Podolsky, E 120, 121
Murdoch, Iris 71 Polk, K, et al 185
My Lai 205-9, 359 Policing 50
Pollack, Oscar 389, 390, 405
Naffine, Ngaine 416 Political economy 47
Nagell, I 391 Poole, ED and Regoli, RM 184, 185
Nagel, I and Hagau, J 387, 392 Popper, Karl 86, 127, 343
Nagin, D, and Pagernoster, R 469 Positivist sociology 55
Naturalism, paradigm of 9, 39, 83, Positivism in criminology
85, 86, 210 tendency to categorise,
Neutralisation, techniques of 330-32, 332 differentiate, and typologise 120
Newman, Oscar 251-2 Positive criminology and the
Nietzsche, F 4, 60-70, 121, 183, 187, 190, Rule of Law 128
198, 200, 209, 210, 317, 344, 474 Post-modernism 15-17, 30, 53
Nihilism 4, 61-63 as exhaustion of modernity 32
NWA (Niggers With Attitude)/ but as the paradox of exhaustion
Gangster Rap 266-7 and energy 319-20
as impossibility of fulfilling
Oakley, A 395, 400 modernity 33-35, 474
Objectivity 85-88 as the end of the dream of
Obligation to obey the law 107-114 organisational modernity 210-12
Offe, Claus 434 impacting upon culture 298
Offord, DR 134 as a systematic condition without
Ogareu, Nicholas 89 a corollary centre of political and
Ontology social action 310
laws ability to create its own 81-2, as implying the impossibility
91-2, 95-6 of constructing
Opportunity theory general theory 455-60
as explanation of women’s as a journey into the unknown 471
differential crime rates 402-4 Poverty
Orcutt, JD 152 radical right argument that
Osborn S G, and West, DJ 134 current poverty as
an ironic consequence
Packer, Howard 91 of the war on 419-26
Pahl, RE 418 Powell, GE 146
Panopticon, or Inspection House 75, 201, Privatisation, of public space 268, 456,
242, 316 459-60, 463
Park, Robert 150, 173, 243, 244 as dismantling of welfare state 451
Parisi, N 391 Progress, idea of 101, 198-200, 310
Parsons, Talcott 187, 289-90 as legitimating crimes 473
Pathological stimulation seeking Psychological approaches to
(as theory of crime) 458 explaining crime 139-164
Psychoanalytic theory 343-7, 458
515
Index
Psychopathology 145, 155-163, 358-9 Routinisation, as a factor in

Public executions 89-90 crimes of obedience 208
Rowe, C, and Koetler, F 259
Quay, HC 141 Rule of Law 77
Quinney, R, and Wilderman, J 253 and desire to transgress 345
Quetelet, Adolphe 165, 167-8, 174 Runciman, W 418
Quinney, Richard 52 Rusche, G and Kircheimer, O 103
Rutter, M 143
Rada, RT 136
Radzinowicz, Sir Leon 75, 80, 90 Sagarin, E, and Kelly, R J 352
Radzinowicz, Sir Leon and Saint-Simon, Henri 2
Hood, Roger 89-90, 122 Samnow, Stanton 349
Radzinowicz, Leon and King, J 405 Sampson, Robert 470
Rankin, J 184 Sampson, RJ and Laub, JH 470
Raine, A, and Venables, PH 148 Samuel, R 434
Rational choice theory 458 Sarte, Jean-Paul 349, 350-1, 380
Rational conformity of women 414-6 Saunders, P 418
Rationality Schoenberger, K 418
formal 42, 79, 90, 100 Schoenthaler, S and Doraz, W 136
substantive 42, 79, 90 Schwendinger, H and
link with types of Authority 43 Schivendinger, J, Scott, A 254-5
Rationalisation 41-44 Scull, AJ 191
in classical criminology 88-91 Scutt, J 400
Realism Seduced/repressed (models of social
right realism 214, 216, 464 control in post-modernism) 212-4
left realism 52, 54, 214, 262-66, 464 Self
Reality as the focal point of
problematising of in modernity 27, 30-2, 36-7
post-modernism 319 as brearing the strains of
Reckless, Walter 390 modernisation 36-7
Reflexivity 6, 79, 83, 202-3 in Nietzsche 63, 65-70
and criminology 7, 12 as subjected to injunctions
Reiner, Robert 22 of self-control and self-creation 307
Reiss, AJ and Rhodes, AL 152, 177 as located in the melange of
Resentment, as the the late or post-modern 308
post-modern emotion 465 as requiring large quantities of
Richards, P, Berk, R, and Foster, B 359 social skills to cope
Rime, B, Bonvy, H and Rouillon, F 162 with late-modernity 309-13
Robbins, L 157 as defined by consumption
Robbins, LH and Ratcliff, KS 469 patterns 313-15
Robbins, LN West, PA as constantly on trial in modernity 380
and Herjanil, BL 152 - as the idea of post-modernism 468-9
Robinson, Sophia 244 Self-control
Romantic love 232 as criminological theory 19, 20-22, 38
Rosanhoff, et al 135 See also Gottfredson and Hirschi
Rose, Nikolas 139, 148, 163, 197 as affected by contingency 301
Rosen, S 210 as created by social structure 27, 37-9,
Rosenbaum, J 185 460-1, 467-73
Rossi, A 260 as without solace with
Rorty, Richard 118, 299 the death of God 349-50
Rotham, David 196, 336 See also civilising process
Rousseau, J-J 28, 72, 165, 383 as the site of all action and
516
Index
responsibility in the Sonatotypes 130-33

