Hypercrime

The New Geometry of Harm

Michael McGuire

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135330972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Rechtstheorie & -praxis

Hypercrime develops a new theoretical approach toward current reformulations in criminal behaviours, in particular the phenomenon of cybercrime. Emphasizing a spatialized conception of deviance, one that clarifies the continuities between crime in the traditional, physical context and developing spaces of interaction such as a 'cyberspace', this book analyzes criminal behaviours in terms of the destructions, degradations or incursions to a hierarchy of regions that define our social world.

Each chapter outlines violations to the boundaries of each of these spaces - from those defined by our bodies or our property, to the more subtle borders of the local and global spaces we inhabit. By treating cybercrime as but one instance of various possible criminal virtualities, the book develops a general theoretical framework, as equally applicable to the, as yet unrealized, technologies of criminal behaviour of the next century, as it is to those which relate to contemporary computer networks. Cybercrime is thereby conceptualized as one of a variety of geometries of harm, merely the latest of many that have extended opportunities for illicit gain in the physical world.

Hypercrime offers a radical critique of the narrow conceptions of cybercrime offered by current justice systems and challenges the governing presumptions about the nature of the threat posed by it.

Runner-up for the British Society of Criminology Book Prize (2008).

Chapter 1

Crime and space

Space is a practiced place.

(De Certeau, 1984, p. 117)

Human lives are decisively shaped by the spatio-temporal medium in which they move and express themselves culturally. The implications of this have been increasingly emphasised by a number of contemporary social theorists who have drawn upon the seminal work of writers such as Simmel (1997), Inis (1962), McLuhan (1964), Harvey (1989), Lefebvre (1991), Virilio (1977) and others to develop our understanding of the ways in which these influences might operate. Simmel’s examinations of the sociology of space attempted to sketch an outline of what he called a ‘social geometry’ which utilised variables such as distance, proximity, boundary, movement and clustering in order to theoretically ground social interaction. His argument that ‘the sensory proximity or distance between people who stand in some relationship to one another’ will affect the ‘liveliness of sociological interactions’ (Simmel, 1997, p. 151) provides a simple example of the way social interaction appears to be necessarily bounded by certain basic spatial constraints. Communication with someone requires their ears or eyes to be within a fixed auditory or visual range; touching someone requires that their bodies be within a 2–3-foot radius; perceiving objects requires that they be presented in space as having a certain shape, a certain degree of tactile resistance, a certain degree of optical transparency and so on. Likewise, to act or do anything at all requires that act to have a duration – the length of time required to complete it. Whilst the role of spatial constraints such as proximity in experiencing phenomena like ‘neighbourliness’ or ‘foreignness’ is, as Simmel (1997, p. 138) reminds us, strongly related to ‘psychological contents’, there are many interactions ‘realised in such a way that the spatial form in which this happens justifies special emphasis’.

However one reads the role of spatiality – in psychological or physical terms, as something determining of or determined by social interaction – clear limitations upon the way societies as a whole are able to construct and articulate themselves seem able to be drawn from an examination of the spatial context in which they are embedded. For our purposes of course the limitations imposed by any social geometry are relevant to the ways that deviant behaviours are shaped. In many ways these determinations seem even more straightforward. It is clear, for example, that a wallet cannot be removed from someone’s pocket outside the spatial region determined by the length of the would-be thief ’s reach. A rape, attack or physical molestation do not seem able to be directed at someone who is too far away to be grabbed or manhandled. Traditional frauds or deceptions have usually required the victim to be within a certain optical and auditory range for their success. And deviant acts, once committed, cannot then be temporally reversed – no matter how many feelings of guilt make the culprit wish that they could.

Deviant behaviour, however subjective its construction, must almost by definition be spatially located since deviant behaviours are always directed across space and between distinctly located actors. Contemporary statements about the ‘negations of space’ (Punday, 2000) or ‘timeless time’ (Castells, 1997, p. 460) need therefore to be understood very carefully – as metaphors about transitions in contemporary spatial and temporal experience, not as descriptions of the disappearance of spatial or temporal constraints upon those experiences. Castell’s claim that ‘simplistic notions of (a) systematic covariance between space and culture’ have been ‘put to rest’ (1997, p. 60) is only credible to the extent that there cannot be absolute or invariant systemacities between these two variables. Whilst a social geometry of deviant behaviours could never be properly axiomatic, it could indicate influences which are structurally formative and therefore prove culturally informative.

Space, time and crime

Lefebvre (1991, p. 2) argued that mathematicians had ‘. . . appropriated space and time’ so that the geometry they produced was merely that of ‘an empty area’. But superimposed on this are always:

Successive stratified and tangled networks . . . paths, roads, railways, telephone links and so on . . . Each network or series or sequence of links – and therefore each space . . . is produced, and serves a purpose.

