Theoretical Criminology from Modernity to Post-Modernism

Wayne Morrison

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135427016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book incorporates many of the exciting debates in the social sciences and philosophy of knowledge concerning the issues of modernity and post-modernism. It sets out a new project for criminology, a criminology of modernity, and offers a sustained critique of theorizing without a concern for social totalities.

This book is designed to place criminological theory at the cutting edge of contemporary debates. Wayne Morrison reviews the history and present state of criminology and identifies a range of social problems and large scale social processes which must be addressed if the subject is to attain intellectual commitment. This book marks a new development in criminological texts and will serve a valuable function not only for students and academics but for all those interested in the project of understanding crime in contemporary conditions.

CHAPTER ONE

NARRATING THE MOOD OF THE TIMES: CONFUSION, SELF-DOUBT, AND AMBIVALENCE?

‘So hard to focus the ball of the human eye

On our terrible Mother, that stone Medusa

Sitting on her hill of skulls – suicides, abortions,

Gang-splashes, bloodstained mattresses, a ton of empty pill bottles,

And whatever else the wind may blow in the doorway,

including, one may hope, the tired dove

Of the human spirit, raped again and again in the skyway

By the mechanical hawk. So hard for us to praise

The century of Kali – since a poem has to celebrate

Its moment of origin. As yet I am only able

To smile a little, and say, ‘Not yet, not yet, Mother!

You must wait till I have bought the right kind of sawblade

‘To turn the top of my skull into a drinking cup, –

Then begin! Things have to be done in the right order.’

(James K Baxter, extract from Letter to Peter Olds, 1980: 578)

Finding places, finding time, finding beginnings …

This book should start in a sensible fashion; but where? In what sort of mood should it commence? What is the time and where is the place that we begin from?

We could begin in a mood of contentment, perhaps even joy. Things, on the whole, appear fine for those of us who live in the west. In fact we have never enjoyed so many goods and opportunities. There are some problems with the world … but domestically progress seems stable if only wages for labour can be cut to ensure a competitive product, etc. John Kenneth Galbraith has recently analysed the mood of the influential groups in the US and Europe in terms of a Culture of Contentment (1992), warning that such a culture is short-sighted, and is detrimental to long term social stability and health. In particular he argues that the economically fortunate and those aspiring-to-be have a strong electoral position (since those who are not gaining from the system tend not to vote), and control large portions of the media; they oppose public expenditure except where they personally stand to gain; they attack attempts to regulate corporate raiders, property speculators or junk bond dealers, yet if disaster strikes, as when a bank fails, they demand immediate action. The contented seem to believe that others in society only fail for lack of effort, or for deficiencies of their constitution such as low IQ, and thus argue that payments for welfare and public infrastructure should be reduced in real terms. This contentment places future social harmony horribly at risk. It involves a collective refusal to look seriously at the problems of the discontented.

Or, we could begin in melancholy. This appears to be the mood of many intellectuals, particularly those who speak of the coming of a post-modern society. It is a hard mood to describe. Elsewhere I have tried to locate the current mood of criminology within such a post-modern and melancholia frame (Morrison, 1994). The feeling is best summed up by a conception that something has been lost from human endeavour, that the great social projects – liberalism, socialism, communism, radical democracy, nationalism in the third world – have lost their energy as the hopes held out for them in earlier times have been compromised by reality.

Or, we could begin with depression. Things are bad, very bad world wide with social chaos threatening and bad for a lot of people in the west. There are record numbers under psychiatric counselling, drug abuse aids in the wrecking of many people’s lives, unemployment climbs and climbs (kept in check only by various changes in the way statistics are compiled); the only growth industry appears to be in prison building and private security.

And our recent history? Two world wars, a third which would have been totally destructive prevented by weapons of such power that using them would have been MAD (mutual assured destruction). Instead we have fought numerous wars by proxy … and we remember the holocaust.

There are so many books, and articles, and TV shows, and films, we are threatened with drowning in this sea of communication. Images, messages, and interconnections … Naomi Campbell’s image everywhere, and where she isn’t there are books which remind us that the beauty of the architecture we are surrounded by in Bristol and London was built in significant part on the basis of the slave trade in Africans … books which tell us that the contentment of the west is built upon the exploitation of the third world … articles which tell us that while we may be afraid of street crime, we are really being ripped off by the vast world of unreported and unpunished corporate and white collar crime … The impossibility of escaping from images … TV… where does the real world begin and spectacle end? … what’s real and what is imaginary?

What does it all add up to? We need criteria … big criteria … big enough to differentiate between kinds of information, between kinds of knowledge, between varying perceptions … Big enough to escape an inhuman emotivism. Big enough to tell us what are real crimes and what are not, who are the criminals and who are not.

