“SOCIAL CRIME PREVENTION STRATEGIES IN A MARKET SOCIETY”

Elliott Currie (1991)

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LINKS BETWEEN MARKET SOCIETY AND CRIME

FIRST MECHANISM

Market society promotes crime by increasing inequality and concentrated economic deprivation.  In the US the rise in violent crime has – not at all unexpectedly from the standpoint of several different lines of criminological theory – gone hand-in-hand with the sharpest rise of economic inequality in our postwar history, the attainment of the widest gap in incomes since we began gathering statistics after the Second World War.  In turn, that rising economic inequality in the US can be traced to several related trends.

                One is the deterioration of the labour market, both private and public.  Throughout the economy, vast numbers of ‘middle-jobs’, especially but not exclusively in blue-collar industry, have disappeared to be replaced by a significant rise in extremely well-rewarded jobs at the top, and a much larger increase in poor jobs, including unstable and part-time ones, at the bottom.  This downward shift has been especially destructive to the prospects of younger people.  According to data from the US Senate Budget Committee, more than four-fifths of the net new jobs available to young men under 35 during the 1980s paid poverty-level wages or below.  In the course of that decade there was a net loss of 1.6 million middle-level jobs available to men of that age group.

                This shift in the labour market is not, of course, a matter of the mysterious workings of fate or even of politically neutral changes in technology or demography.  It has been driven by deliberate social policy in several ways:

All of this has resulted in a growing tendency toward what has been called an ‘hourglass’ income distribution.  This tendency is compounded by two other important thrusts of the market-driven social policy of the past fifteen years: the erosion of income support benefits for low-income people and the unemployed, and a pattern of systematically regressive taxation […]

                The result of these compounded distributional policies has been to raise the top to unprecedented pinnacles of wealth and of personal consumption, while dropping the poor into a far deeper and more abysmal hole than they were in before, which was already the deepest among advanced industrial societies.

                Today we not only have about six million more poor Americans than we did in 1979, but they are much poorer both relative to the affluent and, often, in absolute terms.  As the job structure has narrowed and income support shrivelled, it is now far more difficult, as surveys have discovered, for them to get out, at least through legitimate means, a fact which is not lost on the urban poor, especially the young.

                We are now in real danger of creating something like an economic apartheid and it is by no means just a problem of the so-called, hard-core urban ‘underclass’, but of an increasingly threatened and declining bottom third of the American population.

                Nor are these general trends confined to the US.  […] The trend towards growing inequality is increasingly international in scope and international in its consequences.  And it is deeply implicated in the pattern of crime.

SECOND MECHANISM

Market society promotes crime by weakening the capacity of local communities for ‘informal’ support, mutual provision and socialization and supervision of the young.  This is closely related to the first link: it is, in part, a function of the declining economic security and rising deprivation in low income communities, as well as the rapid movement of capital and accordingly of opportunities for stable work which are hallmarks of the advance of market society.

                Under the sustained impact of market forces, communities suffer not only from the long-term loss of stable livelihoods, but also from the excessive geographic mobility that results from that loss.  The process is by no means confined to the US; it is central to the experience of many countries and especially many in the developing world and those on the periphery of European prosperity.  It is compounded, in the US, by the crisis in housing for low-income people as market forces drive up the cost of shelter at the same time that they drive down wages.  The loss of stability of shelter, in turn, helps destroy the basis of local social cohesion.

                Communities suffering these compounded stresses begin to exhibit the phenomenon some researchers call ‘drain’: as the ability of families to support themselves and care for their children drops below a certain critical point, they can no longer sustain those informal networks of social support and help that can otherwise be a buffer against the impact of the economic grinding of the market.  If you’re having tough times you can’t lean on your neighbours or your cousins, even if they still live in the same community, because they’re having tough times too; and there are therefore decreasing resources, both emotional and material, to offer to anyone else.

THIRD MECHANISM

Market society promotes crime by stressing and fragmenting the family.  Again, this is deeply enmeshed with the first and second mechanisms.  The growing economic deprivation and community fragmentation characteristic of market society put enormous pressures on family life, and it is partly through these pressures that the growth of market society generates crime. 

