A Sociology of Crime

Peter Eglin, Stephen Hester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136805141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The authors take three particular sociological perspectives, and use them to offer a distinct and critical reading of criminology, highlighting the ways that crime is, first and foremost, a matter of social definition. They provide a good introductory text which will be of great value to students.

Chapter 1
Sociology and crime

In this opening chapter we are concerned to provide the foundation for the overall position we take in the book, including the selection of the sociological perspectives with which it deals. We begin by explaining the distinction between social and sociological problems. We then describe the ‘face of the enemy’, namely correctional or ‘cause-and-cure’ criminology/sociology, based as it is in a ‘social-problems’ conception of crime. Against this background we introduce the three sociological perspectives which we use and which address crime as a sociological problem. We specify the types of sociological questions they raise about crime. Finally we set out the key issues, organization and overall aims of the book.

SOCIAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

We begin by making a distinction between social and sociological problems. Following Spector and Kitsuse (1987 (1977)), we conceptualize social problems as those activities through which conditions and circumstances are claimed and defined as problems by governments, the media, the private and public welfare agencies, as well as problem spokespeople amongst the general public, that is:

we define social problems as the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions. The emergence of a social problem is contingent upon the organization of activities asserting the need for eradicating, ameliorating, or otherwise changing some condition.

(Spector and Kitsuse 1987:: 75–76)

Social problems, then, reflect what persons are currently concerned about, what they claim something should be done about, what: people find undesirable and in need of eradication. Such problems, depending on the concerns of the time and place, are subject to change. They range from wife battering to illiteracy, racial discrimination to environmental pollution, drugs to abortion, alcohol to sexual assault, gender inequality to juvenile delinquency. For example, as Pfohl (1977) has shown, it was only in the early 1960s that ‘child abuse* became recognized as a ‘problem’ about which something should be done. Previously, although children were beaten and otherwise ‘abused’, this never became a matter of sustained public attention. Only when certain groups, in this case medical specialists such as radiologists, acted in such a way as to result in this being brought to widespread public attention was this condition defined as a major public problem. Various kinds of ‘crime’ have also been defined at various times as social problems. For example, robbery, that is theft with violence, has long been recognized as a crime but it was only in the early 1970s that a particular form of it became labelled as ‘mugging’ and became elevated to the status of a serious social problem. This occurred as a result of the activities of claims-makers such as politicians, police officers and journalists. It depended, too, on the nature of the routine operation of news gathering and production (Fishman 1980) and on the ‘structural context’ of political and economic relations at the time (Hall et al 1978).

Sociological problems are those which are derived from the concerns which motivate sociological inquiry. These concerns reflect the different theoretical perspectives which are used by sociologists. Perhaps the most fundamental of these concerns is the problem of social order: how is society possible? Other preoccupations of sociologists include: understanding social action, locating social practices and cultures within changing structural environments, describing social processes, including the formation of social identities and identifying organizational structures of social interaction; they also include methodological debates about the problems of theory and practice, structure and agency and objectivity and meaning.

It is our view, sociologically speaking, that ‘crime’ is interesting only in so far as it provides a pretext for asking sociological questions rather than those motivated by a concern to ‘do something about it’. This means that our interest in ‘crime’ is sociological rather than correctional or ameliorative. Much inquiry into crime appears to presuppose that the fundamental questions are ‘what causes crime?’ and ‘what can be done to cure it?’ For us, however, these questions reflect a view which is itself in need of sociological investigation.

Some of the concerns of those who claim that crime is a social problem include: crime is not only increasing but becoming increasingly violent; that these increases are occurring despite increased public expenditure; that harsher penalties, a return to traditional values and an expansion of law enforcement personnel are needed to deal with the failure of the criminal justice system to deal effectively with the problem of crime. These are views that, while widespread in society, tend to be articulated by particular interest or value groups such as associations of chiefs of police or correctional officers or government departments or grass-roots organizations such as Victims of Violence (see Amernic 1984). The propagation of such views is a classical example of the construction of a social problem through claims-making.

