Cultural Criminology

An Invitation

Jeff Ferrell,Keith Hayward,Jock Young

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473927315
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cultural Criminology: An Invitation traces the history, theory, methodology and future direction of cultural criminology.

Drawing on issues of representation, meaning and politics, this book walks you through the key areas that make up this fascinating approach to the study of crime.

The second edition has been fully revised to take account of recent developments in this fast developing field, thereby keeping you up-to-date with the issues facing cultural criminologists today. It includes:

• A new chapter on war, terrorism and the state
• New sections on cultural criminology and the politics of gender, and green cultural criminology
• Two new and expanded chapters on research methodology within the field of cultural criminology
• Further Reading suggestions and a list of related films and documentaries at the end of each chapter, enabling you to take your studies beyond the classroom
• New and updated vignettes, examples, and visual illustrations throughout

Building on the success of the first edition, Cultural Criminology: An Invitation offers a vibrant and cutting-edge introduction to this growing field. It will encourage you to adopt a critical and contemporary approach to your studies in criminology.

First edition: 2009 Distinguished Book Award from the American Society of Criminology?s Division of International Criminology

1 Cultural Criminology: An Invitation

In October 2011 at a demonstration organized by the protest movement Occupy, Julian Assange, the controversial Australian activist and long-time editor-in-chief of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, appeared outside the London Stock Exchange in a stylized Guy Fawkes mask. Stark white, with pink cheeks, a wide smile and a rakish moustache, the Guy Fawkes visage has emerged as one of the most enduring icons of the many anarchist and protest groups that have sprung up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The origins of the mask can be traced to the classic 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta – a dark tale of one man’s protest against a futuristic police state based loosely on the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Catholic Revolutionaries attempted to overthrow the British Government by blowing up the House of Lords (Sauter, 2012). The anti-authoritarian story struck a chord with protestors, and after V for Vendetta was adapted into a movie in 2005, the Fawkes mask emerged as a ubiquitous symbol of contemporary political resistance; not least, it became the ‘face’ of the international hacker group Anonymous. But while the mask served the very practical purpose of hiding protestors’ faces from the pervasive police surveillance that is now such a feature of political demonstrations, it also served the interests of an altogether different cultural group: the executives and shareholders of one of the world’s biggest media conglomerates. As producers of V for Vendetta, the media giant Time-Warner owns the rights to the mask’s image and is consequently paid a licensing fee with the sale of each unit. And the mask is big business. According to Harry Beige of Rubie’s Costume, the New York-based costumier who produces the mask, sales are running at over 100,000 a year (Bilton, 2011). To make matters worse, it recently came to light that the masks are manufactured in non-unionized sweatshops in the impoverished backstreets of Brazil and Mexico.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, another clouded cultural relationship takes shape. For decades, the poor of Sinaloa in North West Mexico have paid homage to Jesus Malverde, a legendary ‘Robin Hood’-style bandit who, according to local lore, stole from the rich and gave to the poor before the Federales eventually hanged him in 1909. More recently, however, Jesus Malverde has taken on a new, unofficial role as the patron saint of Mexico’s drug dealers and border traffickers. Dubbed the ‘narco saint’ by the Mexican press, Malverde was originally only popular in Sinaloa’s capital Culiacán, but in recent years his familiar moustachioed face and black neckerchief have been seen in makeshift shrines everywhere from Tijuana to Mexico City. In the poor neighbourhoods where drug gangs thrive, Malverde has become not just a mythic symbol of crime, but a quasi-religious cult figure. Put simply, Malverde is the figurehead for what is known as ‘narco culture’ – the celebration and admiration of affluent drug lords and successful traffickers who, through skill or good fortune, beat the odds and avoid arrest. Today, narco culture is a veritable cottage industry which also includes the appropriation of the Mexican folk icon Santa Muerte (Saint Death or Holy Death), ‘narco fashion’ and the ‘Chalinazo’ subcultural clothing style, ‘narco corrido’ music and ‘narco ballad’ pop songs that recall the criminal exploits of legendary drug bandits (Lippman, 2005), and even a branch of the Mexican movie industry known as ‘narco film’. Narco culture is even spreading into the Sun Belt cities of the United States and beyond (Ortiz Uribe, 2011). In Pico Rivera, California, partygoers flock to El Rodeo Night Club, one of many such narco corrido music clubs in the Los Angeles area that are at the forefront of this new form of Mexican-American cultural hybridization. Likewise, in recent years, Los Angeles gang members have started working as film extras in Tijuana’s narco gangster movie industry. In all this, the startling truth is that narco culture bespeaks a certain acceptance of drug smuggling as a normal aspect of everyday life in the impoverished neighbourhoods that straddle the US–Mexican border; as one local teacher put it: ‘To live in Culiacán is to be conversant with the legends of specific “narcotraficantes”, whose names are as recognisable as those of great athletes or musicians’ (Quinones, 1998: n.p.). And this narco culture is not without its dangerous digital echoes as well. Increasingly, citizens and ‘cyber-guardians’ use social media like Twitter, and websites and blogs like Wikinarco and Blogdelnarco, to track and warn of drug-related violence. In response, the Mexican authorities have made it a crime to use Twitter to ‘undermine public order’ or spread rumours, and the drug cartels, ‘threatened by the decentralized distribution of the Web’, have responded as well – in one case hanging two bodies from a bridge with the sign, ‘this will happen to all the Internet snitches’ (Cave, 2011: 5).

