Power, Crime and Mystification

Steven Box

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415045728
• eBook ISBN: 9781134948048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Power, Crime, and Mystification is one of the classics of radical criminology -a compelling account of how power and powerlessness operate within the criminal justice system. Questioning the orthodox view that it is powerlessness that leads to serious criminal behaviour, Steven Box focuses on the serious crimes committed by those in positions of power and privilege, particularly in government agencies and multinational corporations. He also points out that some relatively powerless groups, such as women, hardly commit any serious crimes at all. He suggests that crime can be the extreme form of otherwise socially sanctioned behaviour and, in taking this approach, provides coherent answers to the questions How does a society define crime? and 'What is the difference between justice and social control?. A major implication of Steven Box's stimulating analysis is that definitions of serious crime, the criminal justice process, and government penal policies are all in need of review. So far these have been more concerned with regulating, controlling, and demoralizing relatively powerless groups than with tackling real crime.

1 Crime, power, and
ideological mystification

Murder! Rape! Robbery! Assault! Wounding! Theft! Burglary! Arson! Vandalism! These form the substance of the annual official criminal statistics on indictable offences (or the Crime Index offences in America). Aggregated, they constitute the major part of ‘our’ crime problem. Or at least, we are told so daily by politicians, police, judges, and journalists who speak to us through the media of newspapers and television. And most of us listen. We don’t want to be murdered, raped, robbed, assaulted, or criminally victimized in any other way. Reassured that our political leaders are both aware of the problem’s growing dimensions and receptive to our rising anxieties, we wait in optimistic but realistic anticipation for crime to be at least effectively reduced. But apart from the number of police rapidly increasing, their technological and quasi-military capacities shamelessly strengthened, their discretionary powers of apprehension, interrogation, detention, and arrest liberally extended, and new prisons built or old ones extensively refurbished (all with money the government claims the country has not got to maintain existing standards of education, health, unemployment welfare, and social services), nothing much justifies the optimism.

The number of recorded serious crimes marches forever upward. During the decade 1970–80, serious crimes recorded by the police increased for nearly every category: violence against the person rose by 136 per cent, burglary by 44 per cent, robbery by 138 per cent, theft and handling by 54 per cent and fraud and forgery by 18 per cent. These increases were not merely artefacts of an increased population available to commit serious crimes. For even when the changing population size is controlled statistically, crimes continue to rise. Thus in 1950, there were 1,094 per 100,000 population. This rose to 1,742 by 1960, then to 3,221 by 1970, and reached 5,119 by 1980. From 1980 to 1981 they rose a further 10 per cent, to reach an all-time record. Ironically, as ‘our’ crime problem gets worse, the demand for even more ‘law and order’ policies increases, even though these are blatantly having no effect on the level of serious crimes. At least not on the level recorded by the police.

The result, so we are told, is that the ‘fear of crime’ has now been elevated into a national problem. Techniques for avoiding victimization have become a serious preoccupation: more locks on doors and windows, fewer visits after dark to family, friends, and places of entertainment, avoidance of underground and empty train carriages, mace sprays or personal alarm sirens held nervously in coat pockets, a growing unwillingness to be neighbourly or engage in local collective enterprises, furtive suspicious glances at any stranger, and attempts to avoid any encounter except with the most trusted and close friends.

