Existentialist Criminology

Don Crewe, Ronnie Lippens

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134034338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Existentialist Criminology captures an emerging interest in the value of existentialist thought and concepts for criminological work on crime, deviance, crime control, and criminal justice.

This emerging interest chimes with recent social and cultural developments - as well as shifts in their theoretical consideration - that are oriented around contingency and unpredictability. But whilst these conditions have largely been described and analysed through the lens of complexity theory, post-structuralist theory and postmodernism, there exploration by critical criminologists in existentialist terms offers a richer and more productive approach to the social and cultural dimensions of crime, deviance, crime control and, more broadly, of regulation and governance. Covering a range of topics that lend themselves quite naturally to existentialist analysis - crime and deviance as becoming and will, the existential openness of symbolic exchange, the internal conversations that take place within criminal justice practices, and the contingent and finite character of resistance - the contributions to this volume set out to explore a largely untapped reservoir of critical potential.

Chapter 1

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Will to self-consummation, and will to crime

A study in criminal motivation

Don Crewe

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Introduction

When people ask me ‘What is criminology?’ — people I might meet in the pub, friends, family, spouse — I suspect the reply they expect is that it seeks to answer the question: ‘Why do people commit crime?’ Within the criminological community, we tend to lose track of the simplicity of the implications of this question. We think, ‘Well, we can't answer that question until we answer the question: “What is crime?”' We tend to ask a subtly different question: ‘What causes crime?’ The answer to that question gives rise to answers that tend to fit on a continuum between ‘criminals cause crime’, and ‘societies cause crime’. This is the distinction we teach to undergraduates, between classicist criminology and positivist criminology, and we know that the ramifications of adherence to one or another of these positions are immense. Fundamentally, the classicist position says that humans have free will, and therefore can be held responsible for their actions; the positivist position, similarly fundamentally, insists that humans are caused to behave in certain ways, through genetics, social learning, psychopathology, or the rigours of the free-market society (amongst other things), and therefore cannot be held responsible for their actions. This dichotomy is represented in the broader sociological world by the conflict that sets the concept ‘agency’ over against the concept ‘structure’. The classical position states that we have agency, the positivist tradition states that we are determined by the power of structure. We might say that the older position that humans are free, which grew out of the enlightenment, was overtaken by the structuralist positions of writers like Marx or Parsons (amongst others) for whom social structure was the determining force in human behaviour. The apparent failure of Marxist or Weberian structuralism, brought about in part by Western perceptions of Stalinism, and the failure of meta-narratives in general after the Second World War¹ (amongst other things), led sociological writers to attempt to find ways of steering a course between the two traditions, and thus structuration theories were developed. Giddens' structuration theory,² for example, suggests that agency and structures emerge simultaneously from our repetitive or ritual behaviour.

The point that I wish to stress here is that the two sides of the balance, agency and structure, one asserting itself at the expense of the other, are central to most contemporary sociological thinking. Even Foucault uses the ideas, and indeed, suggests that certain structures are capable of robbing the human being of all agency, producing what he calls ‘docilebodies'.³ This is also true of criminology. Some criminologists are of the belief that structure does not limit people's agency but that they are rationally calculating ‘free’ agents: they choose freely to commit crimes (some varieties of control theory — rational choice theory, for example). Others are of the belief that crimes are driven by social conditions and that, dependent upon those conditions, a person is more or less ‘caused’ to commit crimes: they are in some way determined by social structures to do so (early conflict criminologies, for example). Now we live in a sociological world where pure classicism or pure structuralism are unthinkable; most positions, at whatever point along the continuum between freedom or determination, rely upon the concepts of agency and structure: they exist in a zero-sum relationship with one another (that is, outside structuration theories).

There are, however, certain problems associated with the concept of agency. Furthermore, while we hang on to the notion of agency — because we can only talk about it in terms of the absence of its antithesis, structure — we cannot get off the continuum that lies between the classical view and the positivist view. If we are to talk meaningfully about criminal motivation — about ‘why people commit crime’ — we have to move away from the crude ‘he was free to choose, ergo he must be wicked’, ‘he was caused to do it, it's not his fault’. tit-for-tat arguments. We have to do this if we are genuinely to understand criminal motivation.

In this chapter I am going to talk about the agency part of the above dichotomy, and what I am going to do first is to say why I think that agency is not a particularly good concept for making sense of criminal motivation. So, what I'm going to do is to talk about an older concept, that of will, and suggest that it is a better tool for looking at criminal motivation. In other words, I suggest that we might conceive of human behaviour as being the product of constrained will. To do this, I'm going to examine what will is. I will found my examination of will on the nature of human being, and I do this for two reasons: first, because it allows me to suggest that my conception of will is useful in understanding human behaviour because it is a fundamental part of being human; and second, because it allows me to view will as a part of the way in which humans change. The latter I will do by dealing with ideas that have to do not just with being — being complete, being what we are, and being here — but with ideas that say that the necessary parts that make us what we are, whilst necessary, are not sufficient to make us what we will become. When someone commits a crime, they become someone who has committed that crime — they do something new.⁴ Furthermore, they didn't just do it by accident (usually), they chose to do it: they had a will to do it. Of course, we know that we can have a will to do things and be unable to do them: I would like to be on holiday by the sea all summer, but I can't because I haven't got the money or the time. These are constraints on my will. Some times we are caused to do things that are against our will. This is the positivist, structuralist side of the balance. I'm not going to talk about that in this chapter, although I will make allusion to some ideas concerning the nature of constraints upon our will.

