The Truth about Crime

Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order

Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780226424910
  9780226424880
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226425078
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves—it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing—from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war—they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen.
           
To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled.  
           
The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.

PART ONE

Crime, Capital, and the Metaphysics of Disorder:

An Overview, in Three Movements

CHAPTER 1.1

Crime, Policing, and the Making of Modernity

The State, Sovereignty, and the Il/legal

Four fragments from different fronts in the so-called “War on Crime,” variously imagined, variously deployed, distinctively diagnostic of their time and place:

The First: British Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his summer vacation Monday night and flew back to the U.K. in order to chair a crisis meeting with government ministers as the streets of London continued to see rioting and looting, and as the prospect of further violence spreading to other cities and towns intensified. In a Tuesday statement, the prime minister said that his government “will do everything necessary to restore order to the British streets” and characterized those behind the riots as “pure criminality.” The prime minister said that 450 people had already been arrested and that more would follow.—Kim Hjelmgaard, MarketWatch, August 20111

The Second: [In the wake of the shooting of the unarmed black youth Michael Brown by a police officer, the] people of Ferguson, Missouri, have caused serious complications for the US National Security State. By virtue of standing their ground in their own small city, the demonstrators have forced the police to show their true, thoroughly militarized colors. Ferguson’s rebellious Black youth have succeeded in pinning down the armed forces of racist repression in full view, so that the whole world can bear witness to the truth of what another generation proclaimed nearly half a century ago: that, in the Black community, the police are an army of occupation. . . . The term “mass Black incarceration” had not yet been coined [then], but it was only a matter of time before a permanent, militarized police offensive against rebellion-prone ghettos would cause unprecedented numbers of Black prisoners to flow into the greatest gulag in the history of the world. Since America tells itself and the world that it does not make war on its own citizens, . . . the war against Black people had to be called something else—a War on Drugs, or simply a War on Crime.—Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report, August 20142

The Third: This website is called Turn It Around, South Africa, www.turnitaround.co.za. On this website you can receive regular reports of crimes happening in a radius of your home or business and you can also report any suspicious activity or crime incidents online to inform others. . . . If your neighbour was hijacked or robbed—would you even know about it? High walls and security has [sic] made neighbors strangers to one another. With Turn it Around, you will be informed and aware of the crimes happening around you. . . . We CAN use crime to bring us together and become one another’s safety zones. . . . You are not alone—everyone feels the way you do about crime.—Anonymous, Turn It Around, South Africa, October 20113

The Fourth: CAPITA, plc [is] the UK’s leading [private sector] provider of integrated professional support service solutions, with 64,000 staff across the UK, Europe, South Africa and India.

What we do: Police and justice

[We deliver] services to help protect the public, manage the rehabilitation and care of offenders, and support our police and justice services.

We’ve been working in the CRIMINAL JUSTICE sector since the early 1990s. . . . Our end-to-end services support the police and justice systems in delivering best of breed services to the public, helping both victims and offenders to get their lives back on track while enabling police officers and offender personnel to do their job efficiently and effectively.

We deliver a range of solutions directly to the frontline of the criminal justice system, from victim support and forensic services, through to custodial services and offender management and rehabilitation.

[We supply] products and services to 43 police forces in England, Ireland and Wales; and to Police Scotland.

We were the first providers of outsourced police custody services in the UK.

We process and look after 644,000 detainees for the UK police and Home Office annually.—Capita, plc, capita.co.uk, August 20144

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Crime is a major preoccupation across the world today. It always has been, more or less, since the dawn of modernity. Nor is this surprising, especially in Euro-America and its former colonies. The modernist nation-state, after all, was founded from the first on a scaffolding of legalities. To the degree that it conceived of itself, in classic liberal terms, as a body of free citizens living, normatively, according to the rule of law, its endemic nightmare was crime-run-amok, crime “out of control.” Emile Durkheim long ago noted the epistemic corollary that follows from this: crime is a critical prism through which a society might come to know itself, might measure itself against its own ideal self-image, might contemplate ways and means of perfecting itself. As he once put it (1938, xxvii; cf. Greenhouse 2003, 276), “a society . . . free of crime would fall into chaos.” Being “bereft of the signs of its own existence as an authoritative order,” it would lack the means to reflect on, and to govern, itself. Hence the concern, obsession even, with breaches of the law.

