A Suitable Amount of Crime

Nils Christie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134306848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Crime and punishment are social and cultural manifestations; they are closely bound up with people's perceptions of morality, norms and values. In this book, Nils Christie argues that crime is a fluid and shallow concept - acts that could be construed as criminal are unlimited and crime is therefore in endless supply. It should not be forgotten that there are alternatives, both in the definition of crime, and in responses to it. A Suitable Amount of Crime looks at the great variations between countries over what are considered 'unwanted acts', how many are constructed as criminal and how many are punished. It explains the differences between eastern and western Europe, between the USA and the rest of the world. The author laments the size of prison populations in countries with large penal sectors, and asks whether the international community has a moral obligation to 'shame' states that are punitive in the extreme.The book is written in an engaging and easily accessible style that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding contemporary problems of crime and punishment.

1 Crime Does Not Exist¹

1.1 Acts

We are four and a half million people in Norway. In 1955, we got our first statistics on crime reported to the police.² The figure was shocking: close to 30,000 cases were reported. In 2002, the figure was 320,000.. The number of persons linked to these crimes has increased from 8,000 to 30,000, the number of those punished has increased from 5,000 to 20,000, and the prison population has doubled compared to its lowest point after World War II.

Does this mean that crime has increased? I do not know! And more important:I will never know!

1.2 The Suffocated Wife

As reported from Stockholm,³ a man drugged his wife, thereafter causing her death through suffocation. Then he wrote to the police, told them what he had done, and also what would be the end of the story. He would board the boat to Finland, load heavy stones on his body and jump. The letter reached the police two days later. They found the entrance door to the apartment unlocked, as the man had said in his letter. They also found his wife, as he had said. The body was cared for in the old-fashioned way – cleaned, and left with a linen cloth over the face. She was 86, he 78. She had Alzheimer’s. He had nursed her for a long time but now she was about to be sent away. They were very close, said the family doctor. We look for the man, he is under strong suspicion for having committed a pre-planned murder, said the police.

* * *

To some this is a story of Romeo and Juliet. To others, it is one of plain murder. Let me illustrate what might be behind these contrasting interpretations by turning to some occurrences where central authority collapses.

1.3 The Fall of Central Authority

Ralf Dahrendorf (1985, pp. 1–3) opens his Hamlyn lecture on Law and Order with a powerful description of the fall of Berlin in April 1945:

Suddenly, it became clear that there was no authority left, none at all.

Shops were found deserted, and Dahrendorf remembers:

I still have the five slim volumes of romantic poetry, which I acquired on that occasion. Acquired? Everyone carried bags and suitcases full of stolen things home. Stolen? Perhaps taken is more correct, because even the word stealing seemed to have lost its meaning.

But, of course, it did not last:

The supreme, horrible moment of utter lawlessness was but a holding of breath between two regimes which were breathing equally heavily down the spines of their subjects. Like the fearful ecstasy of revolution, the moment passed. While yesterday’s absolute law became tomorrow’s absolute injustice – and yesterday’s injustice tomorrow’s law – there was a brief pause of anomie, a few days, no more, with a few weeks of either side first to disassemble then to re-establish norms.

My own memories of surrendering capitals are different. My memories are from Oslo, exactly five years earlier. During the night of 9 April 1940, alarms had continuously sounded to warn us that bombs might fall. I can still feel in my stomach how relieved I was: Now my father would have no time to fuss about a dangerous looking letter which remained undelivered in my pocket, a letter, I believed, about my lack of progress in the German language. And soon more good news followed: The school was closed and was to remain so. On my way home from that closed school I got an unexpected opportunity to practise my bad German. A car stopped. Two German officers asked politely for my assistance to and an address. Equally politely, I helped them.

It was not until months later that I had internalized the lesson that the occupiers were never to be answered, except in cases where they could be given false directions. It also took a long time to understand, not only intellectually, that a theft from the enemy was no theft. Or to understand, again also with my body, that one of the most respected youth leaders in the local neighbourhood was a member of Quisling’s party and therefore never to be talked to, not even given a nod when you met him. I am afraid I never quite managed. Maybe it was he I saw five years later, on the day of liberation, close in time to Dahrendorf’s experience in Berlin. There was a man at some distance, running for the forest. The Criminal. While we, who had not sinned, rushed to the centre of town to celebrate the heroes released from prison.

I do not feel quite at home in Dahrendorf’s Berlin. His picture is one where anomie is the exception. A few unbelievable days where the old rules were non-valid. Then came new rules. Ready-made from the state, as the old ones were. From one regime to another. The picture is one of a society where humans are controlled from above with the same strength as in the types of military camps Foucault (1977) describes as the prototype of discipline. A tightly run panopticon.

