Crime and Risk

Pat O′Malley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781847873514, 9781847873507
• eBook ISBN: 9781446242018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over recent years, the governance of crime - from policing and crime prevention to sentencing and prison organization - has moved away from a focus on reforming offenders toward preventing crime and managing behaviour using predictive and distributional (such as risk) techniques.

Crime and Risk presents an engaging discussion of risk strategies and risk-taking in the domain of crime and criminal justice. It outlines the broad theoretical issues and political approaches involved, relating risk in contemporary crime governance to risk in criminal activity. Taking a broad and discursive approach, it covers:

• Risk-taking and contemporary culture
• The excitement associated with risk-taking and the impact of criminal activity
• The application of risk-oriented developments in crime prevention and control
• The use of genetic and related biotechnologies to assess and react to perceived threats
• The conceptualization of risk in relation to race and gender
• The influence of excitement upon criminal activity
• Evidence and accountability.

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ONE

risk, crime and criminal justice

Risk and crime control

Beginning about the mid-1980s, criminologists began remarking on the ways in which the governance of crime – from policing and crime prevention to sentencing and prison organization – had moved away from a focus on reforming offenders toward preventing crime and managing behaviour using predictive techniques. Some noted that whereas the principal concern of twentieth-century ‘penal modernism’ had been to understand and scientifically correct offenders, increasingly that was being abandoned in favour of focusing on managing their behaviours (Cohen 1985, Simon 1988). No-one was much interested anymore in the motives and meanings of these people. Instead what was at issue was what they did, how to control them, and how to minimize the harms they generated. Offenders and their offences were coming to be reframed less as the pathological products of societal and psychological breakdowns who needed to be therapeutically reformed, and more as bundles of harmful behaviours and potentialities.

At the same time, other criminologists observed that new techniques and new concerns were emerging in crime control. Reflecting the focus on behaviours, they detected a new emphasis on shaping the environment, and especially the built environment, in order to make crime difficult or impossible (Shearing and Stenning 1985, Reichman 1986). Increasingly, crime was seen as a matter of people taking opportunities rather than in terms of their inappropriate attitudes or disadvantaged backgrounds. Crime prevention accordingly was moving away from building up supportive environments and improving economically deprived neighbourhoods. The new focus was increasingly on designing crime-proof buildings, crime-preventing streetscapes and communities. As David Garland (1996) was later to term it, interest was focused on ‘criminogenic situations’. Reducing the risk of crime by restricting criminal opportunities had become critical.

There were other, linked changes also being reported. Penal modernism – the optimistic correctional approach that deployed scientific knowledge in order to reform offenders – was vitally interested in offenders’ pasts in order that they could be understood as individuals. The emerging risk techniques in crime control were also interested in offenders’ pasts, but in a different way. Emerging techniques tended to use statistical methods to identify correlations between pre-existing conditions and criminal action and to treat these conditions as ‘risk factors’. These factors could be used especially to identify potential offenders and change their ways before they offended, rather than correcting them after offending. Furthermore, what was now of interest was to use such information to assign individuals to a certain risk pool: it was this risk-categorization rather than the unique individual that was of interest.

This had been a phenomenally successful model in the medical sciences, of course. By the 1970s it was already the case that all manner of afflictions could be detected in advance by the presence of certain risk factors such as fatty diet and sedentary lifestyle, a family history of certain cancers or heart disease and so on. By modifying our diet and lifestyle, taking drugs or in extreme cases undergoing precautionary surgery, those of us identified as ‘at risk’ may ward off some dreaded cancer or debilitating disease. Over the last half century, almost every aspect of our lives has been affected by this ascendant risk model of government. The design of cars, planes, roads, buildings and household equipment; the shaping of our bodies both inside and out; the production and consumption of food and clothing; patterns of saving and investment; education and training – all these and more are now ‘governed by risk’. And why not? Who would not wish to reduce their exposure to disease, injury, loss or premature death? Who would not want to mitigate financial harms through some form of insurance? Perhaps it is not surprising that, sooner or later, crime would come to be approached in the same way. In fact it’s surprising that risk management techniques came to crime control so late in the piece, for contiguous fields such as fire prevention had been developed on similar principles almost a century earlier.

By the end of the twentieth century, risk had become a predominant way of governing all manner of problems. Prevention is better than cure. Of course it is true that even with respect to governing health through risk techniques there are political and moral dilemmas. Many people refuse to control their smoking or diet on the basis of a personal preference. The introduction of seat belts met with some resistance as an infringement on personal freedom. Fluoridation of the water supply to prevent tooth decay created pockets of alarm and protest. Yet for the most part, these were objections focused on specific issues, and were short lived, individual or local struggles. The model of risk itself – the use of predictive statistical knowledge linked to techniques of harm prevention – overwhelmingly has been regarded as one of the benefits bestowed by science. However, with respect to the governance of crime, this is not altogether how things have gone, and especially not in criminology.

