Sociology of Crime: ‘La delincuencia y su circunstancia: Sociología del crimen y la desviación’ by Fernando Gil Villa
On Part One of ‘La delincuencia y su circunstancia: Sociología del crimen y la desviación’ by Fernando Gil Villa
Introduction
I will explore the most salient concepts within the first part of Fernando Gil Villa’s book ‘La delincuencia y su circunstancia: Sociología del crimen y la desviación’ whilst offering an overview of my understanding of the key concepts of the sociology of crime, an appraisal of the contribution of particular theorists and groups of theorists whilst offering a commentary on my own positions on the key debates. I start with a look at the history of analyzing crime and its importance for political and academic theorizing whilst exploring the important role a more sociological approach has played and will continue to play in this field. I aim to explore the different explanations of crime whilst comparing the terms of their theoretical and political contexts, their central concerns, their substantive themes and their policy prescriptions. The first specific group of theorists I investigate is ‘The Chicago School’ with a particular focus on the concept of ‘Differential Association’ brought to us by Edwin Sutherland. After that I look at the concept of ‘Anomie’ that was introduced by Emile Durkheim but then developed and refined by Robert Merton, this then leads naturally to an investigation of ‘Delinquent Subculture Theories.’ I then look at three important concepts together, the first, ‘Labeling Theory,’ the second, ‘Deviance Amplification’ and, the third, ‘Stigmatization.’ The final paragraphs are each devoted to a different approach to analyzing crime, from a Marxist view, to both Left and Right Realist views, then the Feminist views and finally I look at the ‘Post-modern’ views with particular emphasis on the relationship between criminology and sociology.
Crime and Sociology
Crime has been for a long time and remains today a very important issue, not just because the media serve us up a constant stream of crime related stories but because, possibly for the same reason, it is an important issue for the public and is therefore at the centre of political debate. Crime is clearly a major realm of societal concern and at the same time an important issue for the government agencies that have to come up with policy recommendations to try to monitor and positively affect the amounts and types of offences committed. In the last three decades of the twentieth century many countries recorded a massive increase in the numbers of recorded crimes. In recent years there have also been many ‘self-report’ studies done that point to the fact that there are many more crimes committed than those recorded with some suggesting that for every crime the police record, there were around three to four times as many unrecorded offences, but these figures varied according to the type of offence . As mentioned above, trying to understand crime is not just a recent thing, stretching right back to the nineteenth century people have been preoccupied with crime and its causes. It was only in the 1950’s that a more sociological approach to understanding crime took over from more individualistic explanations suggesting it was related to inherent biological or psychological predispositions.
Sociological Methodologies and Context
Even though the non-sociological and sociological approaches to the understanding of crime have very different methodologies they are both committed to the modernist project. That is for me that they believe that it is possible to establish and verify knowledge about crime, criminals and criminality and that with the use of a rational approach can come up with strategies and methods of deterrence and punishment that can improve the situation. As Heiderson said: “It is, after all, inherent in the nature of the sociological approach, deriving as the discipline does from intellectual reactions to and theories of social change, that its practitioners believe that states can be altered, institutions restructured and communities redeveloped. ” This is not to say that all sociological approaches are the same, I will explore the theoretical and political contexts that these different theories were developed, their central concerns and the policy solutions recommended. I will also argue that some of the best ‘Postmodern’ theories on crime do not reject the project for modernity or enlightenment ideals in the way some people suggest.
The Chicago School and Differential Association
Starting in the 1920’s there was a group of sociologists later know as ‘The Chicago School’ that pioneered an approach to urban sociology research that re-wrote the rule book of the study of crime by studying the urban environment and combining sociological theory and ethnographic fieldwork in their city. It was in part due to this new empirical approach that the sociological methodology was accepted into the main stream but there was at the same time a reworking of older sociological concepts that also attracted a renewed interest in the Chicago School. One of the most important offerings was from Edwin Sutherland who used a version of ‘symbolic interactionism’ to come up with his concept of ‘Differential Association’ which put very crudely suggest that criminal behavior is learned from small scale interactions with other criminal people in everyday life. His theory focuses on the how but not the why people learn to become criminals, the theory goes that exposure to other criminals teaches people about the attitudes, motivations and rationalizations of their behavior that can then lead to its replication. Sutherland developed the idea of the ‘self’ as a social construction through interactions with other people but it is interesting now in the twenty-first century to think of his ideas in a wider way to think how the representations of criminals on television, music and in the movies could also do the same thing. Due to his focus on human interactions as the key to learning behaviors he does not explain how people who have not been exposed to this type of behavior could commit crime but by broadening the influences out to encompass the media, music, television and the movies as well as human interactions his theory leaves us with much to think about.
