Sociological Aspects of Crime and Delinquency (Routledge Revivals)

Michael Phillipson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317569749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The field of crime and delinquency attracts a great deal of heated and partial opinion, prejudice and other forms of mal-thinking. When there is a scientific approach there tends to be a psychological explanation. This book, first published in 1971, is a corrective to both trends. It is a discussion of criminal behaviour in relation to a wide range of behaviours which could be called deviance and regards the whole field from the sociological point of view. The whole discussion is related to social policy, and is vital reading for students of sociology and criminology.

1

Introduction: some problems of traditional criminology

The sociological study of crime and delinquency raises issues which are of general importance to the discipline of sociology. These issues concern the kinds of questions which sociologists ask, the kinds of methods of investigation they use and the kinds of explanations or interpretations which they offer. One issue in particular is well illustrated by the sociological analysis of crime, and it is an issue which underlies the main arguments of this book. The fact that crime is viewed as an important social problem by some members of society raises the complex issue of the nature of the relationship between sociological ‘knowledge’ and problems and those things defined as social problems by the members of society in their everyday practical thinking. Can a distinction be made between sociological problems and social problems? If so, what is the relationship between the two? An underlying theme of this book is that such a distinction can and should be made and that making it has direct implications for the questions sociologists ask about the phenomenon of crime. The discussion rests, to a great extent, on the contrast which is drawn between traditional criminology and the contemporary sociological study of crime and delinquency. This comparison illustrates both the peculiar difficulties involved in the social scientific analysis of crime and also some of the ways in which the social sciences have tried to justify their claims to scientific status.

Criminology is an unusual discipline. It is the only human science which expressly takes as its subject matter a social and political problem. All the other disciplines take behaviour in general as their subject matter and select out a given level for intensive investigation. Criminology does not focus on one level of behaviour but nevertheless attempts to provide explanations of particular forms of behaviour, namely, criminal actions; as its subject matter is limited to highly particular forms of socially defined behaviour (crime), its theories and its methods are forced into the position of having to apply every level of analysis (chemical, physiological, psychological and sociological) to the phenomena which it is trying to understand. There are many problems which stem from this approach and which make the validity of criminological explanations difficult to accept. Because criminologists are often aware of the difficulties of validating their claims to provide explanations, they have to develop a rationale and justification for their activities; such a rationale has to be more than simply the interest in the drama of crime which they share with many other members of society. The criminological rationale is provided by the fact that crime in industrial societies is defined as a serious social and political problem, and the hope is that analysis of this social problem by criminologists could lead to more effective ways of dealing with it. However, the way that this rationale has been interpreted in traditional criminology raises crucial questions about its pretensions to certain kinds of objectivity and about its viability as an independent discipline. In this chapter, the most fundamental of the analytical problems which face criminology are discussed briefly as a prolegomenon to the presentation of an alternative sociological perspective for the analysis of crime.

From a sociological perspective the short history of criminology has been a history of failure, and it is a failure to which sociologists themselves have made a considerable contribution. An understanding of this failure requires a critique of the kinds of questions asked by criminologists, the ways in which they try to answer them and the assumptions upon which criminology rests. Criminology, like other scientific disciplines, makes claims to objectivity, and yet it differs in one crucial respect from the other sciences: it is probably the only discipline whose subject matter is defined not by its own intrinsic qualities but by society at large and by those groups with authority in particular.

The scientist, whether natural or social, normally has the freedom to create and define his own terms, such definitions in themselves limiting his field of study. His definitions may undergo constant change in a rapidly developing science, but the changes arise out of the scientist’s theories and research and not by external fiat; certainly particular interest groups in society, such as industrial or governmental, do attempt to control the direction of scientific research, but they cannot define its limiting concepts. Thus, while the area of the scientist’s research can always be viewed as the product of the interplay of a range of values (stemming from the scientist himself, the scientific community, industry and government), during the course of his research the scientist’s questions arise from the interests of his particular discipline and the nature of the phenomena with which it is concerned. His choice of certain styles of theories, concepts and methods, which actually define the limits of his studies, arises out of the concerns of the discipline and the criteria used within it to evaluate his work.

