Law and Order E-Book

Robert Reiner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Themes for the 21st Century Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 345

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Law and order has become a key issue throughout the world. Crime stories saturate the mass media and politicians shrilly compete with each other in a race to be the toughest on crime. Prisons are crammed to bursting point, and police powers and resources extended repeatedly. After decades of explosive increase in crime rates, these have plummeted throughout the Western world in the 1990s. Yet fear of crime and violence, and the security industries catering for these anxieties, grow relentlessly. This book offers an up-to-date analysis of these contemporary trends by providing all honest and concerned citizens with a concise yet comprehensive survey of the sources of current problems and anxieties about crime. It shows that the dominant tough law and order approach to crime is based on fallacies about its nature, sources, and what works in terms of crime control. Instead it argues that the growth of crime has deep-seated causes, so that policing and penal policy at best can only temporarily hold a lid down on offending. The book is intended to inform public debate about these vital issues through a critical deconstruction of prevailing orthodoxy. With its focus on current policies, problems and debates this book is also an excellent introduction to criminology for the growing numbers of students of the subject at all levels.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Preface and Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Neoliberalism, Crime and Control

Neoliberalism: The Revolution of the Rich

‘Root Causes’ or ‘Realism’?

Neoliberalism, Anomie, Crime and Control

Ethics and Individual Responsibility

2 An Inspector Calls: Putting Crime in its Place

3 A Mephistophelean Calculus: Measuring Crime Trends

What are the Crime Statistics?

Problems of Interpreting Police Recorded Crime Statistics

Alternatives to the Police Statistics

What Happened? Unravelling Crime Patterns and Trends

Conclusion: The Politicization of Crime Statistics

4 Permissiveness versus Political Economy: Explaining Crime Trends

Blame it on the Sixties

Political Economy and Permissiveness

Five Necessary Conditions of Crime

What’s It All About? Explaining Postwar Crime Trends

5 A New Leviathan? Law and Order Politics and Tough Crime Control

The Rise of Law and Order Politics

The Crime Control Consensus

The Toughening of Crime Control

New Labour, Old Punitiveness

Explaining Toughness

Tough on Crime? Assessing the Impact of Law and Order

6 Conclusion: Law and Order – A 20:20 Vision

References

Index

Copyright © Robert Reiner 2007

The right of Robert Reiner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK.

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-07456-2996-4

ISBN-13: 978-07456-2997-1 (pb)

ISBN: 978-07456-5729-5 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN: 978-07456-5730-1 (Single-user ebook)

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Preface and Acknowledgements

The media are saturated with dramatic crime stories; public concern and political argument about crime and its control are more intense than ever throughout the Western world. In Britain, the government itself speaks of the criminal justice system as not fit for purpose in the twenty-first century, and pledges to ‘rebalance’ and modernize it – again and again. Paradoxically this comes after more than a decade of falling crime rates. This is only one of the many ways in which the febrile discourse of law and order is out of kilter with a more sober and measured analysis.

The aim of this book is to inject some of the findings of the extensive research conducted by criminologists into the public debate on crime and control. Its main thesis is likely to be controversial and disputed, however, even among criminologists. The core thread running through the book is the argument that neoliberalism, the increasing penetration of free market principles and practices into all spheres of life, is the fundamental factor underlying both the threats of crime and violence, and increasingly authoritarian control tactics.

The abandonment of the more regulated and welfarist mixed economy strategy that prevailed in the three decades after World War II, often looked back on now – for all its faults – as a golden age of widely shared economic progress and security, was a Faustian bargain. We are learning that there is a high price to be paid for the fantastic wealth of some and the glittering baubles enjoyed by many: growing unhappiness, family breakdown, mental illness – especially among the young – looming environmental catastrophe, financial and physical insecurities and risks of many kinds.

The crimes that are focused on by the media act as a lightning conductor for a mass of other anxieties and resentments. Nonetheless the pains inflicted by these crimes, and by the attempts to control them, are real enough, and this book aims to shed light on their sources and the prospects for effective and humane protection.