existentialist perspective 350-2 Specter, M 193
as criminogenic 379 Spierenbury, Peter 90
in culture of contingency 462 Spiro, M 274
as gaming 465-7 Stack, S 178
as involved with a dialect of Shalin, Joseph 204, 298
self-awareness 367-8 Stanko, E 394
Self-help, crime as 102 State, the, definition of 38
Sellin, T 10, 128, 154, 274-5 nation, state and the rise of capitalism 42
Sensuality of crime 358-64, 377-8, 381 Steffenmeister DJ 405-6, 408
in rape and sexual homicide 365-75 Steffensmeier, D and
Sex/gender distinction 386 Steffensmeier, RH 391
Shackladysmith 394 Strain theory (Anomie) 175-183, 458
Sheldon, WH 130-33 Strauss, Leo 100
Shils, E 25 Strawson, PF 464
Shavit, Y and Rathner, A 178, 185 Statistics
Shaw, Clifford R 150, 244, 246 of gender differentiation 387-8
Short, James, F 151 under-representation of
Shott, S 294 crime done to women 390
Shover, NS et al 401 Stumpfl, F 135
Simmel, George 238-9, 349 Sub-cultural theory 263, 281-91
Simon, RJ 405 Subterranean values 332
Singer 111 Suicide, Durkheim’s, analysis of 59-60
Sinha, M 195-6 Sumner, Colin 11, 453
Skinner, BF 151, 226 Sumner, WG 437-8
Skinner, Quentin 5 Surveillance 76-7
Sluckin, W et al 143 in Los Angles 268-9
Smart, Carol 17, 391, 393, 397, 400, 409 Sutherland, E 10, 149-155, 180, 248-9,
Smith, DR, Smith, WR 273, 323,
and Norma, E 152 and Cressey 150
Smith, D and Visher, CA 390 Suttles, G 246
Smith, T 110 Sykes and Matza 330-2
Social contract 109 System: criminal justice as a system 94-6
as guiding idea with Hobbes 71-2 Systems/selves, dialectic of 113-4
in Beccaria 72 Szasz, T 324
Social control theory 458
See control Tannenbaum, Frank 324
Social deprivation/underclass, as Tappan, P 10, 130
theory of crime 458 Tarde, G 150
specific impact upon black Taylor, I, Walton, P, and Young, J 3, 18-19,
households in US 428-30 80, 90, 245, 247
Social distance 190-4 Taylor, Ian 3, 182
Social disorganisation 244-7 Taylor, Lawrence 133, 135
Social ecology 243-9 Teubner, Gunther 94
Social geography 464 Theilick, H 305
Social order 452-3 Thomas, WI 150, 313, 322
as problematic 165 Thompson, W E Mitchell, J
in Tonnies 238 and Dedder, R 185
as unnatural 304 Thornberry, TP, Moore, M
Social solidarity 55-56, 230-32, 462 and Christenson, RL 178, 185
as expressed in great writing 452 Thornton, WE and James, J 401
Social theory, as metaphysical and Thrasher, FM 281, 315
political 455
Sociological positivism 55
517
Index
Title, CR Burke, MJm and Webber, Strome (to be a woman

