Criminal Actions and Social Situations

Understanding the Role of Structure and Intentionality

Anthony Amatrudo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781137457301
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137457318
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book develops a more nuanced, and technically rigorous, account of persons and groups in the context of intentional action and responsibility. Until now criminologists have taken groups as fairly straightforward associations and neglected the technical – and problematic – issues of how intention and action both structure membership and action. Amatrudo also assesses the often-overlooked fleeting nature of many groups and the overstated continuity of group membership, and this book has radical implications for the way we describe criminal groupings e.g. "criminal" groups with their loose bonds but tight sense of intentionality from criminogenic groups with their tight bonds and loose sense of intentionality. A key issue investigated here is the implications involved for people incarcerated on joint criminal enterprise charges and gang membership-related charges; and this timely topic will be of great interest to academics and students of Criminology, Law, Sociology and a variety ofother Social Sciences. The volume will also be useful for lawyers, social workers, community workers and others involved in the criminal justice system.

Section 1Technical and Analytical Considerations

© The Author(s) 2018

Anthony AmatrudoCriminal Actions and Social Situationshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-45731-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Central Problem of Collective Action

Anthony Amatrudo¹

(1)

Law School, Middlesex University, London, UK

End Abstract

The basic issue this book seeks to address is the knotty problem of what exactly collective action is. In this regard it is more ambitious and more broadly focused than is typical for a work focused upon Criminology. The job of this chapter is to move the existing criminological settlement around gangs, and joint enterprise, towards a more technical concentration upon the nature of individual action and its relationship with joint action. In doing this I largely follow the line I originally set out in my earlier article (Amatrudo 2016). My view is that it is a more straightforward task to seek to apportion criminal responsibility technically than to use the current, overly simplified and culturally reductive, accounts. This more technical approach makes the allocation of culpability surer. The argument will be that the law ought to be focused upon the wilful actions of individuals acting either alone or in a group. Individuals commit crimes, though they often do so with others. Culpability can only reside with individuals and their individual actions and with groups that are comprised of individuals. Culpability is only incidentally a structural matter. Whilst robbers, street gang members, war criminals, drug dealers and the like may form a group, what really matters are the individual actions of actors even where there is agreement about the intentional status of the group. The individual who stabs with a knife is always more culpable than the person who looked on. Furthermore, serious consideration needs to be afforded to goal setting, intentionality and deliberation when considering the criminal action of criminal actors; more so than the role of culture. When such technical matters are marginalised, the legitimacy of the outcome becomes inadequate, as is seen in the rise of joint enterprise prosecutions since the 1980s in the UK (Williams and Clarke 2016). Our aim will be to better understand the actions, deliberations and goals of individuals, and of groups, simply because these individuals are held responsible for their actions. Accordingly, we must deconstruct the blasé arguments often advanced concerning joint criminal activity in order to weigh more carefully the elements that make it up. We can all agree that it is certainly possible for individuals to act with a common purpose : whilst also understanding that such a claim is a very complicated, and multi-faceted, determination to make.

On the matter of culpability we must allow that one of most important elements in collective action is the understanding that individuals, themselves, may self-impose certain constraints upon their deliberation in the form of goals and intentions . Collective action is simply what we call the outcome of what happens when all the members of a given group accept the same constraints put on their personal deliberations in order that they might bring about collectively acceptable outcomes or an array of collectively acceptable outcomes. We note that such an understanding is effectively individualistic since it holds that each member of the group makes their own personal deliberation. The only real difference between the deliberation of personal goals and collective ones is in terms of the sorts of goals that are set. The point here is that collective goals always rest upon the role of individual moral agency. Consequently, we should stress the role of individuals: rather than marginalise them in stressing collective agency. The personal responsibility of actors cannot be subsumed into merely an aspect of a broader ontological affiliation.

