Ageing, Crime and Society

Azrini Wahidin, Maureen Cain, Azrini Wahidin, Maureen Cain

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134008544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

The relationship between ageing and crime has been a much neglected issue, the focus rather being on youth. This books aims to redress this imbalance, bringing together a group of leading authorities to address key issues on the subject of crime and ageing, considering older people as both victims and perpetrators of crime, and looking too at conditions faced by older prisoners.

The book draws upon both criminology and gerontology, as well as sociology and social policy, to help understand the complex relationship between ageing and the criminal justice system, and argues that the needs of elders must be far more firmly on the penal policy agenda than is the case currently. Ageing, Crime and Society will be concerned with 'unsilencing' a group who because of their age and status have been muted by the criminal justice system.

Chapter 1

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Ageing, crime, and society: an invitation to a criminology

Azrini Wahidin and Maureen Cain

How did it happen?

Age has been a key variable in the study of ‘conventional’ criminality and in criminological theorising at least since the Chicago School focused attention on migration, socialisation, and the young offender. Young people still predominate among those caught for conventional offending in the west, and the young were for many years the most popular subjects of ethnographic work. In spite of this, age has remained under-theorised in criminology, a last bastion, perhaps, of positivist categorisation (Cain 2003), long after ‘race’, ‘gender’, and ‘sex’ have all earned their postmodern quotation marks. Ageing as duration has been studied in relation to rates of desistance, but age as a social construction and ageing as a social process have played little part in our understanding of the phenomena of victimisation, crime, and punishment. Thus, in order to begin to theorise the relation of older people or ‘elders’ to these processes we have first had to recognise that for the ‘old’ as well as the ‘young’ very little is pre-given. We and our contributors have had to suspend our common sense upon the subject. Once this suspension is achieved, the relationship of older people to crime emerges as complex and varied, and as amenable to explanation in terms of what are by now normal post-modern theoretical categories such as subjectivity, identity construction, agency, and risk, as well as the interplay between these categories and what Powell and Wahidin (this book, pp. 17–34) have called the political economy of ageing. Before going deeper into our argument let us just point out that while domestic violence against elderly women (aged 65–74 and 75 years+) is reportedly less than it is for younger women, the rate is still higher than the rate for men in those age groups (Simmons et al. 2002): victimisation of the aged remains gendered. Also, there is an increasing number of both older women and older men in prison (aged 50 years+) with the vast majority being men (Wahidin this book, pp. 171–93), and a disproportionate number of the older women are black (Phillips, in this book, pp. 53–70): imprisonment of the aged is both sexed and raced. There are reasons why understanding older people may need a particular elaboration of theory, but there are also many instances where the social patterns for older people do not require a different theorisation from the patterns for the rest of us.

These have been our theoretical starting points, but before we discovered these understandings we travelled separate, more personal routes to a recognition that criminology needs to engage in a more theoretical and less demeaning way with the victimisation, crime, and punishment of the elderly.

Maureen's starting point was the long dying of her mother in what Brogden (2001) has described as a ‘death hastening institution’ (p. 43).¹ It was this, coupled with the development of a new section for her undergraduate course called ‘Crime and the Body’, which led her to recognition of structural grounds for hostility to and disregard for the aged. In less than a week of residence, her mother was given clothes to wear which were not her own, in spite of hours of bedside sewing in of labels. But at least Maureen was now able to add anger to her guilt, and the seeds were sown of the course of action that became this book.

As to the teaching, well, it gave Maureen something to talk about when, while chairing the Advisory Committee of the British Society of Criminology, she first made contact with Azrini. She brought to the table a concern with victims, while Azrini brought a recently published doctoral thesis on ‘Older Women in the Criminal Justice System’ (Wahidin 2004).

Azrini's story began, and perhaps remains, in a more academic place, in particular with her mentors at Keele University² where, having completed a PGCE, she registered for a Master's and then a PhD in criminology. She became involved with the NGOs Justice for Women and Women in Prison, and also ran a series of classes at HMP Drake Hall. Here she realised that elderly women who were serving lengthy prison sentences were forgotten, neglected in a system at breaking point, and institutionally maligned in a system catering for the able bodied, mainly those aged 20–40. Here too, she became involved in two miscarriage of justice campaigns, meeting and corresponding with Sheila Bowler and Sue May. Both women found themselves, in their mid-sixties, serving a life sentence for the first time. In both cases their convictions were eventually quashed, but not before Sheila had spent 4 years in prison, and Sue 12 years. The injustice they suffered was particular to each woman, but also through listening to them Azrini learned to notice the plight of all older people in prison, and the degree of institutional abuse and neglect they endured — but do not become used to — on a daily basis.

