Crime, Drugs and Social Theory
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Crime, Drugs and Social Theory

A Phenomenological Approach

Chris Allen

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Crime, Drugs and Social Theory

A Phenomenological Approach

Chris Allen

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About This Book

Do criminal cultures generate drug use? Crime, Drugs and Social Theory critiques conventional academic and policy thinking concerning the relationship between urban deprivation, crime and drug use. Chris Allen outlines an innovative constructionist phenomenological perspective to explore these relationships in a new light. He discusses how people living in deprived urban areas develop 'natural attitudes' towards activities, such as crime and drug use, that are prevalent in the social worlds they inhabit, and shows that this produces forms of articulation such as 'I don't know why I take drugs', 'I just take them' and 'drugs come naturally to me'. He then draws on his constructionist phenomenology to help understand the 'natural attitude' towards crime and drugs that emerge from conditions of urban deprivation, as well as the non-reasoned forms of articulation that emerge from this attitude. The book argues that understanding the conditions in which drug users deviate from their 'natural attitude' can help effective intervention in the lives of drug users.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351947596

Chapter 1

Crime, Drugs and Social Research

Introduction

Drug use is now ‘normalised’ across a wide range of social groups in modern societies (Williams and Parker 2001; Parker et al 2002; Duff 2005). This means that most people below the age of 50 have now tried drugs and that large numbers of people regularly use drugs (Pearson 2001; Williams and Parker 2001; Parker et al 2002). Further, the majority of the population appear to think that there is little wrong with the use of drugs, even cocaine and LSD, so long as they are taken within ‘sensible’ limits which they tend to be, for example at weekends (Parker et al 2002). Indeed, most users of illicit drugs have otherwise conforming social profiles (Williams and Parker 2001; Pearson 2001). However, some illicit drug users do not have such conforming social profiles. These users tends to live in deprived urban areas (Parker et al 1998) and have involvements in crime which, the state has long claimed, is connected with their need to support their drug ‘addictions’ (Bean 2002). This chapter is concerned with this ‘official view’ of the drugs-crime problematic and, in particular, the extent to which social research has been implicated in the problematisation of drug use by certain sections of the population. The chapter begins by charting the nature and extent of drug use in modern societies. This highlights how drug use by people living in deprived urban areas, or working class people more generally, has been problematised for its relation with acquisitive crime (Helmer 1977). This problematisation of the link between drugs and crime is, of course, a product of the political discourse from which it originates rather than a real or necessary empirical relationship. This will become more and more apparent as the book progresses.
Given that links between drugs and crime are the product of political discourse (rather than ‘real’ empirical relationships) the second part of the chapter examines how social research has been implicated in the political problematisation of the drugs-crime link. It does this by examining the social relations of funded research production, specifically, how ‘facts’ about the link between drugs and crime that are said to ‘speak for themselves’ are little more than products of a political discourse that manifests itself in the epistemology of a state funded criminological enterprise that problematises rather than understands the practice of drug use. This informs a discussion of the different types of research studies that have sought to establish the nature and extent of the link between crime and drugs. The discussion shows that much of this drugs research is based on ontological assumptions about the pharmacological properties of drugs (i.e. that they are addictive), and therefore a hypothetico-deductive approach that seeks to test the ensuing proposition that addiction is criminogenic because it perforce necessitates crime. Although the political and arbitrary nature of these ontological assumptions will be exposed as the book unfolds, for the purposes of this chapter I simply seek to demonstrate that they manifest themselves in a variety of research designs that seek to verify this proposition though which fail to do so when placed under closer scrutiny.
My discussion of hypothetico-deductive research into the proposition that ‘drugs cause crime’ will also show that counter-factual evidence of the internal relationship between drugs and crime (e.g. that involvement in crime precedes drug use) has been used in one of two ways by the criminological enterprise. First, some criminologists have used counter-factual evidence to suggest that the ‘causal’ relationship between drugs and crime is not necessarily straightforward, i.e. because drug use may only increase – rather than cause – involvement in crime. This does little to challenge the dominant political discourse that problematises people that engage in drug use and crime. Second, other criminologists have used counter-factual evidence to suggest that an eclectic range of ‘third variables’ (e.g. poverty, family disruption, delinquent peers, etc.) may cause involvement in drugs and crime. My argument will be that hypothetico-deductive testing of the range of ‘third variables’ that are thought to cause both crime and drugs is equally futile. This is because we are presented with a further round of research that either proves or falsifies the validity of the hypothesised ‘third variables’. Verification and then subsequent falsification of various hypothetical ‘third statements’ about the ‘causes’ of drugs and crime simply causes confusion and therefore leaves us in the epistemological quicksand. This distracts from the production of a critical criminology of why the practice of drug use is not problematic in the way the dominant political discourse suggests. This sets the scene for Chapter 2 where I examine the various ways in which the relationship between drugs and crime has been explicitly theorised in order to develop critical understandings (verstehen) of drug use as social phenomena.