Who are these ‘villains’ driving us into a state of national agoraphobia? We are told a fairly accurate and terrifying glimpse can be obtained of ‘our’ Public Enemies by examining the convicted and imprisoned population. For every 100 persons convicted of these serious crimes, 85 are male. Amongst this convicted male population, those aged less than 30 years, and particularly those aged between 15 and 21 years are over-represented. Similarly, the educational non-achievers are over-represented—at the other end of the educational achievement ladder there appear to be hardly any criminals, since only 0.05 per cent of people received into prison have obtained a university degree. The unemployed are currently only (sic) 14 per cent of the available labour force, but they constitute approximately 40 per cent of those convicted. Only 4 per cent of the general population are black, but nearly one-third of the convicted and imprisoned population are black. Urban dwellers, particularly inner-city residents, are over-represented. Thus the typical people criminally victimizing and forcing us to fear each other and fracture our sense of ‘community’ are young uneducated males, who are often unemployed, live in a working-class impoverished neighbourhood, and frequently belong to an ethnic minority. These villains deserve, so ‘law and order’ campaigners tell us ceaselessly in their strident moral rhetoric, either short, sharp, shock treatment, including death by hanging or castration by chemotherapy—‘off with their goolies’— or long, endless, self-destroying stretches as non-paying guests in crumbling, insanitary, overcrowded prisons constructed for the redemption of lost Christian souls by our Victorian ancestors. If only these ideas were pursued vigorously and with a vengeance morally justified by the offender’s wickedness, then ‘our’ society would be relatively crime-free and tranquil. So ‘law and order’ campaigners tell us.

It is tempting to call all this hype—but that would be extreme! ‘Conventional’ crimes do have victims whose suffering is real; steps should be taken to understand and control these crimes so that fewer and fewer people are victimized. A radical criminology which appears to deny this will be seen as callous and rightly rejected. Furthermore, those crimes so carefully recorded and graphed in official criminal statistics are more likely to be committed by young males, living in poor neighbourhoods and so on. A radical criminology which appears to deny this will be seen as naive and rightly rejected. Finally, there are very good grounds for believing that the rising crime wave is real—material conditions for large sections of the community have deteriorated markedly. A radical criminology which remained insensitive of this would be guilty of forgetting its theoretical roots and rightly rejected. So the official portrait of crime and criminals is not entirely without merit or truth.

None the less, before galloping off down the ‘law and order’ campaign trail, it might be prudent to consider whether murder, rape, robbery, assault, and other crimes focused on by state officials, politicians, the media, and the criminal justice system do constitute the major part of our real crime problem. Maybe they are only a crime problem and not the crime problem. Maybe what is stuffed into our consciousness as the crime problem is in fact an illusion, a trick to deflect our attention away from other, even more serious crimes and victimizing behaviours, which objectively cause the vast bulk of avoidable death, injury, and deprivation.

At the same time, it might be prudent to compare persons who commit other serious but under-emphasized crimes and victimizing behaviours with those who are officially portrayed as ‘our’ criminal enemies. For if the former, compared to the latter, are indeed quite different types of people, then maybe we should stop looking to our political authorities and criminal justice system for protection from those beneath us in impoverished urban neighbourhoods. Instead maybe we should look up accusingly at our political and judicial ‘superiors’ for being or for protecting the ‘real’ culprits.

If we do this, we might also cast a jaundiced eye at the view that serious criminals are ‘pathological’. This has been the favourite explanatory imagery of mainstream positivistic criminology. It was, however, an explanation that only remained plausible if crimes were indeed committed by a minority of individuals living in conditions of relative deprivation. For whilst this was true it was obvious, at least to the conservative mind, that ‘something must be wrong with them’. However, if we look up rather than down the stratification hierarchy and see serious crimes being committed by the people who are respectable, well-educated, wealthy, and socially privileged then the imagery of pathology seems harder to accept. If these upper-and middle-class criminals are also pathological, then what hope is there for any of us! Wanting to avoid this pessimistic conclusion, we might instead entertain the idea that these powerful persons commit crimes for ‘rational’—albeit disreputable—motives which emerge under conditions that render conformity a relatively unrewarding activity. Having rescued the powerful from ‘abnormality’ we might do the same for the powerless. Maybe they too are rational rather than irrational, morally disreputable rather than organically abnormal, overwhelmed by adversity rather than by wickedness.

If these are the lessons of prudence, then standing back from the official portrait of crime and criminals and looking at it critically might be a very beneficial move towards getting our heads straight.

However, there is an agonizing choice to make between at least two pairs of spectacles we might wear to take this critical look. We could wear the liberal ‘scientific’ pair, as did many young trendy academics during the 1960s and early 1970s when the stars of interactionism and phenomenology were in the ascendant. Or we might wear the radical ‘reflexive’ pair, whose lenses have been recently polished to a fine smoothness by those same trendy academics who have now entered a middle-age period of intellectual enlightenment! These spectacles do provide quite different views on the official portrait of crime and criminals.

