Crime and Inequality

Chris Grover

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134733064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

This book examines key relationships between material circumstances and crime, and analyzes the areas of social policy– in particular social security and labour market policy – that are most important in terms of dealing with inequality at the lower end of the income hierarchy. It seeks to explain why inequality is linked to offending behaviour and the evidence underpinning explanations for this, and looks in detail at the relationship between offending and anti-social behaviour and its management through social policy interventions.

Crime and Inequality draws upon both criminological and social policy approaches to understand this vital relationship, moving beyond criminological approaches which often fail to analyse the way the state attempts to manage poor material circumstance, offending and anti-social behaviour through social policy.

The main aims of the book are threefold: to draw upon the disciplines of both criminology and social policy to understand the relationship between crime and inequality; to provide an in-depth analysis of those aspects of social policy that have a bearing on the context, management and punishment of offending behaviour; to examine government crime and anti-social behaviour policies in the context of social security and labour market policies, and to identify the tensions that have resulted from attempts to address social justice issues while also making individuals responsible for their actions.

Chapter 1

---

Introduction

That the British criminal justice system deals with and processes poor working-class men and women is widely accepted. Even the government’s own research on connections between crime and social exclusion points to this. In the report Reducing Re-offending by Ex-prisoners (2002), for instance, the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) noted the following observations. Of the prison population in Britain:

• 72 per cent were in receipt of state benefits immediately before their entry to prison, compared to 13.7 per cent of the general population.

• 48 per cent have a history of debt, compared to 10 per cent of households with difficult or multiple debts.

• 4.7 per cent were sleeping rough immediately before their imprisonment, compared to just 0.001 per cent of the general population.

• 67 per cent were unemployed in the four weeks before their imprisonment, compared to 5 per cent of the general population.

• 27 per cent had been taken into local authority care as a child compared to 2 per cent of children in the general population.

• 49 per cent of the male and 33 per cent of the female prison population were excluded from school compared to 3 per cent of the general population.

• 52 per cent of the male and 71 per cent of the female prison population have no educational qualifications, compared to 15 per cent of the general population.

While these observations point to the poor material and social circumstances of offenders, the SEU report gives no indication of how these factors that structure offending should be addressed. This is because it is concerned with reducing offending among ex-prisoners, rather than with addressing the reasons why people engage in offending behaviour in the first place. These observations, however, demonstrate that if offending is to be addressed then relationships between crime and inequality must be taken seriously. Related to this, they also suggest that in order to tackle offending, areas of policy intervention that are not necessarily or usually associated with criminal justice need to be considered for their potential to address the social and economic circumstances that contextualise offending. It is these two issues — relationships between crime and inequality and social policy interventions as a means of managing offending and anti-social behaviour — with which Crime and Inequality is concerned.

Economic inequality has been part of criminological analyses since the development of structurally based explanations in the early decades of the 20th century. From the Marxist-inspired work of Willem Bonger (1916) explaining crime as a working-class survival strategy through the Chicago School’s (Shaw and McKay 1942) analysis of the patterning of crime and Merton’s (1938) attempt to explain the propensity for crime, to the neo-Marxism of the ‘new criminology’ (Taylor et al. 1973), inequality has appeared, most often, implicitly in criminological analyses. It has also been part of more recent attempts to place crime within its wider social and economic context (for example, Taylor 1999; Hillyard et al. 2004).

However, in such analyses the issue of inequality is often not dealt with to any great extent; the fact that societies are unequal is often taken for granted, with little discussion of the evidence of inequality, why it occurs and what, if anything, is being, or can be, done about it. In contrast, Crime and Inequality makes the issue of inequality much more explicit in its analysis of relationships between inequalities and various aspects of offending. In brief, while this book is in a tradition of criminology that locates the contextual factors of offending in socio-economic structures, it more closely focuses upon the nature of inequality, how it is linked to offending and how, through the constraints of patriarchal and racialised capitalism, interventions of the state help to construct economic inequalities and often exacerbate them. In the level of detail that it offers, it is also distinguishable from analyses (for example, Taylor 1999; Young 1999, 2002) that acknowledge that wider social policy changes may impact upon offending. Both Taylor’s (1999) and Young’s (1999, 2002) recent analyses are broad in approach. Taylor (1999), for instance, is accused of ‘painting on a large canvas’ (Haggerty 2001: 131), while Young’s analysis (although he refutes this — Young 2004) is criticised for its methodologically flawed pairing of the inclusion/exclusion dichotomy leading to sweeping claims about modern and postmodern societies (Yar and Penna 2004). What this means is that both Taylor and Young tend to gloss over the detail of policies, many of which may not have criminal justice as their focus, but nevertheless are thought of, at least in the policy imagination, as having potential impacts upon offending and anti-social behaviour. So, for instance, several of Taylor’s (1999) nine crises, most notably the job crisis, crisis of material poverty and social inequality and the crisis of inclusion and exclusion, are structured through and arguably exacerbated by state interventions, but he wrote very little about those interventions.

