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1 Practical Criminality

In his essay entitled ‘Who thinks abstractly?’, Hegel provided us with the following description: A murderer is led to the place of execution. For the common populace he is nothing but a murderer. Ladies perhaps remark that he is a strong, handsome, interesting man. The populace finds this remark terrible: What? A murderer handsome? How can one think so wickedly and call a murderer handsome; no doubt, you yourselves are something not much better! This is the corruption of morals that is prevalent in the upper classes, a priest may add, knowing the bottom of things and human hearts. One who knows men traces the development of the criminal’s mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relationship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became embittered against the social order . . . and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime. There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer! … This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality. (Hegel 1817/1965: 116–17)

Hegel’s aim here was to show that the common-sense view of abstract and concrete thought is the inverse of reality. The criminal appears as a very ‘concrete’ phenomenon: the murderer on the tumbril, the defendant in the dock. However, in order to focus on this one aspect of his identity, his criminality, others have to be suspended and annulled. His criminality has to be abstracted out from the complex of other characteristics which make him what he is and be regarded as dominant. In the criminal trial, of course, some of these other characteristics, such as his unhappy childhood, may re-enter the frame in a subordinate role as mitigation. While they do not influence the initial characterisation of our individual in terms of his crime, they represent a move towards a more concrete and many-sided view of his nature. For Hegel concrete reality is not something we start off from, readily given to observation, but which we arrive at as a conclusion. But the important point for us here is that this process of abstraction is the foundation stone

of modern law and criminal justice. All societies have some notion of ‘crime’ and individual redress of interpersonal conflicts and harms. But in pre-modern society this is usually integrated into other social relations such as status and kinship, etc. It might be one thing to rob or kill a member of your own family, another to rob or kill a stranger; one thing for a nobleman to harm a peasant and something quite different for a peasant to harm a nobleman or a priest. The focus on the criminal identity of the individual was less sharp and was still locked into other contexts and characteristics of the individual. It was of course much harder to think abstractly in a society where nearly all social relations were interpersonal ones of status and submission. By contrast, in modern society where a large proportion of relations are ones involving passing strangers, or individuals whose relationship centres around a single dimension of work or economic exchange, it is far easier to think of people abstractly because we know so little about them anyway. So when they kill, it is the killing that defines them. If a mediaeval king or the lord of the manor killed, then it was hard for all those under his personal

Lea, John. Crime and Modernity : Continuities in Left Realist Criminology, SAGE Publications, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umpi-ebooks/detail.action?docID=254815. Created from umpi-ebooks on 2020-08-20 08:01:06.

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rule to forget that even though he had killed, he was still the king or the lord of the manor. The assumption that criminality is largely an individualistic response, which does not have

to be individualised by the powers that be, is easily made. Most social mechanisms involve the actions of individuals in one way or another but it does not follow that it will be the individual who is constructed as the responsible agent as opposed to families, communities, ethnic groups or more impersonal market forces. Older, pre-modern forms of ‘crime control’ such as ethnic warfare, feuding, vendetta, etc., testify to the essential modernity of criminalisation and its link to the emergence of the notion of the free individual and the abstract legal person. In addition, and again this is easily taken for granted, crime is usually seen as an episodic disruption of an otherwise harmonious ongoing process. This is linked to its nature as individual act rather than ongoing institutional or social process. It is also linked to the existence of the other, the stranger. In the closed mediaeval village

community in which the status of all individuals was known and integral to their being, harms and wrongs had to be dealt with in terms of their status rather than through its negation. Conversely, those from outside the community tended to be feared and ‘criminalised’ quite irrespective of their actions. Modern society makes possible the re-production of individuals as ‘criminal other’ even before the judge, let alone the state, has decreed it. Modernity provides the resources and possibilities for this in the notion of the free individual as abstract person, half-way, as it were, to criminalisation. The issue for the modern court is whether the right individual has been taken: the one who actually committed the offence. If so, the status as criminal is assured automatically by their actions. The degradation ritual of the court confirms what has already taken place as a social interaction. Alternatively, because criminalisation has already occurred as a social fact, the modern court – at least in the more progressive jurisdictions – need not overly preoccupy itself with such ceremony and can become an altogether more ‘humane’ place. Thus the process of abstraction – we might call it the criminalising abstraction – which