The prisons Azrini worked in then and as a researcher did not vary their regimes: she noticed, now, that aged prisoners are subject to the same lack of facilities, same timetables, same physical plan as the men and women in their 20s and 30s who formed the majority. Later, when she started formal research, there were people she interviewed who have subsequently died in prison; there were many suffering from incontinence, Alzheimer's, arthritis, Parkinson's. She learnt that fellow prisoners helped clean the incontinent when staff did not. She began to wonder why criminologists (like the prison staff) did not regard research on the elderly as quite so worthwhile as on subjects such as the core, the mainstream, the still under 40 (and certainly under 50). On raising these issues, as an interested young researcher, she was told ‘the prison estate has more pressing concerns’. Colleagues responded to her interest in the aged with incredulity. She realised that the journey she had embarked on might be a lonely one. Yet each time she saw an older woman in preventable pain, because ‘arthritis’ (the catch all term) is ‘normal’ for her age, her sense of injustice burned stronger and deeper. The rest of her journey to this point will be known to our readers: it continues.

What Azrini and Maureen shared was an understanding of the parallels between reactions in the 1970s to academics who wanted to write about violence against women (VAW) and reactions to us as people who wanted to write about violence against the aged (VAA). When Maureen took our proposal for a one-day conference on Ageing, Crime, and Society to the BSC's executive committee, there was at least one snickering remark to the effect that it was understandable that she in particular should want to do this. Of course it was! She was already 66! But how reminiscent of the responses to those feminist proposals 30 years ago! In those days VAW was most likely a minority male activity, but the presumptions of dominance which made it possible were pervasive. Similar presumptions about the lesser humanity of the aged create a social space in which VAA may be condoned. (Though perhaps granny bashing was never quite so funny as wife beating once was thought to be: ‘have you stopped beating your wife’, ha! ha!). The response was a foretaste of responses to ageing which has been immensely helpful to Maureen professionally: she was alerted to the relevance of feminist theory to an understanding of what is going on and also to how to deal with such responses without losing her cool (too often). More importantly, it has helped us both to realise that to change the culture of legitimation which refuses to name abuse as crime, a political movement is required: a movement by older people with the support of younger people, most particularly active researchers and those in positions of authority. Already there are NGOs established through which we can work, some of which have contributed to the event and to this book (see Burnett, pp. 124–38; Eastman, pp. 249–64; Fitzgerald, pp. 90–106).

Criminology and crimes against the aged

Please note that in this text we intentionally change our terminology: elders, elderly, aged, older people. Similarly, we do not suggest a chronological moment when one or another of these terms should come into effect. In our view, rather than an empirical cut off point we need a theorised concept of those who are getting on a bit, getting past it, surprisingly alert for their age, and so on. The concept we propose will undoubtedly be refined by the further research and campaigning which we hope will result from this book. In the meantime we offer, as above, empirically interchangeable terms which broadly connote the women and men with whom we are concerned. Beyond that, we propose a concept indicative of the socially constructed nature of the aged. This concept denotes those characterised as unyoung as the concept of the deviant denotes the unconforming. The unyoung, being presumed to be beyond the norm(al) (the able bodied, the well remembering, the workers, the sexually active) are exposed to the censure of being beyond the fully human and the protections which recognition of that condition ensures. Can human rights extend to those beyond the full and archetypal status of human? In law, yes. What happens in practice is the subject of this collection.

Unlike deviants, the unyoung are not objects of official censure, although this may soon be the case for those who are physically capable of work but do not. Rather, the unyoung are deemed beyond the pale of the human because of their perceived frailties, their perceived dependence, their perceived failure to be contributing members of the society. Those who have money and own property challenge the view that only those who work ‘deserve’ a reasonable standard of living. The many in poverty are a ‘drain’ on the national resources. A Catch 22 situation. What the unyoung share with the deviant is an outsider status, and it is this which leaves them vulnerable.

