Limited Responsibilities

Social Movements and Criminal Justice

Tamar Pitch, John Lea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134883509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Limited Responsibilities explores the interaction between the criminal justice system and the wider concerns of political and social institutions, including the welfare state, social work and forensic psychiatry.
Using the key concept of `responsibility', Tamar Pitch critiques the classical theories of Anglo-American and Italian criminologies, examining the allocation of responsibilities to individuals and society. Looking at the shifting political relationship between criminal justice and the welfare system, Pitch considers the problems which arise in our understandings of responsibility, particularly in relation to the young and the mentally disabled. She also documents the centrality of responsiblity as an issue in women's struggles for legislation on sexual violence, as a paradigm of the politicisation of notions of crime, victimization and criminal responsibility.
Limited Responsiblities will be of interest to lecturers, students and professionals in criminology, social policy and women's studies.

1
Processes and products of social control

The use and abuse of a concept

The concept of social control has a long and controversial history not only within sociology, whose development it accurately mirrors, but also in political science, anthropology and social psychology. It is not my intention to retrace this history. Rather, in a book whose central focus of attention is the criminal justice system, I would like to single out, through an analysis of some of the applications of the concept, the ways in which it can be used to situate the criminal justice system itself and to understand aspects of it which have hitherto been rather hidden in the Italian literature.

Social control is a concept imported from the English speaking world and its current usage, both in everyday speech and in the social sciences, is relatively recent in Italy. I will deal in the next chapter with what I consider to be the specifically Italian aspects of the study of crime and the criminal justice system. Italian sociology in general appears to have touched only peripherally on questions which in other intellectual traditions come under the heading of social control. Rather, such questions have been constructed in a different way and therefore discussed under different headings. This has to do with the interplay between a specific cultural tradition and the particular development of questions which in other cultures are interpreted through the category of social control.

The term ‘social control’ derives from a tradition of philosophy and political theory whose roots lie within the framework of a complex decentralised democracy with an ethnic and cultural diversity. In such a context the term has performed differing and even contradictory tasks. It has formed the basis both of an account of the various forms of self regulation of the social system, and of the dynamics of social integration in a multi-ethnic society. Obviously I am referring here to the United States where the category of social control was not only coined for the first time (by E.A.Ross), at least as a central concept in sociology, but was adopted within the most diverse theoretical models, functioning as a description of, and as a response to, political, social and cultural questions which changed both over time and between particular fields of study.

The concept of social control theorises the problem of social order in fundamentally anti-Hobbesian terms. As the central issue in European social science for a century, the question of order was posed in Europe in terms of a relationship between the individual and society which is basically conflictual and in which human nature is by no means entirely socially determined. There is thus a double dualism, detectable in different ways both in Durkheim and in Freud, which tends to become obscured in the reconceptualising of the problem of social order as that of social control. It is the consequent fading of this dualism which helps to explain the continual transition, in the American social science tradition, from the macro to the micro levels of social control: from the regulation of the social system to the induction of the individual into social conformity. It is this fading, finally, which explains the semantic extension and the multiple uses of the interface of social control: the concept of deviance.

The concept of social control is, as I have noted, of relatively recent importation into Italian intellectual culture. It is being utilised today with a suspect abundance: suspect in my opinion because it betrays little awareness of the debates of which social control was and is the subject. Until not long ago most of the questions now being formulated in terms of social control were theorised in other ways: as questions having to do with power, domination and hegemony. To what new demands and/or changes in theoretical standpoint does the deployment of the concept of social control correspond?

REGULATION, CONFORMITY, CONSENSUS, COERCION

In a famous article Morris Janowitz (1975) spoke out in defence of a ‘high’ connotation which, in his words, the concept of social control possessed in the classical sociological tradition. The macro sociological origins of the term had, argued Janowitz, become successively banalised in order to identify the micro, or rather the psycho-social, processes involved in the induction of individuals into conformity with social norms. This supposed banalisation in reality is already implicit in the very transformation of the problem of social order into that of social control. It is therefore not so much a question of trivialisation as of privileging one of the several possible lines of enquiry implied in that transformation. Of course the choice of, or rather the exclusive emphasis on, the micro processes of social control identifies particular theoretical orientations different from those which would follow from an emphasis on the so called ‘macro’ side of the issue.

