Critical Criminology (Routledge Revivals)

Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, Jock Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415519434
• eBook ISBN: 9781136334023
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

First published in 1975, this collection of essays expands upon the themes and ideas developed in the editors' previous work, the visionary and groundbreaking text: The New Criminology.

Directed at orthodox criminology, this is a partisan work written by a group of criminologists committed to a social transformation: a transformation to a society that does not criminalize deviance. Included are American contributions, particularly from the School of Criminology at Berkeley, represented by Hermann and Julia Schwendinger and Tony Platt, together with essays by Richard Quinney and William Chambliss. From Britain, Geoff Pearson considers deviancy theory as 'misfit sociology' and Paul Hirst attacks deviancy theory from an Althusserian Marxist position. The editors contribute a detailed introductory essay extending the position developed in The New Criminology, and two other pieces which attempt to continue the task of translating criminology from its traditional correctionalist stance to a commitment to socialist diversity and a crime-free set of social arrangements.

1 Critical criminology in Britain: review and prospects^*

Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young

The purpose of this chapter is not so much to describe the development and future prospects of critical criminology in Britain, as to argue that the process of transformation of criminology into ‘radical deviancy theory’ gives rise to a series of theoretical and practical possibilities, and that these possibilities relate to new forms of academic and political practice. The purposes for doing ‘radical deviancy theory’ (or critical criminology) have now clarified to the point where the radical deviancy theorist can no longer remain content with demystifying traditional correctionally-oriented criminology.

1 The revolt against criminology in Britain

Earlier attempts to characterize the ‘theoretical’ themes in the British sociology of deviance that crystallized out of the formation of the National Deviancy Conference in 1968 have concentrated on what can be called the formal features of that sociology (cf. Cohen and Taylor, 1972).

Amongst the most central concerns was the defence of the authenticity of deviance. Here, the concern was to attack the notion that one can explain deviance by reference to some social or personal pathology. Instead, it was argued, deviant action must always be examined in terms of its meaningfulness to the deviant actor. Flowing out of this, in deviancy theory at the time, was the view of society as a series of alternative realities, all with an authenticity and meaningfulness of their own.

Connected with the emphasis on the existence of alternative realities was what then was called the denial of absolutism (Young, 1970). Where the orthodox criminologist has tended to characterize the social order as concensual and monolothic, with a minority of inadequate deviants existing on society's fringes, the deviancy theorist argued for the existence of a diversity of values sited in the plethora of subcultures existing within industrial society. The suggestion was not that these subcultures necessarily had a full-blown contracultural ideology, but rather that there existed a cultural diversity, albeit often of an inarticulate, contradictory and hesitant nature.

A third feature of the embryonic British sociology of deviance was its revolt against correctionalism. Where orthodox criminology, unquestioning in its relationship to the social order (that it was concensual) could see part of its task as the effective management of intervention and reform in the penal system on behalf of existing social arrangements, deviancy theorists came increasingly to see the fact of societal reaction to crime and deviance as problematic, and a crucial matter for examination and critique – a part of the explanation of commitment to deviance. An increasingly critical posture came to be adopted, not only towards the more obvious guardians of the status quo, like prison administrators and the judiciary, but also towards the social work and psychiatric professions in their role as agents of social control.

The revolt against correctionalism tied closely into a developing critique of the ‘scientificity’ that underpinned it – the ideology of positivism. Correctional criminology consistently viewed the deviant as being determined in his deviant activity by forces beyond his control. The ‘scientific expert’ was seen to have a superior understanding of these forces to that of the layman, or even of the deviant himself, as to the causes of deviant behaviour. In reaction to this particular (criminological) version of positivism, the deviancy theorist came increasingly to stress (and to examine) the exercise of ‘free-will’ by deviants, and, in particular, to take seriously the ‘vocabularies of motive’ used by the deviant as an expression of belief that might be related, in a meaningful fashion, to his involvement in deviance (cf. L. Taylor and Walton, 1971; L. Taylor, 1972).