(Lefebvre, 1991, p. 403)

The basis of this spatial production, he argued, lay in social life and in this way Lefebvre’s views were partly anticipated by Kant’s ‘Copernican’ revolution in thought. Kant’s revolution (Horstmann, 1976) was directed precisely against the idea of a world where the spatio-temporal medium was something inhabited passively, as a form absolutely external to us. Instead, the spatio-temporal relations and orderings we experience are products of fundamental ways in which our cognitive systems impose themselves upon that experience. This makes the experience of space a profoundly social one. As Simmel (1997, p. 138) puts it: ‘Kant defines space . . . as the possibility of being together.’ The theme is one that has been constantly revisited. For Merleau-Ponty this fact comes down to the ineluctability of our embodiment for: ‘our body is not primarily in space: it is of it’ (1962, p. 148) so that we: ‘. . . grasp external space through our bodily situation’ (1964, p. 5). Since embodiment is profoundly ‘intercorporeal’ it is necessarily a located, social experience. Indeed, even our subjective mental life can be argued to depend upon the positing of some ‘generalised other’ (Mead, 1934, p. 195), which situates our attitudes within ‘interpersonal processes’ (Thrift, 1995, p. 17) as much spatial as they are social, a theme further developed by both Garfinkel (1967) and Goffman (1959).

If our nature partly consists in being embodied, spatio-temporally located beings then it is reasonable to suppose that every kind of social interaction, not least deviant ones, must be informed by this fact. Simmel’s conception of a social geometry is just one example of a theoretical position that attempts to make some practical uses of this insight. Other social scientists have displayed similar inclinations. Durkheim’s work, for example, clearly implied that urban space and its associated forms of organisation may elicit different behavioural patterns than those associated with less concentrated spatial agglomerations such as rural settlements. More recently, anthropologists such as Edward Hall have made more specific attempts to explain how individuals deploy space as an aspect of culture. In particular, his theory of ‘proxemics’ (cf. Hall, 1966 and 1976) emphasises how our innate sense of distance modifies the way we interact socially. Donald Black (1976) proposed his own version of a ‘social geometry’ with variables such as the ‘horizontal’ (which determines the extent of social interactions), or the ‘vertical’ (which determines the distribution of social resources). (See Bernard (2002) for a critique of Black’s views in criminology.)

A key trend in the application of spatial thinking to the explanation of social phenomena – one that will play a central role in the concept of hyperspatialisation that follows – is the way in which contemporary shifts in the experience of space and time are reorganising social relations. A number of writers have pursued this theme. Harold Innis (1962) contrasted face-to-face interaction with an increasing prevalence of remote interaction – an idea taken up by writers such as Calhoun (1992). Innis’ ideas were a huge influence upon McLuhan’s discussions of the ‘global embrace’ of communication which are responsible for ‘abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’ (McLuhan, 1964, p. 3). In turn, both anticipate the kinds of social reconfigurations referred to by David Harvey in terms of ‘time-space’ compression, a phenomenon he locates historically in ‘the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 284). Giddens (1991) suggested a longer term basis for changes to our experience of time and its measurement, showing how culture was radically altered by the experience of new temporal mechanisms such as clocks and timetables. For Virilio (1986), social interaction has always been a phenomenon shaped by our changing experiences of speed, a fact that has been of especial importance in the age of mechanised transport. This theme has been taken up by writers such as Thrift (1996) who talk in terms of the relative mobilities of different societies. In turn theorists such as De Certeau (1984), Carey (1989) and Poster (1995) have all made important contributions to our understanding of the way that changing modes of spatial practice are central to the formation of new social relations.

Criminologists have not ignored such ideas. A central trend in explanations of deviance has of course been to consider deviant behaviour in terms of factors internal to social actors – maladjustment, psychological or physical malfunction and so on. But external contexts have also played an important explanatory role. Variables such as class, gender or social labelling processes are familiar enough resources in this context but appeals to the spatial medium in which such acts are embedded have also been invoked on occasions. The ‘cartographic’ criminologists (Smith, 1986, p. 3; Hayward, 2004, p. 88) of the nineteenth century such as Quetelet (1842) or Rawson (1839) saw correlations between spatial patterns and offending patterns and some, such as Guerry (1833), worked directly with geographers in the production of their analyses. However, their work was soon sidelined by Lombroso’s ‘biological turn’ in crime analysis and it was not until the rapidly mutating urban environments of the early twentieth century in the USA began to attract the attention of social theorists that spatial explanations became fashionable again. One of the prime justifications for the Chicago School’s spatial conceptualisations of deviant activity, in particular their famous ‘concentric zones’ model, was that it appeared to yield evidence of clear causal patterns. For example, it appeared to legitimise correlations between offending frequencies and specific kinds of urban location. Thus, where urban space was at its most contested, turbulent and unstable (the so-called zone of transition), there was a higher probability of deviance occurring. Their model implied distinct orderings within social space, and associated deviant outcomes with the way the space was occupied (Park et al., 1925; Shaw & McKay, 1942).

