Criminalising Social Policy

Anti-social Behaviour and Welfare in a De-civilised Society

John Rodger

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843923268
• eBook ISBN: 9781134002948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent legislative and policy developments in contemporary Britain have ushered in a new approach to criminal justice. The focus on criminal dispositions and welfarism has given way to a strategy which now involves the management of social exclusion, dysfunctional and anti-social families and situational crime prevention, leading to what has been widely characterized as the 'criminalisation of social policy' - and evidenced most recently by the anti-social behaviour and respect agendas.

This book is concerned to explore, analyse and explain these developments. It seeks at the same time to situate the study of anti-social behaviour and response to it in the wider context of changes in the industrial and social structure, social polarization and inequality and the changing role of the welfare state in present-day society.

This book will be essential reading for students taking courses in criminology, sociology, criminal justice, social policy and related subjects.

Chapter 1

Criminalising social policy: some general observations

The role of the welfare state in a capitalist society was always conceived of in terms of its compensatory functions. The social and economic dislocation that accompanied the inevitable social changes wrought by capitalist industrialisation required a mechanism to steer society towards an acceptance of the view that while inequalities would inevitably occur, and that collectively produced wealth would be appropriated privately, social order and social justice could nevertheless be achieved by institutionalising a sense of social solidarity through a benevolent state system that redistributed resources through welfare benefits and social services. Within this arrangement, social policy would compensate those who were the main losers in the rapidly changing occupational structure and support them when they were made redundant. The pursuit of full employment in the demand-side economy, which was a feature of the Keynesian welfare state, was premised on the assumption that redundancy would be a temporary feature of the ebb and flow of an industrial economy and, consequently, the period of exclusion from work and the full fruits of society that accompanied productive activity would be short. Today that assumption no longer holds, and many of those ejected from the occupational structure because of their outdated skills and absence of credentials to compete in the knowledge society have discovered that their redundancy is long term.

Today the welfare state has fundamentally changed its role and its function in response to the changing social and economic circumstances of post-industrialism. It has largely abandoned the strategy of social steering, aimed at encouraging people to adapt to social change by offering them fiscal and service incentives, in favour of its social control function, aimed at encouraging behaviour to change by cutting back on the benefits and services provided by the welfare state. The task is no longer to compensate the losers in the competitive market system that characterises post-industrial society (so-called because it relies on knowledge and services to create wealth rather than primary industrial manufacturing) but to make them more actively self-reliant; to equip them to compete better and more effectively in the marketplace rather than lick their wounds. The problem is that there are many in present-day society who cannot or are unwilling to accept the incentives being provided in a post-welfare society. How should this problem be addressed? Increasingly, the purpose of social policy is to align with the problems of managing problem populations. The world of welfare and the world of criminal justice, while never very far apart, are now moving increasingly together in terms of establishing modes of social discipline considered appropriate for living and working in a complex, postmodern society.

Criminalising social policy

The relationship between social policy and criminology has until recently been left unexplored at both the academic level and the level of political debate and policy design (see Knepper 2007). While criminologists have tended to treat issues surrounding the development of social policy and the welfare state as a backcloth, dealing with concerns about poverty, disadvantage and citizenship that are correlated with criminality and anti-social behaviour but not necessarily causal in a determinist way, social policy specialists have tended to ignore criminology and the working of the criminal justice system as fields which study the consequences of failed social policies. There is often an implicit relationship that can be identified in the literature of both fields of study, but recently that relationship has become more explicit, and this book is primarily concerned with the boundaries between criminal justice and social policy that have been uncovered by the very contemporary preoccupation of governments with issues such as social exclusion (treated as a central concern of social policy) and anti-social behaviour (treated as a central concern of criminologists). Increasingly, these areas of policy are being drawn together in a process that is criminalising social policy.