Each of these cases embodies fundamental issues for cultural criminology. Whether the symbolic dynamics of globalized street protest or the strange hybrid of criminality and religiosity associated with narco culture, both illustrate one of cultural criminology’s founding concepts: that cultural dynamics carry within them the meaning of crime. Given this, cultural criminology explores the many ways in which cultural forces interweave with the practice of crime and crime control in contemporary society. It emphasizes the centrality of meaning, representation and power in the contested construction of crime – whether crime is constructed as political protest or stylized representation of drug culture, as ephemeral event or subcultural subversion, as social danger or state-sanctioned violence. In our view, the subject matter of any useful and critical criminology must necessarily move beyond narrow notions of crime and criminal justice to incorporate symbolic displays of transgression and control, feelings and emotions that emerge within criminal events, and public and political campaigns designed to define (and delimit) both crime and its consequences. This wider focus, we argue, allows for a new sort of criminology – a cultural criminology more attuned to prevailing conditions, and so more capable of conceptualizing and confronting contemporary crime and crime control. This cultural criminology seeks both to understand crime as an expressive human activity and to critique the perceived wisdom surrounding the contemporary politics of crime and criminal justice.

Thinking about culture and crime

Cultural criminologists understand ‘culture’ to be the stuff of collective meaning and collective identity; within it and by way of it, the government claims authority, the consumer considers advertised products – and ‘the criminal’, as both person and perceived social problem, comes alive. Culture suggests the collective search for meaning, and the meaning of the search itself; it reveals the capacity of people, acting together over time, to animate even the lowliest of objects – the homeless person’s bedroll, the police officer’s truncheon, the gang member’s bandana, the Guy Fawkes mask – with importance and implication.

For us, human culture – the symbolic environment created and occupied by individuals and groups – in this way intertwines with structures of power and inequality. Culture is not simply a product of social class, ethnicity or occupation – it cannot be reduced to a residue of social structure – yet culture doesn’t take shape without these structures, either. Both the cultural prowess of the powerful and the subcultures of acquiescence or resistance invented by the less powerful shape, and are shaped by, existing forms of patterned inequality. Cultural forces, then, are those threads of collective meaning and understanding that wind around the everyday troubles of social actors, animating the situations and circumstances in which their troubles play out. And for all the parties to everyday crime and criminal justice – for perpetrators, police officers, victims, parole violators and news reporters – the negotiation of cultural meaning intertwines with the immediacy of criminal experience.

As early work on ‘the pains of imprisonment’ demonstrated, for example, the social conditions and cultural dynamics of imprisonment form a dialectical relationship, with each forming and reforming the other. While all inmates experience certain pains of imprisonment, the precise extent and nature of these pains emerge from various cultures of class, gender, age and ethnicity – that is, from the lived meanings of the social lives that inmates bring with them to the prison. And yet these particular pains, given meaning in the context of pre-existing experiences and collective expectations, in turn shape the inmate cultures, the shared ways of life, that arise as inmates attempt to surmount the privations of prison life (Young, 1999; Fader, 2013). Facing common troubles, confronting shared circumstances, prison inmates and prison guards – and, equally so, street muggers, corporate embezzlers and criminal lawyers – draw on shared understandings and shape new ones, thereby investing troubles and their solutions with human agency.