These connections are many and complex: let me just mention two of them for now, again using the American experience as an example. 

First, the long term economic marginalization of entire communities which characterizes market society tends to inhibit the formation of stable families in the first place – as the sociologist William J. Wilson has powerfully argued for the US case – by diminishing the ‘pool’ of marriageable men who are seen as capable of achieving a legitimate livelihood that can support a family.  The result is to encourage single parenthood and its associated poverty.

But unemployment itself is only one way in which the deterioration of the labour market has affected families.  The flip side is overwork in inadequate jobs.  Because so much of the employment recently created pays poverty level wages, great numbers of families, especially young families, can only stay afloat by drastically increasing their hours of work, often taking on two or three jobs.  This is an increasingly common phenomenon in low income communities in the US and one I have encountered over and over again in working with delinquent kids.  […] 

The socializing and nurturing capacities of many families have been seriously compromised and children in America are too often thrown back on their own resources and own peer groups for guidance, support and supervision.  […] 

FOURTH MECHANISM 

Market society promotes crime by withdrawing public provision of basic services for those it has already stripped of livelihoods, economic security and ‘informal‘ communal support.  […]

Beyond public income support there have been substantial cuts in those public services which could prevent or repair some of the damages inflicted by the compound impacts of economic deprivation, family stress and community breakdown.  That process has accelerated enormously in the current fiscal crisis of the 1990s, leading to huge cuts in the kind of preventative health and mental health care that might help intervene with some of the children most ‘at risk’ of delinquency and drug abuse; a tragic shortfall of effective intervention for families at high risk of child abuse; and a continuing inability to develop nurturing and accessible childcare for low income families whipsawed by low wages and overwork. 

All these impacts also must be understood in the light of the fifth link between market society and crime. 

FIFTH MECHANISM

Market society promotes crime by magnifying a culture of Darwinian competition for status and dwindling resources and by urging a level of consumption that it cannot fulfil for everyone through legitimate channels.  […]

A full-blown market culture promotes crime in several ways: by holding out standards of economic status and consumption which increasing numbers of people cannot legitimately meet, and more subtly, by weakening other values more supportive of the intrinsic worth of human life and well-being and of the value of what we call ‘craft’, the value of creative work , of productive contribution, of a job well done.

One of the most chilling features of much violent street crime in America today, and also in some developing countries, is how directly it expresses the logic of immediate gratification in the pursuit of consumer goods, or of instant status and recognition.  Some of our delinquents will cheerfully acknowledge that they blew someone away for their running shoes or because they made the mistake of looking at them disrespectfully on the street.  People who study crime, perhaps especially from a ‘progressive’ perspective, sometimes shy away from looking hard at these less tangible ‘moral’ aspects.  In the US we are certainly witnessing a kind of demoralization that must be acknowledged and confronted if we wish to understand crime today.  […] The point is not simply to bemoan the ascendancy of those values among some of the urban young, but to recognize that they are, as Bonger said, the ‘result of powerful social forces’, a direct and unmediated reflection of the inner logic of market society, part of the total package that we must be prepared to accept if we accept that package at all.

There are other links as well between the growth of market society, market culture and crime.  A full analysis of those connections would need to consider, for example, the impact of crime of the specifically psychological distortions of market society, its tendency to produce personalities less and less capable of relating to others except as consumer items or as trophies in a quest for recognition among one’s peers.  And we need also to consider the long-term political impacts of market society that are related to crime, in particular its tendency to weaken and erode the alternative political means by which those who are victimized by destructive social and economic policies might express their frustration and their desperation in transformative rather than predatory ways.  And, finally, the ways of market society also magnify the opportunities for white-collar crime and may simultaneously minimize the seriousness of the governmental response to it.

It is not, then, simply by increasing one or another specific social ill that market policies stimulate crime: it’s when you put them together that the effects emerge in full force.  But that is precisely what market society does.  The growth of market society is a multi-faceted process which is at its core destructive of the economic, social and cultural requisites of social peace and personal security.

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