Crime Control and Social Order

Crime Control and Social Order

Description

. . . Today's world of crime control and criminal justice was not brought into being by rising crime rates or by a loss of faith in penal welfarism, or at least not by these alone. These were proximate causes rather than the fundamental processes at work. It was created instead by a series of adaptive responses to the cultural and criminological conditions of late modernity—conditions which included new problems of crime and insecurity, and new attitudes towards the welfare state. But these responses did not occur outside of the political process, or in a political and cultural vacuum. On the contrary. They were deeply marked by the cultural formation that I have described as the “crime complex”; by the reactionary politics that have dominated Britain and America during the last twenty years; and by the new social relations that have grown up around the changing structures of work, welfare and market exchange in these two late modern societies. During the 1980s and the 1990s the political culture that articulated these social relations was quite different from that which had prevailed in the heyday of the welfare state. In its emphases if not in every respect, this culture was more exclusionary than solidaristic, more committed to social control than to social provision, and more attuned to the private freedoms of the market than the public freedoms of universal citizenship. The institutions of crime control and criminal justice have shifted in this same general direction. They have adjusted their policies, practices and representations in order to pursue the social objectives and invoke the cultural themes that now dominate in the political domain. The specific policies and practices that have emerged are adaptations to the world in which crime control now operates and to the practical predicaments that this world creates. As we have seen, these new practices typically emerge as local solutions to the immediate problems encountered by individuals and organizations as they go about their daily routines. But what they add up to is a process of institutional adaptation in which the whole field of crime control gradually adjusts its orientation and functioning. In terms of that bigger picture, the adjustments that have occurred are structural, and concern the relationship between crime control and social order. Over time, our practices of controlling crime and doing justice have had to adapt to an increasingly insecure economy that marginalizes substantial sections of the population; to a hedonistic consumer culture that combines extensive personal freedoms with relaxed social controls; to a pluralistic moral order that struggles to create trust relations between strangers who have little in common; to a “sovereign” state that is increasingly incapable of regulating a society of individuated citizens and differentiated social groups; and to chronically high crime rates that coexist with low levels of family cohesion and community solidarity. The risky, insecure character of today's social and economic relations is the social surface that gives rise to our newly emphatic, overreaching concern with control and to the urgency with which we segregate, fortify, and exclude. It is the background circumstance that prompts our obsessive attempts to monitor risky individuals, to isolate dangerous populations, and to impose situational controls on otherwise open and fluid settings. It is the source of the deep-seated anxieties that find expression in today's crime-conscious culture, in the commodification of security, and in a built environment designed to manage space and to separate people. I have described how the new crime control developments have “adapted” and “responded” to the late modern world, and to its political and cultural values. But these developments also, in their turn, play a role in creating that world, helping to constitute the meaning of late modernity. Crime control today does more than simply manage problems of crime and insecurity. It also institutionalizes a set of responses to these problems that are themselves consequential in their social impact. In America and Britain today, “late modernity” is lived—not just by offenders but by all of us—in a mode that is more than ever defined by institutions of policing, penality, and prevention. This desire for security, orderliness, and control, for the management of risk and the taming of chance is, to be sure, an underlying theme in any culture. But in Britain and America in recent decades that theme has become a more dominant one, with immediate consequences for those caught up in its repressive demands, and more diffuse, corrosive effects for the rest of us. Spatial controls, situational controls, managerial controls, system controls, social controls, self-controls—in one social realm after another, we now find the imposition of more intensive regimes of regulation, inspection and control and, in the process, our civic culture becomes increasingly less tolerant and inclusive, increasingly less capable of trust. After a long-term process of expanding individual freedom and relaxing social and cultural restraints, control is now being re-emphasized in every area of social life—with the singular and startling exception of the economy, from whose deregulated domain most of today's major risks routinely emerge.

Source Publication

Theorizing Criminal Justice: Eight Essential Orientations

Source Editors/Authors

Peter B. Kraska

Publication Date

2004

Edition

1

Crime Control and Social Order

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