Journeys, snippets … modernisations

This text takes up the theme of a journey … Where are we? Over 200 years ago with all the flush of 18th century optimism Saint-Simon declared:

‘The Golden Age of the human race is not behind us but before us; it lies in the perfection of the social order. Our ancestors never saw it; our children will one day arrive there, it is for us to clear the way.’ (1952: 68)

We are those children – are we at the place foreseen? That is one question of this text … also the attempt to ask, what does it mean to think like this … what words should we use? One key word that will infuse this text will be modernity. What does it mean? By its nature the term is vague, Chapter two shall attempt to define it, but for now we can see it as denoting a grand construction project – the attempt to build the good society; post-modernity is the realisation that the construction has fallen apart.

Our part in this? Crime is read as the most obvious sign of this disintegration. Why study crime? Crime is both an example and a result of immediate and pressing concerns. The first motivation which drives criminology is the feeling that crime is a serious social problem and this reflects for some a feeling that our modern societies are ‘out of control’ in certain key respects. The existence of such a social problem is also problematic in an important second respect, in that it offends against certain cultural assumptions of modern western societies. Put another way, the cultural underpinning of the confidence of the modern west relies upon certain cultural assumptions, such as ‘progress’, prosperity and the power of social engineering; mushrooming official crime rates taunts these, showing their falseness, exposing the weakness of modernity.

In the US the Final report of the President’s Task Force on Victims of Crime in 1982 stated:

‘Something insidious has happened in America: crime has made victims of us all. Awareness of its danger affects the way we think, where we live, where we go, what we buy, how we raise our children, and the quality of our lives as we age. The spectre of violent crime and the knowledge that, without warning, any person can be attacked or crippled, robbed, or killed, lurks at the fringes of consciousness. Every citizen of this country is more impoverished, less free, more fearful, and less safe, because of the ever present threat of the criminal. Rather than alter a system that has proven itself incapable of dealing with crime, society has altered itself.’ (1982: vi)

The presence of so much desperation and social unrest complicates the notion that modernity would create ‘good’ or ‘grand’ societies of peaceful coexistence and economic plenty, in which the conditions for harmonious social co-existence would be achieved. But the present… How can we characterise the present? In the mid 1970s Bell was clear:

‘If the natural world is ruled by fate and chance, and the technical world by rationality and entropy, the social world can only be characterised as existing in fear and trembling.’

While the leading Australian criminologist, John Braithwaite, was ambivalent about the prospects for criminology:

‘[Contemporary] Criminologists are pessimists and cynics. There seem good reasons for this. Our science has largely failed to deliver criminal justice policies that will prevent crime. The grand 19th century utilitarian doctrines – deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation – are manifest failures. The return to classicism in criminology – the just deserts movement – has been worse than a failure. It has been a disastrous step backwards.’ (1992: 1)

Should we be in a good mood or bad, has modern society progressed? It’s getting hard to tell. Bauman (1991) has defined post-modernity as modernity taking a long look at itself and being confused at what it sees. What has it all amounted to? What has this task of becoming modern been all about? Thus we face a crisis of confidence … a lack of direction … a demand for directions … a crisis of law and order.

Although crisis may have always been a term used by those deeply embedded in the complex flows of social ordering of their contemporary society, the driving force for the post-modern condition seems a sense of bewilderment and ambivalence. It has become difficult even to define the nature of the problem.

The problem of the modern world

The German social theorist Friedrich Nietzsche best expressed the problem of the modern world as our growing perception of the death of God. God’s death left a huge void. As Morse Peckham put it: ‘in Medieval European thought, the epistemological authority was the word of God as revealed through the teachings of the Roman Church’ (1962: 8). Writing towards the end of the 19th century Nietzsche was perplexed. Surely the whole scheme of rational and critical intellectual enquiries which Europe had thrown up in the 17th and 18th centuries had removed any rational basis for belief in God? The foundations of modern thought needed to be thought anew. But while this period had seen important thinkers – Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Comte, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, to name a few – Europe appeared not to have succeeded in the radical revaluation of values, the wholesale redevelopment of its institutions, beliefs and aspirations which Nietzsche believed were necessary to avoid a forthcoming social disaster.

Without such a revaluation Nietzsche feared that nihilism or meaninglessness would overtake the world. For without God how could there be ultimate answers to the fundamental questions of existence? If we really face up to the fact that God was dead what will become of man? Indeed … what is man? Where did he come from? What gives his existence meaning? What will make him happy? What should structure his relationships with his fellow humans? What is the aim of social life? What is the point to his desires? What gives his life purpose? What ensures frustration? What is the basis of concepts such as guilt, tolerance, good and evil? What is the phenomological reality of his behaviour? What, for example, is a crime? What or who is a criminal? Is the criminal to be loved as a strong man or feared? Is he a social rebel actually to be encouraged, or despised as a socially retarded individual?