‘Anomie’ in Durkheim and Merton
The concept of ‘Anomie’ borrowed from the work of the founding father of sociology Emile Durkheim has been interestingly reworked by Robert Merton to offer us some insights into the sociology of crime. For Durkheim ‘Anomie’ is where normal cultural norms break down because of the rate of change in modern society, his studies used this concept to explain increased rates of suicide when, for example, an economic downturn leads people to not be able to achieve the goals they learned to pursue. Merton alters this concept slightly, to refer to a situation in which there is an apparent lack of fit between the culture's norms about what constitutes success in life (or goals) and the culture's norms about the appropriate ways to achieve those goals (or means). Merton's formulation offers an explanation for the distribution of deviant behavior across groups defined by class, race, ethnicity, and for high rates of deviant behavior in the U.S. compared with other societies. Merton sees the U.S. as an example of a society where there are polar opposites between the goals (the accumulation of vast sums of money) that are emphasized for everyone in the culture, but the culture is at best ambivalent in its means of achieving this success. One version of ‘The American Dream’ is working hard and working your way up to a position of great wealth, but there is also an admiration for anyone who has ‘made it’ regardless of how exploitative (at best) or outright criminal (at worst) their behavior was to achieve this. This is the disparity between goals and means that he suggests is a reason for the high levels of crime in the United States.
Delinquent Subculture Theories
Building on some of Merton’s ideas there later came what became known as ‘Delinquent Subculture Theories’ that attributed crime in a similar way to the lack of opportunities available to young working-class males. In the late 1950’s and 1960’s ‘Delinquent Subculture Theories’ were developed in the United States of America most notably by Albert Cohen, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. These theories rejected non-sociological explanations of crime but were still rooted in the positivist tradition that sees the social world as an objective entity that are subject to the same cause and effect relationships as the physical world so, for them, the question was to look at the social causes that caused this behavior. This further advance on Merton’s ideas established the idea more firmly that criminality was actually a product of society not just something inherent in people, which could lead to the problems of alienation for some social groups (working class males) and lead them to commit more crime. This dissatisfaction led to the situation where, as Cloward and Ohlin said: “Delinquents have withdrawn their support from established norms and have invested in officially forbidden norms of conduct with a claim to legitimacy in the light of their special situations. ” This perception that they can not succeed in the normal ways approved by society leads them to embrace delinquent subcultures to allow them to an ‘explicit and wholesale repudiation of middle-class standards and the adoption of their very antithesis. ’ It is interesting to consider that in keeping with liberal positivism the policy solutions were to try create more opportunities for these groups not something more radical like the Marxist criminologists I will come to later.