CORRECTIONAL CRIMINOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

Some sociologists have been coopted into viewing crime as a social problem. The story of Irvin Waller's involvement in the propagation of ‘Victims of Crime’ as a social problem through his work for the Ministry of the Solicitor General of Canada is elegantly told by Paul Rock (1986) in A Viexo from the Shadows. Both in such applied work, and more fundamentally in their theoretical formulations, such sociologists have become part of the process through which crime is constructed as a problem. This has arisen in part through the historical connection of sociology with the practical discipline of criminology, a discipline which has defined itself in ‘cause-and-cure’ terms. For example:

Criminology, in its narrow sense, is concerned with the study of the phenomenon of crime and of the factors or circumstances … which may have an influence on or be associated with criminal behaviour and the state of crime in general. But this does not and should not exhaust the whole subject matter of criminology. There remains the vitally important problem of combating crime … To rob it of this practical function, is to divorce criminology from reality and render it sterile.

(Radzinowicz 1962:168)

The scholarly objective of criminology is the development of a body of knowledge regarding this process of law, crime, and reaction to crime … The practical objective of criminology, supplementing the scientific or theoretical objective, is to reduce the amount of pain and suffering in the world.

(Sutherland and Cressey 1978: 3, 24)

Research in criminology is conducted for the purpose of understanding criminal behaviour. If we can understand the behaviour, we will have a better chance of predicting when it will occur and then be able to take policy steps to control, eliminate, or prevent the behaviour.

(Reid 1985: 66)

Let us state quite categorically that the major task of radical criminology is to seek a solution to the problem of crime and that of a socialist policy is to substantially reduce the crime rate.

(Young 1986: 28; quoted in Sim et al 1987: 42, and Smart 1990: 72)

Following Matza (1969, such sociology can be regarded as correctional. The central components of correctional criminology and sociology are as follows: (1) the equivalence of social and sociological problems; (2) the derivation of sociological questions from social concerns; (3) the objective of sociological inquiry as the amelioration of social problems; (4) an ‘overwhelming* preoccupation with questions of etiology or causation in relation to criminal behaviour, (5) a commitment to the methodological principles of positivistic social science.

In order to exemplify this process of cooptation we review briefly some of the major positivistic theories of criminal behaviour (see, for example, Wilson and Herrnstein 1986). We egin with the non-sociological theories the focus of which has been on the biological and psychological causes of criminal behaviour. For an exhaustive review of current work of this type see Eysenck and Gudjonsson (1989) The Causes and Cures of Criminality.

Biological and psychological theories of criminal behaviour

From the biological criminology of Lombroso in the nineteenth century to the psychological criminology of Eysenck in the twentieth, as Box (1981) points out, the concern has been with isolating the criminal individualby identifying those characteristics which differentiated him or her from the ‘normal’ person. For the biological criminologist, these differentia were to be found in the human body; that is, it was assumed that there were physiological differences between criminals and normals. Early work in this field, for example, that stemming from an 1876 pamphlet of Lombroso (1972 (1911); Sutherland and Cressey 1978: 58–59), argued that criminals were distinguished by their ‘head shapes, peculiarities in their eyes, receding foreheads, weak chins, compressed faces, flared nostrils, long ape-like arms and agile and muscular bodies’ (Box 1981: 2). Since then it has been claimed and continues to be claimed (by the likes of Dr Sarnoff Mednick (Sim et al. 1987: 10)) that criminality is caused by or at least correlated with such factors as biological inferiority (Hooton 1939), body shape (Glueck and Glueck 1950, 1956; Sheldon 1949; Kretschmer 1925), nutritional deficiency (Hippchen 1977), chromosome abnormality (West 1969) and, when averaged out for ‘racial’ groups, the size of the genitals, buttocks and brain (Rushton 1989). Rushton's work, which has achieved some notoriety in Canada, is a straight revival or continuation of nineteenthcentury ‘race science’, down to the ‘anthroporn’ of one of its principal sources (French Army-Surgeon 1972 (1898)).

For the psychological criminologist, the determinants of individual criminality, in contrast, are to be found in various aspects of the human personality. These include extreme intraversión and extraversión (Eysenck 1964, 1977), a weak super-ego and riotous id (Alexander and Ross 1952), insanity (Menninger 1969; Prins 1980) and ‘a commitment to bureaucratic detail coupled with an opportunistic belief in a Messianic identity’ (Kuttner 1985: 35). This last pair of features is said to characterize ‘the genocidal mentality’ as exhibited by Phillip the Second of Spain, Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second of Turkey and Adolf Hitler, although the author acknowledges that ‘[s]orting criteria that can identify and separate invisible mental lesions of individuals prone to mass violence remain unknown’ (ibid: 42). During the Gulf Massacre (January-March 1991) Saddam Hussein was credited with exhibiting the pathological condition called by its inventors ‘malignant narcissism’. Comment should be superfluous.

