“THE NEED FOR A RADICAL REALISM”

Jock Young (1986)

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[…]

If in 1960 one had been asked what steps society might take to prevent a sharp increase in the crime rate, one might well have answered that crime could best be curtailed by reducing poverty, increasing educational attainment, eliminating dilapidated housing, encouraging community organization, and providing troubled or delinquent youth with counseling services…

                Early in the decade of the 1960s, this country began the longest sustained period pf prosperity since World War II, much of it fuelled, as we later realized, by a semi-war economy.  A great array of programs aimed at the young, the poor, and the deprived were mounted.  Though these efforts were not made primarily out of a desire to reduce crime, they were wholly consistent with – indeed, in their aggregate money levels, wildly exceeded – the policy prescription that a thoughtful citizen worried about crime would have offered at the beginning of the decade.

                Crime soared.  It did not just increase a little; it rose at a faster rate and to higher levels than at any time since the 1930s and, in some categories, to higher levels than any experienced in this century.

                It all began in about 1963.  that was the year, to over-dramatize a bit, that a decade began to fall apart.  (Wilson, 1975: 3-4)  […]

THE CONVERGENCE BETWEEN LEFT IDEALISM AND ADMINISTRATIVE CRIMINOLOGY

I have noted that the anomaly which traditional positivist criminology confronted was what I have termed the aetiological crisis; that is, a rapidly rising crime rate despite the increase in all the circumstances which were supposed to decrease crime.  This was coupled by a crisis in rehabilitation – the palpable failure of the prison system despite decades of penal ‘reform’.  With the passing of the 1960s the new administrative criminology concluded that, given that affluence itself had led to crime, it was social control which was the only variable worth focusing upon.  On the other hand, left idealism forgot about the affluent period altogether and found the correlation between crime and the recession too obvious to merit a discussion of aetiology.  If administrative criminology side-stepped the aetiological crisis, left idealism conveniently forgot about it.  Both, from their own political perspective, saw social control as the major focus of the study, both were remarkably unsophisticated in their analysis of control within the wider society – and anyway were attempting the impossible, to explain the crime control whilst ignoring the crime itself – the other half of the equation.

                In a way, such a convergence suggests a stasis in criminological theory.  And, of course, this is precisely what has occurred over the past ten years.  But, as I have tried to indicate, theory is very much influenced by changes in empirical data and in social and political developments.  And it is in this direction, particularly in the phenomenal rise of criminal victimization studies, that we must look for the motor forces which begin to force criminology back to theory.

                The empirical anomalies arising from both radical and conventional victimology were a major spur to the formation of realist criminology.  Paradoxically, findings which nestled so easily with administrative criminology caused conceptual abrasions with left idealism.  Thus, as the crisis of aetiology waned, the problem of the victim became predominant.

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 analyze 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.  Crime is a staple of news in the Western mass media and police fiction 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 (see 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 fit 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.  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.  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 find their house broken into there is no-one there and their fantasies about their dangerous intruder are left to run riot.  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 Office 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 fiercely sceptical of official statistics and control institutions without taking the posture of a blanket rejection of all figures 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 finds 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 (see 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.  Indeed, they saw crime as the second problem after unemployment whereas in the middle-class suburbs only 13 per cent of people rated crime as a major problem (see 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.  […]

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