In a suggestive analysis Melossi (1983) situates the emergence of the problematic of ‘social control’ in two interrelated transitions: an historical transition from the late feudal absolutist and the classical nineteenth century liberal states to that of modern complex democracy, and a theoretical transition from the science of politics and law to social science. When social order is seen as a natural result of the free interplay of economic forces in which the role of the state is limited to that of guarantor—a model, as Melossi points out, both normative in the form of the ideology of ‘laisser faire’, and interventionist in allocating to political organisation the task of removing all resistance to capitalist development—the state itself is perceived only as law, that is, as that which guarantees juridically the ‘natural rights’ of the bourgeois citizen. But when the problem is posed of a law which not only reflects, but also actively intervenes in, the functioning of the market, such a system of law cannot be understood simply as the expression of civil society, but refers directly to ‘the state’ as an— ethically superior—institutional entity.

The spread of democracy during the later 19th and 20th centuries through the enlargement of political citizenship and the recognition and institutionalisation of social conflict dissolved the unity of the ethical state and displaced the problem of social order onto new terrains and new bodies of knowledge. Such circumstances formed the background to the development of European sociology. But it was especially the North American social sciences which confronted these issues from the standpoint of social control. This, according to Melossi, was due to the anti-statist tradition of American political theory and to a cultural environment marked by pragmatism and by its attention to the active and processual aspects of human experience. The problem of social order, or how ethical cohesion and social organisation arise in a non coercive way, is transformed into the problem of social control.

I would like to emphasise three aspects of this transformation. First, and this is the aspect underlined by Melossi, is the substitution in the American sociological tradition of social control for the state, by contrast with the European tradition in which the latter retains its centrality. One of the most interesting consequences of this substitution seems to me to be that of decentralisation. The sites of the production of social order multiply, diffuse and disperse themselves outside of any hierarchy. This poses nevertheless a fundamental problem: that of explaining, identifying or reinforcing the coherence between the various forms of social control in the absence of a central, hierarchically co-ordinated process.

The second aspect relates to the attenuation, in the concept of social control, of the conflict between individual and society, human nature and culture. The theory of symbolic interactionism, which draws its foundations from the social psychology of G.H.Mead (1966), in its turn closely linked to pragmatist philosophy, conceives the personality as the product of communicative interaction and therefore as entirely social. This does not signify a disappearance of the tension between individual and society, rather the nature of that tension changes in such a way as to no longer presuppose a fundamental irreducibility of one to the other. Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical and methodological current which runs through the entire American sociological tradition. In various interpretations and deployments it inspired the Chicago School (and, in conjunction with other theoretical currents of European origin, such as phenomenology, later tendencies deriving from the Chicago School—for example, ethnomethodology and labelling theory) just as it inspired structural functionalism.

The third aspect concerns the semantics of order and control. To re-theorise the problem of social order as a problem of social control implies a displacement of emphasis from mechanisms of government ‘of’ actions whose social nature is prior to and independent of such regulation, to processes of intervention ‘in’ events which only derive their social nature as a result of such intervention. This shift entails both a subjectivisation and a depoliticisation of the process of control. It becomes subjective in the sense that control refers back to interventions, by something or someone, oriented to, or interpretable by reference to, goals and values. It is de-politicised because these interventions are generalised and dispersed and their analysis starts from the question of ‘how do they function?’ rather than to that of ‘what type of order do they produce?’¹

In Europe, as in the United States, it is the non-coercive aspects of the production of social order which are of interest. But where, as in Europe, the state remains the central question, these aspects can only be understood as founded on domination. When, on the other hand, social control is substituted for the State, this foundation tends to disappear. Again, two general consequences of these different approaches can be identified. The first has to do with the identification of the object of analysis itself. Much of what in the American sociological tradition is analysed through the category of social control, in the European tradition is the subject matter of political science, political sociology and the sociology of organisation. In other words, traditional European reflection on the question of order has confronted the problems of social integration as institutional and political problems rather than as problems of conformity and deviance.