Labeling Theory, Deviance Amplification and Stigmatization
The late 1960’s brought ‘Labeling Theory’ that was another innovation in sociological theory about crime that was again influenced by the work on ‘symbolic interactionism’ by George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. It was a rejection of positivist sociology that treated social reality as something unproblamatically ‘out there’ and observable and instead treated it in an anti-positivist way accepting that this ‘social reality’ was not something straightforward or absolute but was instead ‘socially constructed’, open to interpretation and problematic. This development needs to be seen within the political context of the late 1960’s which was a time where normal social norms in the US were being challenged by, for example, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and a more general anti-Vietnam War movement. This moved the question from what causes criminal behavior to which behavior is classified and defined as criminal and why? The answers these Labeling Theorists came up with were that it was a relationship between those who have committed offences and a range of other people, from the victims to witnesses and then the police and finally the criminal justice system. These theories stress the importance of power in these relationships and as Becker said: “Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point if view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.’ The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behaviors that people so label. ” From this type of ‘Labeling Theory’ other interesting concepts within the field such as (the closely related) ‘Deviance Amplification’ and ‘Stigmatization’ were derived. Both these ideas are related to what happens to an individual who has been ‘labeled’ a criminal by the system. The first, ‘Deviance Amplification’ suggests that once someone has been labeled a criminal it damages their social identity and social status in normal society so can then lead to the amplification of more criminal behavior in the future because they feel that they don’t fit in anymore. The second, ‘Stigamatization’ is very similar, but this has led to the suggestion that in some cases it could be better to eliminate or reduce some of the ‘Stigmatization’ of the label of ‘criminal’ for lesser offences because this label once applied can then become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Marxist Criminology
The next group of theorists I will look at are Marxist criminologists who had concerns with the way labeling theory (amongst others) neglected, in their view, more structural causes of crime. This was developed from the 1970’s by theorists like Frank Pearce, William Chambliss and Richard Quinney who, as with all Marxist theory, place a heavy emphasis on the structural-conflict caused by the capitalist system itself. Again this has to be placed in its historical-political context where there was a renewed interest in Marxism that reflected the social, economic and political tensions of the time. They stressed the importance of political economy and class division when it came to explaining the causes of crime in the western capitalist world. For them it was an obvious by-product of a system that is built on fiscal inequality and an ideology that promotes self-interest over social harmony. As Quinney said: “Some of the behaviors that follow from alienated work are an attempt at setting things right again. Some behavior is a conscious rebellion against exploitation and inhumane conditions. And there is the responsive activity which, in a responsive activity which, in a reproduction of capitalism, is pursued for economic survival or gain. Activity of a criminal nature becomes a rational and likely possibility under the conditions of capitalism. All this is to say that crime – including both crime control and criminality – is a by-product of the political economy of capitalism. ” Whether these claims are true or not the only solution they offer is the total reorganization of society within their Marxist paradigm and with anything short of that they don’t really have a very much to offer us.
Left Realist Criminology
One reaction to the Marxist views above and also Right Realism (which will be looked at in more detail below) was what has become know as the Left Realists. They shared with the Marxists the view that structural inequality was an important factor in the causation of crime but they avoid their simple structural explanation and instead consider this as only part of their explanation of the causes of crime. They recognized that crime is more of a problem in working class areas and inner-cities but that intra-class crime is most prevalent and this is not just caused by structural inequality or official bias. The Left Realists factor in some of the delinquent subculture theories, stress the role of relative depravation and marginalization to these more structural factors and consider their approach to be a rejection of 'the moral panics of the mass media or the blatant denial of left idealism. ’ For the Left Realists a multi-level approach is necessary to tackle the problem, the macro solution is based around the quest for social justice, improved opportunities, housing and education in the poorer areas whilst developing better relations through more locally sensitive policing, a penal system that can be more flexible and other local measures to help the most problematic areas.
Right Realist Criminology
The Right Realist views of crime reject the utility of sociological theorizing about crime and stressed the need for policies based on an understanding of human nature to deter people from committing crimes. As with many of the other different approaches I have looked at these Right Realist views were a product of their times, namely, the 1980’s that were dominated in the US and UK by New Right/Neo-Liberal politics of Reaganism and Thatherism. This rejection of a more sociological approach is illustrated by Thatcher’s (in)famous quote “There is no such thing as society.” The Right Realists rejected the ideas that came before them that relative depravation or marginaization were the causes of crime and even if they were they felt that it was not their role as governments to get involved. They consider people to have a natural human nature that is strongly motivated by self interest and high crime rates were a product of weak policing and ineffective deterrence from the penal system. Their solutions were to create a situation where the risk involved in committing crime was greater, this meant longer terms in jail and more police convictions. This led to policies such as ‘Zero Tolerance’ where the police confronted all anti-social behavior with heavy law enforcement measures. If this led to the occasional mistake it was a necessary evil for the greater good of the community. They also promoted greater involvement in the community to create ‘active citizens’ and to work together as a community to protect your own property with neighborhood watch schemes and more domestic security measures.