The basic difference between criminology and other scientific disciplines is that the criminologist has his subject matter defined for him by non-criminologists; other people place the limits on his discipline. Very simply, criminology is the study of crime and the criminal; however, the sorts of behaviour defined as crime and those individuals convicted as criminal emerge out of social processes quite independent of the activities of professional criminologists. Criminal behaviour is defined by the criminal law, and law is created through a range of elaborate social processes within the political and legal institutions of industrial societies. Similarly, it is through such institutions that we set up, maintain and sometimes change the penal institutions which deal with the people who are convicted of breaking the criminal law. The criminologist thus has his subject matter given him by the society through its formal definitions of illegal behaviours – crime – and its identification of some of the people who commit criminal acts – the convicted criminals.

A recognition that the creation of the criminal law in contemporary industrial societies is a process of political conflict and compromise and that the penal system is only able to select out a proportion of all those who break the law, reveals three facts which have important implications for the explicit goals of criminology. Firstly, it is immediately clear that the legal definition of what is criminal behaviour changes over time within any society (for example, the recent changes in this country in the law relating to homosexual behaviour); secondly, different societies have different definitions of what is criminal behaviour (for example, many forms of gambling and drug use which are quite legal in this country are criminal offences in the United States); thirdly, societies’ reactions to crime, expressed in their penal apparatus and the institutions which ‘back-up’ the law, change according to time and place (for example, the abolition of the death penalty or changes in the ways in which prisons are used). This temporal and cultural relativity in relation to the social definitions of and the responses to crime mean that there is no one behavioural entity which we can call crime; there is no behaviour which is always and everywhere criminal. This crucial fact lies at the basis of the present criticism of criminology and is central to the subsequent discussion of sociological perspectives on crime and delinquency. Crime and the criminal result from social definitions and social processes. The study of crime and the criminal therefore makes criminology a ‘normative’ discipline, that is, one which rests initially on the evaluation by non-criminologists of what ‘the problem’ is; its subject matter is defined by particular social values.

Criminologists prefer to reject the suggestion that their discipline is normative (see, for example, Mannheim, 1965, I, p. 13) by asserting that the objective study of norms is not in itself normative. However, it seems possible to demonstrate criminology’s normative character by showing how far its acceptance of the legal and social definitions of crime and the criminal limits its objectivity and precludes its achievement of its stated goals of explanation.

If the criminologist has his subject matter defined for him through social processes unrelated to scientific analysis, how does this impinge on the questions which he asks and the answers which he obtains? The central concern of criminology has been and still is (Mannheim, 1965; Walker, 1967; S. and E. Glueck, 1964) to locate ‘the causes of crime’. This stated aim is very often accompanied by explicit and implicit suggestions that once we have located these ‘causes’ we can do something about ‘the problem’ in the form of ‘treatment’ or ‘prevention’ (Mannheim, 1965, I, p. 20; Walker, 1967, p. 17). Thus, complementary to the search for ‘causes’ in criminology has been an interest in the reform, rehabilitation, change and control of the criminal. For example, criminologists have been very much concerned with the problem of evaluating the different penal sentences; evaluation here refers to attempts to measure the success of penal sentences in reducing levels of recidivism or re-offending among convicted offenders (Glaser, 1964; Mannheim and Wilkins, 1955). The two major areas of theory and research in criminology, then, are crime causation and the ‘treatment’ of offenders, the aims being to find ‘the causes’ and to improve ‘treatment’.

Seen from a sociological perspective these aims and concerns of criminology are inappropriate because they are based both upon false assumptions about the nature of crime and the criminal and also upon implicit, and sometimes explicit, prescriptions about what society should do in relation to crime and delinquency; such value prescriptions are in themselves an immediate denial of criminologists’ claims to scientific impartiality and objectivity. A brief examination of these assumptions may help to clarify the sociological case against traditional criminology and also suggest more appropriate perspectives for an analysis of crime and delinquency.

