“THE EXCLUSIVE SOCIETY: SOCIAL EXCLUSION, CRIME AND DIFFERENCE IN LATE MODERNITY”

Jock Young (1999)

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A major motif of social control in late modern society is actuarialism.  This involves, […] a transition where there is a concern less with justice than with harm minimization and where causes of crime and deviance are not seen as the vital clue to the solution to the problem of crime.  The actuarial stance is calculative of risk.  It is wary and probabilistic, it is not concerned with causes but with probabilities, not with justice but with harm minimization, it does not seek a world free of crime but one where the best practices of damage limitation have been put in place; not a utopia but a series of gated havens in a hostile world.  The actuarial stance reflects the fact that risk both to individuals and collectives has increased, crime has become a normalized part of everyday life, the offender is seemingly everywhere in the street and in high office, within the poor parts of town but also those institutions which were set up to rehabilitate and protect, within the public world of encounters with strangers but within the family itself in relationships between husband and wife and parent and child.  We are wary of scoutmasters, policemen, hitchhikers, babysitters, husbands, dates, stepfathers and stepmothers, people who care for the elderly – the ‘other’ is everywhere and not restricted to criminals and outsiders.  Its causes are increasingly unsure and this uncertainty is compounded by its seeming ubiquitousness.  Both individuals and institutions face the problems of sorting out the safe from the risky and doing so in ways which are no longer cast iron and certain but merely probabilistic.

                Rules themselves have become problematic in a pluralistic society where rules overlap to be sure but are never identical between one group and the other; they change over time and have changed, without doubt, within the lifetime of everyone.  So it is no longer a question of right and wrong, more what is the lifetime of everyone.  So it is no longer a question of right and wrong, more what is the likelihood of your rules being broken, and when the unit of risk becomes your chance of victimage, assessment of individual responsibility becomes less and less relevant.  If you are the manager of a shopping mall or a mother seeking to protect her family, whether the likely transgressor is mad or bad, following rules or being unable to engage in rule-following behaviour, is of little consequence.  Thus the line between free will and determinism becomes not only blurred but in a sense irrelevant.  You want above all to avoid trouble rather than to understand it.  You want to minimize risk rather than morally condemn behaviour.

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UMWELT AND THE MANAGEMENT OF RISK

[…] Anthony Giddens discusses the way in which human beings generate around themselves a feeling of bodily and psychic ease.  ‘If we mostly seem less fragile,’ he notes, ‘than we really are… it is because of long-term learning processes whereby potential threats are avoided or immobilized’ (1991, p.127).  He builds Goffman’s notion of an Umwelt: a core of accomplished normality with which individuals and groups surround themselves.  Taking inspiration from studies of animal behaviour, Goffman begins the section of Relations in Public designated ‘normal appearances’ with this remarkable imagery of the Umwelt:

Individuals, whether in human or animal form, exhibit two basic modes of activity.  They go about their business grazing, gazing, mothering, digesting, building, resting, playing, placidly attending to easily managed matters at hand.  Or, fully mobilized, a fury of intent, alarmed, they get ready to attack or to stalk or to flee.  Physiology itself is patterned to coincide with this duality.

                The individual mediates between these two tendencies with a very pretty capacity for dissociated vigilance.  Smells, sounds, sights, touches, pressures – in various combinations, depending on the species – provide a running reading of the situation, a constant monitoring of what surrounds.  But by a wonder of adaptation these readings can be done out of the furthest corner of whatever is serving for an eye, leaving the individual himself free to focus his main attention on the non-emergencies around him.  Matters that the actor has become accustomed to will receive a flick or a shadow of concern, one that decays as soon as he obtains a microsecond of confirmation that everything is in order;  should something really prove to be ‘up’, prior activity can be dropped and full orientation mobilized, followed by coping behaviour…. (1971, p.238)

