Left Realist Criminology: New Theoretical Perspective - Essay Example

Running Head: LEFT REALIST CRIMINOLOGY Left Realist Criminology: A New Theoretical Perspective of the of the institution] Left Realist Criminology: A New Theoretical Perspective Introduction A school of criminology which emerged initially in Britain in the early 1980s as a response both to the punitive and exclusionary policies of conservatism and to the utopianism of New Left criminologies. Distinctive Features Left realist criminology, as its name implies, is radical in its criminology and realistic in its appraisal of crime and its causes. It is radical in that crime is seen as an endemic product of the class and patriarchal nature of advanced industrial society. (Clarke, 1980, 136-47) It is not a cosmetic criminology of an establishment sort which views crime as a blemish which, with suitable treatment, can be removed from the body of society, which is, in itself, otherwise healthy and in little need of reconstruction. Rather it suggests that it is within the core institutions of society (its relationships of class and of gender) and its central values (such as competitive individualism and aggressive masculinity) that crime arises. Crime is not a product of abnormality but of the normal workings of the social order. Secondly, it is realistic in that it attempts to be faithful to the reality of crime. This involves several tasks: realistically appraising the problem of crime, deconstructing crime into its fundamental components (the square of crime), critically examining the nature of causality, being realistic about the possibilities of intervention and, above all, fully understanding the changing social terrain in which we now live. The particular political space in which left realism emerged was in the mid-1980s. The juxtaposition was with the emergence of conservative (neo-liberal') governments in many Western countries which pursued an overtly punishment-oriented approach to crime control. At that time a liberal/ social democratic opposition was on the defensive. The neoliberals actively pointed to the rise in the crime rate and entered vigorously into law and order campaigns on behalf of the silent majority', holding offenders responsible for their actions and advocating punishment as the solution. The New Left position, which had its origins in the libertarianism of the 1960s, tended to resemble a mirror image of the right. That is, it denied or downplayed the level of crime, portrayed the offender as victim of the system, and stressed a multiculturalism of diversity and struggle where radicalism entailed the defence of the community against the incursions of the state, particularly the police and the criminal justice system. What was necessary was a criminology which could navigate between these two currents: which took crime seriously but which was radical in its analysis and policy. (Muncie, 2003, 144-163) These theoretical developments, originating from the mid 1970s, however, took place against the political backdrop of a resurgence in popular law and order politics and authoritarianism. In the UK and the United States the rhetoric of a resurgent radical Right revived a neo-classical vision of criminality as voluntaristic a course of action willingly chosen by calculating individuals, lacking in self-control and with a potential for communal contamination and moral degeneracy. New realist' theorists of the Right disengaged from existing criminological agendas whether they be positivist or critical by claiming that crime emanates from rationally calculating individuals who are insufficiently deterred from the actions by a criminal justice system deemed to be chaotic and ineffective or lacking in just deserts'. Both remind us of the potency and endurance of classicist and neo-classicist formulations of the crime problem'. The key concern is with developing efficient means of control rather than with questions of causality. Against a backdrop of perennially growing official statistics of crime and the presumption of increases in a rational public fear, the extension of police powers, the erosion of civil liberties and the expansion of imprisonment to unprecedented levels have all been justified. The public/ political debate has come to be dominated by images of violent crime, lawlessness, disorder and declining morality. In the early twenty-first century it seems that authoritarianism, law and order policies have the political potency to undermine welfare and rehabilitation discourses. However, the tough on crime' discourse has also been tempered by an apparent failure to prevent escalating crime rates. Within the developing ethos of what works' in all public services, it appears to be acknowledged that all that can be realistically hoped for is to implement more pragmatic means of managing crime through situational opportunity preventative measures and developing ever more cost-effective and efficient methods of managing criminal justice. (Cressey 1978, 171-91) The New Right colonization of almost the whole terrain of law and order politics in the late 1970s forced sections of the Left to rethink their position and to move closer to the mainstream in a pragmatic attempt to counter some of its more reactionary policies. (Platt, 1984, 97-102) The self-styled left realists gradually is associated themselves from the new' and critical' criminologies in an effort to find a new