Crime, Risk and Justice

Kevin Stenson, Robert Sullivan, Robert R Sullivan

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781903240380
• eBook ISBN: 9781135986421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Crime control has risen rapidly up the social and political agendas to become a central feature of western societies. As inequalities in society have increased, so the actual and perceived risks of crime and other social ills have grown rapidly for all sections of society. Crime has become a central issue to governments, and no longer just a technical operation of law enforcement and adjudication.

This book is concerned with issues arising from these developments. Top criminologists from Britain, the USA and Australia explore the links between crime and risk through a range of themes, from the depiction of crime in the media to the dilemmas of policing, to the new punitiveness of criminal justice systems and the custodial warehousing of the poor and excluded. Crime, Risk and Justice will be of interest to students, academics and practitioners with an interest in crime and crime control and the place they have in modern society.

1

Crime, liberalism and risk

1

The new politics of crime control

Kevin Stenson

Introduction

This chapter will set the issues raised in this book in a wider political context, providing working definitions of key terms like liberalism, politics, government, and governance. It firstly unpacks the new political saliency accorded to crime. Secondly, it analyses the retreat from ‘liberal’ approaches to crime control fashionable in the high period of the welfare states between 1945 and the late 1970s. Thirdly, it analyses the shifts in liberal society in the broadest sense of the term as associated with the post-monarchical liberal democracies. It highlights the changes from ‘social’ modes of government characteristic of the welfare states to ‘advanced liberal’ modes of government. These were associated with the rise of New Right intellectuals and regimes. Their mixture of neo-liberal, free market philosophies and traditional conservative values prioritised the defence of hierarchy and the attempt to restore traditional morality. Fourthly, the chapter records the struggle to construct approaches to crime control under the auspices of ‘third way’ or, as it is also termed, ‘progressive governance’ rationalities of government. It would be premature to describe these developments as constituting a new phase of liberal government. Rather, they embody a stage of political experiment and re-emphasis within the broad terrain of advanced liberal government. These try to integrate tough policies associated with the Right with those that attempt to deal with underlying crimogenic conditions. Fifthly, the chapter highlights the vital importance of social scientists as liberal – in the widest sense – critics of power.

The salience of crime control

The focus for the saliency placed on law and order lies in, inter alia, long-term trends towards increasing levels of officially recorded crime, especially crimes of violence and drug-related crime, growing legal recognition of hitherto neglected areas of crime like domestic violence, rape, hate crimes against minorities and growing concerns over fear, insecurity and a retreat from the open public sphere into heavily guarded zones of surveillance and security. In addition, in an increasingly interdependent world, where boundaries between nation states are blurring, there are concerns about the challenges to law, order and governmental legitimacy posed by the spread of transnational modes of criminal organization and the influx into richer countries of people fleeing war, poverty and the cataclysmic changes in the post-communist societies. In the latter countries organised crime, underpinned by ruthless violence, has become a mainstream feature of economic life. There is increasing concern in the richer countries that this virus could spread and threaten the integrity of western banks and industrial corporations (Sheptycki, 1995; Rawlinson, 1998; Taylor, 1999).

Hence, during a period of enormous global, political, economic and cultural change, crime is emerging as an issue at the very core of government in societies marked by increasing demographic diversity, mobility and inequalities, and within which the news and entertainment media have become increasingly focussed on crime. A central theme of this book is that the media are not (not that they ever were) simply neutral conduits of information about crime. The institutional arrangements that organise the media and rhetorical forms through which crime is represented can play a vital role in shaping and reflecting our deepest personal and cultural fears and sensibilities about crime and insecurity. Moreover, in an increasingly fragmented world marked by mutual distrust and suspicion in public spaces, the media become increasingly important as a source of information about crime. Furthermore, where other sources of solidarity have become tenuous, we can at least be united in our ghoulish fascination for the reported shadowy worlds of death, violence and the anarchic and carnivalesque flouting of the rules that still constrain most of our lives (see chapters by Reiner et al, Green and Sparks in this volume).

This politicization of crime control, echoing a deeply ingrained, profound dread of crime and related social and spatial polarization in many poor countries, is also now increasingly a feature of France, Germany, Austria and other West European countries (Stenson, 2000a). Even the Netherlands, for long viewed in England as a beacon of progressive penal practice, has responded to rising public anxiety about crime with a growing use of imprisonment. Since 1975 its prison capacity has increased fivefold (van Swaaningen, 2000). Concerns about crime, especially the routine ‘volume’, acquisitive crimes and crimes against the person, join a series of other anxieties about environmental and other risks created by the effects of a new industrial order, increasingly resistant to the control of politicians. However, among progressive politicians and social scientists, there is concern that the responses made to trends and public fears highlight a drift towards an emotionally fuelled, vengeful approach to crime control that can threaten the delicate cultural foundations of both liberalism and democracy.