Still, the sense that lawlessness is presently on the rise, dangerously so, seems to be evident almost everywhere. As David Garland (2001, 163) has noted, “high crime rates are regarded as a normal social fact,” a “fact” that elicits “fascination as well as fear, anger, resentment.” Already in May 2001, the director of the Europol went public with the statement that crime, both domestic and transnational, had come to pose a critical threat to the security of European countries; authorities in many southern nations had been saying the same thing of their parts of the world for some years. Governments, he went on, ought to rethink the prevailing paradigm of international geopolitics: “the resources that had previously been spent on military defense would be better invested” in dealing with that threat.5 And, he might have added, domestic terror. Many agreed. In sedate Sweden, for example, citizens have come to see their country as “a place of dark crimes and vicious psychopaths, of fractured families and a fraying society,” in which few have faith in either the police or the criminal justice system;6 their dark imaginings being fed by a highly fertile, often-febrile crime fiction industry now known as Nordic noir (see below). Similarly in Britain, the “rule of lawlessness”7 has been a major issue for two decades, to the extent that, at the millennium, the country was said to be on the verge of a “nervous breakdown”;8 since then, felony rates have dropped sharply, but two-thirds of the population believe the contrary.9 Even in law-abiding Singapore, the state recently festooned its streets with public signage that read “Low Crime Doesn’t Mean No Crime.” By contrast, South Africa has much higher incidences of violent transgression. MURDER AND RAPE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD10 is a boldfaced claim often made for it by its citizens (Masuku 2001, 16; de Haas 2000, 300). The uppercase attests to an odd mix of assertiveness and ignominy, the frisson that comes with living in a place taken to be, at once, terrifying and titillating (Malan 2002), a perilous paradise in which, as Goldberg et al. (2001, xii) have put it in another context, “romantic longing and the embrace of terror . . . stand as components of the sublime.” In fact, South Africa, as we shall see, is not nearly as exceptional as its population thinks (de Haas 2000, 319; du Preez 2013 187). True, whites there have suffered more frequent attacks on persons and property since the late 1980s than they did during the apartheid years, when, to all intents and purposes, they lived in garrisoned residential enclaves; as the racial state gave way, crime spilled over the heavily policed boundaries of black neighborhoods, where—partly as a result of an economics of scarcity, partly out of a culture of criminal iconoclasm, partly a response to the violence and illegitimacy of the law—it had long been endemic. Nonetheless, beyond the most immiserated of those black neighborhoods, risk to life and limb still lies less in lawlessness than it does in other, more mundane things. And that risk has been decreasing. Over the past decade or so, rates of most felonies, especially serious “contact crimes,”11 have dropped substantially, although murder and aggravated (i.e., armed) robbery numbers rose in 2013/14. Moreover, “Crime Capital of the World” is a crown that has also been claimed, in the Caribbean, for Kingston; in Latin America, for Barrancabermeja (Colombia) and Ciudad Juárez (Mexico); in the United States, for Washington, DC, and Gary, Indiana—even, oddly, for Adelaide in Australia.12

What is striking, though, is that, in all these places—in Sweden, Britain, Singapore, South Africa—the relationship between fear and danger is starkly disproportionate. Thus, in Cape Town, the homicide ratio in 2003 between its wealthier white suburbs and one of its poor black “townships”13 was somewhere in the region of 1:358; in 2013 it was 0:262 (see 2.3); two-thirds of all murder victims are black males between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine (Bundy 2014, 125). Yet it is in the former, in the wealthier white suburbs, that angst about violence was, and still is, more marked. Thus, too, in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Singapore—not to mention the United States, where, despite the claims of the New York Police Department to the contrary (see below), “violent crime is at its lowest level in a generation.”14 Those who discuss the threat of lawlessness and social disorder in such urgent terms rarely suffer it directly. This is not to deny that criminality is a gravely serious matter in many places. But so are chronic un(der)employment, poverty, disease, ecological and technological disaster, regional wars, and xenophobic outbreaks, which wreak demonstrably more devastation. Yet they seldom elicit the same measure of civic outrage, acrimonious political debate, severe penal sanction, or urgent policy-mongering.

Nor only is it that criminality is commonly perceived to be on the rise, thus to justify the mood of “popular punitiveness” that has gripped much of the late modern world (Bottoms 1995; Simon 2001; Haggerty 2001, 197).15 The phenomenon itself, as a productive category of signifying practice (cf. Caldeira 2000, 19 et passim), appears to be metamorphosing. States are said to be “governing through crime” (Simon 2007; Super 2013)—indeed, to have become “penal states” in the Global North (Wacquant 2009b, 162 et passim) and “criminal states” in the Global South, especially in Africa (Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999). They are also said to be managing large populations with reference to it (Kohler-Hausmann 2014, 611 et passim); to be deploying it to achieve the effects of civil—specifically, race and class and ethnoreligious—war (Packer 2011); to be legitimizing authoritative, forensic knowledge by means of it (Keenan and Weizman 2012); and to be justifying the digitization of entire nations under its biometric sign (Jain, Flynn, and Ross 2008; Breckenridge 2014a). Reciprocally, as the language of criminality becomes the vernacular in which politics is increasingly conducted, governments past and present are indicted by their citizens for corruption, war atrocities, human rights abuses, the violation of persons, the seizure of property, disagreeable and discriminatory legislation; even for history itself, which, these days, is redeemed fully for its victims only by subjecting its perpetrators to a judicial settling of accounts (in all senses of the term; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006b). What is more, those citizens tend increasingly to construe social reality in toto—in a dialectical dance with mass representations authored by the culture industry—through the allegory of law-making and law-breaking (cf. de Kock 2015).