Students of both criminology and social policy may have noticed variations on a frequently mentioned phrase in the social science literature in recent years: a number of texts have referred to the criminalisation of social policy (Crawford 1999: 228–32; Swaaningen 2002: 273–5; Stephen 2005), the criminalisation of incivility (Hillyard, Sim, Tombs and Whyte 2004), the criminalisation of everyday life (Presdee 2000), criminalising social policy (Muncie 2004: 242–4), and the penalisation of poverty (Wacquant 2001), and students have had their attention drawn to the convergence of social policy and criminology (Gilling and Barton 1997; Boutellier 2001; Gilling 2001). Jonathan Simon (2007) has even advanced the argument that American society is governed through crime in the wake of the collapsing social consensus around the welfare state. Similar tendencies are evident in Europe too. While the development of social policy from the Poor Law tradition to the present day has always been framed by socio-moral considerations, such as the need to avoid providing benefits and services that might act as perverse incentives that encourage inactivity and indolence, this precept has become a defining feature of modern welfare systems that equate indolence and inactivity with a propensity for anti-social behaviour. Since the late 1990s, the New Labour government has signalled this change through the creation of hybrid policy units such as the Social Exclusion Unit and the Civil Renewal Unit, as well as allocating responsibility to specialised groupings working from within the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), reincarnated as the Department of Communities and Local Government, and the Home Office for driving forward strategies to enhance ‘active citizenship’ and ‘community efficacy’. The coordination of a broad range of policy initiatives affecting antisocial behaviour, criminality and dysfunctional families has been shared between the ODPM and the Home Office and drawing in the Departments of Education and the Treasury, particularly relating to strategies to develop the voluntary sector as part of the civil renewal programme. The devolved authorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have also participated in these initiatives. The effort to develop ‘joined-up’ policies across the field of what might be called the politics of behaviour has been a distinctive feature of British social policy in the early years of the twenty-first century. Social policy today appears to be founded on the principle that there is a need to connect welfare benefits with disciplined behaviour and active rather than passive citizenship. The notion that social policy and criminality are closely tied together has moved, therefore, from being merely an assumption to a phenomenon that must be named and understood more rigorously. The dominant themes in this movement can be identified briefly before they are examined in more detail in the book.

Welfare and discipline

The welfare state project has always been driven by a modernist zeal of political and policy elites to shape attitudes and manage behaviour in the name of realising a vision of a welfare society. In response to what might be described as an idealist view of the welfare state set out by Viet-Wilson (2000), who argues that only those welfare systems that provide for the needs and suffering of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy regardless of desert are justified in being called welfare states, Atherton (2002) argues that a welfare state cannot be defined by such an unattainable goal: all welfare systems have pragmatically directed a significant effort to the management of incentives to work. Atherton supports the view, therefore, that the welfare state from the twentieth century until the present has been a system primarily designed to meet the needs of the working class through employment and social insurance rather than the chronically poor, the socially excluded or the deviants. In his view it should more accurately be described as a worker-benefit state. While the social security system has been geared to addressing the needs of the deserving claimants who have worked and contributed to the welfare system, the principles of eligibility, together with social work services primarily designed for the management of problem populations, have also been an integral feature of the welfare state. Eligibility rules have been underpinned by criminal law for those who might seek to ‘cheat’ the system. What is perhaps new today is that the relationship between welfare and discipline, and between social policy and criminal justice, is changing from being an implicit feature of welfare state development to becoming a more explicit and strategic characteristic.