Sociological theories of criminal behaviour

Sociological theories of criminal behaviour locate the difference between the criminal and the normal person in the character of the social environment to which the person is exposed. Early work by the Chicago School of Sociology, for example, correlated criminality with urban social disorganization or ‘social pathology’ in terms similar to Durkheim's concept of anomie, that is, a lack of moral regulation brought about by rapid social change. Merton (1938) also employed the concept of anomie, though rather differently (see now Hilbert 1989), linking deviant behaviour with the disjunction between institutionalized aspirations and the availability of access to legitimate opportunity structures. The prime candidates for criminal behaviour such as property theft, for example, were those whose class position prevented them from realizing material success through school, work and other legitimate means. For Sutherland (1939) in his theory of differential association the link between society and criminal behaviour was related to exposure to ‘definitions favourable to the violation of law’. In particular, Sutherland proposed that ‘a person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law over definitions unfavourable to violation of law’ (quoted in Box 1981:110). Later, in the work of subcultural theorists such as Cohen (1955), Cloward and Ohlin (1960) and Young (1971a), attempts were made to combine the Mertonian emphasis on structural disjunctures and the Sutherlandesque focus on cultural transmission. The major, though not exclusive, focus of these studies was on lower-class delinquency. Finally, control theory has examined the connection between criminal behaviour and the weakness or absence of certain social bonds such as commitment to conformity, attachment to conventional others, involvement in conventional activities and belief in the legitimacy of particular rules.

Whether explicitly derived from his work or not the sociological theories considered above may be said to stand in the tradition of theorizing established by Durkheim in such works as Suicide (1951 (1897), and The Rules of Sociological Method (1982 (1895)). The behaviour in question, here criminality, is to be explained in terms of the principles of social-structural differentiation and determinism. Moreover:

Although we set out primarily to study reality, it does not follow that we do not wish to improve it; we should judge our researches to have no worth at all if they were to have only a speculative interest. If we separate carefully the theoretical from the practical problems, it is not to the neglect of the latter; but, on the contrary, to be in a better position to solve them.

(Durkheim 1964 (1893): 33)

A critique of correctional criminology and sociology

We see the failures of this correctional, social-problems-oriented approach to the study of crime as residing in three errors. Firstly, the attitude towards the study of crime is shaped from the outset and throughout the inquiry by an overriding concern to ‘do something about crime’. This concern is founded in an anxiety about the state of civil society which arose in the wake of the industrial revolution. ‘Positivistic’ social science in general and criminology in particular was conceived against the background of this anxiety about the perceived ‘evil consequences’ of industrialization. For example, what came to be known as ‘juvenile delinquency’ was problematic because it was taken as portending the greater evil of adult crime and that, in turn, was seen to threaten the very fabric of civil society with the prospect of anarchy (Houston 1978). The development of scientific inquiry into these phenomena was explicitly conceived as directed towards their amelioration (and thus to the relief of this anxiety). In the words of Comte, ‘savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour prévenir‘. Lukes has this to say about Comte's most famous follower:

Durkheim's notions of ‘egoism’ and ‘anomie’ were rooted in a broad and all-pervasive tradition of discussion concerning the causes of imminent social disintegration and the practical measures needed to avoid it — tradition ranging from the far right to the far left. His own approach was distinctive … The remedy lay neither in outdated traditionalist beliefs and institutions, nor in speculative and Utopian social schemes; the only way to solve ‘the difficulties of these crucial times’ … was the scientific way.

(Lukes 1975:198–199)

The anxiety expressed in positivistic social science persists in the correctional criminological studies reviewed above as well as in sociology more generally. Correctional criminology and sociology thus equate social and sociological problems, deriv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Sociology and crime
• 2 Constructing criminal law
• 3 Criminalization and domination
• 4 Ethnomethodology's law
• 5 Policing as symbolic interaction
• 6 The ethnomethodology of policing
• 7 The political economy of policing
• 8 Discipline, domination and criminal justice
• 9 Justice and symbolic interaction
• 10 Ethnomethodology in court
• 11 Crime and punishment
• 12 The functions of crime control
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index