As this implies, criminality, broadly conceived, serves not merely as an index of undoing, of things falling apart, of doubts about the legitimacy of the law itself. It is also the object of political demand, an alibi for assertive efforts to remake the authority of that law in pursuit of the liberal-democratic idyll of “the good life.” Patently, this—the counterpoint between a fear of lawlessness and a felt need for law-enforcement, between a sense of immanent chaos and a desire for the recuperation of order—is not peculiar to the here and now either. As a secular resurrection narrative, it has been an enduring feature of modern state-making (C. Smith 2009). But criminality seems to be an especially urgent motif in public discourse at present. Listen to a cri de coeur from the New York Police Department. Dated 26 August 2014, it was published by the New York Times in a full-page open letter: “[The city] is lurching backwards to the bad old days of high crime, danger-infested public spaces, and families that walk our streets worried for their safety. . . . The degradation of our streets is on the rise.”16 This is in spite of the fact that in Camden, in the adjoining state of New Jersey, “notoriously one of the nation’s poorest, most crime-ridden cities, . . . shootings [were] down 43 percent in two years, and violent crime down 22 percent”;17 also the fact that, as recent scholarly research shows (Roeder, Eisen, and Bowling 2015), crime has declined in New York City as well—although, to be fair, while the FBI released figures in late 2015 showing a fall in violent offenses, there have been recent reports of sharp spikes in a number of US cities.18

The problem, then, will be plain enough. While global felony rates may or may not have risen—some, like John Gray (1998), say they have, others disagree19—the preoccupation with lawlessness appears to have grown exponentially. It expresses itself in rising carceral rates, calls for tougher law-enforcement, moral panics about impending disorder, draconian strategies of social management—and an explosive economy of representation that reflects upon, and makes capital from, it. As this suggests, crime has become the metaphysical optic by means of which people across the planet understand and act upon their worlds.

But why? Why should this be so if the risk posed by lawlessness appears disproportionate to its incidence? If the imminent danger it poses to most people—other, ironically, than to the poor and the marginalized, those who are commonly seen as the prime perpetrators of crime, not its primary victims—is comparatively limited, perhaps receding? If, as a threat to social order, it pales into insignificance against other potential sources of public peril? After all, crime waves, real and imagined, are hardly unprecedented; they often spike in periods of social transition, as Steinberg (2001) has shown for South Africa, rupturing the flow of “ordinary times.” But could it be that, with the end of “the long twentieth century” (Arrighi 1994), with the dawn of “the new way of the world” (Dardot and Laval 2014),20 we are seeing a tectonic shift in the relationship between capital, governance, and the state, a cumulative reconfiguration of the long run, as we explained in the preface, involving the rearticulation of foundational elements of our social, economic, political, juridical, ethical, and cultural universe, a shift that is part intensification and part rupture? Could it be that this reconfiguration—made manifest in changes in the nation-state form, in its rapid privatization, and in the assault on it by an aggressively rising corporate sector—is recasting the line between the political and the il/legal? And blurring the distinction between the criminal economy and legitimate business? Could it be that this, by turn, is having an effect on the practices of sovereignty, on public perceptions of social dis/order, and on the ways in which populations are being defined, differentiated, managed, even commodified, all the more so as inequality appears to be reaching critical proportions? In which, finally, crime is being mobilized to frame new philosophical concerns, to yield new truths, and to explore new species of normative knowledge about a changing world?

In order to address these questions, to plumb the meaning of crime in the early twenty-first century—be it in South Africa, the United States, or elsewhere—let us first step briefly back into the past, into the archaeology of the relationship between criminality and modernity. And its theoretical scaffolding. A contrapuntal reading of the present against that past, of its play of continuities and discontinuities, turns out to be more than a little illuminating.

Criminality and the Making of Modernity

Classical understandings of criminality, as our opening citation of Durkheim underscores, have, ab initio, been integral to liberal-humanist ideas of law, sovereignty, and social order. For Hobbes (1994, 190–91), transgression might have been fired by human passions. But it did not qualify as crime until it breached a jural norm: while every crime was a sin, not every sin, nor every breach of morality, was a crime. Lex naturae, natural law, and the rules of moral behavior that derived from it, might be understood as universal and eternal, but not so the positive law of any sovereign political community. To be sure, “customary” legal systems, in Africa and elsewhere, have long tended to draw a sharp distinction between moral and legal infraction (Gluckman 1955). The text often held to have mar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE  Crime, Capital, and the Metaphysics of Disorder:An Overview, in Three Movements
• PART TWO  Law-Making, Law-Breaking, and Law-Enforcement: Five Uneasy Pieces
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index