criminology for new times. Left realism, initiated its programme through virulent attacks directed as much to the Left as to the Right. Labelling its former bed fellows as idealist, it argues that the Left has traditionally either romanticized or underestimated the nature and impact of crime and largely speaks to itself' through its lack of engagement with the day-to-day issues of crime control and social policy. With empirical support from a series of victim surveys, left realism is able to assert that the fear of crime is indeed growing and that, in particular, property and street crimes are real issues that need to be addressed, rather than dismissed as social constructions. In short it concurs with right realism that people's fear of crime is rational and a reflection of inner city social reality. However, it differs from the Right in its insistence that the causes of crime need to be once more established and theorized; and a social justice and welfare programme initiated to tackle social and economic inequalities, under the rubric of inclusive citizenship'. Clearly this marks a distinct break with the critical agenda of The New Criminology. It invokes many themes (such as crime causation) which are grounded in positivist criminology, with, for example, street crime being portrayed as caused by relative deprivation. In this respect it appears to reflect and indeed mirror New Right and media-driven definitions of what constitutes serious crime and consequently downplays corporate crime and crimes of the state. Analyses of the relationship between the public, criminal justice agencies, offenders and victims are largely restricted to street crime and fail to capture the harm caused, for example, by workplace injury, occupation-related diseases and environmental pollution. Left realism's dismissal of critical criminology idealist ignores the interventionist role that critical criminologists have played since the 1970s in developing a politics of support for marginalized groups such as black youth, prisoners, gypsies and women, as well as establishing independent inquiries into aspects of state authoritarianism and monitoring police practices. Equally, critical criminology has not ignored the necessity of developing new theoretical frameworks in which to further an understanding of processes of criminalization. It believes that the para-Marxist heritage need not be totally abandoned but can be refined and developed; to deliver not a sealed doctrine, but a new set of provisional hypotheses or frames of conceptual resources/ deposits. For example, it has become common to find a more complex set of analyses which move away from a restricted chain of criminological references state, law, crime, criminals to the examination of other arenas of social regulation. By recognizing and working within the Foucauldian concept of governance' it has become possible to study how networks of power and resistance are diffuse and governed more by their own internal logics and knowledge than by the definite intentions of particular classes or oppressive states. (Downes, 1982, 72-84) This direction in turn has opened up work on a variety of semi-autonomous realms, such as informal justice, local communities, privatized organizations and families in which notions of policing and control are present, but whose relation to the state is by no means direct and unambiguous. It is in these areas too that interest in the potential of often neglected processes of informal networks of order and control has been awakened, albeit sometimes from different theoretical starting points. In this context the issues of idealism vs realism becomes something of a red herring. It is surely just as real' to unearth the complexities of processes of criminalization, resistance and control, as it is to be bound to public perceptions and victim surveys. Whilst the mainstream of criminology increasingly appears to be simply involved in a technocratic what works' exercise to evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice procedures and practices, the critical paradigm continues to expose the discriminatory powers and outcomes and retains a space in which alternative visions of social justice can be created. Such visions remain important for they enable us to rethink social conditions in terms of them not simply being made bearable (as in left realism or social democratic reformism) but transformed into a vehicle for emancipation. A key failing of all criminologists up to the 1970s was to acknowledge the presence of absence' in the form of critical analysis of gender relations and women and crime. The development of feminist inroads into the male bastion of criminology initially took the form of a comprehensive critique of the discipline firstly for its neglect even to study women's involvement in crime and criminal justice and secondly for its distortion of women's experiences as essentially biologically driven. The Nature Of Left Realism The basic defect of pathology and of its romantic opposite is that both yield concepts that are untrue to the phenomenon and which thus fail to illuminate it. Pathology reckons without the patent tenability and durability of deviant enterprise, and without the subjective capacity of man to create novelty and manage diversity. Romance, as always, obscures the seamier and more mundane aspects of the world. It obscures the stress that may underlie resilience. (Matza, 1969: 