As regards this human agency, cultural criminology builds from a foundational understanding as to the creativity of human action. From this view, people and their social groups create cultural meanings and craft their own cultural perspectives, albeit in a moral and material world not of their own making. To paraphrase Marx, they may not make their own history just as they please, but they do make history. Human behaviour is shaped by the actors themselves; it is not merely the unfolding of preordained essences somehow encoded in DNA sequences, psychoanalytical tendencies or the causal effects of a broken home or childhood trauma. Rather, moral careers are contingent on the present, with the past holding sway mostly to the extent that powerful actors reinforce notions of a fixed self and powerless subjects come to accept these narratives. Motives are, in this sense, cultural products – shared accounts and creative accomplishments – not simply individual essences revealed. In a hyper-plural society where a multitude of vocabularies of motive (Mills, 1940) circulate, individuals and groups may in fact pick among them – not willy-nilly, of course, but in relationship to their perceived problems. The individual self certainly remains, but less as an isolated entity and more as a centre of the human construction of meaning in a world riven by a plurality of options. To postulate that human beings operate as narrative creators, constantly writing and rewriting their personal stories, does not imply a lack of unity of the self, but rather the self as a unique constellation of constructed meanings (Presser and Sandberg, 2015).

Of course, none of this ongoing human creativity rules out dangerous or destructive meanings, bad faith decisions, or past decisions that over time take on the reified, mechanistic power of habituation. Nor does it preclude the common and dangerous human predicament of ontological insecurity, where various groups or sectors within the population come to sense that their social status is threatened and their identity disembedded. One cultural response to this problem is the process of ‘othering’, with actors actively embracing narratives about themselves and other groups that deny human creativity and imagine a world preordained and fated. Through othering, essentialist attributes are projected onto another and onto oneself so as to justify privilege and to stem feelings of deep insecurity. Ironically, this cultural strategy operates so as to erase culture itself. It promises fixed, essentialist lines of orientation in a late-modern world of increasing complexity and disorientation; seeming to guarantee set structures of superiority and inferiority, as encoded in binaries of gender or race, it is a guard against the vertigo of late modernity (J. Young, 2007).

A particularly potent version of this dynamic centres on crime and deviance; here the essentially ‘normal’ is contrasted with the inherently ‘deviant’, and the law-abiding cleanly set apart from the criminal. Here, virtue is contrasted with vice – and ‘their’ vice is seen to corroborate ‘our’ virtue. Such a process of othering allows vice to be seen as a lack of culture – that is, as a lack of values and assimilation into the moral order – and frequently this view forms the basis of a determinism that is presumed to propel the deviant actor. Layered onto this dynamic are social-psychological processes which add intensity and passion to the process of othering. Chief among these is a sense of moral outrage and indignation towards those others who are seen as cheating the rules of responsibility, sacrifice and reward. According to this cultural construction, ‘deviants’ live on the dole or irresponsibly parent children outside of marriage, while ‘virtuous’ citizens in contrast embrace their economic responsibilities and attend to their civic duties. This essentialist dichotomy is in turn exacerbated in situations where ‘deviants’ from immigrant groups or the underclass are seen as directly causing problems for the virtuous. Importantly, cultural criminologists argue that these psychodynamics are not determined by an individual’s psychoanalytical past (e.g. Gadd and Jefferson, 2007) but instead result from current problems and pressures percolating in particular parts of the social structure. Amidst the current economic crisis, for example, corporate downsizing, the deskilling of work and chronic job insecurity are critical social problems in their own right – but when they are mixed with mistaken beliefs about their causes and racially charged ideologies of othering and essentialism, they can produce intensities of violent misperception that redouble their dangerous consequences. For cultural criminologists, then, psychosocial criminology operates most insightfully when existentially based and when grounded in the present structural and cultural problems of late modernity.