Broadly speaking a fissure has opened up that divides opinion across almost the whole range of criminological and penological concerns – legislation, crime prevention, policing, sentencing, prison regimes and post-release interventions. On one side are those who take a generally positive view of risk techniques. Frequently those supportive of the use of risk techniques work in psychology and related disciplines, and/or in government offices, police and correctional agencies and institutions. On the face of things their views are not unreasonable. They seek to reduce crime victimization, to lower the public cost of crime, to deflect individuals from a life of crime and punishment, and to use risk techniques to provide services to reduce the risk of prisoners reoffending. Set against these so-called ‘administrative criminologists’ are their traditional foes – a great number of academic criminologists and certainly most of those coming from critical criminology and social justice disciplines. The warring camps will be depressingly familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of criminology, for they are traditional enemies. But why has risk become another of their interminable battlegrounds? And why do increasing numbers of lawyers and judges voice concerns with, and opposition to, risk-based crime prevention?

For critical criminologists, by the late 1990s, risk-based approaches were seen to have played a key role in the emergence of the ‘culture of control’ in which the reformist and socially inclusive optimism of modernist penal policies has been submerged beneath an exclusionary and punitive approach to crime. Because of its focus on behaviour rather than therapeutic correction, and on offenders as risks to others rather than as disadvantaged people struggling with the challenges of life, the new risk techniques were seen by critics to mesh well with an emerging ‘new punitiveness’ (Garland 2001, Pratt et al. 2005). Examples that support this view are not hard to find. This is not only because they erode ‘progressive’ reformism in criminal justice, but also because they have often become high-profile political issues in the media and public consciousness. For example, ‘three strikes and you’re out’ and similar tariff-based sentencing policies focus on the risk that an offender represents rather than on the seriousness of the particular offence at issue. For quite minor offences – but offences that are seen to be part of a pattern of activity that indicates a high risk of future crime – offenders can be imprisoned for long periods. These approaches to sentencing collide with almost taken-for-granted principles of proportionality between wrong and punishment, for a relatively minor offence may result in a lengthy risk-based sentence. They also fly in the face of therapeutic thinking that sentences should reflect the correctional needs of the offender as judged by experts.

Other examples exist in abundance. Curfews imposed on troublesome teenagers and electronic tagging of sex offenders in the name of risk reduction, are condemned as doing nothing to reform the offender while limiting the freedom of many people whose offences are minor. They are also viewed as turning the community into an extension of the prison system. Another prominent instance includes ‘Megan’s Laws’ and ‘Sarah’s Laws’, where in the name of risk minimization the identities and often the addresses of former sex and violence offenders are made public. The stated aim is to warn people in the neighbourhood to take extra precautions in view of this risk in their midst. These laws have become associated with accusations that they promote vigilantism and victimization of past offenders who may be trying to reform themselves or whose offences may in fact be quite mild. They may also create living hells for the families of the offenders.

Such ways of using risk to reduce crime are viewed as extending punishment into an indefinite future after release from prison, and as making unbearable the lives of former offenders and their families without this technique actually being proven to reduce crime victimization (Levi 2000). On top of this, a ‘new penology’ based on risk is seen to be shifting emphasis from correction to risk-reducing incapacitation or warehousing (Feeley and Simon 1992, 1994). A prime example is taken to be the imprisonment of many of those incarcerated under ‘three strikes’ laws, who are imprisoned in the name of reducing risk to the community but who receive little or nothing by way of correctional services while they are inside. The goal is simply to remove these ‘risks’ from society.

Alongside these changes, crime prevention moved from the margins to the centre of policing activities. Many of these new developments have been regarded by criminologists as deeply troubling. Reducing crime opportunities by creating ‘gated communities’, and the widespread installation of closed circuit television (CCTV) to monitor public spaces, are seen to create a paranoid society. In this view, intervening against the different, the unwanted and the merely annoying is a principal means whereby we are creating an ‘exclusive security’ (Young 1999). Pre-emptive intervention against ‘pre-delinquents’ and ‘at risk’ young people, ‘threatening’ gangs of youths or ‘anti-social’ groups of teenagers congregating in shopping malls inflict restrictions on those who may not yet have done anything dangerous or illegal. Crime awareness campaigns aimed at improving public safety are often regarded as increasing the sense of insecurity and adversely affecting the quality of life for all citizens. Such problematic and often worrying developments are viewed by critics as exemplary of risk techniques’ characteristic forms. In what has become a new orthodoxy in critical criminology, risk appears overwhelmingly as a negative development in crime control and criminal justice, driving out the inclusive model of criminal correction and installing in our midst segregating practices and technologies.

Such critical criminological views reflect social theory’s abiding pessimism about the present. It is epitomized by works such as Bauman’s (2000) and Young’s (1999) sociologies of the ‘exclusive society’ and Agamben’s (2000, 2005) apocalyptic vision of the state of exception. For Agamben, those who pose threats to security are consigned to a vulnerable form of humanity increasingly stripped of the rights and protections others take for granted, living a life deemed not worthy of living. In these accounts, criminal justice, public security and social exclusion blur together, and in the post-9/11, post-social-welfare state there seems little hope of change except for the worse. It is hard to disagree with many of the points they make, substantiated as they are by copious research.

However, these analyses pick up and maybe over-emphasize just one trend, albeit a powerful one, and they rarely suggest any way out of the nightmare they depict. I will argue that there are other trends and other possibilities with respect to risk. These include ‘developmental crime prevention’ and some forms of ‘risk-needs’ service provisions in prisons in which social reform programs and/or individual treatment are provided where a crime prevention risk-reducing effect can be demonstrated. Of course, as David Garland (2001) argues, these can be regarded as part of the culture of control, for they subordinate correctional reform and social assistance to techniques of crime prevention. As this implies, they will only be provided for offenders and the needy to the extent that they are shown to reduce crime risks.

This is a valid and important point. But they can also be seen as sites of resistance by the ‘social’ professions – psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists and so on seeking to maintain or defend the welfare orientations and the therapeutic corrections that so many criminologists complain are being swept away. More significantly, they can be seen as points from which more promising initiatives can be explored or launched. In this way they are possibly Janus-faced, offering at least ambiguous risk-based alternatives to the apparently desolate culture of control. ‘Drug harm minimization’ is likewise dangerous but promising. As will be seen, it offers therapeutic services and efforts to reintegrate and accommodate drug users in society in the name of reducing the total array of harms illicit drug use creates. On the other hand, it does impose expert domination and subjects therapeutic services to the test of reducing those actions and behaviours judged by experts to be harmful and risk-laden. It also has the potential to extend the net of social control, for example by the use of methadone programs as a ‘chemical leash’ for users. Whatever their other benefits, methadone programs are intrusive and constraining, requiring users to report at frequent intervals to an approved drug agency, and often making them submit urine tests to detect illicit drug use. All of these risk-related formations have dangerous potentials. People who have not been convicted of an offence are required to restrict their movements, be available to surveillance and provide personal information. But they may also offer the potential for the reconfiguring of risk in more optimistic, socially inclusive and constructive fashion than is imagined by many of those opposed to crime control through risk techniques. Perhaps it is time, in the twenty-first century, to explore this ‘uncertain promise’ of risk.

Risk and criminal activity

At the same time, and with the same guarded optimism, it is also important to explore the ways in which social theory can reframe risk with respect to understanding the motives and ways of life that lie behind criminal offending. Positivist criminology has long attended to crime as risk-taking. Usually, it does so in a way that regards risk-taking as pathological. Thus ‘short-term hedonism’ produced by poor socialization, or ‘thrill seeking’ produced by the boredom of lower-class working life, are ideas that have been deployed by positivist criminologists (e.g. Miller 1958). These approaches tend to reduce risk-taking to the status of a problem leading to crime, and to attribute it to personal inadequacy and social malaise. This vision is in many ways a remnant of the nineteenth-century view of the poor as feckless, lacking proper prudence and needing an injection of discipline.

Such criminological work can readily be accused of class bias. For example, while some criminologists see crime arising from risk-taking as a response to the boring lives of workers, it is hard to believe that the lives of many white-collar males (including criminologists) are startlingly different when it comes to day-to-day excitement. Indeed, evidence abounds of white-collar workers engaging in binge drinking and illicit drug consumption on the night club circuit (Winlow and Hall 2006). Furthermore, this pathologizing approach to crime as risk-taking is associated with treatment responses to teach better impulse control and deferred gratification. Consequently it can be accused of seeking to make the poor and especially the young modify their ways in order to conform to the moral standards of the middle classes and the requirements of public order bureaucrats. Other pathologizing criminological models, such as that of Hans Eysenck (1978) suggest that some people are driven to risk-taking because of problems with their autonomic nervous system. People with a ‘slow’ or unresponsive nervous system are believed to require more stimulus in order to provide levels of satisfaction. Such ‘extraverted’ individuals are driven to more ‘extreme’ activities – such as risk-taking – that have a high probability of being associated with crime. Of course, the same is seen to be true for sky divers, arctic explorers and many great achievers – and to be fair to Eysenck and his allies, they do recognize that risk-taking is also socially productive.

Sophisticated variants of this kind of criminology go on to argue that working-class risk-taking is linked to crime largely because there are fewer legitimate outlets for excitement open to the poor. Yet even such approaches still carry with them a baggage of determinism that many critical criminologists find problematic: an assumption that certain people are driven to crime by something in their bodies or their background. Against this kind of approach to risk-taking it is argued in ways epitomized by Jack Katz’s (1988) Seductions of Crime, that the experience of risk can be analysed as a form of resistance and creativity. Common-or-garden shoplifting, for example, is too widespread across class lines to be explained in conventional terms as either the poor attempting to eke out a living or as evidence of the working classes trying to escape from the tedium of factory jobs. Katz explores the experiential phenomenology of such activities rather than trying to reduce them to an effect of some determining variable. He attempts to render these experiences intelligible as a form of risky flirting with the humiliation of capture that generates ‘sneaky thrills’, and thus provide excitement available to all. Perhaps the children of the middle class, standing to lose more, would find this even more thrilling, no matter how supposedly less boring their lives are than those of their working-class peers.

Some crime therefore can be understood as ‘embracing risk’, to use Baker and Simon’s (2002) term. Such crimes may emerge as not needing a pathological, determinist explanation. After all, the current world of consumer culture constitutes excitement as good, as normal and as desirable. Risk-takers who end up committing crimes in pursuit of excitement may thus embrace actions that embody mainstream values. Perhaps their misfortune, and their main difference from other people, is not their background or their nervous system, but that they choose to seek excitement and risk-taking in what is judged to be a ‘subterranean’, inconvenient or ‘inappropriate’ fashion (Matza 1964).

The work of ‘cultural criminologists’ and others has extended this work more recently, linking legally problematic risk-taking to broader themes extolling the virtues of risk-taking in contemporary consumer society. Key examples include writings on ‘edgework’ – for example extreme sports such as base-jumping (parachuting off cliffs or illegally off high rise structures), or the criminal financial speculation that has blossomed in the morally ambiguous cultural milieu of risk-taking created by the ‘enterprise society’. However, even while exhibiting continuities with mainstream values of embracing risk, some criminal risk-taking may be seen as intertwined with resistance to a perceived dominant culture and agencies of authority. While it is easy to slip into romanticizing and patronizing in this way, nevertheless the act of resistance is often itself exhilarating through the risks it bears – even if this takes complex forms of fear, anger, arrogance and even cruelty.

This kind of personal orientation to risk and excitement is not necessarily new. Yet perhaps the expansion of consumer culture, coupled with the neo-liberal political emphasis on risk-taking as valued attribute in the ‘entrepreneurial’ society, combine to produce an environment in which crimes embracing risk become more attractive to many people, especially young people. At the same time, legitimate forms of risky consumption – such as ‘lifestyle choices’ associated with certain styles of dress and music, bodily adornment and attending night clubs and casinos – may have become more ‘edgy’. That is, in the culture and environment of the consumer society, the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate is becoming more volatile or ambiguous. Resistance and flirting with crime even becomes a theme in many legitimate commodities ranging from alcopops to motorbikes. Perhaps here too, ‘risk’ offers uncertain lines of flight out of a present that many commentators and young people alike see as being rendered unfree by a political over-emphasis on security. The allegedly hegemonic ‘culture of control’ seems to leave little room for resistance, yet risk-taking may be one of the key forms of such potentially transformative activity paradoxically generated by different facets of neoliberal, consumer society.

What may be particularly characteristic of the present era is that a heightened emphasis on risk-taking is colliding with a heightened emphasis on risk-containment. In other words, there have been risk-managing forms of government before now, but they have not been so pervasive, so sophisticated and so politically and culturally salient. Likewise, there have been plenty of examples of risk-taking crimes in the past, but perhaps now risk-taking has become much more widespread and so much more a part of everyday life. As a result more people, and especially more young people, are attracted to styles of living and to activities that have risk-taking as a ke...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Risk, Crime and Criminal Justice
• Chapter 2: Risk and Crime Control
• Chapter 3: Crime, Risk and Excitement
• Chapter 4: A Risk-taking Criminology
• Bibliography
• Index