Feminist Criminology
The penultimate group of theorists I will look at is ‘Feminist Criminologists’ who fit their theorizing on this subject into their greater theoretical-political stance against the marginalization of women in society as a whole. Although they recognize that female offending is less prevalent than that of men, they highlight that the mainstream of criminological theory has a male orientated bias and that much theorizing on the subject has almost ignored women. They also stress that women need to be considered from the prospective of them as victims of crime and sexist stereotyping whenever they are brought into the criminal justice system. For them any general theory of criminology needs to take into account the criminal behavior of both men and women and reject ‘an exclusive interest in male criminality in a comfortable world of academic machismo. ’ Much of this theorizing rejected the crude biologism that suggests women are by ‘nature’ passive and virtuous and that any exception should be considered biologically or psychologically abnormal. This gender expectation was highlighted by the suggestion that in a court situation being considered a ‘good mother’ could have considerable bearing on the outcome of the case and criminal women tend to be medicalised as abnormal. Again the work of Heidenson showed that women were very often the victims of domestic and sexual violence and that this problem had been heavily under-reported in official reports and national crime figures.
‘Postmodern’ Criminology
The final group of theorists I will look at are generally called ‘Postmodern’ but this name is controversial to many theorists who receive this label. These theorists challenge the general meta-narratives of most general sociological theorizing around crime and aim to challenge assumptions that many other theorists take for granted. They challenge the idea that as Garland called ‘the Lombrosian project …that tradition of enquiry, begun by Lombroso, which aims to differentiate the criminal individual from the non-criminal. ’ The criticism of this group of theorists suggests that questioning theory that is ‘wedded to the positivist paradigm of modernism ’ leads to a nihilistic rejection of the enlightenment project in its entirety. For me questioning assumptions is exactly what this project was meant to be about, as David Campbell, a critical international relations theorist inspired by Foucault’s work says: ‘decisions must be taken only to be simultaneously criticized… to enact the Enlightenment attitude by a persistent and relentless questioning. ’ The ‘Post-Modern’ critique of criminology is therefore recognizing that it is too diverse to be dealt with one great totalizing theory and that it needs to be broken down and deconstructed into more manageable areas of sociological interest. I will end with another quote from Smart: “The whole raison d’etre of criminology is that it addresses crime. It categorizes a vast range of activities and treats them as if they were all subject to the same laws… The thing that criminology cannot do is deconstruct crime. It cannot locate rape or child abuse in the domain of sexuality or theft in the domain of economic activity or drug use in the domain of health. To do so would be to abandon criminology to sociology: but more importantly it would involve abandoning the idea of a unified problem which requires a unified response- at least at a theoretical level…. The core enterprise of criminology is profoundly problematic. ”
Conclusion
I have attempted to illustrate an understanding of the key concepts within the first section of Fernando Gil Villa’s book ‘La delincuencia y su circunstancia: Sociología del crimen y la desviación’ whilst offering a commentary with some of my own opinions on the contemporary debates. I commence with an exploration of the history of crime analysis and its importance for political and academic theorizing whilst explaining the way a more sociological approach has become more important. I explored the different explanations of crime whilst trying to compare their theoretical and political contexts, some of their central concerns, their substantive themes and their specific policy recommendations. I started with ‘The Chicago School’ particularly focusing on Sutherland’s concept of ‘Differential Association.’ I progressed by looking at the concept of ‘Anomie’ that was taken from Durkheim’s work but developed and refined by Merton, this led me to an explanation of ‘Delinquent Subculture Theories.’ The final three concepts I looked into were Labeling Theory, Deviance Amplification and, Stigmatization. The final paragraphs are each devoted to a different approach to analyzing crime. Although it does offer some interesting insights I was critical of the one-dimensional Marxist view because of its lack of anything but structural analysis and recommendations that could be called idealistic. I was more appreciative of the multilayered approach Left Realist views, whilst disagreeing with the rejection of the sociological approach in Right Realism. The Feminist views offered some interesting insights and has a relationship with the final group the ‘Post-modernists’ because both approaches suggest ways that the more established theories unwittingly base their theories on assumptions that are problematic.