This shifting relationship between cultural negotiation, individual experience and social problem affirms another of cultural criminology’s principal assumptions: that while crime and deviance constitute more than the simple enactment of essentialist traits, they constitute more than the enactment of a static group culture as well. Put simply, cultural criminologists understand culture to be not a product but a process – the sort of process through which Jesus Malverde’s identity can continue to shift a century after his death. Here, cultural criminologists take issue with the tradition of cultural conflict theory, as originated with the work of Thorsten Sellin (1938) and as highlighted in the well-known subcultural formulation of Walter Miller (1958), where crime largely constitutes the enactment of lower working-class values. While such approaches do take note of ‘the cultural’, they do so in ways that tend to be simplistic and reductionist; Sellin’s original formulation suggested that vengeance and vendetta among Sicilian immigrants led to inevitable conflict with wider American values. The danger of this approach can be seen today in, for example, the supposition that multiculturalism generates ineluctable cultural collisions. Yet, as we will argue, and as cultural criminologists like Frank Bovenkerk, Dina Siegel and Damian Zaitch (2003; Bovenkerk and Yesilgoz, 2004) have well demonstrated, cultures – ethnic and otherwise – exist as neither static entities nor collective essences. Rather, cultural dynamics remain in motion; collective cultures offer a heterogeneous mélange of symbolic meanings that blend and blur, cross boundaries real and imagined, conflict and coalesce according to dynamics of power and influence, and hybridize with changing circumstances. To imagine, then, that an ethnic culture maintains some ahistorical and essential tendency to crime (or conformity) is no cultural criminology; it’s a dangerous essentialism, stereotypical in its notion of cultural stasis and detrimental to understanding the intricate dynamics that connect culture and crime.

In Culture as Praxis, Zygmunt Bauman (1999: xvi–xvii) catches something of this cultural fluidity and complexity. There he distinguishes two ways of thinking about culture, longstanding and seemingly diametrically opposed. The first conceptualizes ‘culture as the activity of the free roaming spirit, the site of creativity, invention, self-critique and self-transcendence’, suggesting ‘the courage to break well-drawn horizons, to step beyond closely-guarded boundaries’. As we’ll discuss further in the following chapter, culture of this first sort fits most easily into the tradition of subcultural theory as developed by Albert Cohen (1955) and others, where deviant or delinquent subcultures create collective responses to social inequality. Here, culture suggests the collective vitality of subversive social praxis, and the creative construction of transgression and resistance; in this sense, the illicit self-inventions of an outsider subculture can at times symbolically stand the social order on its head. As Bauman suggests, though, a second way of thinking about culture understands it as just the opposite: ‘a tool of routinization and continuity – a handmaiden of social order’, a symbolic universe that stands for ‘regularity and pattern – with freedom cast under the rubric of “norm-breaking” and “deviation”‘. Culture of this second sort is more the province of orthodox social anthropology, of Parsonian functionalism and of post-Parsonian cultural sociology. For these orientations, culture is the stuff of collective cohesion, the Durkheimian glue of social order and preservative of predictability, the soi-distant support of social structure. And if for the first conception of culture transgression signals meaningful creativity, for the second, transgression signifies the very opposite: an absence of culture, an anomic or even atavistic failure of socialization into collective meaning. For cultural criminologists, though, the two ways of understanding culture are not irreconcilable; both highlight the collective construction of shared meaning, if in different domains, and both suggest the ongoing, contested negotiation of morality and cultural identity. For some, this negotiation calls forth a collective belief in tradition, an emotional embracing of stasis and conformity, and the ideological mobilization of rigid stereotype and fundamental value. For others, it calls forth against this conformity a gnawing disbelief in the social order itself, and so a willingness to risk inventing collective alternatives. For cultural criminologists, both are of interest – and the moments when the two collide around issues of crime and justice form a significant subject matter for cultural criminology itself.

A cultural criminology that foregrounds human agency and human creativity, then, does not ignore those cult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Brief contents
• Detailed contents
• Illustration List
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Praise for the new edition…
• 1 Cultural Criminology: An Invitation
• 2 The Gathering Storm
• 3 The Storm Breaks: Cultural Criminology Now
• 4 A Cultural Criminology of the Everyday
• 5 War, terrorism and the State: A Cultural Criminological Introduction
• 6 Media, Representation and Meaning: Inside the Hall of Mirrors
• 7 Against Criminological Method
• 8 Dangerous Knowledge: Some Methods of Cultural Criminology
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Filmography
• Index