It is at this juncture that Crime and Inequality becomes important, for it examines the state of inequality in contemporary society and its relationship to offending and social policy developments that are, at least in part, thought of as having potential impacts upon offending.

Crime, inequality and social policy

In the previous section we saw that the prison population is marked by indicators of inequality, poverty and exclusion. That is one reason for examining the connections between, on the one hand, crime and, on the other hand, inequality and social policy. There are, however, a number of other reasons why the interconnections of crime, inequality and social policy need examining. First, while we have seen that there is statistical evidence suggesting that the criminal justice agencies basically manage poor people, those statistics cannot explain why this is the case. The structure/agency debate is important here, because those observations could be explained through structural arguments that suggest we need to understand offending behaviour in its wider socio-economic environment (this is the underlying approach that Crime and Inequality takes). However, there are other approaches that we shall be discussing along the way where the focus is upon the behaviour of individuals; the argument being that poor material circumstances cannot be used as a reason to condone offending and anti-social acts because, no matter what their circumstances, individuals can always act as responsible moral agents (see Deacon 2000, 2002). In such arguments offending is committed by people who either do not know how to act in a law-abiding manner, or actively choose not to act in such a manner (Grover 2005a).

Second, and related, there is an argument that the relief of poverty and its causes (most notably, worklessness) actually encourages criminal and anti-social behaviour by eroding the responsibility of individuals. Such arguments were the crux of the behavioural ‘underclass’ thesis and are also visible in the more individualistic and morally prescriptive versions of communitarianism that New Labour subscribe to (Deacon 2000). Such arguments have a long and infamous history. Chambliss (1964), for instance, demonstrates how the 1349 Vagrancy Act that criminalised the giving of alms, an activity previously seen as being part of the moral economy, to those of ‘sound mind and body’ who were unemployed was driven by a concern that such alms discouraged vagrants from working and encouraged them to engage in theft and other criminal activity. In what is now termed the ‘economic model of crime’ — that individuals ‘choose between crime and legitimate work depending on the opportunities, rewards and costs of each’ (Hale 2005: 328) — the suggestion is that there is a direct correlation between not engaging in paid employment and offending.

Third, there is an argument, supported by the statistics quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that the criminal justice system has the role of controlling what are seen as ‘problem populations’; those which:

disturb, hinder or call into question … capitalist modes of appropriating the product of human labour … the social conditions under which capitalist production takes place . patterns of distribution and consumption in capitalist society . the process of socialization for productive and non-productive roles . and . the ideology which supports the functioning of capitalist society. (Spitzer 1975, cited in Box 1987: 128)

When Spitzer was writing the main ‘problem population’ was unemployed people (cf. Box 1987; Crow et al. 1989). While unemployed people continue to be problematised because their worklessness is associated with fecklessness (cf. Crow et al. 1989), they have been joined by other groups lacking paid work, most notably lone parents (hereafter, referred to as lone mothers as about 90 per cent of them in the UK are female — National Statistics 2006a) who are seen as being particularly threatening because they have the potential to subvert not only the capitalist order (many are not in paid work and those who are not are likely to be receiving state benefits) but also the patriarchal order (they are outside the control, and therefore threaten the power, of men). In this context, it is argued that lone mothers are incapable of raising their children, especially their male ones, unless they are in paid employment (Grover and Stewart 2002).

Fourth is the observation that social policy, particularly social security and labour market policies, act partly to manage anti-social and criminal behaviour. There are different ways of approaching this argument. Piven and Cloward (1972), for example, argue that during periods of high levels of unemployment relief programmes are expanded to maintain order. In the case of Britain we might point to youth training programmes and active labour market policies to support their argument. In a more abstract account, Claus Offe (1984) argues that social policies are crucial in effecting what he describes as ‘active proletarianisation’; the ways in which unemployed labour offers itself for sale to capitalist enterprises. The state is involved in this process because it cannot be assumed a priori that unemployed labour will offer itself for sale. In contrast, workers could find other means of survival: for example, begging, crime or the adoption of an ‘alternative’ lifestyle (ibid.: 93). The implication of this argument is that the state’s role in active proletarianisation is crucial to maintaining the supply of labour for capital by preventing workers from taking forms of subsistence other than paid work. In doing so, it also prevents offending and other behaviours that are defined as being problematic.

Fifth, some areas of social policy, in particular social security policy, are increasingly being used as a means of punishing offenders. So, for instance, the 1991 Criminal Justice Act made it possible for magistrates to apply to have fine and compensation payments deducted from the benefit payments of those people receiving Income Support (IS), the benefit for the very poorest people in Britain. Similarly, the 2000 Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Act allowed in pilot areas IS and means-tested Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) to be reduced or withdrawn from individuals who break the conditions of their community orders (see Knight et al. 2003), while the 2006 Welfare Reform Bill will allow the withdrawal of Housing Benefit (HB) from those tenants who do not take recommended measures to address their anti-social behaviour after they have been convicted of it (for discussion see Deacon 2004; S. Lister 2004; Rodger 2006).

