Crime, Community and Morality

Simon Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136237515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Political leaders and the popular press tell us that society is in the grip of a moral crisis. 'Where have our values gone?' our newspapers scream at us. 'Benefit scroungers', 'greedy bankers', 'intrusive journalists', 'have-a-go rioters', political scandals and criminals of all shapes and sizes are continually cited as evidence that we live in a modern-day Gomorrah. Criminologists have studied this in several ways, including: media representations of crime, mass incarceration, hooliganism and the exercise of power and control through communities.

What criminologists have not studied is the place of morality in shaping public debate about understanding crime and how this then shapes crime control strategies. Rather than dismiss statements about community breakdown, 'broken society' and irresponsibility as ideological, self-justificatory rhetoric, what happens when we take these claims seriously? What do they tell us about the causes of crime? How do they shape the crime control agenda? How else might we begin to understand and explain the relationship between crime and society?

Navigating between criminological concerns about control and governance and social theories about culture and identity, this book explores what is meant by crime, community and morality and puts this meaning to the test. Discussion of a new theory of rule-breaking, combined with an analysis of how our justice system is becoming maladapted, makes this essential reading for criminologists around the globe, as well as those general readers interested in the causes of crime.

1 Crime and the community

Community has for a long time been closely linked to discussions about crime and criminal justice, yet it has been viewed with a degree of suspicion by many criminologists in recent years who have warned us about the ambiguity of the concept (Hope and Shaw 1988, Lacey and Zedner 1995, Crawford 1997, Shapland 2008). The concept of community is not an easy one to define. It often conceals any one of a number of different ideological as well as descriptive meanings and is often used without an appreciation of these variations. This has never been truer than in the field of criminal justice.

There is a crucial and central ambiguity in the arguments of many of those who recommend further community involvement in the control of crime. It is left unclear (perhaps deliberately) whether community is being proposed as a means to an end, i.e. as a new resource for tackling the problem of crime, or whether the creation of better community feeling is itself the end which is being pursued.

(Nelken 1985: 239)

Nelken (1985) also goes on to suggest that the call for increasing community involvement conceals the political Right’s desire to utilise public support for law and order policies and the Left’s aspirations to empower communities as a forum for challenging existing institutions and hierarchies.

Concerns about the political and social meaning of community form a crucial component within this book and the aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the criminological research about crime and community. The purpose of this is to begin to disentangle the differing interpretations of community and the claims made about its relationship to criminality. However, the primary aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of the growth and development of the concept of community within criminological theory and criminal justice practice. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, to illustrate the types of ideas and activities that have incorporated a notion of community, and secondly, to distinguish between those ideas and activities that are the concern of this book and those that are not.

In an effort to achieve these goals the chapter is split into three broad sections. The first looks at the relationship between community decline and crime, focusing on social disorganisation, the Chicago School and environmental criminology more generally. The second considers the intersection of community and criminal justice. This is split into three further sections that roughly correspond to Nelken’s (1985) categorisation of community as agent, locus and beneficiary. Third, the discussion then begins to look at the mobilising community as offering a distinctive ideological and political approach to crime and criminality that, whilst containing elements of all of the other approaches discussed, is unique insofar as it is primarily focused on devolving responsibility for crime control from the state to its citizenry

Presenting these themes in such neat bundles is potentially dangerous, as it implies a coherency to such strategies as it glosses over the often inconsistent and contradictory perspectives that punctuate both theory and practice. Drawing on Cohen’s (1985) work, Crawford (1997) succinctly summarises this danger:

By reducing history to neat dichotomies, lines of development or ‘master’ tendencies, there is an inclination to highlight and caricature historical difference and change at the expense of identifying significant continuities.

(Crawford 1997: 15)

As Crawford (1997) states, it would be incorrect to view the somewhat artificial categorisation of trends as definitive break points in the progression of ideas. This is certainly true of the inclusion of community into criminological theory and criminal justice practice. Yet this chapter will conclude by arguing that a new perspective has emerged. Whilst environmental criminology might use community decline to explain criminality and whilst criminal justice policy might deploy community in a range of different fields, mobilising community treats community as both the cause of crime and the means for addressing it. Not just in terms of a passive understanding of community as environment or community as location, but community as a group of people sharing common interests and values, taking responsibility for both the causes of criminality and the means of controlling it. This, it shall be argued, is based on a very particular political and ideological perspective that has gathered momentum since the mid-1990s and which will be both explored and critiqued in detail throughout this book.

Community decline and the rise of crime

Some of the earliest criminological studies that brought the concept of community to the fore argued that high levels of crime could be explained by a corresponding decline in community. Although this observation developed out of research conducted in the United States there has been significant work on the spatial and temporal distributions of crime on both sides of the Atlantic. This section attempts to plot these ideas and to show how they came to the conclusion that there is a correlation between low levels of community organisation and high levels of crime. This approach can be broadly classified as environmental criminology (Brantingham and Brantingham 1981, Bottoms and Wiles 1997).

Alongside this approach is subcultural theory, which attempts to link the spatial clustering of crime to the growth of alternative norms and values that foster criminal and anti-social attitudes and behaviour. Both this and environmental criminology represent the first attempts to explore the relationship between community and crime, and both link what Hope and Shaw (1988) have referred to as community ‘disorganisation’ and ‘disadvantage’ to the crime rate.

The focus of this section is necessarily restrictive. The purpose is to show how these early perspectives sought to demonstrate the relationship between community and crime. It is not a review of all the available literature on environmental criminology and subcultural theory. Neither is it an attempt to discuss the merits and variations within these two schools of thought. Some important criticisms will be mentioned, but only when they have implications for the diagnosis of community decline as the cause of high crime. This is a review of community within the field of criminology, not of environmental criminology or subcultural theory.¹

The origins of environmental criminology can be found in the work of Shaw and McKay (1942), who were members of Chicago University’s School of Sociology. Based on a rich source of quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence, they asserted that crime was a result of a breakdown of community life. Using Burgess’s (1925) concentric zone theory, they sought to explain why there were distinct concentrations of offenders in certain locations. Burgess’s theory posited that the ‘zone in transition’ that surrounded the city of Chicago’s Central Business District (CBD) was typified by a number of social conditions that led to high levels of ‘social disorganisation’. Poor housing and the ever-increasing encroachment of the CBD, combined with waves of immigrants moving to the area, meant that the population of this area was constantly in transition. Those who accumulated enough resources sought to leave the ‘zone in transition’ for the more desirable residential zones further from the city centre. This meant that there was a regular population turnover and the only people who remained in the ‘zone in transition’ were those who could not afford to leave. Burgess believed that these social conditions weakened family and communal ties that bound people together and this led him to make the claim that such areas suffered from social disorganisation. Burgess and other members of the Chicago School linked this social disorganisation to high crime. Shaw and McKay’s studies corroborated Burgess’s ideas. Siegel (1995) describes social disorganisation as neighbourhoods in which:

Residents are trying to leave at the earliest opportunity. Since residents are uninterested in community matters, the common sources of control – the family, school, business, community, social service agencies are weak and disorganised. Personal relationships are strained because neighbours are constantly moving and leaving. Constant resident turnover weakens communication and blocks attempts at solving neighbourhood problems or establishing common goals.

(Siegel 1995: 181)

Social disorganisation thus describes an economically and socially deprived neighbourhood that has at other times been referred to as the slum or the ghetto. This neighbourhood’s population is so transitory that social institutions and the associated social cohesion that they bring do not properly develop, leaving the residents in a perpetual state of uneasiness and anxiety (Siegel 1995).²

In addition to Burgess’s concentric zone theory and social disorganisation, Kornhauser (1978) noted that Shaw and McKay (1942) also believed that criminal values were transmitted in the ‘zone in transition’. Based on observations from the life histories of juveniles, Shaw and McKay (1942) felt that disorganised neighbourhoods cultivated criminogenic values that were passed on to juveniles by older boys. It is this notion of shared criminogenic values that differ from the cultural norms of mainstream society that prompted the growth of literature on subcultures.

Shaw and McKay (1942) conclude three things. Firstly, that offenders tend to be concentrated in a particular area; secondly, that the communities in which they reside are typified by high levels of social disorganisation; and thirdly, that criminogenic attitudes flourish in such communities. These conclusions clearly show that a diagnosis has been made. High crime is due to the decline of community life. Yet community decline is understood in terms of poverty and its impact on social cohesion. Hence environmental criminology tends to think about high crime as a consequence of deprived communities and its conditions rather than high crime as a consequence of declining morality.

Before going on to outline how these ideas have proliferated, one important criticism of Shaw and McKay’s (1942) work must be mentioned, as it has a bearing on later discussions of the relationship between community decline and high crime. This criticism is of their concept of social disorganisation. It has been suggested that criminality can, in many circumstances, stem from social organisations. Crawford (1998) describes this criticism:

there is much criminological evidence to suggest that ‘organised communities’ are criminogenic, such as the Mafia (noticeably absent from Chicago School theory despite its heightened activity caused by the prohibition in Chicago of the 1920s and 1930s), criminal gangs, football hooligans and deviant subcultures.

(Crawford 1998: 129)

In addition, the term ‘social disorganisation’ has been criticised for being overly deterministic in saying that certain locations lead to criminality and for failing to pay any attention to the distributions of power in society. David Matza (1964) reinforces the criticism by suggesting that social disorganisation can also be understood as diversity. Hence, social disorganisation also assumes an implicit value bias as to what constitutes disorganisation and denies the possibility that alternative legitimate or otherwise types of organisation may exist. Downes and Rock (2003) illustrate this point, distinguishing between the types of intra-social order that can be found in any neighbourhood, regardless of its level of deprivation or criminality, and intra-social disorganisation which compare a neighbourhood to the wider social order across a city or society:

Social differentiation, a period of excited social change, or uneven development can exaggerate the instability of those relations, leading to strain and breakdown of local order. In turn, particular worlds can become dislocated, thrown up out of their context and exposed. They can achieve a social and moral independence which some sociologists have chosen to emphasize.

(Downes and Rock 2003: 67)

This hints at the relationship between slum life and the formation of subcultures, discussed below. The combination of social disorganisation and subcultural theory suggests that the conditions in which crime and criminality are bred are not ones that lack community per se, but ones in which the breakdown of social institutions and social cohesion prompt the formation of new and sometimes deviant communities.

Despite the limitations of social disorganisation, Shaw and McKay’s (1942) ideas have prompted a large body of research exploring the validity of their claims and attempting to refine them. In the United States Edwin Sutherland developed his theory of differential association, which sought to explain how criminogenic values were transmitted, whilst in the United Kingdom Mays (1954) and Downes (1966) observed that British youth tended not to have the same reasons for offending as suggested by Shaw and McKay (1942). Similarly, Morris (1957) and later Baldwin and Bottoms (1976) noted that crime in the UK was not only focused in the ‘zone in transition’ but also tended to be located on housing estates usually found significant distances from the centre of town. In addition, Baldwin and Bottoms (1976) found that offender residences were strongly influenced by council housing location policies, community subcultures and the reputation of an area. Newman’s (1973) vision of defensible space has also been of considerable importance in describing the crime-inducing properties of the architectural design of housing estates.

Finally, one further development has been the advancement of the ‘broken windows’ thesis by Wilson and Kelling (1982). Crawford (1998) describes their work:

they argue that mino...