Sebastian O’Brien May 2008
Introduction
I will explore the most salient concepts within the first part of Fernando Gil Villa’s book ‘La delincuencia y su circunstancia: Sociología del crimen y la desviación’ whilst offering an overview of my understanding of the key concepts of the sociology of crime, an appraisal of the contribution of particular theorists and groups of theorists whilst offering a commentary on my own positions on the key debates. I start with a look at the history of analyzing crime and its importance for political and academic theorizing whilst exploring the important role a more sociological approach has played and will continue to play in this field. I aim to explore the different explanations of crime whilst comparing the terms of their theoretical and political contexts, their central concerns, their substantive themes and their policy prescriptions. The first specific group of theorists I investigate is ‘The Chicago School’ with a particular focus on the concept of ‘Differential Association’ brought to us by Edwin Sutherland. After that I look at the concept of ‘Anomie’ that was introduced by Emile Durkheim but then developed and refined by Robert Merton, this then leads naturally to an investigation of ‘Delinquent Subculture Theories.’ I then look at three important concepts together, the first, ‘Labeling Theory,’ the second, ‘Deviance Amplification’ and, the third, ‘Stigmatization.’ The final paragraphs are each devoted to a different approach to analyzing crime, from a Marxist view, to both Left and Right Realist views, then the Feminist views and finally I look at the ‘Post-modern’ views with particular emphasis on the relationship between criminology and sociology.
Crime and Sociology
Crime has been for a long time and remains today a very important issue, not just because the media serve us up a constant stream of crime related stories but because, possibly for the same reason, it is an important issue for the public and is therefore at the centre of political debate. Crime is clearly a major realm of societal concern and at the same time an important issue for the government agencies that have to come up with policy recommendations to try to monitor and positively affect the amounts and types of offences committed. In the last three decades of the twentieth century many countries recorded a massive increase in the numbers of recorded crimes. In recent years there have also been many ‘self-report’ studies done that point to the fact that there are many more crimes committed than those recorded with some suggesting that for every crime the police record, there were around three to four times as many unrecorded offences, but these figures varied according to the type of offence . As mentioned above, trying to understand crime is not just a recent thing, stretching right back to the nineteenth century people have been preoccupied with crime and its causes. It was only in the 1950’s that a more sociological approach to understanding crime took over from more individualistic explanations suggesting it was related to inherent biological or psychological predispositions.
Sociological Methodologies and Context
Even though the non-sociological and sociological approaches to the understanding of crime have very different methodologies they are both committed to the modernist project. That is for me that they believe that it is possible to establish and verify knowledge about crime, criminals and criminality and that with the use of a rational approach can come up with strategies and methods of deterrence and punishment that can improve the situation. As Heiderson said: “It is, after all, inherent in the nature of the sociological approach, deriving as the discipline does from intellectual reactions to and theories of social change, that its practitioners believe that states can be altered, institutions restructured and communities redeveloped. ” This is not to say that all sociological approaches are the same, I will explore the theoretical and political contexts that these different theories were developed, their central concerns and the policy solutions recommended. I will also argue that some of the best ‘Postmodern’ theories on crime do not reject the project for modernity or enlightenment ideals in the way some people suggest.
The Chicago School and Differential Association
Starting in the 1920’s there was a group of sociologists later know as ‘The Chicago School’ that pioneered an approach to urban sociology research that re-wrote the rule book of the study of crime by studying the urban environment and combining sociological theory and ethnographic fieldwork in their city. It was in part due to this new empirical approach that the sociological methodology was accepted into the main stream but there was at the same time a reworking of older sociological concepts that also attracted a renewed interest in the Chicago School. One of the most important offerings was from Edwin Sutherland who used a version of ‘symbolic interactionism’ to come up with his concept of ‘Differential Association’ which put very crudely suggest that criminal behavior is learned from small scale interactions with other criminal people in everyday life. His theory focuses on the how but not the why people learn to become criminals, the theory goes that exposure to other criminals teaches people about the attitudes, motivations and rationalizations of their behavior that can then lead to its replication. Sutherland developed the idea of the ‘self’ as a social construction through interactions with other people but it is interesting now in the twenty-first century to think of his ideas in a wider way to think how the representations of criminals on television, music and in the movies could also do the same thing. Due to his focus on human interactions as the key to learning behaviors he does not explain how people who have not been exposed to this type of behavior could commit crime but by broadening the influences out to encompass the media, music, television and the movies as well as human interactions his theory leaves us with much to think about.