Finally, deviancy theorists rejected, and attempted to bridge, the gap between the narrow (and often simplistically individualist) emphases of orthodox criminology, offering in their place a more extensively sociological explanation of crime-creation, and, in particular, a transactional approach to the social phenomenon of crime. Orthodox criminology, underpinned as it was by a consensual conception of the social order and the unproblematic nature of social reaction, attempted to explain the fact of deviance without significant reference to the society within which it occurs. Deviancy theory, on the other hand, came increasingly to be taken up with the ways in which the power to impose social order was socially differentiated, with the importance of social ‘labelling’ – and, to some (very halting and undeveloped) extent, with the importance of social power. Centrally, of course, the emphasis in this translation on the work of the neo-Chicagoan school of Howard Becker and others was on the transactions between actor and re-actor as important and consequential social processes.

These formal agreements amongst deviancy theorists were based more upon antipathies to orthodox criminological formulations than they were upon any clear alternative formulations, and this ambiguity was in large part responsible for the identification by British sociologists of deviance with American labelling theory, and its variants. In retrospect, the alternative positions taken appear to be little more than inversions on orthodox (structural-functional, psychologistic and other) perspectives, and cannot be seen to have transcended the fundamental features of orthodox criminology.¹

If we were merely to recite the formal features of what Stan Cohen (1971) then dubbed the ‘sceptical approach’, there would be a danger of underplaying the substantive (that is, the ideological) background to the reaction against orthodox criminology. We would, indeed, be guilty of discussing theories in the abstract without situating them in terms of historical time and social constituency.

Both orthodox criminology, as it manifested itself in the post-war period, and its sceptical adversary relate to interpretations and critiques of the utilitarianism widespread ideologically in the advanced capitalist nations. Criminology on the one hand embraced utilitarianism and on the other inverted it – one theoretical tradition pursued an objective analysis which denied any meaning to deviance in that it lacked a utility for the assumed consensual interest of all; the other spurned the analysis of the total society and focused on the subjective meanings of deviant action in ever-increasing, microscopic detail. Thus, positivism denied the deviant any consciousness, interpreting his actions from the perspective and ideology of the dominant class, whilst the idealist inversions on positivism granted him a welter of subjectivity, yet imparted to this consciousness no social or ideological significance, in that this consciousness was seen to exist unrelated to the total society, and independently of any historical setting. Both criminology and sceptical deviancy theory tended, therefore, to produce abstractions ‘bracketed off’ from any historical situation, or the structurally-specific consciousness of the deviant himself.

The alternatives of pure objectivity or pure subjectivity are alternative paradigms of bourgeois thought itself; and, as we shall attempt to show later, the goal of a thoroughly critical criminology must be to transcend the abstract structural or idealist theories which compose the universe of discourse of deviancy theory at the present time. We intend, therefore, to present a brief but substantive account of orthodox criminology and deviancy theory, situating both tendencies in their context of the post-war period, with the aim of establishing the social-philosophical fulcrum of both as utilitarianism.

2 Fabian criminology

In a pointed description of the components of Britain's national culture, Perry Anderson (1968, p. 4) has argued that:

Britain, the most conservative major society in Europe, has a culture in its own image: mediocre and inert…. It is a culture of which the Left has been a passive spectator, and at times a deluded accomplice. Twentieth century culture was by and large made against it. Yet the Left has never questioned this ‘national’ inheritance which is one of the most enduring bonds of its own subordination.

The social-democratic tradition in Britain was a direct production of such an empiricist culture. In the same way as the British bourgeoisie never accomplished a total transformation of an artistocratic society and never recast that society in its own image, so working-class politics in Britain has been endowed with a myopia which could rarely conceive of the total reformation of a class society. Working-class politics has consistently taken the form, from the Chartists to the modern-day Labour Party, of a piecemeal though highly detailed reformism.

The apotheosis of this reformism ideologically was Fabianism, a Fabianism that has been characterized by Nairn (1964, p. 45) as

a derived Utilitarianism, the timid and dreary species of bourgeois rationalism embraced by the British middle-class during the Industrial Revolution. In it, bourgeois rationalism became socialist rationalism chiefly through the substitution of the State for the magic forces of the laissez-faire capitalist market: the former was seen as bringing about ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ almost as automatically as the latter had been.