Liberal ‘scientism’: partially blind justice

One way of getting a clear perspective on those crimes and criminals causing us most harm, injury, and deprivation is to excavate unreported, unrecorded, and non-prosecuted crimes. This can be achieved by sifting evidence from numerous self-reported crime studies and criminal victimization surveys. This is undoubtedly an important exercise for it leads us to reconsider the validity of official criminal statistics and the more extreme pronouncements made directly and uncritically from them.

What lessons are there to be learnt from the results of these surveys? First, there is much more serious crime being committed than the official police records indicate. The emerging consensus is that one serious crime in three (excluding burglary and car theft) is reported to the police. This knowledge can and does add fuel to the alarmist ‘law and order’ fire: ‘it’s even worse than we imagined!’ Second, although the official portrait of criminals is not untrue, it is inaccurate. It is more like a distorting mirror; you immediately recognize yourself, but not quite in a flattering shape and form familiar to you. Thus self-report data indicate that serious crimes are disproportionately committed by the young uneducated males amongst whom the unemployed and ethnically oppressed are over-represented, but the contribution they make is less than the official data implies. There are, it appears, more serious crimes being committed by white, respectable, well-educated, slightly older males and females than we are led to believe (Box 1981a: 56–93).

To the liberal ‘scientific’ mind, there are two problems here of ‘slippage’, one more slight than the other. Too many people fail to report crimes because they consider the police inefficient; we need to restore police efficiency in order to increase the reportage rate and hence obtain a better more reliable gauge of crime. The second, more important slippage, is that the administration of criminal justice is fine in principle, but is failing slightly in practice. The police pursue policies of differential deployment (for example, swamping certain parts of London where the West Indian population is prominent) and ‘methodological suspicion’ (that is, routinely suspecting only a limited proportion of the population, particularly those with criminal records or known criminal associates). Coupled with these practices are plea-bargaining (negotiating a guilty plea in return for being charged with a less serious offence) and ‘judicious’ judicial decisions (which take as much notice of who you are as they do of what you have apparently done). In other words, the police, magistrates, judges, and other court officials have too much discretion. The result is too much ‘street-justice’, ‘charge-dealing’, ‘plea-bargaining’, and ‘disparate sentencing’. In these judicial negotiations and compromises, the wealthy, privileged, and powerful are better able to secure favourable outcomes than their less powerful counterparts (Box 1981a: 157–207). This slippage between ideal and practice reveals a slightly disturbing picture. The process of law enforcement, in its broadest possible interpretation, operates in such a way as to conceal crimes of the powerful against the powerless, but to reveal and exaggerate crimes of the powerless against ‘everyone’.

Furthermore, because a substantial section of this criminalized population is stigmatized and discriminated against, particularly in the field of employment, its reproduction is secured; many of them, out of resentment, injustice, or desperation, turn to more persistent and even more serious forms of crime. This vicious circle increases the overrepresentation of the powerless in the highly publicized ‘hardened’ criminal prisoner population.

The outcome of these processes is that the official portrait of crime and criminals is highly selective, serving to conceal crimes of the powerful and hence shore up their interests, particularly the need to be legitimated through maintaining the appearance of respectability. At the same time, crimes of the powerless are revealed and exaggerated, and this serves the interests of the powerful because it legitimizes their control agencies, such as the police and prison service, being strengthened materially, technologically, and legally, so that their ability to survey, harass, deter, both specifically and generally, actual and potential resisters to political authority is enhanced.

To the liberal ‘scientific’ mind, a solution of this second and more important slippage would involve a strict limitation on police and judicial discretion and less stigmatization either by decriminalizing some behaviours, or imposing less incarceration (Schur 1973). The adoption of these policies would narrow the ‘official’ differential in criminal behaviour between the disreputable poor and the respectable middle-class so that it approximated more closely the actual differences in criminal behaviour—at least criminal behaviour as defined by the state.