‘Anomie’ in Durkheim and Merton
The concept of ‘Anomie’ borrowed from the work of the founding father of sociology Emile Durkheim has been interestingly reworked by Robert Merton to offer us some insights into the sociology of crime. For Durkheim ‘Anomie’ is where normal cultural norms break down because of the rate of change in modern society, his studies used this concept to explain increased rates of suicide when, for example, an economic downturn leads people to not be able to achieve the goals they learned to pursue. Merton alters this concept slightly, to refer to a situation in which there is an apparent lack of fit between the culture's norms about what constitutes success in life (or goals) and the culture's norms about the appropriate ways to achieve those goals (or means). Merton's formulation offers an explanation for the distribution of deviant behavior across groups defined by class, race, ethnicity, and for high rates of deviant behavior in the U.S. compared with other societies. Merton sees the U.S. as an example of a society where there are polar opposites between the goals (the accumulation of vast sums of money) that are emphasized for everyone in the culture, but the culture is at best ambivalent in its means of achieving this success. One version of ‘The American Dream’ is working hard and working your way up to a position of great wealth, but there is also an admiration for anyone who has ‘made it’ regardless of how exploitative (at best) or outright criminal (at worst) their behavior was to achieve this. This is the disparity between goals and means that he suggests is a reason for the high levels of crime in the United States.
Delinquent Subculture Theories
Building on some of Merton’s ideas there later came what became known as ‘Delinquent Subculture Theories’ that attributed crime in a similar way to the lack of opportunities available to young working-class males. In the late 1950’s and 1960’s ‘Delinquent Subculture Theories’ were developed in the United States of America most notably by Albert Cohen, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. These theories rejected non-sociological explanations of crime but were still rooted in the positivist tradition that sees the social world as an objective entity that are subject to the same cause and effect relationships as the physical world so, for them, the question was to look at the social causes that caused this behavior. This further advance on Merton’s ideas established the idea more firmly that criminality was actually a product of society not just something inherent in people, which could lead to the problems of alienation for some social groups (working class males) and lead them to commit more crime. This dissatisfaction led to the situation where, as Cloward and Ohlin said: “Delinquents have withdrawn their support from established norms and have invested in officially forbidden norms of conduct with a claim to legitimacy in the light of their special situations. ” This perception that they can not succeed in the normal ways approved by society leads them to embrace delinquent subcultures to allow them to an ‘explicit and wholesale repudiation of middle-class standards and the adoption of their very antithesis. ’ It is interesting to consider that in keeping with liberal positivism the policy solutions were to try create more opportunities for these groups not something more radical like the Marxist criminologists I will come to later.