Any account of collective action has to do several things. It first has to explain how collective actions are themselves related to collective goals whilst noting that the collective is always comprised of individual actors and that is a tricky determination. Laws need to understand that the criminal responsibility of groups always comprises a degree of individual responsibility. It has been argued that: “There is no need to speak of degrees of responsibility. All that is required is the minimum voluntariness: that the person could have done otherwise” (Amatrudo 2010). Moreover, the responsibility of individuals, for their actions, cannot be waived or reduced to some minor aspect of some prior association with a group of other individuals. A useful way of understanding group membership is in terms of its connection to collective action. What is more we should note that groups can, and do, participate in collective actions that are wholly irrational and undertake activities that are immoral for the group and the individuals who make it up. We see this clearly in a lot of criminal activity, such as drug usage. It is an aspect of our world and of our nature. The drug gang deals drugs and though that is socially undesirable it is just another case of collective action. It is useful for criminologists to understand criminal activity as just a different sort of behaviour, or if you like action. There is no need to be censorious or to claim a form of exceptionalism for criminal action. Criminals are persons and can be simply understood as such. They act at times rationally and at other times irrationally and their actions are differentiated only by the fact that they breach a criminal threshold. When we determine their actions it is better done as a calm, moral and rational activity of reasoning and not as one that prioritises a disputed notion of culture. We need not ask if collective actions, whether criminal or not, are positive or not, in order to account for them. All the same it is useful here to look briefly at rational choice making in terms of the, so-called, prisoner’s dilemma . List and Petit have looked at the prisoner’s dilemma in relation to group agency. The prisoner’s dilemma sets out to explain cooperative behaviour and how to assuage the costs of it, notably in terms of defecting. Essentially the prisoner’s dilemma demonstrates that defection is often less costly than a strategy of straightforward cooperation for individuals. The prisoner’s dilemma illustrates two important issues: (1) that there are cases of genuinely cooperative collective behaviour that seem not to correspond with the wellbeing of the cooperating parties and (2) that it is the case that individuals often justify their part in collective actions in terms of advancing a collective goal and can understand collective action as rational. Prisoner’s dilemma games illustrate how individuals can undertake cooperative behaviour, as a rational activity, though they themselves may have good reasons not to engage in collective action. This may seem perplexing but the thing to note here is that there can be a range of reasons for individuals to undertake cooperative actions. Simply put collective actions in the prisoner’s dilemma game illustrate that these may be justified in terms of the meta-reasoning of the collective action itself or as a justification for the individual in terms of their part in the collective action by way of executing an action that contributes to the greater collective action. In other words, collective action is commonplace and there is rational justification for those undertaking it. One may imagine collective actions which have no deliberative aspect to them, and possibly dancing might be such a case, whilst conceding that deliberation is usually an aspect of collective action. Those individuals who undertake collective action surely need to reason concerning their role in achieving the goal of the group. As we saw earlier, this may be either through collective or individual deliberation. For it is through deliberative collective action that individuals settle issues and undertake actions. Surely it is better to look at criminal groups as undertaking collective criminal actions in this fashion; as opposed to using external attributes to explain the actions of criminal groups or the demarcations allowed by academic gang typologies (Gordon 2000). It is also a good idea to distinguish between collective action and collective behaviour: the former being deliberative, in other words purposive, and rationalised in terms of a definite reason and the latter being mere undirected activity. This is helpful since it illustrates how the reasoning of individuals involved in deliberative collective action is an active and dynamic aspect of it. Through a process of deliberation individuals come to perform actions of the sort X performs actions x in accord with their reasons and so are performing an action not a behaviour. When individuals perform collective actions they are doing so in the light of collective goals . I accept that it is possible that collective goals could be undertaken either deliberatively or non-deliberatively but because our focus is upon culpable criminal activity we focus on deliberative instances.

The question is how to explain deliberative collective action? There is distinction being made that holds there is a real difference between collective and individual actions. Moreover, surely some actions are part of sets of actions, individual and/or collective. Furthermore, deliberative collective action has to be set out in terms that always relate to a pre-existing, or underlying, collective goal or goals . It is a tricky idea: for instance, if a rational actor when presented with an issue then decides to participate in collective action with others to overcome it, what should their action be in this collective endeavour? I note these things for later.

One thing that is abundantly clear within Criminology is that it cries out for a better explanation of action, especially in relation to group offending cases. At present this is lacking, as is the lack of a thoroughgoing consideration of intentionality and responsibility. This book aims to address this deficit by taking a more philosophical approach. This is not some academic indulgence for criminal justice regularly presents us with group offending cases, including serious offending and joint criminal enterprise cases where there is common agreement that the UK criminal justice systems seems to over-criminalise secondary parties in joint criminal enterprise prosecutions. The effective use of joint criminal enterprise prosecution, moreover, gets more and more shaky where the number of defendants ris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Section 1. Technical and Analytical Considerations
• Section 2. Legal Considerations
• Section 3. Reality and Sociology
• Back Matter