We are 100 years on from Nietzsche’s bitter discussion of God’s death. In the 1990s, for most westerners, God is a memory from more certain times or something to tell the children to believe in to aid socialisation. Occasionally the odd Conservative politician will argue that the fact that we no longer fear suffering in Hell is the cause of the rise in crime, but, by and large, God has been replaced by science, hedonism and the ‘care of the self’. Modern westerners live, not so that someday they can gain entrance into heaven and exist in God’s grace, but to make a success of their own lives – so that they achieve things for themselves. Science, technology, research institutes, the welfare state, human rights, the United Nations, McDonalds, the world cup, mortgages, holidays in the sun, exercise regimes and cosmetic surgery, all are more important than religion.

Whom do we obey in our daily lives? We do not obey God’s will, God’s commands – and while we may obey or follow the commands of others, parents, friends, bosses, throughout modern life it is the law that we are principally called upon to obey; the law and the state. It is the state that organises, the state that we appeal to for change … for legislation … And of the masses of legal regulation which constitutes our modern socio-political framework, it is the criminal law which appears to cut closest to our interests in personal security and the protection of our property. Those who do not obey the criminal law are criminals. And we have a science, criminology, which investigates why crimes are committed and what to do with those individuals who commit crimes. It is tempting to claim that belief in God has been replaced by faith in reason and science. Criminology claims the status of the rational and scientific attempt to study the phenomena of crime. It was born with the death of God. It was meant to aid in the journey, the construction of a secure modernity, its presence offered confidence and its discourse solace:

‘The surest sign that a society has entered into the secure possession of a new concept is that a new vocabulary will be developed, in terms of which the new concept can then be publicly articulated and discussed.’ (Skinner, Quentin, 1978: vol 1 xii-xiii)

Thus a different definition can be given: criminology is the attempt to produce a coherent and productive vocabulary to delineate and comprehend certain aspects of the social world loosely grouped around the concept of crime.

What is criminology currently? The simple answer is to look at the word: crim-o-logos – the logos, or rational speech, concerning crime. What makes human society possible is language, discourse. Criminology is the discourse concerning crime and the methods by which society deals with crime. Given such a topic it is not surprising that criminology is a blanket label covering a large set of discourses and diversity of material; material which may at times verge on the political, the sociological and philosophical, the rhetorical and the technical. But can this material be read as having a central core, a coherent domain? Or is it totally unstable, a mass of perspectives which tease the reader of an article into thinking that the discourse encountered has sense but negates this as soon as various other articles are read? There is another tension between treating criminology as a special discipline in its own right with its own topic, that is the analysis of crime, and regarding criminology as a synthesis of social sciences (such as jurisprudence, sociology, anthropology, psychology) which themselves may be uncertain as to their own constitution. (After all what is sociology? does it contain politics and economics? Where does social geography fit?)

Reflexivity, and the principle of the recognisability of the world

Modern western societies are reflexive. They constantly ask themselves questions. People are paid, in government think-tanks, in universities, in the media, to ask questions and to reflect upon social processes. Their questions and the attempts to answer them, are recorded in language – but since language is a social cultural product it is a socially constructed grid of understanding. The various attempts to understand the modern world are part of the social process which constitute modernity. For a long time the search for knowledge presupposed that the world was easily recognisable to man’s intellectual tools, reason and observation. But recently we understand that the social sciences constantly move in what is termed an hermeneutical circle. The human sciences are human cultural enterprises attempting to understand human cultural enterprises – they cannot produce absolute certainty since that would require some place outside the circle from which to judge pure truth.

Because we are locked into society, because our journey of knowledge occurs within the journey of our societies, we cannot know things about society with absolute certainty – the ‘truths’ of the social sciences are interpretative. But we need concepts, we need to clarify and analyse our linguistic products. They define the objects we bump into, they lay out the meaning of the courses of action we undertake. As the contemporary Scottish social theorist Alasdair MacIntyre put it:

‘… the limits of action are the limits of description, the delineation of a society’s concepts is therefore the crucial step in the delineation of its life.’ (1962, 62–3)

It is no wonder then, that in the 200 or so years that some form of criminology has been in existence controversy has raged over the meaning of its basic concepts.

The subject matter of criminology is inherently contestable

It may appear strange to begin a book with an admission of confusion but criminology is a subject with a complicated history and a set of polemic arguments about its fundamental subject-matter. Trad...