Without being diverted to a history of the welfare state, it is sufficient to note that the provision of social welfare has gone through a number of what Stanley Cohen (1985) called ‘master shifts’ in relation to penal policy but which apply equally well to changing welfare paradigms. Those ‘master shifts’ in welfare policy reflected, and were accompanied by, major changes in thinking about entitlement, discipline and deviance and, crucially, what constituted deserving and undeserving behaviour. As Squires (1990) has observed in his analysis of the emergence of the disciplinary state, the Poor Law tradition in social policy harmonised issues of moral worthiness and entitlement that provided the normative foundation of future attitudes to welfare. It was a system of welfare that was primarily concerned to police entitlement to benefits in a context of building a disciplinary society that would complement the needs of the growing and developing capitalist economy. Comparing the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act with the haphazard system that had preceded it, Squires (1990) describes the new Poor Law as ‘a more cohesive and calculated system of social policy which would combine the poverty and subsistence of the working class with the discipline of the capitalist economy, and in so doing, force the working class to give freely of their only possession, their labour’ (p 49). The processing of those unwilling to submit to the disciplines of the new society was, therefore, from the outset the responsibility of social policy planners. The two subsequent and related ‘master shifts’ in welfare reform that followed the transcendence of the Poor Law tradition; the first straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and culminating in the Liberal reforms prior to World War I, and the second consolidating welfare reforms after World War II that had been incubating in the interwar years, and giving birth to the modern conception of what a welfare state is, both had at their core a preoccupation with discipline and the management of problem populations. They were part of what I have called the modernist impulse in social welfare (Rodger 2000), which was primarily concerned with the application of scientific method and reason to socially engineer a new society. That social engineering was largely a top-down-led project of intervention and policy development that was driven by political and policy elites and consisted in augmenting the social security system by adding a range of social services primarily aimed at professionalising the social work gaze begun by the nineteenth-century philanthropists. (see Ashford 1986; De Swaan 1988: 9; Pierson 1991: 98–101). The social work and criminal justice services took responsibility for those unable or unwilling to submit to the regulation required to live in the emerging welfare state. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, problem populations were understood as being a residual problem of an evolving welfare system that had to be processed by the adoption of the language of rehabilitation. The welfarist impulse in prisons and community corrections described by Garland (1985) and Cohen (1985)was merely reflecting the wider approach to building a ‘modern’ and socially integrated society. However, the decline in what has been described by Jessop (2002) as the Keynesian welfare state and the emergence of the Schumpeterian workfare state in the period since the mid-1970s has signalled the adoption of a more coercive vocabulary in the sphere of welfare. Social problems once regarded as residual and unthreatening to social order are today considered to require ‘tougher’ policy responses. Therefore, when it is suggested that social policy is being criminalised there is an assumption that there is an ongoing process of redefinition of the aims and purposes of the welfare state: an abandonment of concern for the alleviation of poverty, disadvantage and the meeting of human need as ends in themselves in favour of focusing policy on criminality and criminals in order to maintain a disciplined and orderly society. Increasingly, social policies are forced to address explicitly what historically was left implicit: the thrust of social welfare is to provide care and social support but only on the condition that citizens lead orderly lives (see Crawford 1999: 228–32).

The key to understanding the growing complementarity between social policy and criminal justice today lies in what Deacon (2004) has acknowledged is the shift towards greater conditionality in a wide range of policy areas. This movement in thinking about welfare entitlement has accompanied a shift from a concern about structural causes of social problems to a preoccupation with ‘choices, lifestyle and the culture of the poor themselves’. This change is identified by Deacon as marking out New Labour's broad welfare strategy. However, more accurately, the concentration on the politics of behaviour continues an approach to social administration that began in the early years of the Thatcher government of the 1980s and which the instincts of ‘New’ Labour found congenial when taking power. When individualism is pre-eminently valued, and dependency on public goods and welfare is especially vilified, as it was under Thatcherism and increasingly appears to be under New Labour, it is inevitable that the focus of policy will be on behaviour rather than wider social and economic forces. By way of illustrating this perspective, we can briefly consider the case of housing management as an illustration of some of the emerging issues involved in criminalising social policy. The movement away from structural towards behaviourist diagnoses of social problems has been clearly evident in the area of housing policy.

Housing management and the anti-social tenant

The Thatcher project of rolling back the state faltered in many social policy areas but housing policy was in general terms one of the successes of her strategy. While the reduction of public expenditure remained stubbornly intractable in social security, education and health care, housing provided a rare success largely through the right to buy initiative. What made that policy a success can partly be explained by the language of ‘rights’ and individual choice used to sell it and which became generally accepted as the most appropriate vocabulary to describe housing and housing needs. For example, the image of municipal socialism and the large-scale urban renewal programmes of the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the creation of the vast peripheral council housing estates, were attacked in behaviourist terms precisely because they were said to go against the grain of human nature to own private space and property. The vision of a property-owning democracy which accompanied the Thatcher right to buy policy, evoking images of ‘pride’ in house and neighbourhood and attachment to communities, was later readily mutated into the New Labour vision of the stakeholder society. The stakeholder concept was applied to those who did not own their own property but who could nevertheless become full participants in their communities through active engagement with, and support for, their ‘social landlord’. The decline of the municipal landlord, and the rise of the ‘social’ landlord through an expanded role for housing associations, aimed to improve the quality of life in the inner cities and peripheral housing estates by both improving the housing stock and, importantly, managing that stock more effectively. As Cowan, Pantazis and Gilroy (2001) observe, budgetary disciplines imposed on housing managers after the Housing Act 1996 transformed them from agents who rationed council housing stock to active promoters of their estates in order to avoid empty properties and financial penalties. This has meant that problem tenants who threaten neighbourhoods and communities in what are considered residualised housing areas (the poorer and more dilapidated housing stock that has not been sold and which accommodates those that cannot afford to buy) are targeted by a new, professionalised group of housing managers in what amounts to social and behavioural cleansing. It is the crime-control role that has become increasingly prominent in social housing management at the expense of the concern for meeting social need. Flint (2006b) argues:

Changes in social housing governance are emblematic of a wider evolution of social and urban policy in the UK that emphasises community ownership, neighbourhood interventions, multi-agency working, self-government and a focus on moral conduct. The synergy between social housing and wider governance has resulted in social housing agencies being given an increasingly prominent role in government strategies aimed at delivering care in the community, reducing anti-social behaviour, fostering community cohesion and minimising risks arising from the housing of sex offenders. (Flint 2006b: 172)

As housing managers have become key agents entrusted with the task of overseeing the responsibilisation strategy introduced by the New Labour government, they have acquired a new form of professional status. For example, Brown (2004) suggests that the acquisition of ‘soft-end’ clients and problems in the social housing estates from the police has created a professional space within which housing managers are increasingly usurping the authority of the police in the investigation and decision-making about anti-social tenants and antisocial families. This role has been formalised by the passing of the anti-social behaviour legislation, which both imposes duties on social landlords to prepare policies on anti-social tenants and provides powers to seek Anti-social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) through the courts. Placing the issue in the context of Cohen's analysis of ‘net widening’ (Cohen 1985), Brown views the growing involvement of social landlords in dealing with anti-social behaviour as ‘mesh thinning’ rather than ‘net widening’ (bringing moderately deviant people and problems within the scope of the criminal justice process rather than expanding the institutional sweep of the social control apparatus). Crucially, what she is pointing to is the blurring of boundaries between housing policy as a welfare issue about meeting social need and the social control of dysfunctional families and antisocial tenants as part of a criminal justice agenda. Describing this new role, she observes:

Landlords attempt to reform dysfunctional families. Anti-social families are offered a support worker to help develop positive discipline and regular routine in the home, at the same time as the threat of eviction is held up to them. Community reparation orders aim to ensure that the perpetrator makes amends to ‘the community’ and, through this process, comes under its socialising influence. (Brown 2004: 206)

As Flint (2006b) observes, social housing governance has been leading and testing new ‘rationales about the delivery of welfare services in the UK’ (p 174). Beyond the specific mediating role between the world of welfare and criminal justice, the housing manager is involved in ‘non-core’ housing functions involving community development, neighbourhood renewal and crime prevention and community safety partnerships. Perhaps the role of the social landlord as manager of problem populations has arisen as a by-product of the spatial concentrations of poverty and disadvantage in the peripheral housing estates following in the wake of economic restructuring and welfare state retrenchment. In a context of growing conditionality in welfare, the role of the housing manager lies at the intersection between the imperatives of meeting social need and the administration of a moral code of public propriety. In the execution of this function by the housing manager, social policy is sometimes imperceptibly criminalised. However, recent policy developments, which have reinforced the responsibilities of social landlords in the anti-social behaviour legislation, points to a strategic intent to reconfigure the landlord role by New Labour policy designers.

Civil law and natural justice

The criminal law is often slow and demanding in terms of investigation and evidence gathering, while anti-social behaviour typically requires immediate situational action to release the social tensions it creates. The solution to this dilemma for government is to bring about a complex but effective ‘double convergence’ between social policy, criminal law and civil law. First, social policy strategies targeted at issues that may have deep-seated social causes (a child's unwillingness to attend school, a teenager's unwillingness to find employment having left school, or, as I have described above, unruly behaviour inconsistent with being a good tenant in a social housing estate) are replaced by a focus on medium-term goals primarily concerned with behaviour modification. This is accomplished in alliance with the criminal justice system through the issue of supervisory orders ranging...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Criminalising social policy: some general observations
• 2 Incivility and welfare in a de-civilised society
• 3 Disorderly behaviour and underclass culture: the emergence of the ‘chav’ and ‘NEET’ generation
• 4 The politics and policy of incivility
• 5 Family life and anti-social behaviour
• 6 Child welfare and juvenile justice
• 7 The strategy for civil renewal and community safety
• 8 Fear of the uncivil and the criminal
• 9 Conclusions: criminology and social policy
• References
• Index