Radical ‘reflexiveness’: artful criminal definitions

Although an enormous amount of carefully buried crime can be unearthed by this liberal ‘scientific’ excavation work, we will still be denied an adequate view of those whose crimes and victimizing behaviours cause us most harm, injury, and deprivation.

Through radical ‘reflexive’ spectacles, all this excavation work occurs so late in the process of constructing crime and criminals that it never gets to the foundations. Those committed to self-report and victimization surveys do not start off asking the most important question of all: ‘what is serious crime?’ Instead they take serious crime as a pre- and statedefined phenomenon. But by the time crime categories or definitions have been established, the most important foundation stone of ‘our crime problem’ has been well and truly buried in cement, beyond the reach of any liberal ‘scientific’ shovel.

Aware that liberal ‘scientists’ arrive too late on the scene, radicals resolve to get up earlier in the morning. Instead of merely examining how the law enforcement process in its broadest sense constructs a false image of serious crime and its perpetrators, they suggest we should consider the social construction of criminal law categories. This involves not only reflecting on why certain types of behaviours are defined as criminal in some historical periods and not others, but also why a particular criminal law comes to incorporate from relatively homogeneous behaviour patterns only a portion and exclude the remainder, even though each and every instance of this behaviour causes avoidable harm, injury, or deprivation.

Some sociologists have pondered these issues and come to the conclusion that criminal law categories are ideological constructs (Sumner 1976). Rather than being a fair reflection of those behaviours objectively causing us collectively the most avoidable suffering, criminal law categories are artful, creative constructs designed to criminalize only some victimizing behaviours, usually those more frequently committed by the relatively powerless, and to exclude others, usually those frequently committed by the powerful against subordinates.

Numerous researchers (Chambliss 1964; Duster 1970; Graham 1976; Gunningham 1974; Hall 1952; Haskins 1960; Hay 1975; Hopkins 1978; McCaghy and Denisoff 1973; Platt 1969; and Thompson 1975) have produced evidence consistent with the view that criminal law categories are ideological reflections of the interests of particular powerful groups. As such, criminal law categories are resources, tools, instruments, designed and then used to criminalize, demoralize, incapacitate, fracture and sometimes eliminate those problem populations perceived by the powerful to be potentially or actually threatening the existing distribution of power, wealth, and privilege. They constitute one, and only one way by which social control over subordinate, but ‘resisting’, populations is exercised. For once behaviour more typically engaged in by subordinate populations has been incorporated into criminal law, then legally sanctioned punishments can be ‘justifiably’ imposed.

In a society such as ours, populations more likely to be controlled in part through criminalization,

‘tend to share a number of social characteristics but most important among these is the fact that their behaviour, personal qualities, and/or position threaten the social relationships of production…. In other words, populations become generally eligible for management as deviant when they 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…the process of socialization for productive and nonproductive roles…and…the ideology which supports the functioning of capitalist society.’ (Spitzer 1975:642)

However, this argument needs qualification. It does not maintain that all criminal laws directly express the interests of one particular group, such as the ruling class. Clearly some legislation reflects temporary victories of one interest or allied interest groups over others, and none of these may necessarily be identical or coincide with the interests of the ruling class. Yet the above argument does not demand or predict that every criminal law directly represents the interests of the ruling class. It recognizes that some laws are passed purely as symbolic victories which the dominant class grants to inferior interest groups, basically to keep them quiet; once passed, they need never be efficiently or systematically enforced. It also recognizes that occasionally the ruling class is forced into a tactical retreat by organized subordinate groups, and the resulting shifts in criminal law enshrine a broader spectrum of interests. But these victories are short lived. Powerful groups have ways and means of clawing back the spoils of tactical defeats. In the last instance, definitions of crime r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. Crime, Power, and Ideological Mystification
• 2. Corporate Crime
• 3. Police Crime
• 4. Rape and Sexual Assaults On Females
• 5. Powerlessness and Crime—The Case of Female Crime
• 6. Crime, Power, and Justice
• References