Criminological Realism - Crime, Power and the State PDF

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Criminological Realism & Public Policy Introduction Right realism is sometimes referred to as neo-conservative and ‘new right’ criminology. New right philosophy which is a synthesis of a number of different schools of thought whose principal orientation is to the concepts of individual freedom, self-responsibility and justice (Tame 1991). Although not in itself a discrete theory it treats criminality as one of a group of social pathological phenomena. It is particularly associated with the writings of James Q. Wilson. There are two main themes to Wilson’s criminological writings: 1. The criminal law is defined by the state and its composition is non-problematic. 2. That street crime including burglary is the most important area of study. The characteristics of Right realism are:  The belief that the search for the causes of crime in terms of social factors (e.g. Poverty, deprivation, etc) are futile because improvements in social conditions during the 1950s and 1960s did not lead to a reduction in the crime rate. Indeed crime levels increased during this period.  Essentially crime has biological roots which cannot be changed either by individual treatment or social engineering. Some people are just wicked and we must keep them separate from the innocent as it is impractical to try to cure them.  

The desire to commit crime is seen as a rational choice. A combination of lacking selfcontrol and individual responsibility are seen as the root of all criminal responsibility. Crime is down to a decline in moral standards which is epitomized by: o The permissiveness of the 1960’s o Dependency on welfare benefits o Liberal child-rearing practices o Family breakdown o Illegitimacy o Single parenting o Poor discipline

Cause of Crime  Right realists reject the commonly held view that if one expands welfare provision (support for the needy) that one could significantly reduce the crime rate.  This was based on social democratic positivism which maintains that crime is a product of poor social conditions. Bad social background breeds bad behaviour.  Wilson states that the 1960s in the United States saw:  A long sustained period of prosperity  An array of programmes aimed at the young, the poor and the deprived.  Although these programmes were not implemented specifically to reduce crime a reduction in crime could be expected. However crime soared, rising faster than at any time since the 1930s.  Wilson ridiculed the liberal response to the increase in crime rate of denying real changes (arguing that this rate increase could be down to more laws or greater reporting). He thus states, ‘...by 1970, enough members of the liberal audience had had their typewriters stolen to make it difficult to write articles denying the existence of a crime wave’.

Wilson and Herrenstein (1985) argue that the long-term trends in crime rates are caused by three factors: 1. Shifts in the age structure of the population. This will increase or decrease the proportion of young males in the population who are viewed as temperamentally aggressive or having short-time horizons. 2. Changes in both the benefits of crime (i.e. the accessibility, density and value of criminal opportunities) and in the costs of crime (i.e. the risk of punishment and the cost of being out of school and out of work) changes the rate at which crimes occur. 3. Broad social and cultural changes in the level and intensity of society’s investment through such social institutions as families, schools, churches, the mass media in instilling commitment to self-control, effects the extent to which individuals are willing to conform.  Wilson and Herrnstein argue that the interaction between constitutional factors (the being or nature of the individual) and social conditioning can affect the way in which people balance on the one-hand the attractiveness of rewards, and on the other the lure from their conditioned conscience.  In this Wilson and Herrnstein are agreeing with Eysenck’s (1970) statement that the ‘conscience is a conditioned reflex’.  This conditioning depends not only on how easy a person’s conscience can be conditioned, but also the effectiveness of the family’s conditioning of the child (they believed that effective social conditioning can only occur in a nuclear family; single parent ones are viewed as inefficient) and then later on in: o The peer group o The work situation o The criminal justice system o The wider cultural context 

