Culture, Crime and Punishment

Ronald Kramer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781352010824
• eBook ISBN: 9781350306042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This innovative introductory textbook to the growing field of cultural criminology examines the importance of understanding the cultural contexts in which crime and crime control take place. It describes and discusses the field's theoretical and methodological foundations, its links to other theoretical traditions, and its limits and criticisms. By exploring substantive areas such as crime in popular culture, deviance and social control, criminal justice and punishment, it demonstrates the utility of sometimes complex theory to core issues in criminology. Written in accessible language, this is the first text written specifically for a student audience, making it essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate modules on cultural criminology. Moreover, as it evaluates the connections of cultural criminology with wider theoretical developments, it will be ideal for broader courses on criminology, criminological theory and critical criminology. Finally, it will be of interest to anyone analysing contemporary issues and debates through a cultural lens.

1	THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

Introduction

This chapter will begin sketching a picture of cultural criminology by situating it in relation to positivist criminology, sociological criminology and radical constructivism. Cultural criminology is very much an outgrowth of the sociological criminology that emerged in the 20th century in the Anglophone world, and it could be said that both sit somewhere between positivist criminology and radical constructivism. Given this, the two latter orientations seem well-suited as reference points that help outline the distinctiveness (but also non-distinctiveness) of cultural criminology.

To be sure, other criminological approaches could be utilised for such purposes, such as feminist criminology and Marxist/critical criminology. However, like cultural criminology, these approaches also tend to oscillate between ideal-typical conceptions of positivist logics and radical constructivism. As a result, feminist and Marxist criminologies are arguably not the best reference point for exploring the parameters of cultural criminology. Nevertheless, some major works produced from within these criminological approaches will appear in other sections of the text given the contributions that they make and, relatedly, the critiques that they level against cultural criminology.

The chapter begins by providing a sketch of positivist criminology and how it tends to approach the problems of crime and punishment. Positivist criminology attempts to reproduce the logics that are often held to define natural sciences in accounting for crime and punishment. This leads to a criminology in which crime is taken for granted and assumed to be a problem that requires scientific explanation. Positivist criminology generally seeks the causes of crime in the individual – either a defective biology or perverse use of rational calculation – and thus suggests punitive strategies in which the individual figures as the point of application.

Following positivist criminology, we take a brief foray into the world of radical constructivism. Radical constructivism is heavily indebted to postmodern thought, especially the latter’s tendency to prioritise the notion of discourse and/or language. For the radical constructivist, a reality outside of language does not exist; our experiences and observations are never ‘pure’, but always culturally mediated in some way. In the context of criminology, this leads to the position that ‘crime’ cannot be understood as a category given to us by reality. Crime is one of many possible signifiers we could use to mark out any given behaviour. Absent any reality to crime, searching for its causes and remedies makes little sense. The scholar can only interrogate the representations and accounts of crime that others offer.

Over the next two sections, arguments that have been advanced by sociological criminologists and recognised as influential amongst cultural crimi-nologists are discussed, and their reverberations within cultural criminology are briefly summarised. In the first of these sections, the focus is on sociological accounts of crime or criminalised behaviour; in the second, the focus is on punishment and social control. Given that cultural criminology acknowledges a debt to this sociological body of thought, it constitutes the bulk of the chapter.

In the chapter’s final section, we return to some of the lingering, unresolved questions that haunt cultural criminology. These stem from what can be described as its unprincipled (or chaotic) embrace of sociological criminology and its ambiguous epistemological and ontological standpoint. The ambiguous, if not contradictory, nature of cultural criminology can be opened up by revisiting radical constructivism. From this vantage point, it becomes clear that cultural criminology has not come to solid positions concerning the epistemology and ontology by which it is informed. As we will see, a radical break with positivist criminology is often claimed, but the two enterprises make the same fundamental assumptions about reality, the viability of proffering knowledges in which causal relationships amongst variables are posited and the right to pursue strategic interventions in social life.

Positivist criminology: Theories of crime and punishment

Positivist criminology assumes that crime is a ‘problem’, the causes of which can be discovered via scientific methods. In this quest for a causal theory, it primarily concentrates on the individual, thereby leaving little room to question whether the origins of crime may be found within social structure or discourse. The focus on the individual has spawned theories that focus on biological properties of the body and our supposed capacity for rational decision making.

