Cultural Criminology Unleashed

Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, Wayne Morrison, Mike Presdee, Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, Wayne Morrison, Mike Presdee

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138140479
• eBook ISBN: 9781135309831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

This book brings together cutting-edge research across the range of meanings of the term 'cultural'. A landmark text on the crime-culture nexus, its editors and authors include the leading exponents of cultural criminology on both sides of the Atlantic.

Part 1
Theorising Crime, Culture, and Criminology

Chapter 1
Voodoo Criminology and the Numbers Game

Jock Young

Cultural criminology is of importance because it captures the phenomenology of crime – its adrenaline, its pleasure and panic, its excitement, and its anger, rage and humiliation, its desperation and its edgework. I wish to argue that cultural criminology not only grasps the phenomenology of crime but, for that matter, is much more attuned to phenomenology of everyday life in general in this era of late modernity. We are confronted at this moment with an orthodox criminology which is denatured and desiccated. Its actors inhabit an arid planet where they are either driven to crime by social and psychological deficits or make opportunistic choices in the criminal marketplace. They are either miserable or mundane (see Hayward and Young 2004). They are, furthermore, digital creatures of quantity, they obey probabilistic laws of deviancy – they can be represented by the statistical symbolism of lamda, chi and sigma, their behaviour can be captured in the intricacies of regression analysis and equation.

The structure of my argument is that, given that human beings are culture-creating beings and are endowed with free will, albeit in circumstances not of their own making, the verstehen of human meaning is, by definition, a necessity in any explanation of human activity, criminal or otherwise (see Ferrell 1997 for more on the notion of ‘criminological verstehen’). It is in late modernity that such creativity and reflexivity becomes all the more apparent, and yet – here is the irony – it is at precisely such a time of the cultural turn that a fundamentalist positivism occurs within the social ‘sciences’ with increasing strength and attempts at hegemony.

Let us first of all examine the intimate links between late modernity and cultural criminology. The late modern period is characterised by disruption of employment and of marital stability, by greater spatial mobility, by a pluralism of contested values, by the emergence of mediated virtual realities and reference points, and by the rise of consumerism. It embodies two fundamental contradictions: firstly a heightened emphasis on identity in a time when lack of social embeddedness serves to undermine ontological security, and secondly a stress on expressivity, excitement and immediacy at a time when the commodification of leisure and the rationalisation of work mitigates against this. This is a world where narratives are constantly broken and re-written, where values are contested, and where reflexivity is the order of the day (see Young 1999). For all of these reasons a criminology which stresses the existential, which is focused upon subcultures of creativity and style, which emphasises the adrenalised excitement of human action on the one hand, and tedium and commodification on the other, goes with the grain of everyday life. Moreover, and counter to claims to the contrary (see Garland 2000), rational choice/routine activities theory does not fully mirror the texture of the time, but only one part of it. Let us start by looking at the situation of late modernity.

The loosening of the moorings

In late modernity there comes an increasing awareness of the social construction of boundaries and their contested nature. That is, any sense of the absolute, the reified, the natural, becomes exceedingly precarious. In this process people become more aware of their own role as actors in society. For, although the existential condition and the creation of human meaning has always been part of what we mean by social, this certainty becomes all the more apparent in late modernity. Why is this?

• Voluntarism: on the back of the movement towards flexible labour and the modern consumer society, with a myriad of choices, an individualistic society arises where chance, expressivity, meaningful work and leisure becomes an ideal. The American Dream of the post-war period, with its stress on taken-for-granted ends of material comfort, is overtaken by a new First World Dream, where meaning and expression are paramount and where lifestyles are to be created. Finding yourself becomes more important than arriving.
• Disembeddedness: the flexibility and mobility of labour and the increased instability of the family result in people’s lives becoming disembedded from work, family and community. This identity does not immediately and consistently present itself. The irony, then, is that just as there is a greater stress on creating one’s identity, the building blocks of identity become less substantial. Furthermore, in a lifetime of broken narratives, constant re-invention becomes a central life task.
• Pluralism and contest: increased emigration creates a pluralism of value and this is augmented by the plurality of lifestyles that are created in more individualistic societies. People are, therefore, presented with a social world where values are contested and where there are alternatives of appropriate behaviour and aspiration.
• Mass media and virtual realities: in late modernity the mass media expands in terms of the percentage of time of a person’s life that it takes up – in England and Wales, for example, television and radio alone take up an extraordinary 40% of the average person’s waking life, or 60% of the free time of those in work. The media overall becomes more multi-mediated, diversifying and relating to wider audiences (see McRobbie 1994). As the physical community declines, the virtual community arises, carrying with it virtual realities with new and emerging role models, subcultures of value, vocabularies of motive and narratives both fictional and ‘factional’.

