The Politics of Crime in Turkey

Neoliberalism, Police and the Urban Poor

Zeynep Gönen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784535438
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786720542
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book focuses on urban crime and policing in Turkey since the steady economic decline of the 1990s. Concentrating on the attempts to 'modernize' the policing of Izmir, Zeynep Gonen highlights how the police force expanded their territorial control over the urban space, specifically targeting the poor and racialized segments of the city. Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of these 'targeted' populations, as well as rare ethnographic data from the Turkish police, surveys of the media and politicians' rhetoric, Gonen shows how Kurdish migrants have been criminalized as dangerous 'enemies' of the order. In studying the ideological and material processes of criminalization, The Politics of Crime in Turkey makes the case for the neoliberal politics of crime that uses the notion of 'security' to legitimize violence and authoritarianism. The book will be of interest to criminologists, as well as those investigating the modern Turkish state and its relationship to the Kurds in the wider region. The multilayered methodology and conceptual approach sheds light on parallel developments in penal and security systems across the globe.

CHAPTER 1

CONCEPTUAL/THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND THE LITERATURE ON THE NEOLIBERAL PENAL STATE

This chapter has two aims, first, to draw together the conceptual and theoretical framework of the book, and second, to review the historically specific configurations of the penal/security state formation in the neoliberal era. Two theoretical traditions and their conceptual tools inform this project: Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives. I also borrow from the vast historical literature on crime, policing and criminal justice institutions in a variety of geographies, which help negotiate these competing theories in their exposition of the process of criminalization and state formation. In the first part, I explore the concepts and theories that are useful in developing an analysis of politics of crime and criminalization. In the second part of the chapter, I concentrate on the literature of neoliberal transformations within criminal justice institutions around the world. This is necessary, for I situate the Turkish case in parallel to these global transformations that have been shaping the neoliberal politics of crime.

Conceptualizing the Politics of Crime and Criminalization

Law, police, state

Concerned with the politics of crime,¹ this book is interested in the ideological processes and practices of the state.² The book examines the police organization and its practices as well as the ideologies of crime that shape and legitimize these practices. The police organization, understood as the central part of the organization and operation of the capitalist state, constitutes one of the central subjects of this project. Following various accounts of the police organization, the police can be seen as a political organ embodying the state, shaped largely through political and social conflicts.³

There are different ways in which the relation between the police and the state can be drawn. Firstly, in a specific manner, political police and the policing of political dissidence show that police organization deals with direct threats against the state and the order it reproduces. This way, the police force is not a crime fighting organ, but a coercive organization that protects the state and maintains its order from its political enemies. However, as many scholars argue, the policing of common crimes also constitutes a political process. Crime control, the terrain in which police organization operates requires state authority. It is necessary both to define criminal acts through its law and to ensure the application of the punishments. The state deals with crime not as a mediator between different actors, but because those acts threaten the power and authority of the state. The definition of crime and its control in this sense is always a political problem, therefore questions of police belongs to the sphere of the state and politics.

Conceptually, the relation between police and the state can be understood through Foucauldian studies that are interested in the genealogical analyses of the police. According to Pasquino as the ‘science of the police’ that developed in the pre-modern Europe, ‘police’ denoted a technology of government.⁴ In this period, the regulation of the populations became a problem as the feudal system and its regulatory arrangements were dissolving. Populations who were freed from feudal ties started to compose a new object of government. The ‘science of police’ would try to respond to this governmental need, ‘to constitute and to fashion’ different aspects of the population.⁵ The ‘population’ was transformed into ‘a value, an object of analysis and intervention’, and thus, its management through various other social regulatory institutions became a focus of the state. In turn, the ‘science of police’ was the combination of:

A whole cluster of practices and knowledges […]: assistance, tutelage, medicalization (not to mention areas which have already been analysed by others, such as the prison and its disciplinary mechanisms, sexuality, psychiatry and the family); practices and knowledges [which] together have woven that even-tightening web which constitutes the social.⁶