Labeling Theory, Deviance Amplification and Stigmatization
The late 1960’s brought ‘Labeling Theory’ that was another innovation in sociological theory about crime that was again influenced by the work on ‘symbolic interactionism’ by George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. It was a rejection of positivist sociology that treated social reality as something unproblamatically ‘out there’ and observable and instead treated it in an anti-positivist way accepting that this ‘social reality’ was not something straightforward or absolute but was instead ‘socially constructed’, open to interpretation and problematic. This development needs to be seen within the political context of the late 1960’s which was a time where normal social norms in the US were being challenged by, for example, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and a more general anti-Vietnam War movement. This moved the question from what causes criminal behavior to which behavior is classified and defined as criminal and why? The answers these Labeling Theorists came up with were that it was a relationship between those who have committed offences and a range of other people, from the victims to witnesses and then the police and finally the criminal justice system. These theories stress the importance of power in these relationships and as Becker said: “Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point if view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.’ The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behaviors that people so label. ” From this type of ‘Labeling Theory’ other interesting concepts within the field such as (the closely related) ‘Deviance Amplification’ and ‘Stigmatization’ were derived. Both these ideas are related to what happens to an individual who has been ‘labeled’ a criminal by the system. The first, ‘Deviance Amplification’ suggests that once someone has been labeled a criminal it damages their social identity and social status in normal society so can then lead to the amplification of more criminal behavior in the future because they feel that they don’t fit in anymore. The second, ‘Stigamatization’ is very similar, but this has led to the suggestion that in some cases it could be better to eliminate or reduce some of the ‘Stigmatization’ of the label of ‘criminal’ for lesser offences because this label once applied can then become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Marxist Criminology
The next group of theorists I will look at are Marxist criminologists who had concerns with the way labeling theory (amongst others) neglected, in their view, more structural causes of crime. This was developed from the 1970’s by theorists like Frank Pearce, William Chambliss and Richard Quinney who, as with all Marxist theory, place a heavy emphasis on the structural-conflict caused by the capitalist system itself. Again this has to be placed in its historical-political context where there was a renewed interest in Marxism that reflected the social, economic and political tensions of the time. They stressed the importance of political economy and class division when it came to explaining the causes of crime in the western capitalist world. For them it was an obvious by-product of a system that is built on fiscal inequality and an ideology that promotes self-interest over social harmony. As Quinney said: “Some of the behaviors that follow from alienated work are an attempt at setting things right again. Some behavior is a conscious rebellion against exploitation and inhumane conditions. And there is the responsive activity which, in a responsive activity which, in a reproduction of capitalism, is pursued for economic survival or gain. Activity of a criminal nature becomes a rational and likely possibility under the conditions of capitalism. All this is to say that crime – including both crime control and criminality – is a by-product of the political economy of capitalism. ” Whether these claims are true or not the only solution they offer is the total reorganization of society within their Marxist paradigm and with anything short of that they don’t really have a very much to offer us.
Left Realist Criminology
One reaction to the Marxist views above and also Right Realism (which will be looked at in more detail below) was what has become know as the Left Realists. They shared with the Marxists the view that structural inequality was an important factor in the causation of crime but they avoid their simple structural explanation and instead consider this as only part of their explanation of the causes of crime. They recognized that crime is more of a problem in working class areas and inner-cities but that intra-class crime is most prevalent and this is not just caused by structural inequality or official bias. The Left Realists factor in some of the delinquent subculture theories, stress the role of relative depravation and marginalization to these more structural factors and consider their approach to be a rejection of 'the moral panics of the mass media or the blatant denial of left idealism. ’ For the Left Realists a multi-level approach is necessary to tackle the problem, the macro solution is based around the quest for social justice, improved opportunities, housing and education in the poorer areas whilst developing better relations through more locally sensitive policing, a penal system that can be more flexible and other local measures to help the most problematic areas.
Right Realist Criminology
The Right Realist views of crime reject the utility of sociological theorizing about crime and stressed the need for policies based on an understanding of human nature to deter people from committing crimes. As with many of the other different approaches I have looked at these Right Realist views were a product of their times, namely, the 1980’s that were dominated in the US and UK by New Right/Neo-Liberal politics of Reaganism and Thatherism. This rejection of a more sociological approach is illustrated by Thatcher’s (in)famous quote “There is no such thing as society.” The Right Realists rejected the ideas that came before them that relative depravation or marginaization were the causes of crime and even if they were they felt that it was not their role as governments to get involved. They consider people to have a natural human nature that is strongly motivated by self interest and high crime rates were a product of weak policing and ineffective deterrence from the penal system. Their solutions were to create a situation where the risk involved in committing crime was greater, this meant longer terms in jail and more police convictions. This led to policies such as ‘Zero Tolerance’ where the police confronted all anti-social behavior with heavy law enforcement measures. If this led to the occasional mistake it was a necessary evil for the greater good of the community. They also promoted greater involvement in the community to create ‘active citizens’ and to work together as a community to protect your own property with neighborhood watch schemes and more domestic security measures.
