Crime and Social Policy E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Broadening Perspectives in Social Policy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 304

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Crime and Social Policy provides an invaluable examination of the relationship between social policy and crime. It draws on recent empirical research to offer important insights into the impact of current social policy trends on the lives of offenders.

• Provides an invaluable examination of the critical relationship between social policy and crime management
• Includes illuminating case studies on the impact of social policies on offenders
• Reviews current social policy trends and their influence on crime causation, crime rates, and crime management
• Discusses the role for social policy in promoting more effective reintegration of offenders into the community
• Draws on recent empirical research ranging from youth crime, anti-social behaviour, ‘problematic families’, and social security fraud
• The collection offers important insights into the impact of current social policy trends on the lives of offenders

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Broadening Perspectives on Social Policy

Title page

Copyright page

List of Contributors

Introduction

1 An International Crime Decline: Lessons for Social Welfare Crime Policy?

Introduction

Prisons, Police and Welfare

America, ‘and elsewhere, too’

The Scandinavian Way

Winner Take Nothing

The Shadow Effect

Conclusions

2 Advise, Assist and Befriend: Can Probation Supervision Support Desistance?

Introduction

Probation in Ireland

Methods

Control or Care?

Discussion

Acknowledgements

3 The Relational Context of Desistance: Some Implications and Opportunities for Social Policy

Introduction

Understanding Desistance

Donati’s Relational Theory of Reflexivity

Method

The Role of Extant Social Networks

The Role of Intimate Relationships

The Role of New Social Networks

Discussion

Policy Implications: UK

Conclusion

4 ‘Regulating the Poor’: Observations on the ‘Structural Coupling’ of Welfare, Criminal Justice and the Voluntary Sector in a ‘Big Society’

Introduction

Net Widening, Systems Theory and Structural Coupling

Regulating the Poor: Loss of Steering and the Behaviourist Turn in Welfare Strategy

Conclusion

5 What Prospects Youth Justice? Children in Trouble in the Age of Austerity

The ‘Business’ of Youth Justice: A View from the Estate

Re-imagining Youth Justice?

The ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’: The Marketization and Commodification of Children in Trouble

Conclusion: The ‘Brave New World’ – Youth Justice as Industry

6 Bleak Times for Children? The Anti-social Behaviour Agenda and the Criminalization of Social Policy

Introduction

Youth Justice and the Criminalization of Social Policy

The Anti-social Behaviour Agenda: A Prime Example of the Criminalization of Social Policy Thesis?

Dispersal Powers: A Cautionary Tale?

Enter the Coalition Government

Conclusion

7 Social Citizenship and Social Security Fraud in the UK and Australia

Introduction

What is Social Citizenship?

Models of Citizenship

Welfare States: The UK and Australia

The ‘Rational Economic’ Claimant?

Social Security Fraud Legislation

Criminalizing Fraudsters

Social Citizenship for Fraudsters?

Redefining Social Citizenship

Redefining Fraud

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Index

Broadening Perspectives on Social Policy

Series Editor: Bent Greve

The object of this series, in this age of re-thinking on social welfare, is to bring fresh points of view and to attract fresh audiences to the mainstream of social policy debate.

The choice of themes is designed to feature issues of major interest and concern, such are already stretching the boundaries of social policy.

This is the sixteenth collection of papers in the series. Previous volumes include:

The Times They Are Changing? Crisis and the Welfare State

B. Greve

Reforming Long-term Care in Europe

J. Costa-Font

Choice: Challenges and Perspectives for the European Welfare States

B. Greve

Living in Dangerous Times: Fear, Insecurity, Risk and Social Policy

D. Denney

Reforming the Bismarckian Welfare Systems

B. Palier and C. Martin

Challenging Welfare Issues in the Global Countryside

G. Giarchi

Migration, Immigration and Social Policy

C. Jones Finer

Overstretched: European Families Up Against The Demands of Work and Care

T. Kröger and J. Sipilä

Making a European Welfare State?: Convergences and Conflicts over European Social Policy

P. Taylor-Gooby

The Welfare of Food: Rights and Responsibilities in a Changing World

E. Dowler and C. Jones Finer

Environmental Issues and Social Welfare

M. Cahill and T. Fitzpatrick

The Business of Research: Issues of Policy and Practice

C. Jones Finer and G. Lewando Hundt

New Risks, New Welfare: Signposts for Social Policy

N. Manning and I. Shaw

Transnational Social Policy

C. Jones Finer

Crime & Social Exclusion

C. Jones Finer and M. Nellis

This edition first published 2013

Originally published as Volume 46, Issue 4 of Social Policy & Administration

Chapters © 2013 The Authors

Book compilation © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crime and social policy / edited by Hazel Kemshall.

p. cm.

 Includes index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-50989-0 (pbk.)

