Crime, Justice and Social Democracy

International Perspectives

K. Carrington, M. Ball, E. O'Brien, J. Tauri, K. Carrington, M. Ball, E. O'Brien, J. Tauri

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137008695
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is a provocative collection of timely reflections on the state of social democracy and its inextricable links to crime and justice. Authored by some of the world's leading thinkers from the UK, US, Canada and Australia, the volume provides an understanding of socially sustainable societies.

Part I

Social Justice, Governance and Ethics

1

The Sustaining Society

Elliott Currie

Introduction

I have a lot of friends who have told me lately that they no longer read newspapers. This isn’t because they get their news on the internet now, but because they can’t stand to read news at all because the news is so grim. I haven’t gone that far, but I am sympathetic. It’s undeniable that reading the paper today is a fairly gruelling experience, because the news seems to be full of almost nothing but accounts of the various crises that afflict much of the planet. In particular, the global economic order most of us live under – so-called ‘free-market’ capitalism – seems to lurch from crisis to crisis and indeed often seems to be in a state of perpetual emergency.

Yet there is also a sense that there is not much anybody can do about it – which is part of why my friends don’t read the paper. There is a widespread sense that the alternatives to an out-of-control capitalism have also failed or are simply irrelevant in this new global age. The result is a kind of deep resignation – a profound pessimism, even among many progressive people, about the possibilities for a better society.

The theme of this volume is, of course, crime, justice and social democracy, and social democracy has long been the most prominent progressive alternative to unfettered capitalism. So the sense that we are stuck with the kind of world we now have – and that it is indeed likely to get worse – is in part a feeling that social democracy no longer offers a viable alternative – if in fact it ever did – and we are not sure anything else does either. It’s often said that social democratic politics as practiced by most official socialist or social democratic parties isn’t really an alternative at all – just business as usual, a slightly softened version of neoliberalism but one that is increasingly hard to distinguish from it. It’s said that social democracy has made little enduring difference in the character of modern industrial societies; and that it has shown itself to be politically unsustainable, economically unworkable, or both.

I want to offer a more positive and more hopeful assessment. But to do that I need to make a fundamental distinction between what I take to be some of the core principles or elements of the social democratic (or democratic socialist) vision, versus what social democratic or socialist parties in various countries actually do. Put another way, it’s crucially important to distinguish between social democracy with small letters ‘s’ and ‘d’ versus Social Democracy with capital letters. A huge amount of confusion has been sown by conflating these two very different things: and that confusion fuels the pervasive pessimism about the possibilities of building a good society.

There are many different variants of Social Democracy with capital letters – and it’s very true that not all of them have much to inspire us. But I think the core principles of small-letter social democracy do have much to inspire us – that they continue to offer a social vision that is both possible and well worth striving for. That is not to say that those principles are all we should strive for, or that it will be easy to achieve them. But it is to say that they remain a crucial platform on which to build.

Those core principles include, most centrally, a fundamental commitment to social and economic equality, and to making the best use of existing technological and human resources to advance human well-being – not just for some people, but for all people; and not just as a vaguely hoped-for byproduct of the pursuit of private economic gain, but as the first order of business for a truly civilised society. Small-letter social democracy allows plenty of room for market forces, but with the crucial proviso that markets should be the servants of larger social and human purposes, not the masters. That means that important realms of social life should operate largely if not entirely outside of the logic of private profit. People’s health and security should not be contingent on how they fare in the market economy. They are fundamental, universal rights – rights we possess by virtue of being members of the human community, not prizes we win or lose in the marketplace.

All of this is obviously very different from simply saying that we will let the logic of private profit drive the fortunes and shape the lives of most people and then, if we have any resources left over, we may use some of them to blunt the roughest edges of the struggle for existence – to pick up the pieces after the market has done its destructive work. Some versions of Social Democracy, of course, have historically adopted just that approach, and plenty of formally Social Democratic parties are doing so as we speak. But that’s not the kind of social democracy that embodies the principles that have been small-d social democracy’s chief contribution to the world. And I think the verdict is in on the results of this kind of approach historically. Because this approach holds the principles of social support and solidarity hostage to the fortunes of the private-profit economy, it is precisely when the ‘market’ becomes least able to provide reliably for people’s needs that the countervailing system of public supports is also stripped of its capacity to step in – creating a kind of vicious cycle in which market-subservient social democratic regimes are routinely ensnared. We can see that conundrum unfolding all around us in the current global recession, when social democratic governments have been forced willy-nilly into being the enforcers of a strategy of austerity for the many driven by the profits of the few.

Small-letter social democracy, by contrast, is based on a deeply rooted commitment to the values of human dignity, contribution and inclusion. It is not simply about salvaging people from the ongoing train wreck that is unfettered capitalism. It is about making the most of the human possibilities opened up by the technology and resources available to us at this point in human history. One part of this commitment involves ensuring a floor of material well-being below which no one, no matter where they started out, is allowed to fall, but that is far from being the whole story. The social democratic vision of the good society is not just about minimum requirements that we have to meet in order to keep people from truly desperate straits. As the great British democratic socialist R.H. Tawney put it 60 years ago, it is about ensuring that ‘within the limits set by nature, knowledge and resources’, we enable everyone to ‘grow to their full stature’ (Tawney, 1952: 235).