The irony of the social-democratic ‘opposition’ to the laissez-faire philosophy of English utilitarianism was that, instead of attempting to deny the status of utility as the arbiter of social merit, it merely set about the task of rationalizing it. The central contradiction of utilitarianism stems from its emphasis on the importance of reward through merit and effort, and its status as a social philosophy erected in defence of property alongside the continuing inheritance of the means to achieve success in a propertied society. Gouldner (1970, p. 324) puts this well:

Men who attempt to live by the [meritocratic] value system are demoralized not simply by their own lack of means and their own failures, but also by witnessing that others may succeed even though they lacked the valued qualities.

Fabianism attempts the impossible: it tries to create a truly meritocratic society without transforming the property relationships which work continuously to obstruct such a competitive egalitarian-ism. So, the British Labour Party's commitments have very largely been to a ‘bread-and-butter’ politics, spread over with a welfare reformism; and its aspirations have extended little further than the limitation of material poverty, help for the sick, ill and infirm, and, ultimately, the establishment of a healthy meritocracy. This political package is the direct legacy of the Labour Party's origins in Fabianism, buttressed by its religious affiliation to Methodism.

Fabian ‘utilitarianism’ differed from its bourgeois variant in pointing to the absence of equal opportunity in the wider society. The Fabian project can indeed be seen as the creation of such equal opportunity, via the gradual erosion of the most severe examples of material inequality, in order that a genuinely utilitarian society, based on a universally-appropriate social contract, could be created. The thrust of Labour Party policies in government, and its various manifestoes, is concerned not with a critique of capitalism as a mode of social and industrial organization, but with the inequality of access to participate in such a society (or, alternatively, with the way in which improper control of such a society could enable some to ‘get-rich-quick’ and others not).

Nowhere is the utilitarian edge to Labour Party thinking so apparent as in its commitment to welfare, and in the limits to that commitment. In the period after the Second World War, the Labour government, engaged on behalf of ‘the nation as a whole’ in what it termed the task of ‘social reconstruction’, gathered into itself an army of specialist and expert middle-class constituencies – most notably, architects and town planners, academics and teachers, and, most significantly for criminal and civil legislation, the bulk of the British social-worker population. The concern was to win sections of the middle class to the struggle against those personal, social, environmental, educational and even spatial deprivations which helped to disqualify vast sections of the (working-class) population from meaningful participation in the newly-reconstructing society, a society in which the opportunities (to be unequal) would be more equally distributed. If ever the Labour Party had been a defender of class interests as such, this particular role was translated into one of social defence, whereby class interests were now seen to involve its incorporation and the imposition on the class of ‘universal’ (i.e. system) values. The institutional changes to be encouraged were those that would attack deprivation (better industrial relations as a way to fairer distribution of wealth) and those that would encourage the creation of balance and equilibrium in the conduct of social life (mixing of the social classes in newly-planned housing estates). The end-result would be a society based not upon the inequalities or inherited (or other unearnt) wealth, but on merit – success and social mobility would become a matter of personal effort and initiative in a society of equals.

At the back of such policies lie ideological assumptions that can be traced not only to the Fabian translation of utilitarianism, but also to the legacy of Methodism in the early history of the Labour movement. For Methodism (unlike Anglicanism, with its tolerance of inequality and power, a religion that was later to be pilloried by Aneurin Bevan as ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’) is nothing if not a theology of conformity and unity. Hence, Methodism has often been used as an ideology to castigate and segregate off members of local communities who persist in deviant or militant activities when others have desisted. The role of Methodism during the 1926 General Strike illustrates the ways in which theology can be used to encourage a community to struggle, but also the ways in which it can unite the ‘conformists’ against, for example, those ‘deviant’ miners’ lodges that refused to surrender so easily. It is the double-edged nature of Methodism as the working-man's Protestant Ethic that helps us to understand the apparently contradictory thrust in the Labour Party's welfare programmes – the commitment to welfare, in the shape, ultimately, of the Welfare State itself; and the commitment to punitiveness towards those ‘deviants’ identified or construed as unwilling to recognize, or unwilling to participate in, a utilitarian and reconstructing society.