Those familiar with the work of David Matza⁵ will know that he was particularly interested in the idea of will, and will probably be wondering why I should feel the need to revisit the idea. So, before I look at the nature of will in the abstract, I'm going to look at Matza's conception of the ‘will to crime’ in order that we may have some idea of how the concept ‘will’ has been treated criminologically. I shall then explore the concept of will and postulate a new expression that I will term ‘the will to self consummation’. I shall return to Matza's ‘will to crime’ and show that it needs to be reassessed in view of what I have proposed, leaving ‘will’ in the criminological sense merely the ‘will to transgress’ situationally negotiated norms. I shall begin, however, by looking at a particular problem with regard to the concept of ‘agency’ that leads me to abandon the conventional ‘agency’/‘structure’ dualism in favour of the conception of human behaviour being emergent from constrained ‘will’.

Agency

The concept ‘agency’ is usually set over against the term ‘structure’. In this dualism, agency represents an attempt to capture the freedom from determinism that writers have claimed is inherent in human behaviour. That is, that the agent is free to act in ways that conceptions reifying structure do not permit. In some accounts, agency is a mere synonym for action, yet in others agency is bound up with notions of free will. In either case, the conception is reliant upon completed actions as evidence of its existence — if one is taken to be unable to do a thing, one is taken not to have agency in that regard. This is not to say that this is untrue; clearly, if agency is that concept that speaks of concerns regarding the failure of structures to constrain us, then should those structures constrain us we are not possessed of that quality which expresses our freedom from such constraint. However, the most significant problem with the concept of agency arises not when we consider what it means to be constrained and therefore not in possession of it, but when we consider what it means to say that we are in possession of it.

For Giddens, agency equates to action⁶ and thus is a ‘stream of … causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the-world’.⁷ We are possessed of agency when we act in a way that exhibits the capacity to have acted otherwise,⁸ either through positive intervention or through forbearance.⁹ In other words, we are possessed of agency when we are not the subject of coercion or constraint. In sociological terms, the notions of coercion and constraint equate to elements of determination. This locution — ‘could have done otherwise’ — presents us with a serious problem. To suggest that someone could have done otherwise is to suggest that they could have chosen to do otherwise; that is, their choice was in no way constrained or coerced (determined) and thus, conventionally, the agent has free will. For most people, in commonsense language, I suspect, the idea of having free will means that they ‘to all intents and purposes' are free to choose; that is, they do not perceive any constraints that there might actually be upon their choices.

In common parlance, criminals are frequently said to be evil because they chose to commit a crime. Because they chose to commit a crime, they are fully responsible for their actions and thus are not entitled to the same claims to liberty or welfare as other people who have no choice. This (amongst other things) is taken to be the basis of our right to punish as a society. It is particularly the case where the doctrine of less eligibility is concerned.¹⁰ Poor people are taken, for example, to be poor through no fault of their own — they are determined, it is claimed; criminals, however, are seen to be able to choose freely to be criminals.

The public and policy-makers might feel that the criminal (for want of a better word) is perfectly free to choose between committing a crime or, for example, going peacefully to the football match. However, it is far from clear what we might be saying if, having chosen to commit a crime, we say that the criminal could have chosen to go to the football match. The phrase ‘could have done otherwise’ is problematic because it suggests free will means having the ability to choose without constraint or determination. When we think of constraint, the matter is moderately straightforward. I can think of many physical constraints upon my choice to commit a crime or go to the football match — there may be no tickets left, or they may be too expensive; the house I was intending to burgle has an alarm or is occupied or has a high wall — all the things that rational-choice theorists tell us deter me from committing a burglary — and those constraints may be absent. However, when we speak of the absence of determination, the matter is somewhat more difficult. If we say we are free to choose, I suspect what we really mean is that ‘to all intents and purposes' we feel ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Existentialism - freedom, being and crime
• 1 Will to self-consummation, and will to crime: a study in criminal motivation
• 2 Being accused, becoming criminal
• 3 Biaphobia, state violence and the definition of violence
• 4 Existentialism, edgework, and the contingent body: exploring the criminological implications of Ultimate Fighting
• 5 Scrounging: time, space, and being
• 6 White-collar offenders after the fall from grace: stigma, blocked paths and resettlement
• 7 ‘We just live day-to-day’: a case study of life after release following wrongful conviction
• 8 The seductions of conformity: the criminologicalimportance of a phenomenology of exchange
• 9 Existentialism and the criminology of the shadow
• 10 Towards existential hybridization? A contemplation on the Being and Nothingness of critical criminology
• Index