Sixth, there are conceptual issues that link social and criminal justice policies. In the criminological literature many recent developments in criminal justice are explained through the concepts of responsibilisation and remoralisation. Drawing, sometimes unacknowledged, on the work of Gamble (1988) the former is explained through reference to neo-liberalism, in particular, a reordering of responsibility for crime prevention from the public to the private; while the latter is explained by reference to neo-conservatism. It is argued (Muncie and Hughes 2002; Gilling 2001) that there is a tension between responsibilisation and remoralisation because the neo-liberalism of the former implies a lesser role for the state, while neo-conservative remoralisation demands a greater degree of state intervention in the ‘regulation, surveillance and monitoring of entire families and neighbourhoods’ (Muncie and Hughes 2002: 9). While we should not overstate the extent to which the state has withdrawn from the provision of welfare and related services in Britain (cf. Pierson 1994; Powell and Hewitt 2002), it is the case that trends towards responsibilisation and remoralisation are equally visible in social policy developments. Since the 1980s there has been a concerted effort to ‘responsibilise’ individuals by encouraging them to provide for their own social and economic needs through the purchase of financial products, such as private pensions, insurances to cover sickness, ill health and unemployment, and protection schemes to cover mortgage payments in the event of unemployment and other forms of worklessness (Farnsworth and Holden 2006). There has also been a concerted effort at remoralising state-dependent poor people, particularly through policies aimed at making them compete for and take paid employment (Rose 2000).

Undoubtedly, there are other connections that could be made between crime, and inequality and social policy, but those outlined above provide a fruitful basis for examining their relationships, something that we will do in the following chapters. More immediately, they seem to lend support to the idea that over the past two decades or so we have witnessed a criminalisation of social policy.

Criminalising social policy?

The idea of the criminalisation of social policy is used to describe an expansion of criminal justice concerns into areas of policy traditionally described as social policy. In this sense, it is argued that the boundaries between criminal justice and social policy are becoming blurred (for instance, Muncie and Hughes 2002; Rodger 2006) or merged (Gilling 2001). The criminalisation of social policy is often applied to understanding the operation and strategic concerns of criminal justice partnerships at a local level (see, for example, Crawford 1997, 1999 on crime prevention, and Gilling 2001 on community safety) and refers, according to Crawford (1997), to ways in which statutory and voluntary groups concerned with social policy issues are drawn together through such partnerships around the issue of crime. While crime may not be the substantive concern of the organisations, the focus of their partnerships and the available funding is upon crime-related issues. In brief, the idea is that welfare-orientated policies are being developed for their potential to tackle crime, in particular youth offending (for example, Muncie and Hughes 2002; also Rutherford 2002; Phoenix 2003; Smith 2005; Tidsall 2006; Muncie 2004). While such trends are mostly observed at a local level, Muncie (2006: 242; Muncie and Hughes 2002) points to the ways in which centrally organised policies and initiatives, such as the various New Deal schemes (discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 5), have been drawn into ‘a broader criminal justice agenda’ concerned with the management of risk. Indeed, it is the issue of the management of risk that Gilling (2001: 382) argues has enabled the conjoining of criminal justice and social policy, noting that ‘addressing risk factors and insecurity is something traditionally associated with social policy: the risk factors may be things like unemployment, bad housing and low educational attainment’.

It is argued that the criminalisation of social policy is particularly worrying because ‘fundamental public issues may become marginalised, except in so far as they are defined in terms of their criminogenic qualities’ (Crawford 1999: 527). Crawford, for instance, highlights the potential to ‘view poor housing, unemployment, poor schooling, the lack of youth leisure opportunities and so on as no longer important public issues in themselves’ (ibid.). In this context, Smith (2005: 12) argues that the criminalisation of social policy involves the redefining of power imbalances as ‘problems of disorder and criminal justice’ and that it focuses upon individual behaviour, rather than the socio-economic antecedents of behaviour (Bannister et al. 2006).

The observations of Smith (2005) and Bannister et al. (2006) point to one of the contradictory pressures that structures the criminalisation of social policy. This relates to the argument we have made that some social policies have been co-opted as mechanisms to deliver punishment (point five above). It is the case that punishments can only be delivered through those areas where the state has some leverage; this is most likely to be income and housing (Grover 2005a). Indeed, it is these two areas through which aspects of punishment for crime and anti-social behaviour are being delivered through social policies. Such actions might be defended through popular appeals (holding poor people responsible for their actions) and, more philosophically, through debates about balancing rights and responsibilities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Crime and inequality
• 3 Young men
• 4 Parenting and anti-social behaviour
• 5 Women, crime and inequality
• 6 Crime, inequality and ethnicity
• 7 Street homelessness and crime
• 8 Financial penalties: punishing poor people
• 9 Conclusion
• Glossary of terms
• References
• Author index
• Subject index