My childhood experience, and similar ones have been added up to this day, is a life where norms are shaped, re-shaped and kept alive through a long and complicated process of interaction. Norms are not, they become. I therefore feel more at home in Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s (1985) description of social life in Hungary than in Dahrendorf’s from Berlin. Enzenberger describes a society where obscurities reign, where moral matters are continuously up for debate and where compromises are essential conditions for survival. Crime here becomes a shallow concept, hopelessly imprecise compared to the subtle distinctions and understandings needed.

Heinz Steinert (1986) takes the word `trouble’ as his point of departure. Crime is not useful as a point of departure. But people have troubles and create troubles. And we have to do something with these troubles. The danger is too hastily to define troubles as crime. By doing so, we lose sight of interesting alternatives. We might move even one step further away from the concept of crime and say as follows: Our basic point of departure ought to be acts. The next step, then, is to investigate what sorts of acts that are seen as bad. Then follows an analysis of these acts perceived as bad – a classificatory scheme with categories as irritations, unpleasantness, disgust, sin – and then, but only as one among so many alternatives – crime. When crime is the last concept in the line, it is easier to raise the analytical questions: What are the social conditions for acts to be designated as crimes?

Crime does not exist. Only acts exist, acts often given different meanings within various social frameworks. Acts, and the meaning given them, are our data. Our challenge is to follow the destiny of acts through the universe of meanings.⁴ Particularly, what are the social conditions that encourage or prevent giving the acts the meaning of being crime?

Ralf Dahrendorf’s days of liberation – those days where `there was no authority left, none at all’ – those days were few. To Dahrendorf, it was `but a holding of breath between two regimes’. To Enzenberger, and the group of Hungarians he describes, at least certain elements of those days of liberation are there forever. Regimes are in existence, but in a changing existence. Norms are there, and laws, but norms and laws open for a variety of interpretations. For Dahrendorf, this is different. The norms become an end-product, something given, as when he says: `If the notion of law is to make any sense at all, it refers to rules which apply absolutely. Either certain forms of behaviour are ruled out as contrary to the law, and are therefore sanctioned, or not’ (p. 68). He has gone a long way since he acquired his five slim volumes of romantic poetry in Berlin in 1945.

* * *

But this is war. Some might say that in peace norms are more stable. What is seen as crime has a more robust foundation. I am not so sure. Let us turn our attention to a Scandinavia in peace:

1.4 The Man in the Park

The arena for what here is to be described⁵ is a small park surrounded by apartment buildings. It is in June, the month for celebration of light and sun and summer up in the North. It is a Sunday before noon, ‘church-hours’ is the old-fashioned term for these most quiet hours of the week. On several balconies facing the park, people enjoy late breakfasts, or are reading or relaxing.

A man arrives in the park. He carries plastic bags and sits down amid them. They contain beer bottles. He opens one bottle, two and then several, talks a bit to himself, then to some kids who soon gather around him. He talks and sings, to the enjoyment of his audience.

After a while, the man stands up, moves towards some bushes and opens his fly-buttons. Several of the kids move with him.

And here we need two apartment-buildings, not one, to get our point across: The two houses facing the park are looking exactly similar, built as they are according to the same set of plans. But their histories are not the same. One house was built in the modern way, by a professional building company. All was ready when the tenants moved in, totally finished with key in the door and an efficient lift from the garage up to each floor. Let us call it The House of Perfection. The other building had a more turbulent history. The builder went bankrupt. There was no more money left. No lifts that functioned, no entrance doors in the hallways, no kitchens installed – altogether a desperate situation. The prospective tenants – they had paid before the bankruptcy – were forced to remedy the worst defects. Joint actions were taken to fix doors and defective ceilings and floors, and a pathway of mud; crisis committees were created to sue the builder. It was heavy work and enforced sociability. Let us call this building The House of Turbulence.

And now back to the man in the park.

A man, halfway hidden in the bushes, surrounded by kids, opening his buttons is a situation open for highly different interpretations. In The House of Turbulence, the case was clear. The man in the bush is Peter, son of Anna. He had an accident when he was little, behaves generally a bit strangely, but is as kind as the midsummer night is long. When he drinks too much, it is just to phone his family and someone comes to take him home. In The House of Perfection, the situation is different. Nobody knows him. A strange man surrounded by kids. He exposes his penis. Decent onlookers from the balconies rush to telephones and call the police. A case of indecent exposure was registered, a serious sex case probably prevented.