Retreat from liberalism?

It is now common among politicians of the centre, as well as those on the right, to avoid describing themselves as ‘liberal’ about crime. In the UK, for example, the New Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw was involved in a bidding war before the 1997 election with the punitive Tory Home secretary Michael Howard over how tough they would be on criminals and how much they both wished to import Mayor Giuliani's ‘zero tolerance’, quality of life approach to policing. Notwithstanding barely audible dissenting academic voices, striking claims were made about the success of these strategies in New York's war on the criminal classes in the 1990s, a city that feels palpably more secure to outsiders who have known it over many years. Straw has consistently claimed that a tough approach chimes with the needs and wishes of Labour's core working-class constituents who suffer directly from crime, far more than middle-class ‘liberals’ and leftists (including criminologists). Their credibility is said to be undermined by their refusing to live in rundown areas or send their children to crime-prone schools in such neighbourhoods.

In short, middle-class progressives, living in their distinct cultural and geographical spheres, are accused of displaying a patrician disdain for the justifiable anxieties of poor and working-class people, groups with whom they have less and less in common. There was no discernible shame in the Government admitting that in June 2000 the British prison population had, since the election, risen by 4,500 prisoners (and set to increase rapidly), often living in overcrowded conditions and with little scope for rehabilitation or education. This was despite, under an administration famed for its fiscal prudence, the fact that it cost £25,000 per annum to keep a prisoner, in contrast to £16,000 for a boy at Eton, one of Britain's most exclusive schools. Ironically, in the same month CBS News in the USA (in a report widely publicised in the UK) warned vacationing Americans that – leaving aside murder and rape – Britain was a more crime-ridden and dangerous society than the US (The Guardian, 30 June 2000).

The meaning of ‘liberal’ in this context echoes its common American meaning. It is associated with a ‘bleeding heart’ perspective that is sympathetic to the offender rather than the victim, indeed views the offender as a victim of injustice and inequality. Moreover, it is associated with social science theories and the expertise of the welfare professions developed during the high period of the postwar welfare states. At least in the minds of their critics, these now deeply unfashionable approaches avoided recognizing the personal agency and moral responsibility of the criminal and saw crime as the outcome not, as on the Right, of a pervasive collapse of authority and morality, but of personal and social pathologies, deprivation and inequalities. Humane social engineers in the offender-oriented social service and criminal justice professions would properly deal with these problems. In echoing these critiques and sharing some intellectual ground with the right, New Labour has faithfully followed the electorally successful path forged by Clinton and Gore in the US; they distanced the New Democrats from old Rooseveltian, ‘liberal’ policies. This refers particularly to the New Democrats’ removal of rights to welfare and the introduction of workfare policies, the defence of the burgeoning use of imprisonment (now over 2 million Americans), the death penalty, boot camps, ‘three strikes and you're out’ sentencing policies and the ‘war against drugs’ in the African-American and Hispanic ghettos (see chapters by Simon, Hudson, Stenson and Edwards in this volume).

As in the UK, a strong democratic case can be made to argue that such policies suit the feelings and wishes of the majority. Yet the targets of these policies are disproportionately poor whites and the visible ethnic minorities. Hence, building a consensual community among the majority comes at the price of ghettoizing expanding sections of the population into desolate urban zones that are inhabited by the poor, the addicted, the homeless, the mentally and physically ill. Along with the expanding prisons these spaces segregating the perceivably disreputable from the respectable increasingly function as vast human garbage dumps, where survival, excitement and success and opportunities for entrepreneurship depend increasingly on involvement in illegal economies (Hobbs, 1995). The crucial test of the dismantling of the welfare safety nets will come in the troughs of economic cycles that few economists believe have been abolished by the deregulation of markets.

In harder economic times, particularly, reliance on these dumping grounds risks further weakening the connections between the poor and the damaged with the labour market, now the only acceptable and realistic route to the good life, or even to a reasonably civilized lifestyle. During the 1990s and into the new millennium, the centre left administrations of the New Democrats in the US, New Labour in the UK and their counterparts in Australasia have signally failed to halt the drift towards widening inequalities opened up by the policies of the Right. This is not alleviated by the fact that the majority of people have become better off. This, in effect, signals a reversal of the struggles to broaden the scope of inclusive formal and substantive rights of citizenship that was one of the hallmarks of welfare states (Currie, 1997; Taylor, 1999; Young, 1999). Furthermore, it is tempting to view their reliance on harsh methods of crime control as proof that they are simply conservatives in disguise. However, I will shortly argue that this view is an oversimplification and we need to recognise significant shifts introduced under centre left governments in the area of crime control as in other spheres of government.