Writing during the late 19th century and often regarded as the founding figure of criminology, Cesare Lombroso (2006) is most known for positing that some individuals are ‘born criminals’. Although the born criminal is Lombroso’s most notorious category, he did develop a taxonomy of criminal types over the years, which included the ‘criminaloid’, ‘habitual criminal’ and the ‘criminal of passion’ (Lombroso 2006). Despite these shades of criminality, Lombroso maintained that all criminals, albeit to varying degrees, possessed distinct biological features. This led him to posit that criminal behaviour could be regarded as atavistic, a resurfacing of ancestral traits otherwise rendered redundant by the course of ‘civilisation’. In describing the born criminal, Lombroso (2006, p. 91) suggests that such:

… criminals resemble savages and the colored races. These three groups have many characteristics in common, including thinness of body hair … small cranial capacities, sloping foreheads, and swollen sinuses. Members of both groups frequently have … thick skulls, overdeveloped jaws and cheekbones, oblique eyes, dark skin, thick and curly hair, and jug ears.

Lombroso’s suggestion that there is a biological basis to crime has long been discredited. Aside from the obvious racism of the theory, there is little to support the view that biological features can explain variations in crime rates (Taylor et al. 1973, pp. 41–42). Despite such limits, biological theories were popular and they are still echoed today, albeit in somewhat modified forms. There is, for example, a ‘new’ biological criminology in which crime is generally understood to follow from how genes and environmental forces interact to shape individual dispositions and behaviour (Baker et al. 2010). Moreover, a range of technologies are still deployed in order to measure the body – brain scans, IQ tests, genome mapping, the penile plethysmograph (which purports to measure blood flow to the penis to determine if an individual is a sex offender) – in hopes of finding the biological source of criminality (see Carrier and Walby 2014; Horn 2003; Walby and Carrier 2010 for critiques of biocriminology). Arguably, arguments in which biological processes are accorded theoretical importance remain popular because they are consistent with broader power arrangements and the ideological forms that sustain them: ‘criminality’ can be regarded as an objective category (it can, after all, supposedly be detected in the natural body); criminal behaviour is the product of individual defects; the state’s ‘right to punish’ need not be questioned.

For positivist criminologists who wish to avoid the pitfalls of biological criminology, but continue to construe the individual as defective and thus the fundamental cause of crime, ‘rational choice’ appears to have emerged as the preferred theoretical approach. One could easily argue that ‘rational choice’ is the most well-worn theoretical construct underpinning contemporary theories of crime in which the individual occupies a central place. To give a few examples, rational choice provides the foundation for routine activities (Cohen and Felson 1979), situational crime prevention (Cornish and Clarke 1986) and, amongst other theories, zero-tolerance or order-maintenance policing (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Kelling and Bratton 1998).

Models based on rational choice posit that individuals are essentially instrumental actors that weigh up the costs and benefits – or chances of punishment versus rewards – associated with any given course of action. Criminal behaviour transpires when the commission of any particular crime is perceived as relatively low in risk and thus offering benefits that outweigh its possible negative costs. Construing the individual as a rational actor is generally conservative in its implications. Rational choice theories tend to legitimise strategies that make crime difficult to commit (e.g., target hardening) or intensify the force of punitive interventions (as in zero-tolerance policing). Instead of focusing on social changes that might mitigate the appeal of crime, such approaches are geared towards the suppression of criminalised behaviours that emerge within social orders premised upon inequality, exclusion and gross power asymmetries.

The causal theories of crime espoused by positivist criminology can be associated with distinct arguments concerning the purpose of punishment. To return to Lombroso, his notion that criminal behaviour could be traced back to biological deficiencies was met with an obvious criticism: if biology were the cause of crime and troubling behaviours, how could the state justifiably punish those found guilty of a criminal offence? Biology is, after all, beyond the control of the individual. How can one be held responsible for actions that would appear to be ‘biologically determined’?

In response, Lombroso (2006, p. 165) was quick to truncate any such reading of his theory, lest the state’s power to punish be inhibited. As he put it:

[W]hile we may deny individual responsibility, for it we substitute social responsibility, which is much more exacting and severe. While we may reject the legal responsibility of criminals, we do so not to reduce their punishment, but rather to increase the length of their detention.

Rather than raise questions about individual responsibility and thereby problematise the power to punish, Lombroso turns his biological determinism into a rationale for punishment strategies that prioritise incapacitation. Because some individuals are predisposed to commit crime, the function of punishment becomes that of ‘social protection’, which is to be accomplished by intensifying detention.

In some respects, one could argue that this kind of logic, in which the state is encouraged to protect society by incapacitating offenders, is quite prevalent in numerous contemporary criminal justice systems. As some have argued, much of the Anglophone world seems to have given up on the idea of rehabilitating offenders, preferring to see imprisonment as a viable way to physically prevent some individuals from committing criminal acts (Feeley and Simon 1992; Wacquant 2010; see also Chapters 7 and 8).

