Inequality, Crime and Public Policy (Routledge Revivals)

John Braithwaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415858120
• eBook ISBN: 9781135094508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1979, Inequality, Crime, and Public Policy integrates and interprets the vast corpus of existing research on social class, slums, and crime, and presents its own findings on these matters. It explores two major questions. First, do policies designed to redistribute wealth and power within capitalist societies have effects upon crime? Second, do policies created to overcome the residential segregation of social classes have effects on crime? The book provides a brilliantly comprehensive and systematic review of the empirical evidence to support or refute the classic theories of Engles, Bonger, Merton, Cloward and Ohlin, Cohen, Miller, Shaw and McKay, amongst many others. Braithwaite confronts these theories with evidence of the extent and nature of white collar crime, and a consideration of the way law enhancement and law enforcement might serve class interest.

Part I

Chapter 1

Defining the problem

The research goals

For many years criminologists have been preoccupied with social inequality as an explanation of crime. The emphasis in this preoccupation has shifted from an early stress upon ecological (or inter-area) inequality to inequality among individuals. Discussions of the slum as a cause of crime and individual poverty as a cause of crime have usually been intertwined, often in a confusing way. It is important that confounding between the two levels of analysis be untangled, because policies which are appropriate for tackling the problem of ecological inequality are quite different from policies to reduce inequalities among individuals. Part II of this book is devoted exclusively to a public-policy analysis of ecological inequality, and Part III to an analysis of inequalities among individuals.

There is a variety of individual and ecological inequalities. In the case of the former, the focus of this work is restricted to a discussion of policies to create greater equality of wealth and power among individuals. Other inequalities, such as in prestige, or in educational opportunity, are considered only in so far as they are relevant to the impact of policies to equalize wealth and power. At the ecological level, the focus is entirely upon policies to create greater social class-mix; that is, on policies to reverse the tendency for lower-class people to be segregated into slums. To be more explicit, the goals of this book are in Part II to analyse whether policies to create greater class-mix might have any efficacy for reducing crimes against persons and property, and in Part III to analyse whether policies to change the distribution of wealth and power in society might have any efficacy for reducing crimes against persons and property.

No attempt is made here to analyse the desirable and undesirable effects of greater class-mix and equality on other goals of public policy besides crime reduction. Moreover, in no sense can it be argued that an examination of the data logically impels the criminologist to opt for the kind of policy analysis chosen for this book. If, for example, the data leads one to conclude that poor people are more criminal than others, why not study the efficacy of assigning more police to surveillance of the behaviour of the poor, or more social workers to help the poor, rather than study the efficacy of reducing poverty? To opt for these approaches would be, perhaps, neither more nor less an arbitrary and value-laden choice than the choice I have made.

The call for class-mix as a solution to crime

The slum has long been regarded as the breeding ground for crime and delinquency. Historically, the most favoured solution to the problem of the slum has been slum clearance or urban renewal. In recent years, however, this solution has fallen out of favour because of a belief that the criminality of the slum is more the product of its social and economic conditions than of its physical character. Urban renewal is felt simply to ‘shift the location of the [criminal] subculture from one part of a city to another’.¹ Moreover, it is widely believed that in the long run urban renewal makes things financially more difficult for the poor by depleting the stock of cheap rental housing.² Baldwin, Bottoms and Walker’s review of studies shows that slum clearance programmes may be just as likely to increase the criminality of its beneficiaries as to reduce it.³

The most fundamental objection to urban renewal, however, has been that forced residential mobility disrupts the lives of people, fragmenting cohesive bonds which control deviant behaviour. Once a person is removed from the stable environment to which he is accustomed, his standards can become relativistic in response to the clash of old and new social expectations, and he begins to play the game of life by ear instead of by clearly defined rules. There is now a great volume of evidence to show that the experience of residential mobility is associated with delinquent behaviour by juveniles.⁴

As alternatives to attempting to solve the problems of the slum by slum clearance, a variety of policies have been suggested to encourage greater class-mix—scattering the sites of public housing, modifying local-government zoning regulations which encourage class segregation, providing facilities which will encourage middle-class people to return to lower-class areas, legislating to combat discrimination in housing. These policies seek to destroy the slum by dispersion, where urban renewal sought to do so by knocking it down and rebuilding it. Of course urban renewal could be used to produce greater class-mix if the dislocated lower-class residents of the slum were rehoused in middle-class areas. In practice, however, urban renewal has tended to result in the replacement of deteriorated homogeneous lower-class areas with shiny new homogeneous lower-class areas. If urban renewal were used as a means for creating greater class-mix, it would suffer the important disadvantage that it would involve the forceful relocation of people.