What else could they do, the good neighbours in The House of Perfection, handicapped as they were by modernity? Their builder had not gone bankrupt. They were not forced to co-operate with neighbours. They were not forced to borrow tools from each other, to care for the neighbours’ kids while some others spread asphalt on the pathway, to meet in endless sessions on how not to lose even more in the bankruptcy. They were not forced to get to know each other, to create a system for co-operation and at the same time a stock of shared information. So, knowledge of Peter and Anna could not disperse in their house as it did in the other house. They were, as conscientious citizens, left with only one alternative: to call the police. Peter became a potential criminal due to the lack of bankruptcy in The House of Perfection, while in The House of Turbulence he would have been helped home to Mum. Or, in a general formulation: Limited amount of knowledge inside a social system opens for the possibility of giving an act the meaning of crime.

This has consequences for the perception of what is crime and who are the criminals. You will in social systems with much internal communication gain more information concerning people around you. Among people unknown to each other, official functionaries for control become the only alternatives. But such functionaries produce crime through their existence. The penal institution is in an analogous situation to King Midas. All he touched became gold, and, as we know, he died from starvation. Much of what the police touch and all that the prisons touch, become crimes and criminals, and alternative interpretations of acts and actors might fade away. In this type of society, one’s own survival activities might also be slightly outside the legally accepted zone. A broad network will also increase chances that you now and then come across people defined by authorities as criminals. We are thus back to my general theme: Acts are not, they become. People are not, they become. A broad social network with links in all directions creates at least uncertainty about what is crime and also who are the criminals.

* * *

The neighbours in The House of Perfection lived a modern life. They lived in houses where they became isolated from their neighbours. That meant that they also became isolated from information on local matters. This lack of information forced them to call the police. The case became a criminal case because these neighbours knew too little.

1.5 Daughters and Husbands

Most children will, now and then, act in ways that according to the law might be considered criminal. Money might, unauthorized, disappear from mother’s purse. It became clear that one of the kids had taken the money. Or kids fight – with bloody noses and destruction of family property as visible results. But mostly, we do not apply categories from penal law. Mostly, we do not call the acts crimes. Mostly, we do not call the children criminals.

Why not?

It just does not feel right.

Again, why not?

Because we know too much. We know the child from myriads of other situations. We know her usual generosity, we know her care of siblings, her joys and sorrows. A label from criminal law just would not stick; there is no space left on her forehead where such a stigma might be branded.

What happened here might be kept within the framework of the family. But sometimes the occurrences might also become known outside the family. Modern life can be seen as arenas where a whole army of providers of meaning are in attendance. Various specialists might enter. They can be seen as providers of services. But they can also be seen as in competition for giving the phenomena the type of meaning seen as relevant or natural within their particular profession. In the health system – let us think of an extreme case of panicked parents and insensitive professionals – some of the acts might be seen as indicators of an emerging deviant personality – some sort of psychiatric counselling might follow. Within the legal system, let us think that worst came to worst, some acts by youngsters might be seen as theft or violence where police, court, and possible punishment might follow. Crime does not exist until the act has passed through some highly specialized meaning creating processes and, in the core case, ended up as occurrences certified by penal law judges as the particular type of unwanted acts called crime. Crime is one, but only one, among the numerous ways of classifying deplorable acts.

The daughter in the house is to most of us a relatively easy case illustrating the beneficial effect of closeness in such situations. Here is no space for crime. Our children are above it, except in the most extreme cases. But what is easy here creates trouble for many a woman when the man is violent. He is big, he has power, and he is dangerous. He will often isolate the woman to keep his definition of the situation the valid one; he is in his own view not violent, he is only disciplining her. She might be dependent on his continued support, or even remember days of love and therefore succumb to his definition. Intimacy might protect against perceiving the acts as crimes. This is not necessarily an advantage, seen from the woman’s point of view. This book has as part of its theme the analysis of what is suitable to see as crime. Our point is that this is an open question, open for discussion, and particularly something to be seen against our values. But our reasoning is not a denial that the crime concept in certain situations and for certain purposes might prove the right one to apply. This is particularly so when there exists inequality of power between the parties. I return to this in Chapter 6.

1.6 The Old School, and the New

In my days of school, an episode occurred again and again. Place: The schoolyard. Time: The major break in the middle of the day when the yard was filled with children. Occurrence: Some small circles of children formed. Within seconds, they had multiplied. In the middle of it all, one could observe – if one came near enough to see – two angry boys in a fierce fight. But it did not last long. The inspecting teacher shuffled his way through the circles, took the boys by ears or neck and brought them to a supposed terrible destiny in front of the Headmaster. Today, they might have been brought to the police station, or to the police stationed at the school. Estrada (1999 and 2001, particularly pp. 650–1) has described this development in two stages of Swedish school history. The old legal director of the Swedish school system stated:

There is no general requirement to report an offence that has already been committed to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Roots
• 1. Crime does not exist
• 2. Monocultures
• 3. The use-value of crime
• 4. Incarceration as an answer
• 5. State – or neighbours?
• 6. No punishment
• 7. Answers to atrocities
• 8. When is enough, enough?
• Notes
• References
• Index