Where crime is associated with rational choice, there is a tendency to construe deterrence and rehabilitation as the primary goals of punishment. This line of thought is often associated with utilitarian thinkers, such as Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria. Perhaps its clearest illustration can be found in Beccaria’s short tract, On Crimes and Punishment (1963). According to Beccaria, human nature guarantees that individuals will be governed by self-interest, and thus willing to sacrifice the collective good if it means securing private advantage. In this view, the exercise of rational judgment will not go too far beyond an assessment of what is in the best interests of the individual. Given this, Beccaria (1963, pp. 43, 47) held that punishment needs to be exploited for its capacity to communicate. A well-organised system of punishment could be utilised to provide a moral education of sorts, it will teach people that their self-interests will not be secured via crime. Several conditions need to be met in order for punishment to function in such a manner: it must follow every crime, no matter how small; the costs of punishment must exceed, albeit moderately, the rewards from crime; punishment should never be based on emotion, as this would lead to excessive penalties and thus a loss of the state’s perceived legitimacy.

In much of the Anglophone world, the idea of using punishment to re-socialise the individual, to rehabilitate them such that crime would no longer be perceived as a rationally defensible choice, was a dominant penal logic for much of the 20th century and it is still discernible today. It has, however, increasingly been displaced by the logics of incapacitation and deterrence (Garland 2001). Where state-orchestrated punitive practices are governed by a logic of rehabilitation, they tend to take the form of ‘correcting’ the individual. This is especially evident in the recurrent use of cognitive-behavioural therapies, alongside a range of other approaches derived from the field of psychology, which assume that ‘criminals’ think in ways that involve ‘distortions’ or ‘errors in reasoning’ (Hannah-Moffat 2005; Kramer et al. 2013). By way of contrast, incapacitation is less concerned with re-engineering the thought processes of those who engage in crime. Instead, it prioritises strategies like confinement, chemical castration, intensive monitoring and surveillance of those released from prison and so on, such that offending behaviour cannot be practically enacted even if the motivation to offend remains.

Despite their obvious differences, these punishment philosophies (i.e., incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation) do have some important points of overlap. In all of these views, punishment is regarded as a legitimate state activity, a normatively appropriate response to criminal acts. This in itself takes for granted that the state’s demarcation of criminal from non-criminal behaviour need not be questioned, presumably because it is imagined to correspond to some kind of broad social consensus regarding acceptable/unacceptable behaviours. It is against this imagined consensus that criminal offending occurs, thus rightfully animating the impulse to punish.

Perhaps of greater significance, these theories presuppose that there exists some ‘technical’ and/or individual-level solution to the crime problem, thereby rendering any need for broader social change redundant. In Lombroso, the central technology is the prison, reduced to a mechanism for isolating and thus incapacitating ‘born criminals’. In this view, so-called crime problems can be solved by identifying offenders, especially those with ‘biological signs’ of criminality and ensuring they are quarantined from the rest of society.

Following his view that no human can escape the pursuit of self-interest, including those who occupy important positions within the criminal justice system, Beccaria (1963, p. 15) lays out a blueprint for determining punishments in a way that supposedly achieves the objective of deterrence, but also fairness and impartiality:

For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the minor [premise], the action that conforms or does not conform to the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment.

Punishment, it would seem, is a dish best served cold. What Beccaria seems to suggest is that criminal justice, particularly its capacity to punish, ought to operate like a technical piece of machinery. The judge in this scenario does not interpret the meaning of behaviour, analyse its context, its impact and so on. All that he or she does is ask whether any particular behaviour is classified as criminal and if the individual has engaged in such an act, then consult the law books to apply the corresponding punishment. Human judgment is excluded from the process of imposing punishment because human nature is seen as liable to error. But if this human tendency can be excised, the punishment and rehabilitation of individuals can transpire with some kind of technical precision.

Radical constructivism

Radical constructivism is heavily indebted to postmodern thought, especially the latter’s tendency to centre the notion of discourse. Discourse is explored in more detail in Chapter 5, but a brief description is required here to clarify the radical constructivist position. Discourse refers to ways of speaking (and writing) about topics or objects. However, discourse does not simply reflect an external reality that can be imagined to exist independently of our capacity to observe. Instead, the notion of discourse suggests that the practices of speaking and writing actively construct the world they represent.

According to Michel Foucault (1972), an array of discourses are available at any given time to make sense of ‘reality’. It is not the case, however, that some of these discourses do a better job than others of encapsulating the truth of reality. There is no ‘truth’ to be found outside of discourse according to Foucault. Instead, discourses compete to operate as the truthful account of reality. Those that come to be most commonly accepted can be understood as ‘dominant’ discourses, whereas those that do not acquire as much currency can be thought of as ‘subjugated’.

The radical constructivist essentially pushes this notion of discourse to its logica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Titlepage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical foundations
• 2 Methodological approaches and the politics of research
• 3 The concept of culture and criminalised behaviour
• 4 Critiques of cultural criminology on crime
• 5 The framing of crime and social control efforts
• 6 Consuming crime and punishment
• 7 Culture and punishment
• 8 Criminal justice and new policies on crime control
• Conclusion
• References
• Index