 1. Crime. 2. Crime–Sociological aspects. 3. Crime–Government policy. 4. Social policy. I. Kemshall, Hazel, 1958–

 HV6025.C7125 2013

 364–dc23

2012035902

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design by Design Deluxe.

List of Contributors

Deirdre Healy is Research Fellow, Institute of Criminology, University College Dublin, Ireland.

Janet Jamieson is Senior Lecturer and Head of Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University, UK.

Hazel Kemshall is Research Professor, Community and Criminal Justice Division, De Montfort University, UK.

Paul Knepper is Reader in Criminology, Department of Sociological Studies, Sheffield University, UK.

Gráinne McKeever is Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Ulster, UK.

John J. Rodger is Reader in Social Policy and Sociology, University of the West of Scotland, UK.

Beth Weaver is Lecturer, Social Work, University of Strathclyde, UK.

Joe Yates is School Director, School of Humanities and Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University, UK.

Introduction

Hazel Kemshall

This special issue presents a timely focus on crime and social policy, particularly as governmental spending on both crime management and social policy is being significantly reduced in most Western societies as one response to the post-2008 global financial crisis. Despite relatively high spending on welfare since the 1970s, Western societies have been restructuring their ‘welfare architecture’ (Esping-Andersen 2002), creating social investment states (Jessop 2002) populated by active citizens responsible for their own welfare. A consequence has been the retrenchment of welfare and the increased responsibilisation of citizens, including offenders, for their own actions and futures (Kemshall 2002). A further discernible trend has been the increased criminalizing tendency and net widening of social policy (Rodger 2000), with particular policy attention on the regulation of the family and the social control of ‘risky youth’.

In this special issue, Rodgers analyses the relationship between crime and social policy in the context of a post-industrial world and within a climate of severe global economic challenge. He argues that the role of the welfare state has become increasingly contradictory as the boundaries between its social control and social support functions blur, resulting in states ‘governing through crime’ (Simon 2007). Rodger demonstrates that the criminalization of social policy can be observed in a range of policy fields including housing, family policy, community development and, crucially, youth policy. Social policies are designed less for their social justice aims and more for their social control and criminal justice objectives. Net widening of the criminal justice gaze can be observed as poor households and poor children are targeted for surveillance and punitive control. Rodger examines both recent and emerging policy strategies, including those emerging under the UK coalition government. His analysis casts new light on the emerging policy relationships between the welfare system, the criminal justice system and civil society with application to a range of Western societies.

Jamieson and Yates in their articles draw on detailed empirical studies to focus on the increasing criminalization of youth, particularly ‘troubled youth’. Jamieson for example argues that the ‘anti-social behaviour’ (ASB) agenda resonates with the state’s broader agenda of responsibilisation and the inculcation of duties and obligations into the ‘law abiding citizen’. However, data from an in-depth study of the application of ASB powers demonstrates the perverse outcomes of such extensions of the criminalization net, including increased exclusion and marginalization of ‘troubled youth’. Whilst focused on England and Wales, her overall conclusion that increased policy attention to security in the age of austerity is likely to increase the criminalization of children has resonance across all the Western countries struggling with disaffected and unemployed youth. Yates adopts a broader view, with a firm focus on current policies in the age of austerity and the likely impact on youth in marginalized and deprived communities. His focus is on the impact of retrenchment, but also interestingly the increased focus in social and crime policy on payment by results. He examines the potential for payment by results to increase marginalization and criminality because challenging ‘cases’ are literally sidelined, and implementation attention is only given to ‘cases’ considered to be a good bet for success and hence payment. He critically examines the ‘marketization’ of youth justice provision, and expresses deep concerns about the emerging trade in youth troubles – an agenda that is likely to spread across the Anglophone countries.

More recent criminological research, and to a lesser extent policy, has returned to the social causes of crime, with renewed interest in what has been broadly termed ‘social rehabilitation’ (Robinson and Crow 2009). In brief, this approach focuses on the social context of offending and rehabilitation, and draws attention to the social opportunities that create routes to desistance and rehabilitation for offenders. This social context is complex, comprising a number of factors that may both precipitate offending and conversely create and support resilience to offending – for example housing/accommodation, employment, education, training, drug treatment – those factors most associated with effective ‘resettlement’. Their importance to desistance has been recognized in England and Wales in the Home Office policy construct of ‘resettlement pathways’ (Home Office 2004) and the HMI Prison and Probation report Through the Prison Gate (HMIP and P 2001). However, this social context also comprises more subtle relational components, such as family life, partners, ‘embeddedness’ in community life, and the achievement and maintenance of a non-offending personal and social identity (Maruna 2001). Policy responses have also been limited in their ambition and scope, narrowly focusing on resettlement issues, with little attention to broader structural issues around social exclusion. This has been exemplified in both UK and USA policy developments and practice responses (see Robinson and Crow 2009 for a full discussion).