44) The central tenet of left realism is to reflect the reality of crime, that is in its origins, its nature and its impact. This involves a rejection of tendencies to romanticize crime or to pathologize it, to analyse solely from the point of view of the administration of crime or the criminal actor, to underestimate crime or to exaggerate it. And our understanding of methodology, our interpretation of the statistics, our notions of aetiology follow from this. Most importantly, it is realism which informs our notion of practice: in answering what can be done about the problems of crime and social control. It is with this in mind that I have mapped out the fundamental principles of left realism. It is unrealistic to suggest that the problem of crime like mugging is merely the problem of mis-categorization and concomitant moral panics. If we choose to embrace this liberal position, we leave the political arena open to conservative campaigns for law and order for, however exaggerated and distorted the arguments conservatives may marshal, the reality of crime in the streets can be the reality of human suffering and personal disaster. (Young, 1975: 89) To be realistic about crime as a problem is not an easy task. We are caught between two currents, one which would grotesquely exaggerate the problems of crime, another covering a wide swathe of political opinion that may seriously underestimate the extent of the problem. (Platt, 1984, 97-102) Crime is a staple of news in the Western mass media and police action a major genre of television drama. We have detailed elsewhere the structured distortion of images of crime, victimization and policing which occur in the mass media (Cohen and Young, 1981). It is a commonplace of criminological research that most violence is between acquaintances and is intra-class and intra-racial. Yet the media abound with images of the dangerous stranger. On television we see folk monsters who are psychopathic killers or serial murderers yet offenders who even remotely at these caricatures are extremely rare. The police are portrayed as engaged in an extremely scientific investigative policy with high clear-up rates and exciting denouements although the criminologist knows that this is far from the humdrum nature of reality. (Lea, 1984, 145-157) Furthermore, it grossly conceals the true relationship between police and public in the process of detection, namely that there is an extremely high degree of dependence of the police on public reporting and witnessing of crime. The nature of crime, of victimization and of policing is thus systematically distorted in the mass media. And it is undoubtedly true that such a barrage of misinformation has its effect although perhaps scarcely in such a one-to-one way that is sometimes suggested. (Cressey 1978, 171-91) For example, a typical category of violence in Britain is a man battering his wife. But this is rarely represented in the mass media instead we have numerous examples of professional criminals engaged in violent crime a quantitatively minor problem when compared to domestic violence. So presumably the husband can watch criminal violence on television and not see himself there. His offence does not exist as a category of media censure. People watching depictions of burglary presumably get an impression of threats of violence, sophisticated adult criminals and scenes of desecrated homes. But this is of course not at all the normal burglary which is typically amateurish and carried out by an adolescent boy. When people come home to and their house broken into there is no one there and their fantasies about the dangerous intruder are left to run riot. (Clarke, 1980, 136-47) Sometimes the consequences of such fantastic images of criminals are tragic. For example, people buy large guard dogs to protect themselves. Yet the one most likely to commit violence is the man of the house against his wife, and there are many more relatives usually children killed and injured by dogs than by burglars! In the recent period there has been an alliance between liberals (often involved in the new administrative criminology) and left idealists which evokes the very mirror image of the mass media. The chance of being criminally injured, however slightly, the British Crime Survey tells us, is once in a hundred years (Hough and Mayhew, 1983) and such a Home face view is readily echoed by left idealists who inform us that crime is, by and large, a minor problem and indeed the fear of crime is more of a problem than crime itself. Thus, they would argue, undue fear of crime provides popular support for conservative law and order campaigns and allows the build-up of further police powers whose repressive aim is political dissent rather than crime. For radicals to enter into the discourse of law and order is further to legitimize it. Furthermore, such a stance maintains that fear of crime has not only ideological consequences, it has material effects on the community itself. For to give credence to the fear of crime is to divide the community to encourage racism, fester splits between the respectable' and non-respectable' working class and between youths and adults. More subtly, by emptying the streets particularly at night, it actually breaks down the system of informal controls which usually discourage crime. Realism must navigate between these two poles; it must neither succumb to hysteria nor relapse into a critical