That kind of vision moves beyond the idea of maximising equality in some abstract or quantitative sense. It is a vision of society committed to nurturing and liberating human potential. Nature, knowledge, and resources do set limits. But those limits are not set in stone. What makes a society successful, in this vision, is its commitment to both pushing those limits ever outward and seeing to it that the resources and knowledge we have now are made to benefit everyone.

These principles haven’t been confined to formal social democratic or socialist parties or movements. Historically they have sometimes been put forward, and fought for, by others, including religious parties. But whatever their historical roots, it is when these principles have been most consistently put into practice that we have come closest to building what I call the ‘sustaining society’ – a society that really does provide, within the limits of nature and resources, the most nurturing context for human development and well-being. And I would argue that some actually existing societies have done a fairly impressive job on that score – especially given that they have tried to do it in the teeth of unrelenting hostility from those segments of society that oppose those principles, and in the context of a global economic order that those opponents have largely built and mostly run – and which they will go to almost any length to defend and expand.

No society has gone far enough toward that vision of the sustaining society. No society has completely vanquished the problems foisted on it by global inequality and insecurity or definitively overcome longstanding legacies of racism and sexism. I can’t say that any society has found a magic formula or a ‘plug and play’ model that the rest of us can apply in cookie-cutter fashion to our own societies. But I will say that, contrary to naysayers at all points on the political spectrum, those small-s social democratic principles matter: they have significantly and sometimes dramatically improved human well-being where they have been the most thoroughly implemented. The closer they come to being fully practiced, the closer we come to creating liveable, honourable and sustaining societies that ‘work’ in human terms.

We often talk about ‘what works’ when it comes to specific social programmes, like the rehabilitation of prisoners. But we can also speak of whole societies as ‘working’ or not working. And societies built on these core principles ‘work’ – at least in the sense that they are the closest thing to ‘successful’ societies, in human terms, in modern history. Most importantly, they beat the alternatives hands down: and the rumours of their death or growing irrelevance are greatly exaggerated. Lest I be accused of being a fuzzy-headed optimist, let me also say that I can’t guarantee that these principles will survive. But I can guarantee that if we don’t fight hard to preserve and extend them, as militantly and creatively as we can, they won’t survive. That’s why I think it is so important to talk about what small-letter social democracy has accomplished, and to challenge some myths about its failure or its obsolescence.

Let’s look first at the human impact of those principles. It is remarkable, by the way, how rarely we do this. Much of the vast literature on social democracy is all about the political history of Social Democratic parties, and sometimes about the narrowly economic impact of their policies. That is certainly important, but the deeper and more crucial question is whether and how much those principles have contributed to enhancing the well-being of real people in the real world. And we actually have a massive natural experiment to help us answer that question because some advanced industrial societies have gone pretty far down the road towards small-s social democracy, while others have fiercely resisted it, and still others are somewhere in the middle. The evidence from that experiment is hotly contested and there are all kinds of formidable issues of measurement and empirical interpretation that have to be grappled with and acknowledged. But I think the results of the experiment are basically in. ‘Small s-d’ societies, whatever the specifics of their political histories or policy regimes, ‘win’ on virtually every measure of social well-being – win by powerful margins when it comes to Tawney’s criterion of enabling people to rise to their ‘full stature’.

Some very basic and very striking numbers tell part of the story. Consider Denmark as an illustration. Denmark has been happily in the news recently because the Left has returned to power and they have elected the country’s first female prime minister. But long before this, of course, Denmark was one of the most prominent examples of a social democratic welfare state – a situation which a decade of conservative rule didn’t do all that much to change (see Obinger et al., 2010: chapter 2). What difference does that make for real people’s lives? Well, American children live in poverty at a rate almost eight times that of Danish children. If the United States had the Danish overall poverty rate, about 30 million fewer Americans would be poor – that is to say, about two thirds of the current total. If the United States had the Danish infant mortality rate – which is kept admirably low in part by universal and high-quality health care and in part by the reduction of poverty and social exclusion generally – one third of all the babies who die each year in America would live (if the United States had the Swedish infant death rate, two-thirds of those babies would live) (OECD, 2011).

How about violent crime? In 2011, the entire nation of Denmark, with a population of about five and a half million, chalked up 47 homicides, which is roughly half as many as the city of Oakland, California, near where I live, with 375,000 people, or one-fifteenth Denmark’s population (Statistics Denmark, 2012). If the United States as a whole enjoyed the Danish homicide rate, we would save something in the neighbourhood of 12,000 American lives a year, which is roughly twice as many Americans as have died during the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since we invaded Iraq in 2003 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2011).

I could go on and on with statistics like these and not just of course from Denmark – which I hasten to add is hardly without its own share of social problems. But there is a quicker way to learn the same lessons: buy a plane ticket. Go and walk around the worst neighbourhood you can find in Copenhagen (or Stockholm). See how people live. Then get back on the plane. Fly to Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit and walk around the worst neighbourhood there. Then if you in fact get out alive, take some time to reflect on what you think about the impact of social democratic policies – or the lack of them. In fact, I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse. Come to the United States and I will personally give you a tour of the dark side of rampaging unfettered capitalism that I guarantee will make your hair stand on end. The quick lesson, in short, is that if you believe that those social democratic principles are irrelevant, try living in a country that doesn’t have them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Social Justice, Governance and Ethics
• Part II  Penal Policy and Punishment
• Part III  The Legitimacy of Criminal Justice
• Part IV  Sex, Gender and Justice
• Part V  Indigenous Justice
• Part VI  Eco-Justice and Environmental Crime
• Part VII  Global Justice and Transborder Crimes
• Index