The Nature and Extent of Drug Use in Modern Societies

‘Recreational’ drug use is now endemic across a wide range of social groups in modern societies with young people between the ages of 16 and 29 reporting the highest levels of drug use (Bean 2002). The most convincing evidence of this has been accumulated by Howard Parker and colleagues who have undertaken longitudinal work that has plotted changes in drug use within a sample of young people for over a decade. Their evidence not only suggests that drug use is endemic within this population (with high and regular levels of alcohol, tobacco, amphetamine and LSD use) but also that the nature of drug use is becoming more serious (Parker et al 2002; Williams and Parker 2001). This is exemplified in recent findings about the changing nature and extent of drug using among their sample of young people. At the age of 18, most of Parker’s respondents identified cocaine powder (along with heroin and crack) as drugs they would avoid because they were seen as too addictive and too expensive (Williams and Parker 2001). However, when surveyed at the age of 22 a significant minority of the sample had changed their minds, resulting in a steep rise in cocaine use. Although alcohol, tobacco and cannabis continued to be the most favoured multi-purpose and mixable substances among this cohort, then, stimulants like ecstasy and cocaine were now being used in the mix (Williams and Parker 2001: 410). These findings have been replicated in other countries and amongst other age groups. For example, recent work in Australia by Duff (2005) replicated Parker’s methodology and found that over half of a representative sample of people between the ages of 18 and 44 were drug users and that over half of these drug users had now tried cocaine. Similar findings have also been attached to adults in their 30s and 40s (Pearson 2001).
Furthermore, this mixing of licit and illicit appears to be continuing unchecked with the boundaries between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ drugs eroding even at the extreme end of the drug use continuum, where drugs such as heroin are often located. One of the repeated findings of drugs surveys in the 1990s was that young people with increasingly diverse ‘recreational’ drug appetites rejected ‘hard’, addictive drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine as an unacceptable drug to even try (Parker et al 1998). Indeed, Aldridge et al (1999) point out that no representative youth survey in the 1990s recorded more than a 2 or 3 per cent lifetime trying of heroin (Aldridge et al 1999). Yet, anecdotal evidence collected by Parker and colleagues (Parker et al 1998) during the course of their work on new heroin outbreaks found that these outbreaks were not simply confined to the usual places, i.e. deprived urban areas. Serious recreational drug users with otherwise respectable and conforming social profiles were starting to use heroin as a ‘chill out’ drug within the dance scene.
Nevertheless, although the line between ‘recreational’ and ‘problematic’ drug use is becoming blurred within this social group of otherwise conforming young people (Williams and Parker 2001; Parker et al 2002), raising ‘policy concern’ about the likely health problems that this social group are likely to encounter at some stage in their lives (Pearson 2001), higher rates of ‘problematic’ substance use, specifically heroin and crack cocaine, are still thought to be overwhelmingly concentrated in deprived urban areas (Advisory Council on Drug Misuse 1998; Parker et al 1998; Aldridge et al 1999; Foster 2000; Hunt 2001; Bean 2002; Bernberg 2002; see also earlier studies by Preble and Casey 1969 and Dai 1970). Furthermore, the level of heroin use within ‘socially excluded’ populations ‘coming from the poorest parts of towns and cities’ has recently been increasing as the supply of heroin has increased (Parker et al 1998). In other words, as the supply of heroin has increased it has been soaked up by people living in deprived urban areas. The key political concern here has been less to do with the potential health problems that this may cause and more to do with how this low income population is likely to engage in acquisitive crime to sustain serious drug use (Bean 2002; Allen 2005a). It is within this political context that a plethora of social research into the relationship between crime and drugs has been undertaken. Much of this research has been commissioned by state agencies (‘policy funders’) that are concerned about the links between drugs and crime. The next part of the chapter examines the highly politicised nature of this research which has sought to problematise serious drug use by employing hypothetico-deductive approaches that seek to verify the proposition that there is a link between drugs and crime.

Research Funding and the Social Production of Criminology

The notion that social relations influence the process of knowledge production is becoming increasingly accepted within the social sciences (Allen 2005b; Beaumont et al 2005) where there has been a longstanding debate about the social production and epistemological status of social science. Social scientific interest in the political and social relations of knowledge production began in earnest when Kuhn (1970) argued that a key test of scientific validity concerned the level of correspondence between individual works of social science and its own established paradigms, rather than with social phenomena itself. This led researchers such as Woolgar and Latour (1979) to develop a critical ‘sociology of science’, although their attention was on the ‘natural’ rather than ‘social’ sciences. While this missed Kuhn’s point, which was also pertinent to the social sciences, there has since been a ‘turn’ towards examining the social relations of knowledge production in the social sciences from a variety of theoretical perspectives (see Coffey 1999; Harding 1991; Bourdieu 2000).
Since Elias (1966), Kuhn (1970) and Woolgar and Latour (1979) wrote about the social relations of knowledge production in the natural and physical sciences, an increasing number of social scientists have turned the ‘critical gaze’ of social science upon itself. Some social researchers have analysed how social interactions within the field consciously influence process of knowledge production (see Coffey 1999). Other social researchers have examined how the ‘habitus’ that researchers carry with them into the field produces ‘background thinking’ that can unconsciously affect the process of knowledge production (see Harding 1991; Bourdieu 2000). This ‘background thinking’ is thought to result from the social positioning of the researcher, for example, because their social class background, gender or some other aspect of their identity and experience has provided them with a particular but unacknowledged set of beliefs that tacitly influence their understanding of social phenomena (Allen 2005).
Although illuminating, much of the literature on the social relations of knowledge production demonstrates an oversight towards one key variable which places criminologists in an even more complex position. Specifically, criminology is an applied social science (Moyer 2001) and criminological research has historically been ‘bound to the service of the state’ (Hillyard et al 2004) which has used the state funding of research to steer the criminological enterprise since its inception (see Lee 1997 for a historical overview of state funding regimes for criminological research). There is nothing controversial about this suggestion, of course, because knowledge production tends to be ‘bound to the service of the state’ in one way or another, irrespective of whether or not it has been ‘bought’ (see Bauman 1987; Foucault 1977) and, furthermore, key architects of the welfare state, notably the Webbs, placed great emphasis on instrumental role that the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ of social science should play in contributing to the development of an ‘enlightened state’ (Lund 2002).
That said, the extent to which criminologists have been ‘bound’ to the state has intensified as a result of the restructuring of research funding (and higher education funding more generally) over the last two or three decades (Hillyard et al 2004; Allen 2006). The key change has been a shift of emphasis away from the system in which social science councils provided ‘research grants’ in order to ‘steer’ the criminological enterprise towards the service of the state, that is, by concentrating funding on researchers that came up with research projects that councils’ deemed to be ‘relevant’ (Lee 1997). Although social science councils still exist to provide ‘research grants’ (and indeed now place even more emphasis on steering social research to ensure its ‘relevance’: Allen 2006) social research undertaken from the early 1980s onwards has been mostly conducted ‘under contract’ to government departments (Lee 1997; Hillyard and Sim 1997; Walters 2003; Hillyard et al 2004) suffice it to say that ‘contract research’ has a much longer history than its recent elevation