denial of the severity of crime as a problem. It must be aversely sceptical of official statistics and control institutions without taking the posture of a blanket rejection of all agues or, indeed, the very possibility of reform. Realism necessitates an accurate victimology. It must counterpoise this against those liberal and idealist criminologies, on the one side, which play down victimization or even bluntly state that the real' victim is the offender and, on the other, those conservatives who celebrate moral panic and see violence and robbery as ubiquitous on our streets. To do this involves mapping out who is at risk and what precise effect crime has on their lives. This moves beyond the invocation of the global risk rates of the average citizen. All too often this serves to conceal the actual severity of crime amongst significant sections of the population whilst providing a fake statistical backdrop for the discussion of irrational' fears. A radical victimology notes two key elements of criminal victimization. First, that crime is focused both geographically and socially on the most vulnerable sections of the community. Secondly, that the impact of victimization is a product of risk rate and vulnerability. Average risk rates across a city ignore such a focusing and imply that equal crimes impact equally. As it is, the most vulnerable are not only more affected by crime, they also have the highest risk rates. Realism must also trace accurately the relationship between victim and offender. Crime is not an activity of latter day Robin Hoods the vast majority of working class crime is directed within the working class. It is intra-class not inter-class in its nature. Similarly, despite the mass media predilection for focusing on inter-racial crime it is overwhelmingly intra-racial. Crimes of violence, for example, are by and large one poor person hitting another poor person and in almost half of these instances it is a man hitting his wife or lover. This is not to deny the impact of crimes of the powerful or indeed of the social problems created by capitalism which are perfectly legal. Rather, left realism notes that the working class is a victim of crime from all directions. It notes that the more vulnerable a person is economically and socially the more likely it is that both working-class and white-collar crime will occur against them; that one sort of crime tends to compound another, as does one social problem another. Furthermore, it notes that crime is a potent symbol of the antisocial nature of capitalism and is the most immediate way in which people experience other problems, such as unemployment or competitive individualism. Realism starts from problems as people experience them. It takes seriously the complaints of women [with regard to] the dangers of being in public places at night, it takes note of the fears of the elderly with regard to burglary, it acknowledges the widespread occurrence of domestic violence and racist attacks. It does not ignore the fears of the vulnerable nor recontextualize them out of existence by putting them into a perspective which abounds with abstractions such as the average citizen' bereft of class or gender. It is only too aware of the systematic concealment and ignorance of crimes against the least powerful. Yet it does not take these fears at face value it pinpoints their rational kernel but it is also aware of the forces towards irrationality. Realism is not empiricism. Crime and deviance are prime sites of moral anxiety and tension in a society which is fraught with real inequalities and injustices. Criminals can quite easily become folk devils onto which are projected such feelings of unfairness. But there is a rational core to the fear of crime just as there is a rational core to the anxieties which distort it. Realism argues with popular consciousness in its attempts to separate out reality from fantasy. But it does not deny that crime is a problem. Indeed, if there were no rational core the media would have no power of leverage to the public consciousness. Crime becomes a metaphor but it is a metaphor rooted in reality. When one examines anxiety about crime, one often ands a great deal more rationality than is commonly accorded to the public. Thus, frequently a glaring discrepancy has been claimed between the high fear of crime of women and their low risk rates. Recent research, particularly by feminist victimologists, has shown that this is often a mere artefact of a low reporting of sexual attacks to interviewers a position reversed when sympathetic women are used in the survey team (Hall, 1985; Hanmer and Saunders, 1984; Russell, 1982). Similarly, it is often suggested that fear of crime is somehow a petit bourgeois or upper middle-class phenomenon despite the lower risk rates of the more wealthy. Yet the Merseyside Crime Survey, for example, showed a close correspondence between risk rate and the prioritization of crime as a problem, with the working class having far higher risk rates and estimation of the importance of crime as a problem. Indeed, they saw crime as the second problem after unemployment whereas in the middle-class suburbs only 13 percent of people rated crime as a major problem (Kinsey et al., 1986). Similarly, Richard Sparks and his colleagues found that working-class people and blacks rated property crimes more seriously than middle-class people and whites (Sparks et al.,1977). Those