The contradictions are worth emphasis, for it is against such an ideological mix that any serious critique, founded upon a socialist defence of diversity, would have to proceed.

It is possible to argue, contrary to popular impression, that the Labour Party has had more impact on the systems of social control (the prison system, the probation service, the courts, etc.) and on the systems of social welfare than the Conservative Party (for all that the Conservative Party contains so many senior judges and members of the legal profession and for all that that Party is renowned for its perennial debates on the ‘crime-wave’). Certainly, it was a Labour government that introduced the militaristic detention centres into Britain in 1948, with the object of administering a ‘short, sharp shock’ to recalcitrant youth. It was a Labour government in 1966 which appointed and approved the Mountbatten Enquiry into Security in Prisons, an enquiry whose report set back liberal hopes on ‘individualization of treatment’, in prisons, on parole, and on liberalization of imprisonment generally for years. And, finally, it was a Labour government which, in 1969, five years after the publication of the Party's study group document Crime – A Challenge to Us All, legislated, in the Children and Young Persons Act, for a vast increase in the power of social workers to control the disposition of ‘troublesome youth’ and for the establishment of the benevolent but paternal community homes as substitute family settings for children from ‘poor’ or ‘undesirable’ homes.²

The influence of the Labour Party in social control is perfectly explicable in terms of its ideological grounding in Fabian and Methodist doctrine. The primary concern of Labourism was, and is, to attack deprivation: and it is significant to note the ways in which this insistence has paved the way for alliances to be struck not only with ‘sociological’ criminologists (in the 1950s, with criminologists like Howard Jones and John Barron Mays, whose works were concerned with the role of ‘social’ and ‘environmental’ factors in the creation of criminality, i.e. material inequality), but also with the psychological and social-work professions. The centrality of the family as an agency of socialization (preparing the child for meritorious labour) in large part explains the openness of Labour Party thinkers and policy-makers, on the one hand, to psychiatrists like John Bowlby, who would reduce criminality specifically to a personality disturbance produced by ‘maternal deprivation’, and, on the other, to more explicitly Freudian and psychoanalytically-oriented casework theorists who would concentrate on the variety of psychic repressions that disable the ‘problem’ client from ‘normal’ social participation. The contrast between social-democratic criminology as such and criminology as a whole is best seen in terms of the types of theory which are omitted. The aim of Fabianism was to create a meritocratic society and to help (through social-work agencies) those whose home life disabled them from participating in the meritocratic struggle. Thus, social democrats can embrace both opportunity theory on the one hand, and psychoanalytical theory on the other. But, inevitably, as the Labour Party was unsuccessful in ushering in a full-blown meritocratic social structure, the emphasis in the (expanded) social-work profession came increasingly to fall on personality theories. Indeed, given the failure of the Fabian project, theories stressing maladjustment were vitally necessary. But it is important to observe that the initial Fabian emphasis on the environmental causes of crime would lead them to eschew psychological theories stressing the genetic basis of crime, or the conservative...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Half Title
• International Library of Sociology
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• Editors’ introduction
• 1 Critical criminology in Britain: review and prospects
• 2 Working-class criminology
• 3 Prospects for a radical criminology in the USA
• 4 Defenders of order or guardians of human rights ?
• 5 Misfit sociology and the politics of socialization
• 6 The political economy of crime: a comparative study of Nigeria and the USA
• 7 Crime control in capitalist society: a critical philosophy of legal order
• 8 Marx and Engels on law, crime and morality
• 9 Radical deviancy theory and Marxism: a reply to Paul Q. Hirst’s ‘Marx and Engels on law, crime and morality’
• 10 Radical deviancy theory and Marxism: a reply to Taylor and Walton
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index