The Chicago School model has been heavily criticised, both then and now (Chambliss & Seidman, 1971; Downes & Rock, 2003, p. 75). But while Chicago School theorists never argued that location was an exhaustive factor in explanations of deviance, it was clear that their model was often too specific, thereby limiting its range and application. This meant that it failed to go where its logic suggested it might and to embrace a range of other socially formed spaces, beyond transition zones, that might serve to nurture deviance. For example, corporate spaces, domestic spaces, media spaces and so on all plausibly relate to distinct but under-theorised formations. However, in spite of the many criticisms, one central construct remained influential among theorists and policy makers. This was the idea that certain spatial preconditions may affect clustering patterns in deviant behaviour – so-called ‘crime hot-spots’. By the 1980s, when developments in statistical modelling techniques coincided with a new period of urban fragmentation, attention turned again to the application of spatial conceptions in crime and crime control. As Cohen noted at the time, a discernible drift within criminology began – one that turned ‘away from individuals (and) toward spatial and temporal aspects of crime . . . ecology . . . defensible space’ (Cohen, 1985, pp. 146–8).

That trend soon turned into a flood. A variety of work (see for example Sherman et al., 1989, or Nasar and Fisher, 1993) focused increasingly upon the situational as a way of thinking about and dealing with crime. Statistical techniques such as cluster analysis (for example, McGurk et al., 1981), or Log-Linear Analysis (for example, Crowley & Adrian, 1992) helped refine the search for spaces that could be ‘controlled’ or ‘defended’ (Newman, 1972). Whilst such spaces were largely mathematical abstract constructions, the search for clustering patterns was expedited by the arrival of tools more rooted in concrete processes, in particular of course GIS or geographical information systems (Harries, 1999; Chainey & Ratcliffe, 2005). The study of spatial influence also went beyond the study of ‘hotspots’. For example, the way in which offenders select the sites of their crimes was explained in terms of the purposeful comparison of alternatives by offenders or by their ‘routine activities’ (Cohen & Felson, 1979).

The influence of such trends has been mixed. On the one hand the drive toward ever greater levels of mathematical rigour creates a pressure for social geometries of deviance in their most literal – that is, rigidly axiomatic – sense. Verma and Lodha’s recent (2002) highly formalised spatial analysis of criminal events is one example. Drawing on work such as Brantingham and Brantingham (1978) their ‘topological’ approach goes beyond the twodimensional grids of simple cluster analysis so as to locate crime events within multiple spatial, legal and other dimensions where:

. . . incidents could be seen as the manifestation of movement patterns, routine activities, statutory and administrative laws and socio-economic and demographic characteristics associated with those place-time-law and people dimensions.

(Verma & Lodha, 2002)

Impressive though the resulting models can be, there must again be a certain amount of scepticism about the kinds of ‘appropriation’ of space by mathematics which Lefebvre cautioned against. As Hayward counsels, rigidly mathematical ‘geographies of crime’ centred upon statistical co-variations represent ‘nothing less than the deformation of public space, the hollowing out of the urban environment’ something which has ‘subsequently resulted in the hollowing out of the offender’ (Hayward, 2004, p. 101). As far as mainstream criminology is concerned however, there is simply no other theoretical role to be played by spatial concepts. The ‘question of space’ now largely reduces to ways of regulating it, based upon quantitative patterns which relate offences to locations and times (see Lersch (2004) for a recent example of this view).

By contrast a broader view, able to draw upon these mathematical insights but with a more anthropocentrically centred spatial analytic, seems to offer an equally fruitful line of inquiry. But writers such as Simmel present insights which, though rich, are somewhat fragmentary, lacking the systematicity offered by these more formalised approaches. As a result their conclusions can often seem incomplete – a point Foucault himself concedes: ‘Geography acted as support . . . for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate . . . (but) I either left the question hanging, or established a series of arbitrary connections’ (1980, p. 77).