Thus, Zygmunt Bauman contrasts the post-war modern world with the late modern world of liquid modernity. In the former there were

patterns, codes and rules to which one could conform which one could select as stable orientation points and by which one could subsequently let oneself be guided, that are nowadays in increasingly short supply. It does not mean our contemporaries are guided solely by their imagination and resolve and are free to construct their mode of life from scratch and at will, or that they are no longer dependent on society for the building materials and design blueprints. But it does mean that we are presently moving from an era of pre-allocated ‘reference groups’ into an epoch of ‘universal comparison’, in which the destination of individual self-constructing labours is endemically and incurably underdetermined, is not given in advance, and tends to undergo numerous and profound changes before such labours reach their only genuine end: that is, the end of the individual’s life.

These days patterns and configurations are no longer ‘given’, let alone ‘self-evident’; there are just too many of them, clashing with each other and contradicting one another’s commandments, so that each one is stripped of a good deal of compelling, constraining powers. (Bauman 2000: 7)

Such changes accompanying the cultural turn have extraordinary implications for sociology, particularly for explanation, but also for measurement and research practice. Let us note at this juncture the significant changes in identity formation and with it the vocabulary of motives associated with given roles and structural positions. For the combination of the ideal of choice, disembeddedness and pluralism engenders a situation where vocabularies of motives begin to lose their fixed moorings in particular parts of the social structure and in specific social circumstances. That is, the old rigid moorings of Fordism, the demarcations of class, age and gender, the concentric demarcations of the Chicago model of space in the city begin to dissolve. Vocabularies of motive become loose and cast adrift from their structural sites; they can shift and be fixed elsewhere. This is not willy-nilly: there obviously has to be some fit between structural predicament and subcultural solution, but the level of determination and predictability diminishes. Furthermore, they can be bricollaged elsewhere in the system: they can be reinterpreted, transposed and hybridised. And, finally, and most crucially of course, they can be changed and innovated, sometimes dramatically.

Let us, for a moment, look at the relationship between material and social predicaments, identity, vocabularies of motive and social action, taking crime as an example (although we could as well focus on, say, educational achievement or sexual behaviour). There is an extraordinary tendency to suggest that the motive to commit crime springs fully fledged out of certain material predicaments (eg poverty, unemployment) or social circumstances (eg lack of control) or biological characteristics (eg youth and masculinity), almost as if no connecting narrative or human subjectivity were necessary (see Katz 2002). In reality, a situation like poverty will result in totally different assessments and responses dependent on the narratives which the subjects use to interpret their predicament – indeed, the very assessment of whether one is poor or not will depend on social interpretation. There can be no causality in society without reference to meaning, and even high correlations – as all the methods textbooks tell us – do not necessitate causality (see Sayer 1992). What is necessary is to understand that we live in a situation where such meanings change rapidly and do not adhere fixedly to particular social roles, or material predicaments. Concepts of what it is to be young, what it is to be female, what pleasures we should expect, our attitudes to work, sexuality and leisure have all been dramatically recast. None of these changes was predictable from the social and cultural ‘variables’ present before these fundamental roles and values were reinvented. They are understandable, in retrospect, in terms of responses to material and social change, but they were re-fashioned by human actors who simply rewrote their narratives. Let me give an example: the teenage ‘revolution’ was one of the great changes of the late 20th century – something so dramatic that, as so often with such sweeping changes, we can scarcely see it now. No one knew what the youth were going to do with their new position and status. If you were attempting to predict crime rates from the ‘variables’ which seemed to explain crime rates in the 1950s, you would have talked about inequalities, employment levels, educational achievement, percentage of adolescent males in the population, divorce rates, etc. But even the most sophisticated statistical analysis (very unlikely at that time) could not have predicted the extent of youth crime, and the reason for this is palpably simple: you could not have anticipated what was to happen to ‘youth’.