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Thus for Wilson and Herrnstein constitutional factors predispose certain individual’s towards offending and then the quality of their socialisation will be the ultimate determinant of whether they turn to crime. Individuals weigh the possible gains of committing the act against the potential punishments. As Wilson and Herrnstein (1985: 61) state: ‘The larger the ratio of the rewards (material and non-material) of non-crime to the rewards (material and non-material) of crime, the weaker the tendency to commit crimes. The bite of conscience, the approval of peers, and any sense of inequity will increase or decrease the total value of crime’. The commitment to crime is a rational calculation. For Wilson and Herrnstein the increase in crime is down to the general deterioration in the quality of socialisation coupled with the greater attraction to criminal activity because of the potential rewards available in an increasingly prosperous society. Right realists like Wilson and Herrnstein deny that the structure of society is to blame for increasing crime. As constitutional factors are difficult to address, the proportion of young men (the segment of our population that is particularly represented in the official crime

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statistics) is a permanent fixture within society and effective child rearing practicesparticularly the incidence of single parents- cannot be changed overnight. It would be easy to view the situation as being one in which very little can be done to tackle crime. Particularly as Wilson freely admits that much of which encourages crime in America is part and parcel of the expressive and individualistic culture of contemporary United States. What Wilson’s realism instead emphasises is the importance of marginal gains rather than utopian goals and that we should be focusing on carefully targeted intervention rather than ‘throwing’ money at the problem. Thus: ‘If we grant that it is possible to try to improve the criminal justice system without apologising for the fact that those efforts do not attack the ‘root causes’ of crime, the next thing to remember is that we are seeking, at best, marginal improvements that can only be discovered through patient trial-and-error accompanied by hard-headed and objective evaluations’. ‘Above all, we can try to learn more about what works and, in the process, abandon our ideological preconceptions about what ought to work’. Wilson 1985: 253-4)

Right Realist Policy Implications-Zero Tolerance Policing Introduction;  Zero tolerance policing is a high visibility, proactive, maximum enforcement street policing strategy.  It requires police officers to pursue minor offences with the same vigour as more serious forms of criminality.  The intention of this strategy is to send a message to offenders and law-abiding citizens alike that the police have the capacity and motivation to tackle the full spectrum of anti-social and petty criminal behaviour. Behaviours that make a city or neighbourhood feel and look unsafe. Distinctive features;  During the late 1990s, the proponents of this particular policing style elevated it to the status of a miracle treatment for crime.  Although it can be defined in a number of ways, it primarily involves the strict, aggressive enforcement of laws, irrespective of the circumstances.  The basis for this is the notion that eradicating minor crime can contribute to a notable reduction in serious crime. Broken Windows  The idea for this stems from arguably one of the most influential and widely cited articles in North American criminology- ‘Broken Windows’.  It was published originally by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 and updated by Kelling and Coles in 1996.  Using a mixture of research findings and ‘common sense’, Wilson and Kelling produced a theory about the role of the police in promoting neighbourhood safety through reducing the fear of crime.  The image of ‘broken windows is used to explain how neighbourhoods descend into incivility, disorder and criminality if no attention is paid to their maintenance.

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An unrepaired broken window sends out the message to law abiding citizens and criminals alike that no one cares. Gradually as other windows in the building get smashed, it reinforces the feeling that the local community and authorities have relinquished ownership and that disorder is tolerated Wilson and Kelling saw petty disorderly acts, which although not necessarily breaches of the criminal law, as triggering a chain reaction that undermines community safety and paves the way for serious criminality. If a neighbourhood or street is perceived to be disorderly and unsafe, people modify their behaviour accordingly. Because of fear of being harassed people will avoid or withdraw from such areas or move through them as quickly as possible. Because only the weak and vulnerable are left behind this leaves the neighbourhood open to colonization by drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes and other ‘street criminals’. The human equivalents of the ‘broken windows’ are down and outs, rowdy teenagers and beggars. Therefore policy makers should pay attention to the policing of these individuals because they create the conditions within which more serious forms of criminality can flourish.