The second consequence is that social control, in the dominant American tradition, indicates a generative—as opposed to repressive—process. Various theoretical schools see social control as productive of consciousness, personality, identity, organisation and as implying complex processes of interaction.

Social control involves therefore not only the macro processes of social organisation and social integration, but also the micro processes which induce individual conformity or which, to put it another way, produce consensus or shared meanings as an end result. The emphasis on the processual and productive aspects of social control is accentuated in those types of analysis which focus on the dynamics of the production of meaning. It is less evident in those in which the sharing of meaning—consensus—is explicitly taken as a starting point. Among the first are those interpretative models derived from the classical version of symbolic interactionism, rooted in the social psychology of G.H.Mead, while among the second, structural functionalism as developed both by Merton and Parsons is pre-eminent.

In the social psychology of Mead the self is formed and transformed by the individual subject in a process of self reflection on the ways in which she imagines others to perceive her. The relation with others is therefore constitutive of the self to the extent to which the latter, through a process of interpretation, adopts attitudes of significant others in specific situations. The fundamental process at work here is that of communication mediated by symbols and primarily by language. The emphasis is on the self-reflective aspect of interaction. This process of self reflection leaves room for the interpretation of what makes communication possible: the sharing of symbols and meanings. This process of interpretation is the dynamic aspect of interaction. The sharing of meanings—consensus—can then be analysed not as a presupposition but as a product of continuous negotiations. Social control, in this perspective, becomes a property of any interaction. It is self-control, or rather the process of internalisation by the self of the attitudes of others through confrontation with, and adjustments to, the latter. Social control proceeds from self reflection on the effects of interaction.²

It is this negotiated character of norms which disappears in structural functionalism. The Parsons of The Social System (Parsons 1965) resolves the Hobbesian problem of order in radically anti-Hobbesian terms. If order, which is here taken to mean consensus, is what the theory has to explain, it does so only by taking consensus itself as its presupposition. Consensus—that is, collective orientation through shared values—is a functional prerequisite of the general system of action. It is not therefore really the process of the construction of consensus that the theory sets out to analyse, but rather how such consensus maintains and reproduces itself. The interpenetration of the personality and cultural systems takes place through the complete internalisation of values by the personality. Such values then constitute the motivational structure of the personality. This is, it could be said, a circular solution. It lacks the self-reflexive dynamic and the anchoring in a specific situation characteristic of interactionist psychology. It is the entirely social self which is in evidence here (see Giddens 1979 among others) such that, as has been noted, one cannot speak of action in Parsons so much as of behaviour or rather conduct entirely determined by normative role expectations. The processes of socialisation are at one and the same time processes of social control. The prototypical mechanism of ‘secondary’ social control, or response to deviance, is, for Parsons, psychotherapy as the model of a relationship which attempts to reconstruct the missing motivational links to values through a technique which makes deliberate use of those attitudes of detachment and sustained support typical of a process of successful socialisation.³

In the American sociological tradition therefore, the concept of social control describes a domain⁴ of processes and institutions in which the criminal justice system, indeed law itself, occupy a peripheral and residual place.⁵ They are those processes and institutions of ‘expert’ intervention which, by taking charge of aspects of social behaviour defined as problematic, both reinforce and substitute for the agencies of primary socialisation. Their mode of operation is a repetition of the forms of socialisation themselves. Very early on (see Ross 1922, and the subsequent development of the Chicago School), and at the same time as these institutions developed and multiplied, the question of social order is established as that of the production of motivations for action rather than the censuring and sanctioning of behaviour.⁶