The key defining feature of criminology is that the criminal law is accepted as a given and becomes, therefore, the defining and limiting criterion of the discipline. In practice this has meant that criminologists have entirely ignored the study of the social processes by which the criminal law is made and changed, of the values on which it rests and their distribution in society, of the processes by which law is maintained and enforced and of the complex relationship between societal reactions to crime in the shape of the penal system and the quantity and quality of crime in a society. Refusal to ask such questions about the criminal law and the values and processes on which it is based means that criminology rests upon an implicit acceptance of the legal ‘status quo’; this is, in itself, a value position and a surrender of the criminologists’ claim to objectivity. This unquestioning acceptance of the values upheld by the criminal law seriously limits the type of questions which criminologists ask and also the answers which they obtain to questions concerning, for example, ‘the causes of crime’. In practice this has resulted in criminologists restricting their focus in the search for ‘causes’ almost entirely to individuals officially convicted of criminal offences. Perhaps this limited vision and the unwillingness to question the legal processes is unsurprising in view of the fact that criminologists have traditionally been drawn largely from two of the most conservative professional groups, the law and medicine, many of whose interests the law seems designed to protect. It is difficult for such groups to undertake disinterested research into some of the very values on which their social status rests. The basic premise of traditional criminology seems to have been, therefore, that it is possible to locate ‘the causes of crime’ by a study of the convicted criminal population.

The protagonists of this approach attempt to locate these ‘causes’ through the application, in principle, of natural scientific models of explanation and methods of measurement. The debate between proponents of the natural scientific approach (positivism or determinism) and the ‘free will’ approach (voluntarism or intentionalism) continues in sociology and concerns disagreements as to the most appropriate perspective and methods for the analysis of social life; in criminology, however, the argument seems to have been decided, with very little debate, firmly in favour of positivism. In simple terms the criminological positivist argues that there are underlying causes for every criminal act and that his job is to define, find and measure them; he believes that there is an underlying pattern of events or factors historically antecedent to the criminal act which is its cause. This pattern of events is what the natural scientist calls the necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of any given phenomenon. The criminologist is thus trying to find the laws according to which this pattern of conditions necessary and sufficient for criminal behaviour operates. In fact most of those criminologists who have applied this approach to criminal behaviour seem to have assumed that the acts of the convicted criminals could be explained by focusing on the convicted criminals alone and without reference to the encompassing social structure. The assumption is that ‘the causes’ can be found by an examination of convicted criminals’ personal biographies and that the necessary and sufficient conditions for the commission of and conviction for a criminal act are located within these personal biographies.

If criminality is explained in terms of the biographies of individuals, a further assumption must be that convicted criminals are different in some ways not only from the few non-rule breakers in society but also from non-convicted criminals; this assumption is logically necessary, for if the constellation of biographical factors claimed to be causal can be found in some members of a non-criminal control group, they are obviously not sufficient and necessary for criminality. Assumptions about the differences between criminals and non-criminals have resulted in the predominance of certain kinds of methods in criminology; in particular, there has been much use of the comparison of samples of convicted delinquents or criminals with control groups of non-delinquents matched on a limited range of variables (S. and E. Glueck, 1950). The attempt is then made through various methods to find factors which are present in the delinquent sample but absent in the officially non-delinquent control group; the differentiating factors, if found, are said to be ‘the causal factors’ in delinquency. No study to date has located a constellation of biographical factors which significantly distinguish convicted criminals from carefully matched non-criminals. In fact, the history of such investigations has been the successive abandonment of hypotheses which proposed that particular kinds of factors were effective discriminators (Vold, 1958); these hypotheses included the ideas that criminals were biologically inferior, mentally retarded, mentally ill, maternally deprived, economically deprived or a combination of all these plus others.