It seems clear then that any use of spatial notions in criminological explanation needs to be at once systematic, but open ended. Equally well, as Simmel showed, a great deal can be illustrated by the use of a few relatively simple but rich spatial concepts. An example of such a concept in Foucault’s work was one that Deleuze saw as key to understanding contemporary transitions in spatial experience – one that might, in turn, relate to new geometries of harm. This was the idea of spatial enclosure and the degree of permeability of any boundaries. For Foucault, enclosure was fundamental to the disciplinary order he theorised. As seen in environments like the prison and the factory, the role of enclosure was, as Deleuze points out: ‘. . . (to) concentrate: to distribute in space, to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose affect will be greater than the sum of component forces’ (1992, p. 1).

Just as crime found rich feeding grounds in the enclosed, narrow spaces of the new urban environments, the parallel punitive response – confinement – deployed enclosed space as a way of controlling deviant behaviour. Given this, transitions between different orders of enclosure become a useful metaphor for mapping transitions in both deviance and control. In particular, Deleuze suggests that it is the expansion of enclosures into network spaces that provides the underlying dynamic which turns disciplinary societies into control societies. For just as enclosures act to control behaviour in a way similar to molds, the dilution of enclosure and the opening up of space shapes behaviour in a different way. In this more open-ended, dynamic context:

Controls are a modulation, like a self deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

(Deleuze, 1992, p. 2)

Identifying these more subtly qualitative effects of spatiality upon deviance enables us to see beyond a spatial analysis of crime rooted solely in the statistical analysis of crime locations. In particular, the invocation of an opening of enclosures into open-ended networks makes it clearer how distinctions between crime control and crime production are being elided and eroded to produce the hypercrime society theorised in this book. For example, Stan Cohen’s earlier vision of social control contained in his metaphor of the ‘net’ (1985, p. 255) can be specifically distinguished from Deleuze’s in terms of the differing spatial articulations of their views. For while Cohen seems to see the contemporary erosion of distinctions between criminality and noncriminality in terms of a ‘filling in’ of space (the control net widens as it simultaneously narrows it’s meshes), Deleuze’s idea centres upon the rhizomatic decentrings of space as an explanation. That is, as control spaces are opened up from enclosures to open networks the traditional social roles that mark out criminal systems (the law breaker and law abider) become harder to distinguish because absolute positions within the rhizome are harder to maintain. Rather than one location indicating a specific social role in virtue of its clear separation from another location, social roles ‘bleed’ into each other continuously across the modulations of a multiply connected space. Just as the infinite divisibility of space questioned by Zeno’s paradox means that the hare and the tortoise can never arrive at the definite location of the finishing line and so complete the race, there is no point on the line between offenders and protectors which can be marked out as a definite point of separation between them. Instead they are ‘comingled’ into the kinds of hybrids discussed by Latour (1993) and which criminologists have begun to become increasingly interested in (Lippens, 2001; Hallsworth, 2002; Stevens, 2004; Brown, 2006) On this view the meshes of the net do not narrow or widen, they ‘transmute’ as Deleuze puts it. In turn, as the crude methodologies of deviance control by enclosure are modified by network space, more subtle and continuous approaches for the regulation of individuals arise. For once networked, deviant behaviours can increasingly be controlled by means of the network, from any point within it. New mechanisms such as tagging, CCTV, identity cards and the like serve to modulate spatial movement and access in ways that eschew (physical) enclosure by signifying a new regime of control.

At this point it is worth restating an earlier note of caution. It ought not to be concluded that because we have a spatial modelling of deviance we also have a causal account of such behaviour. Space must (of course) be populated for there to be the kinds of motivations and behaviours which produce criminality. Particularised facts about a society, its hierarchies, its beliefs and norms inevitably continue to play a crucial explanatory role. But neither need the two be completely separate. Psychological causes of behaviour such as motivations and intentions can, as we saw Simmel suggest, have fruitful connections to space if only from their role as a way of ‘connecting sensory impulses . . . into uniform interpretations’ (1997, p. 138). Social geometries, insofar as they can offer us any insight about the causes of deviant behaviour, are primarily related to constraining effects and their basis in social interaction.

The consensual hallucinations of a ‘cyberspace’

The consensual hallucinations of a ‘cyberspace’ One immediate advantage of a clearer focus upon interaction is that it enables us to do without the dubious explanatory resource of a ‘cyberspace’ to explain crime effected by communication devices. Koppell (2000) nicely summarises the basic conceptual flaw in assuming that, because there are new ways in which social interaction can occur, we are thereby committ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Crime and space
• Chapter 2 The making of hypercrime
• Chapter 3 Proximity 0: Body space
• Chapter 4 Proximity 1: Property space
• Chapter 5 Proximity 2: Local space
• Chapter 6 Proximity 3: Global space
• Chapter 7 Shaping space
• End space
• Notes
• Bibliography