By contrast, the adoption of the concept of social control by a theoretical perspective characterised by some form of dualism has different results. Here control is interpreted as either a process of prohibition and interdiction or as the production of ‘inauthentic’ motivations, or both. In all three cases it is assumed that the source of control is exogenous, either to the social system as such, in the form of ‘nature’, of environment to the social system, or else as that area of the social which is dominated and colonised. The effect is either to relocate the diffusion of social control as a process which is extraneous or overdetermined with respect to the individual actor or to denote by control only those exogenous processes which intervene to alter supposedly ‘self-governing’ forms of regulation which are then assumed to be expressive of the true needs and interests of the actors involved. In this theoretical scenario the criminal justice system, even more than law, is central.⁷ By starting from the centrality of the criminal justice system and from the logic of censure, sanction and repression which are imputed to it, other processes of social control, located elsewhere and operating with different dynamics, are understood as auxiliary processes which function to produce inauthentic motivations or which censure behaviour by other means.⁸

These two treatments of social control have to do more with the different political cultures from which they emanate than with any significant difference in the importance of punitive institutions and the dynamics of power in American and European societies, even though of course these cultures themselves arise from different experiences of conflict and its management. It is sufficient to think of Keynesianism and the ‘New Deal’ on the one hand and of European fascism on the other. Today however, these two interpretations coexist in countries with similar political configurations and comparable proliferations of specialist institutions oriented to intervention in, and assumption of responsibility for, social problems. Indeed, the second—European —understanding of social control achieved considerable popularity in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. What took place in fact during this period was on the one hand the adoption of the concept of social control in European sociological and political debates, and on the other the penetration of dualistic models into the North American sociological environment. It is precisely this process of interpenetration of the two traditions which has been conducive to an elaboration of social control as concerned with processes and institutions which are simultaneously totalizing and oppressive.

THE MERITS AND DEMERITS OF DUALISM: TOWARDS A DEFINITION

For a long time the two interpretations of social control have been representative, the first of a consensual and the second of a conflict-oriented theory of social dynamics. The literature on this is enormous (see the bibliography in Pitch 1982) and refers to a context of debate, now quite dated, typical of the early 1970s.

The penetration of at least the terminology of social control and deviance into Italian sociology—which has always had a strongly dualistic theoretical horizon —is due, it seems to me, to two main factors. On one side the explosion, since the late 1960s, of a wide spectrum of social conflicts involving previously unknown social actors and taking place very much outside traditional areas of struggle. In such conflicts the term ‘deviance’ lent itself, and was often utilised by the protagonists themselves, to describe and integrate a diversity of conflicts into a common frame of reference: this frame of reference was the sharing of a common antagonistic subjectivity or of a situation of oppression to which the working class gave meaning and practical expression. ‘Social control’ thus served to identify a range of processes and institutions much more extensive than that invoked by the category of ‘repression’. The attribution of social control became a weapon for actors involved in conflict who ‘discovered’ hitherto unrevealed modes and sites of oppression, or denounced as oppressive social conditions and situations hitherto considered normal.

The second reason for the popularity of the terminology of social control is that it has enabled the coexistence of custodial institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals etc. and more decentralised forms of organisation and treatment oriented approaches to social problems, to be grasped as different aspects of a unified strategy. However, although this resulted in a critical and vigilant attitude towards decentralisation, it often led those concerned primarily with the criminal justice system to accord the latter a central and fundamental role in the shaping of the new processes.

Dualistic paradigms of social control grasp the standpoints of the actors of social conflicts but pretend to found them in some outside place: in nature, ‘real’ needs, ‘unrepressed’ desires, contradictions of the system etc., from which the ‘true’ meaning of these standpoints can be derived. Dualist paradigms make possible the identification of ‘points of resistance’, which allows the attribution of rationality to conflicts and the taking into account of the dynamics of power. But conflict and interaction remain abstract dynamics and the two poles of the dichotomy—actors and their ‘real’ needs on the one hand, the system of social control on the other—remain mutually non-reducible, thereby consigning both to an a priori status which itself negates a reading in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to the English edition
• Preface to the Italian edition
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Processes and products of social control
• 2: Studying the 'criminal question'
• 3: Radical enquiries, unfounded policies
• 4: Rather riders than horses?
• 5: The question of juvenile deviance
• 6: Criminal responsibility and mental illness
• 7: From oppression to victimisation
• 8: From victimisation to autonomy
• 9: A politics of sovereignty
• Notes
• Bibliography