Feminist Criminology
The penultimate group of theorists I will look at is ‘Feminist Criminologists’ who fit their theorizing on this subject into their greater theoretical-political stance against the marginalization of women in society as a whole. Although they recognize that female offending is less prevalent than that of men, they highlight that the mainstream of criminological theory has a male orientated bias and that much theorizing on the subject has almost ignored women. They also stress that women need to be considered from the prospective of them as victims of crime and sexist stereotyping whenever they are brought into the criminal justice system. For them any general theory of criminology needs to take into account the criminal behavior of both men and women and reject ‘an exclusive interest in male criminality in a comfortable world of academic machismo. ’ Much of this theorizing rejected the crude biologism that suggests women are by ‘nature’ passive and virtuous and that any exception should be considered biologically or psychologically abnormal. This gender expectation was highlighted by the suggestion that in a court situation being considered a ‘good mother’ could have considerable bearing on the outcome of the case and criminal women tend to be medicalised as abnormal. Again the work of Heidenson showed that women were very often the victims of domestic and sexual violence and that this problem had been heavily under-reported in official reports and national crime figures.
‘Postmodern’ Criminology
The final group of theorists I will look at are generally called ‘Postmodern’ but this name is controversial to many theorists who receive this label. These theorists challenge the general meta-narratives of most general sociological theorizing around crime and aim to challenge assumptions that many other theorists take for granted. They challenge the idea that as Garland called ‘the Lombrosian project …that tradition of enquiry, begun by Lombroso, which aims to differentiate the criminal individual from the non-criminal. ’ The criticism of this group of theorists suggests that questioning theory that is ‘wedded to the positivist paradigm of modernism ’ leads to a nihilistic rejection of the enlightenment project in its entirety. For me questioning assumptions is exactly what this project was meant to be about, as David Campbell, a critical international relations theorist inspired by Foucault’s work says: ‘decisions must be taken only to be simultaneously criticized… to enact the Enlightenment attitude by a persistent and relentless questioning. ’ The ‘Post-Modern’ critique of criminology is therefore recognizing that it is too diverse to be dealt with one great totalizing theory and that it needs to be broken down and deconstructed into more manageable areas of sociological interest. I will end with another quote from Smart: “The whole raison d’etre of criminology is that it addresses crime. It categorizes a vast range of activities and treats them as if they were all subject to the same laws… The thing that criminology cannot do is deconstruct crime. It cannot locate rape or child abuse in the domain of sexuality or theft in the domain of economic activity or drug use in the domain of health. To do so would be to abandon criminology to sociology: but more importantly it would involve abandoning the idea of a unified problem which requires a unified response- at least at a theoretical level…. The core enterprise of criminology is profoundly problematic. ”
Conclusion
I have attempted to illustrate an understanding of the key concepts within the first section of Fernando Gil Villa’s book ‘La delincuencia y su circunstancia: Sociología del crimen y la desviación’ whilst offering a commentary with some of my own opinions on the contemporary debates. I commence with an exploration of the history of crime analysis and its importance for political and academic theorizing whilst explaining the way a more sociological approach has become more important. I explored the different explanations of crime whilst trying to compare their theoretical and political contexts, some of their central concerns, their substantive themes and their specific policy recommendations. I started with ‘The Chicago School’ particularly focusing on Sutherland’s concept of ‘Differential Association.’ I progressed by looking at the concept of ‘Anomie’ that was taken from Durkheim’s work but developed and refined by Merton, this led me to an explanation of ‘Delinquent Subculture Theories.’ The final three concepts I looked into were Labeling Theory, Deviance Amplification and, Stigmatization. The final paragraphs are each devoted to a different approach to analyzing crime. Although it does offer some interesting insights I was critical of the one-dimensional Marxist view because of its lack of anything but structural analysis and recommendations that could be called idealistic. I was more appreciative of the multilayered approach Left Realist views, whilst disagreeing with the rejection of the sociological approach in Right Realism. The Feminist views offered some interesting insights and has a relationship with the final group the ‘Post-modernists’ because both approaches suggest ways that the more established theories unwittingly base their theories on assumptions that are problematic.
Sebastian O’Brien May 2008
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