in importance suggests (see Horowitz 1967 especially the chapter by Blumer 1967). The purpose of switching emphasis to a ‘contract research’ model has been to take key research tasks (such as conception and objectives of research, formulation of methodology, etc.) out of the hands of scholars and place them directly into the hands of policy makers, who provide scholars with a ‘written specification’ that outlines a timetable of tasks to be completed ‘under contract’ (Hillyard and Sim 1997; Allen 2005). ‘Steering groups’ comprising ‘stakeholders’ in the ‘policy community’ oversee their conduct of tasks to ensure that they are conducted in a way that is consistent with the demands of the written specification (Allen 2005).
Now, the career trajectories of academic staff are increasingly contingent on their successes in obtaining ‘contract research’ (Delanty 2001; Walters 2003; Allen 2005) largely because such staff are valuable to universities that have experienced reductions in their core funding for decades and are now more reliant on income generated through contract research and other ‘enterprising’ activities (Lee 1997; Hillyard et al 2004). The extent to which ‘income generation’ pressures within universities have created a growing body of ‘entrepreneurial’ academic staff (Walters 2003; Hillyard et al 2004; Allen 2005) is evident in the proud proclamations of some universities which now claim that their ‘largest single source of income comes from contract research’. Some universities are now even making formal position statements that curiosity driven research has ‘no strategic value’ within their walls because it does not attract external funding. So, in addition to the influence that factors such as social class, gender, fieldwork experiences, etc. have on researchers’ understandings of the phenomena they investigate, criminological researchers are also moulded by the social relations of state funded research production (Lee 1997; Hillyard and Sim 1997; Walters 2003; Hillyard et al 2004). A good example of how social researchers are moulded by the social relations of state funded research production is provided by Allen (2005) who has analysed how his career of constant exposure to the ‘disciplinary gaze’ of research funders produced a level of ‘docility’ that resulted in an intuitive and taken-for-granted way of doing things that was primarily moulded to the needs of his research funders rather than the demands of seeking to understand the field. Hillyard et al (2004) have identified how the same:

 intimate relationship between criminology on the one hand, and the demands of the state and private interests on the other, has seriously infected the character of British criminology. For us, such trends are the key context for understanding how the massed ranks of policy-driven academic criminology have swollen with such alacrity in recent years. These processes – the marketization and commodification of knowledge – have touched criminology as much as any other discipline in the social sciences, with significant effects for those who work within the discipline and, concomitantly, the work they produce 
 The subordination of research workers to the imperatives of the market has played a crucial disciplinary role in the drive to fashion the academic, self-regulating subject, while simultaneously attempting to normalise those individuals and, indeed, institutions who might dissent from these imperatives, or at least harbour serious doubts about the moral and political discourses that underpin them. (Hillyard et al 2004: 374 and 377–8)
Although policy makers now write the ‘contract specifications’ that govern contemporary criminological research, then, it is important to note that scholarly production has always tended to conform to the realities of power over the longer term in one way or another – so much so that ‘official’ definitions of what constitutes crime have more or less always been taken for granted by criminologists who use them to define and frame the criminological enterprise (Hillyard et al 2004). For Mauss (1991: 188), this is nowhere more apparent in substance ‘abuse’ research where ‘social scientists have generally accepted the definitions of politicians as to what constitutes the most seriou...

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