Zero Tolerance – New York City  Zero tolerance policing is most closely associated in the public psyche with the innovative policing strategies developed by William Bratton, the former commissioner of the New York police department (NYPD) appointed in 1994.  Bratton promised the people of New York that his police department ‘were going to fix broken windows and prevent anyone from breaking them again’.  Police visibility was heightened as officers were put back on the beat and encouraged to look for signs of crime and to take an interventionist stance. He focused on low level infringements of the law: o public nuisance violations; o incidents of incivility; o begging; o fare dodging; o public drinking; o jay walking; o graffiti artists; o squeegee merchants. o This was all done on the grounds that it makes citizens feel unsafe in public places.   

Suspects were stopped, frisked and questioned to gain information about more serious crime in the neighbourhood and to deter offenders. Police tactics included ‘doing a vertical’ (raiding an apartment block and arresting all those who cannot account for being there). Beat officers were also encouraged to arrest suspects and process them through the criminal justice system.

Bratton decentralized the management structure of the NYPD, pushing authority and responsibility down to precinct commanders.  New technologies were introduced such as COMPSTAT (Comprehensive computer statistics) to monitor and map crime events and make commanders focus on emerging patterns and results.  This technology allowed the NYPD to update their data base on the city’s population and crime flows across and within neighbourhoods. The Results;  During Bratton’s tenure (1994-6) violent crime was reduced by 38%.  There were 166, 737 fewer victims of violent crime in the three-year period 1994-6.  In 1990 there were 2,200 murders in New York (42 a week).  In 1996 this was under 1,000 for the first time since 1968. Although there were over 38, 000 police officers making 300, 000 arrests and issuing millions of summonses each year, there were only approximately 9,000 citizen complaints filed in 1996. 

Zero Tolerance (Confident Policing) Hartlepool, England  In the four months before DCI Ray Mallon (nicknamed Robocop) took over as chief of crime strategy at Hartlepool, in April 1994, the monthly crime figure had risen by 38%, including a 31% rise in burglary.  His aim was to reduce the number of crimes and recover control of the streets for the law-abiding citizen.  Zero tolerance in Hartlepool meant that the police were to ‘return peace to the streets’ by controlling minor situations in the interest of ‘decent’ and ‘respectable’ citizens.  DCI Mallon said, ‘boys and young men don’t go straight from being cheeky to their parents into burglary- any more than children go straight from primary school into the university’.  Hanging out with a verbally abusive gang, urinating in a lift, smashing the lights on a footpath, spraying graffiti on a wall, vandalising a park bench were seen as the starting points of a criminal career.  Thus police action at this level was seen as having the effect of closing the criminal career path early.  The focus therefore of the new crime strategy was on confident policing of minor offences and sub-criminal disorder.  Whenever appropriate, police officers were to not ignore deliberate, petty, individual demonstrations of disrespect and defiance of an officer.  For example, if an adolescent was continuing to ride a bicycle on the pavement in the presence of an officer or an officer catches a ten-year old swearing, they do not arrest them but ‘pays attention’ to the event, face-to-face.  As well as the focus on minor offences and sub-criminal disorder, there was also the focus on the house burglar.  A burglary is an extremely difficult offence to complete.  The burglar must find an appropriate house, break into it, get the property out of the house, then get rid of it.  Their success can act as an example, influencing other young boys whose feet are not yet on the criminal ladder.

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It was viewed that the type of person who would partake in something as difficult as house burglary would take advantage of weaker targets. If the police, therefore, could restrain the house burglar, all the other offences he would normally have committed are reduced as well. Home office research suggests that the number of burglaries committed by offenders, nationally while serving community service sentences ranged from between three and thirteen (Dennis and Mallon 1998). If sent to prison for a year instead he would have been put completely out of circulation. The basis for this aspect of the strategy was that in policing the burglar they could have a considerable limiting effect on all criminal activity in the town. The Results Between 1994-6 theft of vehicles went down 565, thefts from vehicles came down 15% and domestic burglaries came down 31%. Overall, reported crime was down 27% from 15, 600 to 11, 300.

Problem-orientated policing: San Diego  Murders came down 41% from between 1993-6 and robberies by 36%.  Burglaries and vehicle related crime fell by 40% during the same period.  The fall in crime is directly comparable in scale to New York though the style of policing is in sharp contrast to that in the ‘Big Apple’.  Jerry Sanders, chief of police for San Diego achieved this through partnerships between citizens and police.  The San Diego approach was to work with communities.  Local police commanders became responsible for co-ordinating and managing the priorities of their communities.  The emphasis was placed on resolving problems by the police working with other agencies and organisations.  The San Diego police department implemented a comprehensive, holistic approach that paired law enforcement with more prevention and intervention programmes from business, education and private sectors.  The aim was also to plan for the medium to long terms rather than to merely achieve a short-term quick fix.  This is in contrast to the Big Apple’s limited emphasis on the need to work with and in communities.  In the wake of the George Floyd killing Sander’s wrote in a June 2020 article for The San Diego Union-Tribune:  “Past models of problem-oriented policing are a good start. In the 1990s, San Diego police and community members partnered, and each community told us what were their highest priority for policing. A feedback loop was created to update the neighborhoods about police and community progress on crime and safety problems and together this created better outcomes. This not only developed an effective crime reduction model but also a closer collaboration.” Zero Tolerance Policing – Evaluation  Zero tolerance’s attractiveness for police chiefs around the world was that it provided badly needed proof that order maintenance policing was central to crime control.

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However, critics of zero tolerance policing insisted that it had been given more credit than it deserved for the reductions in serious crime. There is evidence that the crime rate was falling in New York before zero tolerance policing was introduced and that the downward trend in the murder rate was related to the fact that fewer people were taking violence inducing crack cocaine in the early 1990s and were turning to the more soporific drug, heroin. There were important broader demographic shifts where the numbers in the peak ages for offending (the teenage years) had fallen. On top of this, many people responsible for perpetrating the majority of violent or other crimes in the 1980s and early 1990s were now in prison. There was also mounting evidence that the strategy was: o promoting an aggressive attitude amongst police officers; o encouraging discriminatory and insensitive policing; o leading to the harassment and criminalization of powerless groups; o enflaming racial divisions. The Zero tolerance policing philosophy came into disrepute as a result of a sharp rise in complaints and the public protests about the torture of Abner Louima, a Haitian security guard, who was sodomized by an officer of the 70th precinct, Brooklyn, in August 1997, and the murder of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African street vendor shot 19 times by the police in February 1999. These incidents provided evidence that ‘letting the cops of the leash’ had given licence for certain police officers to over-ride civil liberties and human rights. Zero tolerance seemed to work well in densely populated areas with relatively high policing levels and large amounts of petty crime. However, in populations, which are more dispersed with a relatively low crime rate, it may have little effect. Also, in areas of high racial tension, such a policy might leave locals feeling victimized.

Right Realism – Critique  The theory is very limited in its scope with its emphasis on street crime.  It excludes analysis of corporate or white-collar offences.  They also freely accept official definitions and assessments of seriousness when it comes to crime; uncritically.  Their explanations of criminality are also open to criticism. Their focus on the individual and the behavioural conditioning most strongly connected with the family is open to question.  Also the notion that there is a connection between crime and incivilities or order has also found little support (Matthews 1992).  Many writers have noted that the decline of such areas is more down to structural, socio-economic and other factors. A focus on incivilities and single-parent families ignores the wider issues  The social aspects of depressed communities are ignored as they focus on blaming people.  For right realist’s criminality is a rational choice- but a wrong one- and here lies the contradiction. The individual must be punished because it is an individual choice not affected by social, political or the cultural environment. If crime is an individual

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(internal) choice then how can more policing of ‘order’ within particular areas help to control behaviour. Haan and Vos (2003) argue that rational choice fails to explain fully the phenomenon of crime and its meaning. Right realism needs to a...