Jackson, EF 152, 153 in New York City) 261-262
Title, CR Villemez, WJ and Weber, Max 38, 41-45, 63, 187,
Smith, DA 178 193, 200, 209, 238,
Tönnies, F 26, 237-8 275, 297, 307, 317,
Tonone 112-3 336, 337, 402, 418,
Trasher, G 136 453, 462, 464
Trotha, Trutz 294 West, DJ 134, 143
Truth 239 West, DJ and Farrinton, D 140, 152
in Beccaria 101 West, Robin 415
in Austin 103-6 White Collar Crime 154-5
Turner, B 313 Whyte, W 248
Twin Studies 134-36 Widom, CS 162
Wiatrowski, MD Griswold
Underclass 252, 255-6, 292, DE Roberts, MK 184
417-449, 467 Wiles, P 166
as consequence of constitutional Will to power 70
or cultural factors aided by Williams, D 136
mistaken welfare policy 419-26 Williams, Kate 11, 171
as a consequence of post Willie, W 119
industrialisation 426-33 Wilson, JQ and
as a consequence of the redistribution Herrnstein, R J 133, 139,
of wealth from the 141-2, 153, 79, 180-1,
poor to the rich 433-36 186, 211, 215, 309, 398, 399
and the metaphysics of Wilson, WJ 293, 413, 426-7, 438, 470
contingency 438-40 Wittgenstein, L 16, 222
and the dialectics of social class, Wolfgang, ME, and Ferracuti, F 290, 305
participation and Women’s place in male fears 383-4
social control 440-2 Women’s criminality
Unger, Roberto 79, 105 biological and psychological
Utility/utilitarianism 74, 76, 112, explanations 398-9
as criminogenic 307 sex role socialisation 400-3
as the guiding principle for control 403-4
social progress in Austin 103-4 as growing with liberation 405-9
Women in the construction
Veblen, Thorsten 332 in modernity 384-5
Void, beneath Wootton, Barbara 143, 156
human existence 64-5, 455 Worrell, A 391
Voltaire 87-88
Vold, G and Bernard T 78, 80, 90, 117 Yochelson, S and, Samenow, S 341-43
Voss, Harwin 151 Yoshamasu, S 135
Young, A 394
Wanger, P 222 Young, Jock 52, 262
Walker, A 421-2
Walvin, James 194 Zedner, L 396
Walzer, M 306 Zingraff and Thomson 391
518

Pub - Theoretical Criminology From Modernity To Post Mod PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Pub - Theoretical Criminology From Modernity To Post Mod PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Pub - Theoretical Criminology From Modernity To Post Mod PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THEORETICAL CRIMINOLOGY:

Wayne Morrison, LLB, LLM, PhD,

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Printed and bound in Great Britain

proposed the dominant messages of monetary success and class mobility,

clear that resentment at exclusion from sites of obvious consumption, so clearly

1 NARRATING THE MOOD OF THE TIMES: CONFUSION, SELF-

2 THE PROBLEM OF MODERNITY 25

Modern social life as a normative project 29

3 THE THEORISTS OF MODERNITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO

4 THE PROBLEM OF CLASSICAL CRIMINOLOGY: STABILISING

5 READING THE TEXTS OF CLASSICAL CRIMINOLOGY: BEYOND

6 CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM I: THE SEARCH FOR THE

Early criminological positivism and the rule of law 128

7 CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM II: PSYCHOLOGY

8 CRIMINOLOGICAL POSITIVISM III: STATISTICS,

9 POSITIVISM AND THE DREAM OF

10 MORALITY, NORMALCY AND MODERNITY: T

11 LOCALITY AND CRIMINOLOGY: FROM THE

End-Game: the city as a site of communication and the arrival

12 CRIMINOLOGY AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNITY 273

13 CULTURE AND CRIME IN THE POST-MODERN CONDITION 297

14 LABELLING THEORY, AND THE WORK

15 CRIME AND THE EXISTENTIALIST DILEMMA 349

16 MODERNITY, GENDER AND CRIME: FROM THE

What has criminology said about all of this? 386

17 CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND THE

18 BUILDING CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORY IN

NARRATING THE MOOD OF THE TIMES: CONFUSION,

‘So hard to focus the ball of the human eye

Finding places, finding time, finding beginnings...

Journeys, snippets... modernisations

The problem of the modern world

Reflexivity, and the principle of the recognisability of the world

The subject matter of criminology is inherently contestable

How is criminology presented? How are criminological texts

Most criminological texts are organised so as to present a history of criminology,

The first set of writings we consider as criminology are labelled classical

Positivism in the 19th century

In the early development of positivism, crime was viewed as a

A crucial area of conflict has been, to what does the concept of

A period of contextualising of criminology occurred in the 1960s and

Dissatisfaction with the naive forms of traditional criminology surfaced in the

The consensus or functionalist model

The consensus model incorporates certain features; (i) society is a relatively

The pluralist model

The pluralist model reflects an interactive view of social organisation; while

The conflict model

The meaning of the central concepts of criminology varies according

Contemporary criminology has different perspectives on central

Post-modernism and the acceptance of language games as the reality

Various responses are possible:

Living, and making sense of life, within multiple perspectives is the

At the beginning of this chapter an ambivalence of moods, of directions, of gaining

mere coincidence that the present is characterised both by a drug-ridden culture

Some commentators have become sceptical of the whole enterprise of

process, to try to understand social reality is to construct social reality. Crimes

Because we are trapped in the circles of social processes does not