David Downes on Crime and Punishment

Tell me about Durkheim’s Suicide

 

This is a great taproot for modern theories of crime in the anomie tradition, anomie being a state lacking social and moral cohesion. It was Durkheim who, in this book, did most to establish sociology as a subject in its own right, by showing how suicide, that supremely individual act, varied in relation to social pressures. He stressed the pursuit of ‘infinite aspirations’ as generating higher rates of anomic suicide, due to the weakening of moral regulation in the wake of economic boom as well as slump. Suicide also rose as social bonds weakened due to ‘egoism’ – there is a higher suicide rate in Protestant countries than there is in Catholic ones. And, counter-intuitively, the rate falls when social integration strengthens, as in time of war. His theories of crime, deviance and control are intensely relevant today in the midst of financial crisis following the crash of 2008. In The Division of Labour in Society, he focused on the ‘non-contractual elements in contract’ – trust, integrity and moral obligations – as the prime source of social cohesion in economic relations. Elementary sociology but ignored by, or unknown to, economists, for whom Durkheim should be compulsory reading. Feral bankers are a far greater threat to civil peace than feral children. Even the neo-conservative Francis Fukayama prefaced his book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995) with a quotation from Durkheim.

 

Crime in Durkheim’s view is intimately bound up with the overall nature of society.

 

This sounds quite bleak.

 

Well, Durkheim was actually optimistic. He looked forward to the happy ending of organic solidarity.

 

Robert Merton Americanised anomie theory in the 1930s, arguing that the strain to anomie was integral to the culture of the USA, as all are encouraged to aspire to the goal of ‘money-success’ whilst only a minority can attain it. In the post-World War II period, the conundrum was to explain rising crime in the context of growing prosperity. In 1960, Cloward and Ohlin integrated Merton’s approach with new conceptions of subculture to fashion a compelling theory of what drives lower-class youths to diverse forms of gang formation: basically, differential opportunities to succeed materially due to structured social inequality. The book proved the basis for a major social experiment on the Lower East Side of New York, Mobilisation for Youth, to expand job opportunities for the most disadvantaged. An enormous $12.5 million was invested in the project in the 1960s and it proved an inspiration for much of the War on Poverty under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Though criticised as over-schematic, the theory retains great force as an explanatory framework, and lends itself well to cross-national study. That is, when opportunities are made available they are seized.

 

What opportunities?

 

Jobs. And not shit work jobs, but real training and apprenticeship. In the end it ran out of funds and collapsed. In fact, my own entry into the criminological field was an attempt to apply their analysis to delinquency in London’s East End.

 

And?

 

Well, this was in the early 1960s and in Britain we had full juvenile employment, so what we found chimed with Cloward and Ohlin’s theories. That’s not to say that it was a bed or roses but there was a lower level of violence and gang membership than in the US. Four decades later, in the wake of de-industrialisation and the weakening of working-class institutions, combined with the upsurge of what Oliver James termed the ‘winner/loser culture’, we are seeing far greater rates of violence and youths tending towards gang-like formations. These things were constrained by class solidarity in the post-war period and we expected crime to fall with the increasingly comprehensive welfare state and as prosperity grew. Crime had always been associated with poverty, and yet crime suddenly started rising in the mid-1950s, peaking in the mid-1990s.

 

It’s fallen since then, has it? I would have thought the opposite.

 

It has fallen extraordinarily and beyond all expectations. Victim surveys, which are probably more accurate than police statistics, say crime is back to the levels of the mid-1980s.

 

Why?

 

Well before 1993 the Conservatives had reduced the prison population, persuaded by a 1991 White Paper that declared that prison was ‘an expensive way of making bad people worse’. Following this, crime increased 50 per cent in only three years. But this period coincided with a huge recession that sent the crime rate soaring. The Conservatives couldn’t admit that the problem was the economy and Labour, who had lost four elections, joined in with ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ which really meant tough on criminals. After Michael Howard’s 1993 ‘prison works’ campaign, crime fell dramatically but, again, this coincided with a dramatic upturn in the economy. By the late 1990s we were back to almost full employment and Labour had brought in the minimum wage. So it is socio-economic factors that are responsible for levels of crime. The other reason that crime has fallen is increased fear of crime. People are ‘upgrading their security’. We were burgled in the 1990s and spent £1,000 putting bars on our french windows. If you live in red alert all the time crime falls, but at a heavy cost. This books shows that opportunity is a key variable. You can’t expect to have a lot of unemployed young men living with winner-loser exhortations to get rich and expect things to carry on as normal.