In this issue, Healy for example argues that an important step on the journey towards desistance involves the reintegration of ex-offenders into their communities. In order to desist fully, individuals must gain access to new social resources, overcome existing problems and ‘knife off’ their criminal pasts. However, many ex-offenders continue to experience high levels of social marginalization and low levels of life success at least when measured using conventional indicators. Appropriate social policies can encourage desistance and improve the life chances of ex-offenders, for example by increasing their social and human capital or addressing obstacles to change. Interestingly, Healy’s study is located within the Irish Probation Service, a criminal justice service largely untouched by the new penology and current trends of responsibilisation. Within a still largely welfare-oriented service, Healy’s prospective study of desistance examines the extent to which probation policy and practice support the desistance process, set within the broader context of Irish austerity measures post the 2008 financial collapse.

This is complemented by Weaver’s in-depth study of desistance with a focus on the relational context of desistance and the key role of social supports in promoting a crime-free life. Weaver focuses on those social policies likely to facilitate or hinder desistance, and considers how social and penal policy could assist in ‘generating, developing and sustaining the kinds of social capital and reflexive, relational networks relevant to desistance’.

In a comparative study of social security fraud provisions in the UK and Australia, McKeever examines how social security fraud illustrates the crime/ social policy nexus by focusing on the erosion of citizenship for those convicted of social security fraud. Her argument is placed within a broader contention that the current delineation of social citizenship within an exclusive market-based model is problematic, and that the notion of citizenship requires reconstruction if it is to realize its full potential for inclusivity. At present, those convicted of fraud are presented as citizens who deserve to forfeit their right to citizenship, and this permeates to all claimants, challenging not only the right to claim, but rights to citizenship of all who come to rely on state social security systems. Given the rising numbers likely to fall into the welfare net as the global financial crisis takes hold, this is a serious social policy as well as a crime issue.

Finally, Knepper’s important article raises a fundamental question. What should governments do next given that crime rates have declined in Europe and North America over the last two decades? Interestingly, Knepper examines a range of potential reasons for international crime reduction, and poses the important question as to whether intended policies have the necessary intended impacts, and whether social and crime policies have measurable impacts on crime causation and crime reduction. That they may not is a challenging but important contention, as is the possibility that impacts may be unintended and unplanned. Knepper also contrasts the drop in crime rates to the almost constant government preoccupation with ‘high crime politics’, resulting in a perverse focus on ‘combating crime’ even as crime rates fall. This is perhaps the most critical point. Crime is political, and crime policies are often highly politicized. In the new age of austerity, it will be interesting to see whether ‘high crime politics’ continues, or whether austerity presents an opportunity to re-evaluate policy responses to crime. As cutbacks bite, the policy choices may become quite stark between policies of inclusion, rehabilitation and desistance; or policies of exclusion, marginalization and control.

References

Esping-Andersen, G. (2002), A Child-Centred Social Investment Strategy. In G. Esping-Andersen et al. (eds), Why We Need a New Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorates of Prison and Probation (HMIP and P) (2001), Through the Prison Gate: A Joint Thematic Review by HM Inspectorates of Prison and Probation, London: HMI Prison and Probation, http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/inspectorate-reports/hmipris/prison-gate-rps.pdf (accessed 13 December 2011).

Home Office (2004), National Reducing Reoffending Action Plan, London: Home Office, http://www.lifechangeuk.com/_webedit/uploaded-files/downloads/political/reducing-reoffending-delivery.pdf (accessed 13 December 2011).

Jessop, B. (2002), The Future of the Capitalist State, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kemshall, H. (2002), Effective practice in probation: an example of ‘advanced liberal responsibilisation?’ The Howard Journal, 41, 1: 41–58.

Maruna, S. (2001), Making Good: How Ex-convicts Reform and Rebuild their Lives, Washington, DC: American Psychological Society.

Robinson, G. and Crow, I. (2009), Offender Rehabilitation: Theory, Research and Practice, London: Sage.

Rodger, J. (2000), From a Welfare State to a Welfare Society: The Changing Context of Social Policy in a Postmodern Era, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Simon, J. (2007), Governing through Crime: how the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1

An International Crime Decline: Lessons for Social Welfare Crime Policy?

Paul Knepper

Introduction

Contrary to all expectations, crime has declined in recent decades. Exactly when and where the decline began varies somewhat, depending on whether one is looking at victimization surveys or police statistics, but in general the figures tell a similar story. In the last decade of the 20th century, crime rates began to fall, at first in the USA, then in Europe. Crime rates dropped in Canada, similar to the USA, and in Australia, more in keeping with the timing of the European declines. Victimization data for 15 countries participating in the International Crime Victimization Survey from 1989 indicate that crime rates peaked in the 1990s. Since then crime has decreased, particularly property crime. The ‘near universal fall’ in crime, Jan van Dijk, John van Kesteren and Paul Smit (2007: 16) explain, poses a clear theoretical challenge. ‘In most countries, crime levels in 2004 are back at the level of the late 1980s’.