Writing in the United States President’s Commission report on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, Rodman and Grams⁵ suggested that to create a low-crime environment, new towns should be designed so as to foster ‘balanced communities’ in racial and economic terms. The report of a working party entitled Planning a Low Crime Social Environment for Albury-Wodonga concluded that class-mix should be encouraged in the new growth centre to keep down crime.⁶

The group considered that care must be taken to prevent the development of deprived neighbourhoods where services are limited and there are pockets of low standard housing leading to a potential slum area.

The group was informed and accepted that the housing policy for the new growth areas was designed so that there was a ‘mix’ of housing styles. For a given tract of land, the Housing Commissions of Victoria and New South Wales, the Development Corporation and private enterprise, would each develop a proportionate share of the housing in the area.

The United States National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals has also suggested that increased class-mix would reduce crime.⁷

The Commission recommends that State and local governments break down patterns of racial and economic segregation in housing through such measures as planning scatter site construction of public housing, providing rent supplements to eligible individuals, and enacting and aggressively enforcing fair housing laws, which should provide for legal penalties as a deterrent to future discrimination.

Similarly, Moynihan in the introduction to the report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence asserts that ‘Efforts to improve the conditions of life in the present caste-created slums must never take precedence over efforts to enable the slum population to disperse throughout the metropolitan areas involved.’⁸

Although this kind of policy recommendation has frequently been made by influential commissions, there has been little critical analysis of its efficacy and, in particular, there has been no investigation of the empirical basis for having confidence in such a policy. The purpose of Part II is to help remedy this deficiency in the literature.

The call for a reduction in inequality as a solution to crime

There is no shortage of academics and politicians who regard the abolition of poverty as not only a way of reducing crime, but as the main solution to crime. Burgess is not atypical when he lists it number one on his agenda for delinquency prevention.⁹

An adequate and complete program for juvenile delinquency prevention should combine the following factors:

1. Assured family income to provide for a minimum American standard of living.

Jordan, the executive director of the National Urban League in the United States, says that ‘The most powerful anti-crime measure would be a National Full Employment Policy that guarantees decent jobs for all’,¹⁰ and the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice took a similar position.¹¹

What is imperative is for this Commission to make clear its strong conviction that, before this Nation can hope to reduce crime significantly or lastingly, it must mount and maintain a massive attack against the conditions of life that underlie it (p. 60).

Warring on poverty, inadequate housing and unemployment, is warring on crime (p. 6).

The Commission has no doubt whatever that the most significant action that can be taken against crime is action designed to eliminate slums and ghettos, to improve education, to provide jobs, to make sure every American is given the opportunities that will enable him to assume his responsibilities (p. 15).

Perhaps the most extreme statement of this point of view has been Brady’s recent assertion: ‘poverty, discrimination, and human exploitation. Nearly all brands of criminologists will now argue that these conditions are the underlying causes of crime.’¹²

This belief in the centrality of egalitarian policies in a strategy to reduce crime has included inequality of power as well as inequality of wealth. Gordon says, ‘It seems unlikely that we shall be able to solve the problem of crime in this country without first effecting a radical redistribution of power in our basic institutions.’¹³

Part III of this book is an evaluation of whether there is justification for this boundless confidence in the efficacy for crime reduction of policies to equalize wealth and power. Emphasis will be upon a review of existing empirical evidence rather than upon generating new data. In the past few decades there has been a monumental accumulation of empirical studies on social class, social inequality and criminal behaviour in the United States and Great Britain. Yet there has been no systematic effort to integrate these findings into a coherent policy analysis. This tendency for research on inequality to continue churning out more data, while rarely stopping to assess what it all means for public policy, has been criticized by Rein.

In the course of examining the literature related to poverty, it became evident that … there is little attempt to bring together or acknowledge contradictory evidence, let alone an attempt to reconcile differences in fact and interpretation. Moreover, there are few efforts made to explore the implications for social policy of what is known and accepted.¹⁴

Before embarking on an analysis of the implications for crime-control policy of what is known about the relationship between class and crime, key concepts in the analysis must be defined.

Definitions

Wealth is defined as ‘an abundance of costly material possessions and/or a large and stable monetary income’.¹⁵ Poverty is then defined as a condition of having a relatively low level of wealth compared to others living in the same nation at the same point of ti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Appendix Class-mix policies
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index