affected by crime and those most vulnerable are the most concerned about crime. Of course, there is a fantastic element in the conception of crime. The images of the identity of the criminal and his mode of operation are, as we have seen, highly distorted. And undoubtedly fear displacement occurs, where real anxieties about one type of crime are projected on another, as does tunnel vision, where only certain sorts of crime are feared, but the evidence for a substantial infrastructure of rationality is considerable. The emergence of a left realist position in crime has occurred in the last five years. This has involved criminologists in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia. In particular, the Crime and Justice Collective in California have devoted a large amount of space in their journal for a far-ranging discussion on the need for a left-wing programme on crime control (Crime and Social Justice, Summer, 1981). There have been also violent denunciations, as the English journalist Martin Kettle put it: For their pains the [realists] have been denounced with extraordinary ferocity from the left, sometimes in an almost paranoid manner. To take crime seriously, to take fear of crime seriously and, worst of all, to take police reform seriously, is seen by the fundamentalists as the ultimate betrayal and deviation. (Kettle, 1984: 367) This, apart, the basis of a widespread support for a realist position has already been made. What remains now is the task of creating a realist criminology. For although the left idealist denial of crime is increasingly being rejected, the tasks of radical criminology still remain. That is, to create an adequate explanation of crime, victimization and the reaction of the state. And this is all the more important given that the new administrative criminology has abdicated all such responsibility and indeed shares some convergence with left idealism. This paper has argued for the need for a systematic programme within radical criminology which should have theoretical, research and policy components. We must develop a realist theory which adequately encompasses the scope of the criminal act. That is, it must deal with both macroand micro-levels, with the causes of criminal action and social reaction, and with the triangular inter-relationship between offender, victim and the state. It must learn from past theory, take up again the debates between the three strands of criminological theory and attempt to bring them together within a radical rubric. It must stand for theory in a time when criminology has all but abandoned theory. (Lea, 1984, 145-157)It must rescue the action of causality whilst stressing both the special city of generalization and the existence of human choice and value in any equation of criminality. On a research level we must develop theoretically rounded empirical work against the current of atheoretical empiricism. The expansion of radical victimology in the area of victimization surveys is paramount but concern should also be made with regard to developments in qualitative research and ethnography (West, 1984). The development of sophisticated statistical analysis (Box and Hale, 1986; Greenberg, 1984; Melossi, 1985) should not be anathema to the radical criminologist nor should quantitative and qualitative work be seen as alternatives from which the radical must obviously choose. Both methods, as long as they are based in theory, complement and enrich each other. In terms of practical policy we must combat impossibilism: whether it is the impossibility of reform, the ineluctable nature of a rising crime rate or the inevitable failure of rehabilitation. It is time for us to compete in policy terms, to get out of the ghetto of impossibilism. Orthodox criminology with its inability to question the political and its abandonment of aetiology is hopelessly unable to generate workable policies. All commentators are united about the inevitability of a rising crime rate. (Downes, 1982, 72-84) Left idealists think it cannot be halted because without a profound social transformation nothing can be done; the new administrative criminologists have given up the ghost of doing anything but the most superaficial containment job. Let us state quite categorically that the major task of radical criminology is to seek a solution to the problem of crime and that of a socialist policy is substantially to reduce the crime rate. And the same is true of rehabilitation. Left idealists think that it is at best a contrick, indeed argue that unapologetic punishment would at least be less mystifying to the offender. The new administrative criminologists seek to construct a system of punishment and surveillance which discards rehabilitation and replaces it with a social behaviourism worthy of the management of white rats in laboratory cages. They both deny the moral nature of crime, that choice is always made in varying determining circumstances and that the denial of responsibility fundamentally misunderstands the reality of the criminal act. (Muncie, 2003, 144-163) As socialists it is important to stress that most working class crime is intra-class, that mugging, wife battering, burglary and child abuse are actions which cannot be morally absolved in the flux of determinacy. The offender should be ashamed, he/ she should feel morally responsible within the limits of circumstance and rehabilitation is truly impossible without this