However, if Straw denies being a liberal in the ‘bleeding heart’ sense, it is less clear that he would, as a parliamentarian, lawyer, and stout advocate of anti-racism, deny being a liberal in the wider and deeper sense. This broader meaning of liberalism involves a commitment to the principles and values laid down by Locke, Jefferson, and the other great Enlightenment architects of liberal, constitutional, representative democracies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These basic principles and values include, for example: the valorisation of the rights and expression of the individual; the separation of powers; a respect for procedural and substantive justice (the rule of law); democratic representation; the need for checks and balances against centralised state tyranny; and the need for tolerance towards minorities. It is clearly difficult for mainstream politicians seeking election to disavow liberal principles and values in this broader sense. Yet capturing the broader sense of liberalism is awesomely difficult for the social scientist and certainly beyond the grasp of parsimonious philosophical lists.

Liberal societies tend to be easily recognisable when you experience and contrast them with the many authoritarian societies that, as Amnesty International reminds us, are ruled by the routine, unaccountable use of violence and terror. However, boiling them down to an easy essential definition is difficult, given the considerable variety between countries, regions, and local politico-cultural traditions. Hence, liberalism is not simply a bundle of ideas, the province of political philosophers. It is best understood in social science terms, as a set of linkages between abstract political rationalities, policy programmes and visions and local cultures of political institutions and practices. Furthermore, the problems of maintaining sovereign legal and military authority over geographical territory are not just historical leftovers from monarchical regimes. These issues have always posed crucial questions for liberal regimes given that in practice they usually operate in hybrid relation to forms of nationalism, the articulation of which liberals have always had to compete with ideologues of the Right. The centrality of the struggle for sovereign control in an inherently plural and unequal polity has ensured that despite the benign rehabilitation rhetoric of welfare state penology, at every stage in the history of liberal societies it has been possible to identify a dark underbelly of repressive policing and criminal justice in dealing with recalcitrant, alienated and rebellious sections of the population (Sim, 1990; see Sullivan in this volume; Stenson, 1998, 1999, 2000b).

This should also remind us of the philosophical truism that although historically liberalism and democracy were mutually constituted and close soul mates, they have often been in tension with each other. This is particularly so in the case of crime control. In this sphere, giving the people (or at least large constituencies with clout) what they want can mean tossing them the red meat of revenge with liberal values of justice the principal casualties. There are serious concerns that the hyperbole surrounding the identification of individuals and groups as representing ‘high risk’ criminal threats can be a warrant for and a prelude to withdrawing from them the (liberal) rights to rigorous ‘due process’ of law and a fair trial (see Hudson, Chapter 8, this volume). However, in order to understand the ebb and flow of current trends and debates we need to examine more deeply the nature and transformation of liberal polities.

Transforming liberal society: from welfarism to advanced liberalism

Hence, liberalism in the wider and deeper sense refers to the broad range of post-monarchist societies in Europe and its colonies that have developed from the late eighteenth century. These emerged in the wake of the attempts in the eighteenth century to create a more civilized alternative model of governance to the familiar aristocratic tyrannies, with their arbitrary forms of justice and policing, vague legal codes and cruelty to minorities (Stenson, 1998, 2000a). However, as critics on the leftist radical edge of liberalism remind us, liberalism and hypocrisy are close bedfellows. Throughout the chequered history of liberal polities, adherence to the (liberal) niceties of due process of law has always been a privilege accorded more to the middle and respectable working classes (Sim, 1990). Rougher and harsher codes and practices usually ruled the poor and also subject colonial populations.

Mindful of the above, and despite some continuity since the eighteenth century, we have witnessed major transformations in modes of liberal government (the exercize of public, collectively authorized political power). The early forms of market liberalism unleashed productive forces and generated a plurality of commercial, religious and other sites of non-state governance (those more or less rational attempts to shape human subjectivity and conduct), but at enormous costs to the well being of the poor. While they may be rather amnesiac about those costs, more recent liberals, in the tougher economic sense, seek to rediscover the virtues of early forms of liberalism.

A key concern of this book is to uncover how the new politics of crime control in the latest phase of advanced liberalism reflect the rise since the late 1970s of a dominant approach to government th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Biographical details of contributors
• Introduction: a guide to the chapters
• Part One: Crime, liberalism and risk
• Part Two: Community initiatives and risk
• Part Three: Policing and the risk society
• Part Four: Criminal justice and risk
• Part Five: The media, crime and risk
• Index