The subtitle of the book will be recognized by criminologists as homage to the classic liberal analysis of criminal justice, published in 1970 by Chicago University Press: Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins’s The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control. This was an inspiration to me and I’m sure many of my generation, although my analysis here differs in many profound ways from theirs. An obvious difference is my substitution of ‘honest citizen’ for ‘honest politician’. Sadly the latter label would appear an impossible dream today. But the book is aimed at the many honest citizens remaining, so that they may impress on their supposed representatives smarter and more humane crime control policies. As a brief but reasonably comprehensive review of criminological literature, it is also hoped that the book will be useful as an introduction to the subject for its rapidly growing number of students.

My intellectual debts to many scholars are too many to even begin to acknowledge them all here. But the ideas in the book have been developed over many years during which I have had the privilege of teaching at the Law Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE Mannheim Centre for Criminology has a remarkable number of criminological giants whom I have had the benefit of learning from, at the weekly Tuesday Ph.D. seminars, and the many courses we teach jointly – though they will probably disagree with much if not all of what I say. I would like to thank its members, past and present: Stan Cohen, Rachel Condry, David Downes, Marian Fitzgerald, Janet Foster, Roger Graef, Frances Heidensohn, Mercedes Hinton, Dick Hobbs, Jon Jackson, Nicola Lacey, Leonard Leigh, Terence Morris, David Nelken, Tim Newburn, Jill Peay, Coretta Phillips, Maurice Punch, Peter Ramsay, Paddy Rawlinson, Mike Redmayne, Paul Rock, Judith Rumgay, Mike Shiner, David Smith, Anna Souhami, Janet Stockdale, Michael Zander. I would also like to add Kate Malleson and Lucia Zedner, both of whom left for other pastures some time ago, and Ben Bowling and Wayne Morrison with whom I taught joint courses on the now defunct London University intercollegiate LLM. I have also learned much from Mike Maguire and Rod Morgan during our joint editing since 1994 of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, now in its fourth edition.

The burdens of this book have fallen mainly on my family. I must apologize to them for my mental absence and grumpiness while writing it. Above all I must thank my children, Toby, Charlotte and Ben, and my wife, Joanna Benjamin, for their constant and never-failing support, encouragement, and above all inspiration. I only hope I can find some way of repaying them for everything.

1

Introduction: Neoliberalism, Crime and Control

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?

Hillel, Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14

Law and order has become a central issue of our times. Opinion polls show that over the last twenty-five years it has regularly been rated ‘one of the most important issues facing Britain today’. This has not always been the case. Law and order emerged as a political issue in the early 1970s (following the US where it became contentious in the late 1960s). During this time there has also been a huge rise in recorded crime rates. Concern about crime is far from unwarranted, but the growing obsession with law and order can only be explained in small part by increasing risks of victimization. This book’s main thesis is that the massive rise in crime of recent decades, and the turn to law and order, are both due to the same ‘root cause’: the increasing dominance of neoliberal political economy since the 1970s.

Neoliberalism: The Revolution of the Rich

Neoliberalism is the most common label for the economic theory and practice that has swept the world since the early 1970s, displacing communism in Eastern Europe and China, as well as the Keynesian, mixed economy, welfare state consensus that had prevailed in Western liberal democracies since the Second World War.1 As an economic doctrine it postulates that free markets maximize efficiency and prosperity, by signalling consumer wants to producers, optimizing the allocation of resources and providing incentives for entrepreneurs and workers.2 Beyond economics, however, neoliberalism has become the hegemonic discourse of our times, so deeply embedded in all corners of our culture that its nostrums, once controversial and contested, have become the commonsense, taken-for-granted orthodoxy underpinning most public policy debates.

Neoliberalism as culture and ethic

Advocates of neoliberalism see it as not only promoting economic efficiency, but also political and personal virtue.3 To neoliberals, free markets are associated with democracy, liberty and ethics. Welfare states, they claim, have many moral hazards: they undermine personal responsibility, and meet the sectional interests of public sector workers, not public service. Neoliberals advocate market discipline, workfare and New Public Management (NPM) to counteract this.4

Neoliberalism has spread from the economic sphere to the social and cultural. The roots of contemporary consumer culture predate neoliberal dominance, but it has now become hegemonic. Aspirations and conceptions of the good life have become thoroughly permeated by materialist and acquisitive values.5 Business solutions, business news and business models permeate all fields of activity from sport and entertainment, to charities, non-governmental organizations, and even crime control.6 ‘Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything’, penetrating everywhere, from the stuff of dreams to the minutiae of daily life. Money has become the measure of men and women, with the ‘Rich List’ and its many variations ousting all other rankings of status.