moral dimension. Crime is of importance politically because unchecked it divides the working class community and is materially and morally the basis of disorganization: the loss of political control. It is also a potential realistic issue, amongst others, for recreating community. Bertram Gross, in a perceptive paper originally published in the American magazine The Nation, wrote: on crime, more than on most matters, the left seems bereft of ideas' (Gross, 1982: 51). He is completely correct, of course, in terms of there being a lack of any developed strategy amongst socialists for dealing with crime. I have tried to show, however, that it was the prevalence though often implicit and frequently ill-thought of left idealist ideas which, in fact, directly resulted in the neglect of crime. There is now a growing consensus amongst radical criminologists that crime really is a problem for the working class, women, ethnic minorities: for all the most vulnerable members of capitalist societies, and that something must be done about it. But to recognize the reality of crime as a problem is only the first stage of the business. A fully blown theory of crime must relate to the contradictory reality of the phenomenon as must any strategy for combating it. And it must analyse how working class attitudes to crime are not merely the result of false ideas derived from the mass media and such like but have a rational basis in one moment of a contradictory and wrongly contextualized reality. In a recent diatribe against radical criminology Carl Klockars remarked: Imagination is one thing, criminology another' (Klockars, 1980: 93). It is true that recent criminology has been characterized by a chronic lack of imagination although I scarcely think that this was what Klockars lamented by his disparaging remark. Many of us were attracted to the discipline because of its theoretical verve, because of the centrality of the study of disorder to understanding society, because of the flair of its practitioners and the tremendous human interest of the subject. Indeed many of the major debates in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s focused quite naturally around deviance and social control. And this is as it should be as it has been throughout history both in social science and in literature both in mass media and the arts. What is needed now is an intellectual and political imagination which can comprehend the way in which we learn about order through the investigation of disorder. The paradox of the textbook in orthodox criminology is that it takes that which is of great human interest and transmits it into the dullest of facts'. I challenge anyone to read one of the conventional journals from cover to cover without having a desperate wish to fall asleep. Research grants come and research grants go and people are gainfully employed but crime remains, indeed it grows and nothing they do seems able to do anything about it. But is it so surprising that such a grotesquely eviscerated discipline should be so ineffective For the one dimensional discourse that constitutes orthodox criminology does not even know its own name. (Lea, 1984, 145-157) It is often unaware of the sociological and philosophical assumptions behind it. James Q. Wilson, for example, has become one of the most influential and significant of the new administrative criminologists. Yet his work and its proposals have scarcely been examined outside of the most perfunctory empiricist discussions. The discipline is redolent with a scientism which does not realize that its relationship with its object of study is more metaphysical than realistic, an apolitical recital of facts, more facts and even more facts [and] then does not want to acknowledge that it is profoundly political, a paradigm that sees its salvation in the latest statistical innovation rather than in any ability to engage with the actual reality of the world. It is ironic that it is precisely in orthodox criminology, where practitioners and researchers are extremely politically constrained, that they write as if crime and criminology were little to do with politics. Radical criminology, by stressing the political nature of crime and social censure, and the philosophical and social underpinnings of the various criminologies is able immediately to take such problems aboard. The key virtue of realist criminology is the central weakness of its administrative opponent. We are privileged to work in one of the most central, exciting and enigmatic fields of study. It is the very staple of the mass media, a major focus of much day to day public gossip, speculation and debate. And this is as it should be. But during the past decade the subject has been eviscerated, talk of theory, causality and justice has all but disappeared and what is central to human concern has been relegated to the margins. It is time for us to go back to the drawing boards, time to regain our acquaintanceship with theory, to dispel amnesia about the past and adequately comprehend the present. This is the central task of left realist criminology: we will need more than a modicum of imagination and scientific ability to achieve it. REFERENCES Box, S. and Hale, C. (1986) Unemployment, crime and imprisonment, and the enduring problem of prison overcrowding', in R. Matthews and J. Young (eds), Confronting Crime. London: Sage. Clarke, R. 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