Hence, ‘police’ was not just related to the prevention of dangers and maintenance of order, but also to the production of the ‘happiness and health’ of the population as a means to increase the capacities of the state.⁷ Police were about forming ‘the good order of a population’.⁸

Foucault's lectures on Security, Territory, Population, published in English in 2007, discuss the concept of the police state – or its initial usage – in order to show the intimate connection between the police and the state. Similar to the ‘science of police’, the concept of the police state was related to the idea of increasing government's forces and controlling the activities of the populations, in so far as it is related to the force and power of the state. Police, in this sense, were about ‘effectively integrating men's [sic] activity into the state, into its forces, and into the development of these forces.’⁹ The population and circulation (of goods, of people, of communication) were the concerns of police, as they ‘will be effectively useful to the constitution and development of the state's forces.’¹⁰ At the same time, this idea of the police coexisted with the military/diplomacy apparatus, which situated the state with respect to other states, and its territory and sovereignty with respect to others. The police was the increase of the state's internal forces, which were limited by the (external) military capacity of other states. Hence, police were the form of power that maintained and strengthened the raison d'état of the state. Police and the state were inseparable.¹¹

The modern sense of the police came along with a new idea of governmentality and state, which separated the police from the economy, the population management, welfare, law and juridical apparatus, diplomatic and military apparatus. In this new idea of governmentality, the formation and the growth of forces and order ‘[would] be assured by a whole series of institutions, apparatuses, mechanisms and so on, and then elimination of disorder [would] be the function of the police.’¹² For example, in the case of the nineteenth century US, Monnkonnen argues that the welfare functions and service operations of the police organization were relegated to other agencies.¹³ Marxist scholar Neocleous, too, locates the same shift in Europe. There, the police organization became an institution of crime prevention and security at the end of the nineteenth century, whereas early modern functions of the police included many other aspects of social life.¹⁴

Through presenting its genealogy, Foucauldians describe police as an abstraction, as a form of governmentality and power. Such a conceptualization is useful for understanding the relation between the state and police, also taken in this book; the operations and practices of police present us clues for understanding the regulatory frame of the state and its techniques of government that are organized to manage populations. The concept of the police is closely related to the technologies, strategies and mechanisms that constitute the network of government. However, the Foucauldian perspective fails to present an understanding about why and for what the state and the police exist, whose interest they represent, and for whom the power operates. The police exist in connection to an abstracted power, and its function and politics remain vague if not fully absent.

Without fully dismissing the Foucauldian perspective, the problems can be overcome by the Marxist studies of the police and the state. Poulantzas, in State, Power, Socialism, argues that the function of the capitalist state and its institutions is to reproduce the capitalist order in the largest manner, to ‘duplicate’ the most imperative conditions for the capitalist accumulation, which are based on exploitation of labour, land, nature, etc.¹⁵ Police as a part of the capitalist state can be located within the larger mode of regulation that maintains and reproduces capitalist accumulation.¹⁶ The police organization is described as a class project.¹⁷ Like the state, the police in modern capitalist societies are produced through class relations and in turn reproduce those relations. As Hall et al. suggests:

‘The Law’ – the legal system, the police, the court and the prison system – is manifestly part and parcel of the judicial organization of the modern capitalist state … General questions of law and crime, of social control and consent, of legality and illegality, of conformity, legitimization and opposition, belong, and must ultimately be posed unambiguously in relation to, the question of the capitalist state and class struggle.¹⁸

Crime, poverty, ideology

While the police force can be described as a class project constituted by class struggle, it has been firmly established as a crime-fighting agency since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its role to prevent crime and catch criminals, however, is in fact an ideology as Neocleous suggests.¹⁹ The police have a variety of roles and functions other than fighting crime. Nonetheless, it is necessary to still understand the relationship between crime and police. For Marxist criminologists, crime is not an act of individuals who are anti-social, deviant, or born-criminal. Instead, it is a relational category that takes shape within complexities of social and historical processes. Hall et al. are explicit about their analysis of crime – in their case, mugging – as a relational category between ‘crime and reaction to crime’,²⁰ located in a particular social historical context:

If you look at this relation in terms of the social forces and contradictions accumulating within it (rather than simply in terms of the danger to ordinary folks), or in terms of the wider historical context in which it occurs (i.e. in terms of a historical conjuncture, not just a date on the calendar), the whole terrain of the problem changes in character.²¹

Moreover, as Spitzer puts it: ‘deviance cannot be understood apart from the dynamics of control’ of the working classes.²² Within the project of regulation of population and reproduction of the capitalist order, working classes constitute the ‘problem populations’, the objects of social control.²³ The police and other criminal justice institutions are organized as the social control organs of the capitalist state, and they operate to control ‘problem populations’.²⁴ Neocleous, for instance, locates the object of control as poverty. He draws a close relation between police and social policy, between policing and regulation of the poor.²⁵ But, not all poor people are regulated and controlled through the police and criminal justice. The nineteenth century governmental arrangements distinguished the poor into two categories: unproductive vagrants and idles on the one hand, and the ‘genuinely’ poor on the other.²⁶ The ‘undeserving poor’ were the ‘dangerous classes’, who refused to work and comply with the bourgeois order. They committed crimes in the bourgeoning industrial city and constituted a daily problem to the bourgeois order. They were also ‘dangerous’ in their capacity to revolt against the capitalist classes and their authority. Crime and criminal classes were more than a menace to personal security; they constituted a dire threat to the social order. By rejecting the ‘virtues’ of the ‘orderly’ society, the ‘undeserving poor’ came to constitute a problem category, a ‘residuum’ in the industrialized society to be controlled. While the ‘undeserving poor’ were to be managed and disciplined through penal intervention, the police, the courts, the workhouses and so on, the genuinely poor would be the objects of philanthropist activities, and later of the welfare state. The studies of nineteenth century policing in England explicated the concern of police with poverty both through intervening with criminal threats and popular resistances.²⁷ Modern police became the central organ to control the unruly poor classes.²⁸ As Monnkonen suggests, the police institution dealt ‘with all the things that made the “dangerous class” dangerous – crime, disease, poverty, their raging animals and homelessness.’²⁹ In this respect, police organization can be depicted as an instrument of the dominant classes within the project of the reproduction of the social order. At the centre of their operations are the political resistances and everyday activities of the working classes that threaten capitalist order and discipline.³⁰

In turn, the Poor Laws of the nineteenth century, which offered relief, were operating exactly on this distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’. Relief was not given to those ‘able bodied’ but yet to the ‘savage, semi-criminal class of people who should be harried out of existence.’³¹ This group was composed of vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, and the unemployed, and their regulation was going to be provided not by Poor Relief but by criminalization through the Vagrancy acts. The obedience and discipline of these ‘unruly’ and ‘criminal’ groups were relegated to penal processes rather than welfare.³²

In fact, the ‘undeserving poor’ of the nineteenth century, who were associated with criminality, can be understood through the category of lumpenproletariat. Marx mentions the lumpenproletariat in his historical studies of class struggle. For example, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, he describes the lumpenproletariat as a class indefinable and unnameable, which belongs neither to the bourgeois nor to the working class:

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, moquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organgrinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la boheme.³³

Yet, in other places, Marx's perception of this ‘dangerous class’ is quite different. In Capital, for example, he defines the criminalized poor, or the lumpenproletariat, as a part of the reserve army of labour who were excluded from the productive processes, yet served as a part of the capitalist processes.

Peter Linebaugh also takes up a discussion of lumpenproletariat.³⁴ Using a little known text of Marx on the theft of wood in late eighteenth-century England, he argues that crime is not a way of differentiating between lumpenproletariat and industrial proletariat – or ‘undeserving’ and ‘deserving’ poor. Rather, crime is as an ex...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Conceptual/Theoretical Framework and the Literature on the Neoliberal Penal State
• 2. Neoliberal Ideologies of Crime in Urban Turkey
• 3. The Crisis and Reinvention of the Police
• 4. Giuliani in Izmir: Restructuring of Public Order Policing and Criminalizing the ‘Target Populations’
• 5. Policing a Kurdish Shantytown
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover