Taking Crime Seriously

eddie — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:32:27 +0000

Introduction

Socialists need to take crime seriously. Traditionally, the left has been regarded as being ‘soft’ on crime, which is a consequence of two main factors. Firstly, it is in part due to the success of the right in determining the crime agenda, but it is also because crime is seldom discussed by socialists in a way that is pragmatic. In this article, I want to make the case that crime is an issue that the left needs to address, particularly if left wing political parties are to make inroads in terms of broad public appeal. New Labour has presided over a mixed economy of criminal justice, which has included the traditional method of incarceration (which has increased under Labour to alarming levels), alongside a range of policies around the theme of crime prevention, which are the main focus of this article.

Why Crime is an Issue for the Left

In the past two decades, crime control has moved from being a peripheral issue to one that is centre stage both in terms of public debate and social policy. Hardly a day goes by without newspapers, particularly the tabloids, discussing crime. The mainstream political parties compete with one another to be ‘tough on crime’. Amongst the general public there is a real sense that crime and disorder is an issue, particularly in regards to young people. Statements like ‘young people have no respect nowadays for their elders or their communities’ have become truisms in some working class circles. The Labour Party acknowledges these sentiments and responds accordingly. Legislation such as the Crime and Disorder Act, or policies on Anti-Social Behaviour is often aimed at Labour’s heartland vote, particularly the elderly in marginalised housing estates; it goes without saying that this group should also be a natural constituent of the left. During the debate on anti-social behaviour, Labour ministers lined up to explain why this bill reflected the concerns of their constituents and in a sense, for once they were actually telling the truth.

Moral Panics

The whipping up of crime and fear by politicians and the media has created what sociologists refer to as a ‘moral panic’. How then does the radical left respond? Traditionally, the response has been to stay quiet or to discuss crime in a way that is abstract and fatalist. For the left, crime is a product of the capitalist system; therefore it is only when capitalism is replaced by something better that you can begin to think about living in a society free of crime. The consequence of this line of thinking is a fatalism which leads to a paralysis amongst sections of the left whenever crime is discussed. Whilst I consider it to be a truism that unequal societies will produce crime, I also believe that the left, if it is to have broad appeal, needs to formulate workable policies in the here and now and respond to the concerns of many working class people who identify crime as an issue. To say we have to wait until there is a revolution, whatever that means nowadays, is to shirk away from responsibility. Moreover, the left needs to engage in a debate about crime control at the level of policy and on the ground practice. Failure to get involved, particularly in marginalised housing estates, creates a vacuum which will be filled by the ideas of the right and in particular the British National Party.

Putting Crime into Context

There is a debate regarding the extent to which crime is an issue. It is often pointed out by the left, and I believe it to be true, that the fear of crime is disproportionate to the reality. Politicians and the media promote the politics of ‘fear’ on a regular basis and it would be surprising if it was bereft of any effect. The ‘rule by fear’ reflects a broader malaise which has infected the body politic. Politicians and governments have detected that they no longer rule on the basis of consensus and popular support. In the past, politicians, in theory at least, used to claim that they represented the public; today the aim of mainstream politicians is not to represent but to protect. What is occurring is a careful marketisation and production of a political discourse based on fear. The world conjured up by opinion formers is that of danger and unpredictability; it is a world which is inhabited by ‘teenage gangs’, ‘drug dealers’, ‘paedophiles’, ‘foreign invaders’ and ‘Islamic fundamentalists’. In this new ‘risk society’ the part played by politicians and government is that of protector. Consequently, the government’s war on crime is perpetual and never ending.

In the midst of all this panic, much of it manufactured, the left has been right to highlight the ways in which the media and the government exploit crime as a means of social and population control. Moreover, socialists are completely justified to warn against the outcomes of moral panics, which is often the violation by government of civil liberties and human rights. However, to dismiss it all as a ‘moral panic’ that is carefully manufactured by ruling elites would be a mistake. Furthermore, it would ignore the lived realities of many working class people, particularly those in the poorer housing estates where the radical left needs to establish a base.

Class and Crime

Crime is specifically placed and unevenly distributed and in the final analysis determined by social class. Forty per-cent of recorded crime takes place in just ten per cent of areas, the majority of which are poor. More than half of the people who show up in official statistics as victims of crime are repeat victims (Hughes et al, 2002). Consequently, a small proportion of people are experiencing a disproportionate amount of crime. All of the available research highlights that the more impoverished the area where you live, the greater the chances of you being a victim of car theft, assault, mugging, damage to your property, burglary or living next door to a drug dealer.

Crime is a class issue and that is why the left must respond. In practice this means seizing the debate from Labour and the reactionary right. The starting point is to engage with contemporary policies in regards to crime and disorder, particularly those policies which constitute as ‘alternatives to custody’ and ‘diversion from court’ which are sometimes dressed up in the cloak of progressivism and therefore seductive to people who may be left leaning. The two pillars of contemporary policy, which aim to move beyond simply locking people up, are crime prevention and community safety, which I would now like to examine in detail.

Crime Prevention

Crime Prevention (CP) emerged in the UK in the 1980s. Hitherto, crime had been regarded as a peripheral issue and one primarily for the police and the criminal justice system. As the Tories economic agenda was pushed to the extreme there was a corresponding rise in the overall crime rate. By the mid-1980s, mainstream criminologists and officials in the Home Office acknowledged, albeit in private, that the war on crime was being lost. Consensus was emerging in right wing circles that the overall crime rate would not be affected by deterrence through punishment or as a consequence of traditional policing and increased police resources. Moreover, from the point of view of the government, treatment programmes for offenders were costly and unproductive. The Tories found themselves with a contradiction; on the one hand they were committed to a ‘prison works’ ethos, but at the same time they recognised that whilst prison was politically necessary, it was also highly expensive for a government committed to reducing public expenditure. It was in the context of reducing treasury expenditure in the criminal justice system that prevention began to look extremely attractive. Crime prevention was identified by the Home Office as being a policy which in the long term would be ‘cost effective’.

Situational Crime Prevention

In the 1980s, discourses on crime shifted from overall cure to one of managing crime control. Despite the rhetoric of being ‘tough on crime’, which was lapped up by a docile media, what emerged in policy terms was an acceptance of crime as a necessary risk among others in what was referred to as the modern risk society.

Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) measures reflected this new thinking. SCP was seen as a pre-emptive approach that relied not on improving society or its institutions but on reducing the opportunities that exist for crime. SCP has been influenced by behavioural psychology and what theorists call Rational Choice Theory (RCT). RCT posits a common-sense view that crime is committed by rational actors who make psychological judgements or calculations in response to situations. The response to reducing crime is relatively straightforward according to RCT. What you need to do is create an environment where committing crime is difficult or extremely risky. If the criminal knows that he or she is likely to caught, and that the odds are stacked against them, this will decrease the likelihood of them offending. In practice, reducing the opportunities that exist for crime has been divided into two categories, ‘target hardening’ and ‘surveillance’.

‘Target hardening’ means strengthening and making more secure everyday devices such as doors, telephone boxes and cash withdrawal machines at banks. Also included are things such as installing burglar alarms on property and placing steering locks on cars. CCTV is now the main form of ‘surveillance’ in the UK. In fact, British citizens are now the most observed by CCTV than any other population in Europe. Also included under ‘surveillance’ are neighbourhood watch schemes introduced by the Tories in the 1980s.

CP approaches to crime control are viewed by their proponents as offering a way out of the failed traditional sanctions such as imprisonment and rehabilitation. SCP is seen as being able to reduce crime levels without the direct involvement of the criminal justice system. From this perspective, CP is conceived by its proponents as being ‘anti-statist’ and in line with the political philosophy of neo-liberalism. However a social price has been paid and we should ask ourselves if it has been worth paying? We now live in a nation where fear dominates and this has resulted in community segregation and the creation of a fortress mentality towards society. Furthermore, wherever there is fear, there will always be some right wing populist preparing to attack our civil liberties and take more power away from the citizen towards the state.

Community Safety

Community Safety (CS), alongside incarceration and crime prevention is the third pillar of contemporary crime control. Originally introduced by the Tories in the 1980s, albeit sporadically, CS approaches were taken up with zeal when Labour came to power in 1997. Labour controlled local authorities have been enthusiastic to sign up to community safety initiatives, which they like it because it emphasises ‘community’ and ‘grassroots’ approaches to crime. Moreover, local authorities are in the driving seat. Community Safety, according to its adherents chimes with an older aim of Labour and social democracy in general, which is to address the underlying causes of crime. CS is window dressed with buzzwords such as ‘partnership working’, ‘active citizenship’, ‘social inclusion’ and anything which follows the amorphous term ‘community’.

The 1998 Crime and Disorder Act instructed local government to play a leading role in co-ordinating community safety initiatives. CS was introduced at a time when the power and influence of local authorities was waning. It is not that difficult to see why local councillors were keen on CS: they saw it as a means of reinvigorating and giving purpose to local government. In practice local authorities are responsible for establishing various ‘partnerships’ which bring together the public, voluntary and private sectors.

Partnership Working

Labour likes to boast that partnership working is a holistic way of addressing crime control and one which utilises the resources of various stakeholders and actors from differing ends of the crime control spectrum. In addition to this, the government claims that partnership working is reinvigorating democracy at local level. For Labour, the democratic nature of partnership working is evidenced in the ways in which partnerships ‘consult’ with local communities and incorporate the community sector into the partnership model. Despite the gloss of community regeneration and empowerment, the reality of partnership working has been rather different.

Community partnerships need to be seen in the context of the neo-liberal withering away of the social state, whereby services once provided by local authorities, are either contracted out to private tender or are handed over to the chronically under-funded voluntary sector. Partnership working is part and parcel of a culture of managerialism that now exists in the public sector, which in the main demoralises staff and undermines the very ethos of public services. Community Safety Partnerships are littered with terms such as ‘target setting’, ‘crime reduction performance indicators’ and ‘best practice’ guidelines. Labour likes to boast that its response to crime is ‘evidence-led’ and based on ‘what works’. In reality such claims are rather patchy: it is argued by criminologists, that methodologically rigorous research is the exception not the norm (Hughes, et al, 2002). Even the Home Office has acknowledged in numerous reports that monitoring and evaluation are one of the weakest elements of crime prevention programmes. In truth, Labour’s crime control agenda is driven more by ideological factors than practical considerations.

Labour’s modernisation project has introduced a rigorous culture of auditing into the public sector. Auditing, despised by most workers in the public sector, creates a climate that encourages distortion and spin. Auditing creates a mentality whereby community safety initiatives focus on organisational instead of social goals. In practice, this results in organisations producing ‘paper trails’ of achievement and success which bears little relationship to real events taking place in communities (Hughes, et al, 2002).

Community Safety has deliberately de-politicised the issue of crime. Moreover, the appeal to ‘community’ and localised solutions encourages communities to look inwards and removes from the agenda issues such as unemployment and public housing. Noticeable by its absence in the crime debate are traditional social policy concerns such as welfare and re-distribution of wealth. Furthermore, CS has contributed to a culture whereby social policies have become ‘short-termist’ in their thinking. Although there is not the space to discuss it here, the issues raised by crime prevention and community safety highlight bigger concerns about social policy itself which the left needs to address. There is a blurring of the boundaries between traditional social policy and criminal justice. The consequence is that poverty is transferred from the realm of social policy into a matter for penology, criminal law, policing, crime prevention and community safety (Hughes, et al, 2002).

Conclusion

The left must engage with crime at the level of policy and real events as they occur on the ground. This requires two things. Firstly, it means formulating policies in the here and now which can win popular support. It also means engaging in a debate about the ways in which crime has been localised as a consequence of community safety policies. The changes in the electoral system in Scotland (despite the elections debacle) are creating an opportunity for real change to happen at local level. One of the things that could happen is that the localisation of public policy under the term ‘community’ might be introduced to more rigorous scrutiny and public debate. Although it is fashionable for ministers and policy makers to refer to ‘community’ at every given opportunity, the reality on the ground is rather different. Policies such as ‘community safety’ or ‘community planning’ mean very little to real people outside of the apparatuses of bureaucrats and middle managers who are not directly accountable to the communities they serve. An opportunity is emerging for a mammoth spotlight to be shone on public policy in the community. Moreover, there is the potential to introduce a politics which is adversarial and puts back on the agenda traditional social policy concerns such as wealth redistribution and welfare. The radical left, to be credible, needs to be ready to engage in this new milieu. A starting point is to take the issue of crime seriously. This means engaging with crime as an issue not at the level of the abstract, but at the level of public policy.

References

Hughes, G, McLaughlin, E and Muncie, J, (2002), ‘Crime Prevention and Community Safety’, SAGE Publications Ltd, London, UK

Gary Fraser has recently completed a Masters in Social Policy and Criminology and is a member of Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement

community safety | ukwatch.net

Taking Crime Seriously