Implicit and occasionally explicit in the writings of criminologists who follow this tradition and methodology is the idea that if only such differences could be located, namely, ‘the causes’ of crime, then society could do something about the treatment or reformation of individual criminals; similarly, if we knew ‘the causes’, then we could begin to develop techniques for the prevention and elimination of crime. The kind of preventive actions or treatment programmes that would be developed would presumably be dependent on the sorts of factors said to differentiate criminals from non-criminals, but they would have one thing in common: they would all be particularistic in their restriction to a few factors. They would develop programmes aimed at ‘correcting’ the particular factors thought to generate delinquency or crime; if individual maladjustment were proposed as ‘the cause’ of delinquency, then individual counselling and psychotherapy would be the corollary treatment; if the poor physical and social amenities of the community were seen as the delinquency generating forces then community projects aimed at the improvement of selected facilities would be seen as the answer; if the adolescent peer group were seen as the source of delinquency then perhaps new ways of working with youths would be proposed as ways of lowering delinquency rates. When such preventive and reformative programmes have been put into practice and carefully evaluated they have had no significant effects on community delinquency rates (McCord, 1959; Kobrin, 1959; and Miller, 1962).

The selectivity of treatment or preventive actions is the natural corollary of the highly selective and particularistic explanations of crime causation that have characterized criminology, and the failure of such remedial actions becomes understandable when viewed from the sociological perspective adopted here. Before outlining this alternative perspective, a brief review of the main stumbling blocks in the path of traditional criminological explanations is necessary.

The assumption that criminals are different from non-criminals fails to deal with the following problems. In the first place, by limiting its attention to the individuals found guilty by the courts, criminology becomes the study of the failed offender, that is, the offender who was unlucky enough to be caught and convicted. In fact, and even more narrowly, because of easy access for research, criminologists have largely concentrated on the failed offenders who have been placed in institutions. There are two basic problems of sampling here: firstly, is the convicted criminal population representative of all those committing criminal acts in a society; and secondly, is a sample of individuals drawn from selected penal institutions representative of all convicted criminals or even of all institutionalized criminals? As the answers to both these questions are in the negative, it follows that the assertions or generalizations about causation proposed by those who ignore these questions are automatically invalidated. Such questions have either been completely ignored in criminology or they have received lip service only to be ignored in actual research practice.

A second issue related to the problem of sampling concerns those offenders who, although they are discovered by either the law enforcers or others such as employers, are dealt with informally, thereby escaping public identification and the official criminal label. Restriction of sampling and research to the officially convicted criminal thus falls a long way short of the statistically acceptable sampling criteria to which criminologists nominally subscribe.

A third barrier in the way of traditional approaches to explanation is encountered in their inability to deal with those forms of behaviour which are very similar to officially defined crime in terms of motives and consequences, but which are almost completely immune from the official detection, trial and labelling processes. Many occupations, for example, provide opportunities for a wide variety of property offences (Martin, 1962); employees often claim that systematic distortion of expense accounts or the removal of the organization’s stationery for personal use are simply ‘perks’ that go with the job (Chapman, 1968). However, their occupational immunity means that only the smallest fraction of such offenders ever receive the official criminal label.

Finally, it is worth re-emphasizing that a recognition of the cultural and temporal relativity of the definition of crime and the reactions to crime calls into question the entire approach of traditional criminology and its assumptions and thus requires an abandonment of the search for universal causes of criminality. By creating new laws outlawing different forms of behaviour (for example, in relation to the use of motor vehicles in the twentieth century) and by removing or altering old laws (for example, in relation to abortion) society is constantly redefining what is criminal and at the same time actually creating and eliminating crime by definition; these continuous processes of redefinition require different approaches to the problems of explanation from those adopted by traditional criminology.

The result of ignoring considerations such as these has meant that criminology has been an adaptive or ‘normative’ discipline. To the extent that it accepts existing official definitions and practices as its defining criteria, it becomes little more than a covert tool of social policy and a conservative force in society. The situation is one in which contemporary criminologists make claims to the objectivity of an empirical science and then abrogate this claim by their willingness to undertake...