The forms of abuse resulting from this vulnerability have been ably categorised as physical abuse, psychological abuse, financial or material abuse, unsatisfactory living environments, and violation of individual or constitutional rights (Boudreau 1993). An earlier taxonomy by Hudson (1991) supplies further distinctions in relation to a very similar basic classification, namely between different kinds of relationship based on trust, i.e. personal/social or professional/business; between abuse and neglect; and between intentional and unintentional behaviour. In the intervening decade these complex descriptors have had no impact within criminology. This leads us to believe that in spite of important contributions relating to abuse such as those of Brogden (2001), Brogden and Nijhar (2000), Decalmer and Glendenning (1993), Manthorpe, Penhale, and Stanley (1999) and Pillemer and Suiter (1988), and on older people in custody (Wahidin 2004), there has been remarkably little theoretical engagement with the plight of the unyoung within criminology. The lack of a concept denoting the subject area to be studied has been one problem. Another may have been the low status of the subject area: dealing with the aged is largely women's work after all. A third reason may have been criminology's historic problem of boundary definition. Here our mentors have been Howe (1987), Hillyard et al. (2004), Brogden and Nijhar (this book) and above all Edwin Sutherland (1949) who argued forcefully that there are two criteria for inclusion within the subject matter of criminology, the first being ‘the legal description of an act as socially harmful’ (p. 31), which he explicitly does not restrict to those ‘descriptions’ contained in the criminal law, and the second being ‘the legal provision of a penalty’ (ibid., p. 31). Once again, his text makes it clear that he does not restrict this concept either to sanctions imposed by the criminal law. Indeed, he offers as one example of what would be sufficient to bring the initial behaviour within his definition the possibility of contempt sanctions for those failing to comply with a court order. Tortious neglect would also fall within his definition. Ten years after his work was published Sutherland was criticised for an ‘anything goes’ approach to criminology (Tappan 1960). In fact he restricted the field of criminology to what we might call the post-political moment, to the time after a law of some kind has been put in place using harm language and indicating the possibility, at some stage, of punishment if there is no reparative action in relation to the harm caused. This definition may still be too restrictive for many. Indeed, since the emergence of deviance and conflict theories in the 1960s and 1970s, and with some impetus from the feminist concern with VAW, contemporary criminology has also analysed social and political struggles leading to or inhibiting criminalisation, precisely the political moment, the contest about the form of social order, itself. However, we are spared that debate on this occasion as crime, abuse, and neglect of the unyoung, as identified in the literature on institutionalised age in particular, fall well within what should by now be the conventional parameters of the discipline, having been established by Sutherland almost 60 years ago.

In saying this we are not arguing for a punitive response to harassed carers. In the home there may be wild emotions at play, sometimes perhaps scores to settle, often tiredness and resentment at being tied. In care homes there is evidence that untrained staff are more likely to abuse than the qualified (Görgen, this volume). Punishing individuals for being untrained is unlikely to produce the widespread changes in practice we are looking for. Arguing that a problem falls within the discipline of criminology simply means that documenting, interpreting, and theorising these problems, and making recommendations based on this empirico-theoretical work, is an appropriate task for a criminologist. We would go further than this, arguing that the theoretical understanding of social relations and the compendium of research strategies and techniques that criminology can bring to bear mean that it is a special responsibility of criminology as a discipline to engage with these issues.

Beyond the understandable personal issues, as several contributions to this volume have indicated, there are structural factors at play in the generation of crime and abuse against the unyoung. There is a political economy of both abuse and conventional crime, and similar factors affect the availability of appropriate penalties and conditions in the prison environment. Here we briefly disentangle some strands in this argument, drawing on papers in this book as well as the wider literature, before turning to a more particular discussion of the individual contributions in the final section of this introduction to our book.

Aged people, the unyoung, often control resources that the next two generations need (Brogden 2001). In our society this may well be the family home. Does this connect with the ‘death hastening’ character of unyoung residential care? Does the cost to the state of quality care make a difference? These are crude and shocking questions. We can address them by realising that most of us would not take that decision for our parents, but perhaps many of us are too ready to take the death-in-care of those who are already ‘a good age’ for granted. Why no demand for published league tables of dying in care, so that we can have the debate? So, indeed, that we can form a waiting list for the best homes, and have our personal choices opened to scrutiny.

Care at home also costs money, unseen money in lost earnings and reduced pensions, local authority resources. Social workers have made sure that these issues are widely understood, as Manthorpe (this book) makes plain. But do criminologists not have anything to add, after 35 years' sustained work on domestic violence? There are challenges here: the challenge of methodology, always a problem when a dominant co-resident is present at interview: more of a problem when the respondent has a short attention span, a failing memory, or a deep fear of reprisal; there is the challenge of theory, because VAW theories will not do for VAA. In the VAA situa...