Let me turn now to the problem of measurement, and here I will repeat the structure of my argument. First I will note how the social and meaningful nature of human action makes positivistic methods inappropriate; secondly I will indicate how the situation of late modernity heightens this situation. To do this I will turn first of all to a debate within the sociology of sex.

Measurement and the sexologists

In April and May 1995 the columns of the New York Review of Books were subject to a remarkable and, some would say, acrimonious debate. It was an argument which was, to my mind, one of the most significant examples of academic whistle-blowing, wide ranging in its critique, apposite in its targeting and reasoning, timely and badly needed, yet falling, as we shall see, on stony ground.

On one side of this skirmish was Richard Lewontin, Professor of Zoology at Harvard, a distinguished geneticist and epidemiologist; on the other was a team of sociologists led by Edward Laumann and John Gagnon from the University of Chicago, who had recently published The Social Organisation of Sexuality (1995a) and its popular companion volume Sex in America: ADefinitive Survey (Michael et al 1995). On the sidelines, chipping in with gusto, was Richard Sennett, joint Professor of Sociology at the LSE and NYU.

This debate is of interest because it represents a direct confrontation of natural science with sociology or social science, as it is often hopefully and optimistically called. Such encounters are relatively rare and tend to occur when particularly politically distasteful findings are presented to the public as cast iron and embellished with the imprimatur of science. A recent example of this was the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), accompanied by pages of statistical tables which purported to present the scientific evidence for the link between race, IQ and, indeed, crime. At that time many prominent scientists, including Steven Rose and Stephen Gould, were moved to intervene, but normally the walls between disciplines remain intact: indeed a collegial atmosphere of mutual respect coupled with lack of interest ensures that parallel and contradictory literatures about the same subject can occur in departments separated sometimes by a corridor or, more frequently, a faculty block. In the case of the natural and social sciences this is complicated by a unidirectional admiration – a one-sided love affair, one might say – or at least a state of acute physics envy – between the aspiring social scientist and the natural sciences. Be that as it may, a considerable proportion of sociologists, the vast majority of psychologists and an increasing number of criminologists embrace, without thought or reservation, a positivistic path. Namely, natural scientific methods can be applied to human action, behaviour is causally determined, incontestable objectivity is attainable, and precise quantitative measurement is possible, indeed preferable. In the case of criminology, this entails the belief that the crimes of individuals can be predicted from risk factors and that rates of crime can be explained by changes in the proportion of causal factors in the population.

Richard Lewontin sets out to review the two books. They arose on the back of the AIDS crisis and the need to understand the epidemiology of its spread. The survey was eventually well funded by research foundations, and was conducted by NORC, the premier social survey research organisation in North America. The project involved a sample of 3,432 people representing 200 million post-pubertal Americans. Just for a minute let us think of the audacity of the sample survey – and this one was more thoroughgoing than most – to claim to generalise from such a small number to such a large population of individuals. Lewontin’s critique is on two levels, one the problem of representativeness and two – and more substantially – the problem of truth.

Let us first of all examine the problem of representation. An initial criticism is that the random sample was not actually from the total population. It was based on a sample of addresses drawn from the census, but it excluded households where there were no English-speakers, and no one between the ages of 15 and 59. Most crucially it excluded the 3% of Americans (some 7.5 million) who do not live in households because they are institutionalised or homeless. This latter point is, as Lewontin indicates, scarcely trivial in understanding the epidemiology of AIDS as it excludes the most vulnerable group in the population, including those likely to be victims of homosexual rape in prison, prostitution, reckless drug use, and sexually ‘free’ college aged adolescents, etc. The random sample is not, therefore, drawn from the population as a whole: a very atypical population is omitted. Such a restriction in population sampled is a usual preliminary in survey research.

However, once this somewhat restricted sample was made, the research team did not stint in their efforts to get as large a response rate as possibl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• Fragments of a Manifesto
• Part 1: Theorising Crime, Culture, and Criminology
• Part 2: Across the Borders of Crime and Culture
• Part 3: Marginal Images
• Part 4: Breaking Open the City
• Part 5: Terms of Engagement
• Part 6: Questions of Agency and Control