The Umwelt has two dimensions: the area which one feels secure in and the area in which one is aware; the area of apprehension.  The lioness sleeps tranquilly on the veldt, her eye every now and then taking in the activities on the distance.  In human society it is a moving bubble which shrinks and expands wherever one is: whether, for example, one is at home or in the urban street.  The nature of the Umwelt varies by social category.  It is strongly gendered: Goffman noted that the Umwelt of women differed from men.  Clearly, recognizing predatory sexual signs as well as signals of possible violence from men both in public and in the home is an important party of the social repertoire of women.  Anyone who has conducted a criminal victimization survey knows that it is possible to identify and differentiate, ‘blind’, between women and men merely by looking at their avoidance behaviour patterns.  Researchers talk of the ‘curfew’ at night of urban women (see Painter et al., 1989).  The Umwelt is strongly racialized: ethnic groups are aware of areas of safety and danger and in racist discourse, minorities are represented as signals of fear and danger to the majority population.  It has strong dimensions of age: schoolchildren have a vivid sense of space and safety (see Anderson et al., 1994); whilst street gangs and home boys actively police their turf, providing both security for themselves and alarm for others.  Lastly, Umwelt is, of course, crucially constituted by class: the middle class by virtue of the cost of area, by the use of motor car, by private club and fancy restaurant seek to separate themselves from the undesirables, the ‘dangerous classes’, even when in transit through the busy city centres of Manhattan and London.

                The signs of danger need not be crime itself or the threat of it, but more subtle perceptions of possible risk and the escalation of danger.  Goffman was perhaps the first academic to note the problem of incivilities, way ahead of Wilson and Kelling’s famous ‘Broken Windows’ […]  Thus:

When an individual finds persons in his presence acting improperly or appearing out of place, he can read this as evidence that although the peculiarity itself may not be a threat to him, still, those who are peculiar in one regard may well be peculiar in other  ways, too, some of which may be threatening.  For the individual, then, impropriety on the part of others may function as an alarming sign.  Thus, the minor civilities of everyday life can function as an early warning system; conventional courtesies are seen as mere convention, but non-performance can cause alarm.  (1971, p.241)

He cites an example of sexual harassment which graphically indicates the continuum nature of crime.  This is from Meredith Tax’s article in Women’s Liberation: Notes from the Second Year:

A young woman is walking down a city street.  She is excruciatingly aware of her appearance and of the reaction to it (imagined or real) of every person she meets.  She walks through a group of construction workers who are eating lunch in a line along the pavement.  Her stomach tightens with terror and revulsion; her face becomes contorted into a grimace of self-control and fake unawareness; her walk and carriage become stiff and dehumanized.  No matter what they say to her it will be unbearable.  She knows that they will not physically assault her or hurt her.  They will use her body with their eyes.  They will evaluate her market price.  They will comment in her defects or compare them to those of other passers-by.  They will make her a participant in their fantasies without asking if she is wiling.  They will make her feel ridiculous, or grotesquely sexual, or hideously ugly.  Above all, they will make her feel like a thing.  (Tax, 1970, p.12)

Goffman is convinced that the condition of ‘uneventfulness’ is a moral right of a citizen (see 1971, p.240); such a level of trust is part of the nature of civilized life.  And he detects an overall deterioration in this quality of life:

The area of security, of the Umwelt, shrinks apace…: it shrinks because of actual risk, but also, as we saw in the last section, because sensitivity to risk rises while knowledge of others diminishes.  But what can one say of the area of apprehension?  Here the paradox of a drop in knowledge of immediates is associated with a globalization of knowledge of the outside world.  The area of security, of the Umwelt, thus decreases whilst at the same time the area of apprehension vastly increases.

                Lastly, there is another side of Umwelt, not touched upon by Goffman, but with obvious relevance and with parallels in animal behaviour.  The lioness gazing fleetingly across the veldt is mapping out not only an area of security and one of apprehension but also looking for indications of prey and the possibilities of predation.  In human terms the city is not only an area of security an insecurity but of opportunities of excitement, interest, gain and action.

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There is a body of thought which sees fear of crime and perceptions of likely risk as a phenomenon quite separate from the actual risk of crime itself.  Indeed ‘fear’ of crime is regarded sometimes as a problem autonomous from crime.  Fear and concern about crime then become metaphors for other types of urban unease (e.g. urban development), or a displacement of other fears (e.g. racism, psychological difficulties).  The ‘real’ or ‘true’ fears are separated from crime itself and this exercise is achieved by contrasting the ‘gap’ between the ‘real’ risk of crime and the evidence of ‘disproportionate’ fears.  Women and old people are the most frequently cited examples of evidence that such a proportionality exists.

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