establishes the identities of those who violate the criminal law as criminals irrespective of other characteristics they might have, that leaves, in the words of the great eighteenth-century jurist Cesare Beccaria, ‘no further care to the judge than to examine the acts of citizens and to decide whether or not they conform to the law as written’ ([1764]1996: 7), is not simply a logical process. The content of abstraction, what is included and what is excluded, who can in actual practice be criminalised, is a social, historical and political process. It is a question of power and imagery. On the one hand the emergence of the rule of law, the doctrine that all killers from the king to the merchant to the landless peasant, will be treated as murderers in the same way by the courts is rightly held to be one of the great achievements of modernity, of the Enlightenment. Its historical precondition is the emergence of the doctrines of individualism and universal human rights. These were based in turn on the ascendancy of capitalist market relations in which individuals related increasingly as abstract legal persons, citizens, buyers and sellers of commodities, bearers of rights and obligations irrespective of other differences and characteristics. Without this the rule of law would be impossible in anything other than a tautological sense. Law is the counterpart of political economy (see Fine 1984; Pashukanis 1978). On the other hand, however, the content of the criminalising abstraction is never free of the imagery and practice of power. Who can be criminalised; who is virtually ‘pre-

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criminalised’ irrespective of their actions; and who can only be criminalised with great difficulty, if at all, irrespective of what they do. These forces, at play within the relationship between formal criminalisation and the substantive character of criminals, reintroduce the older issues of social status and identity into the newer abstractions. Modernity is contradictory from the outset. It is not simply a break from the past but its reworking into new configurations. The rule of law and legal equality is also the counterpart of the modern democratic state.

Modern states are democratic in so far as the people, through their representatives and with the departure of God and the king, become the ground of the legitimacy of the state and its laws. The state as the most powerful agent in society, freed from direct appropriation by powerful individuals or social groups, is thus in a position to apply the criminalising abstraction consistently. The powerful state, supreme power within its national territory – and frequently beyond its borders – is an aspect of the dual nature of modernity. On the one hand modernity brings the emancipation of the individual from the hierarchical ordering of feudalism and, on the other, the need to secure social order by regulating this process through the various apparatuses of law, discipline and regulation. Hence modernity, as it developed in western Europe during the eighteenth century, is a dual process of liberation and disciplinisation (Wagner 1994). The modernity of criminalisation lies precisely in its subordination of the freedom of the individual to the interests of social stability. It is achieved by the criminalising abstraction which singles out individuals, annuls other aspects of their character and circumstances – be it social status, life history or control over resources – and holds them responsible for their actions in accordance with a general rule of law that recognises their right, as free individuals, to equal treatment. However, since capitalist modernisation is carried, initially, by a particular social class, the bourgeoisie, those freedoms, and also the potential criminalisation of their misuse, are not distributed evenly. This gives modernity a decidedly dark side. As far as criminal justice is concerned, the

criminalising abstraction is, firstly, never entirely consistently applied. It is subject to key exclusions. Some, such as women in the marital relationship, are effectively precluded from claiming victim status in the case of violence from their husbands, while the working class bears throughout the early stages of modernity the status of the already criminalised having, for the bourgeoisie and its magistrates, no other identity than the criminalising abstraction itself – in the form of the dangerous classes.1 Simultaneously the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie by virtue of their social status are able to deflect the rigours of criminal justice to a considerable extent. The content of the criminalising abstraction varies. The poor working-class criminal takes on an exaggerated animal status as brute while the female offender is defeminised as ‘mad’. But quite apart from exceptions and exclusions, the very working of a system of universal human rights and legal rules serves to reproduce as well as ameliorate the substantive social inequalities and injustices alongside which they function. The Napoleonic Code, which in its impartiality prevented rich and poor alike from sleeping under the bridges of Paris, is the best known illustration. The enlightened magistrate responds by taking into account the poverty or other disability of the offender as mitigating circumstances at the stage of sentencing. Of course what circumstances count as disability or weakness is itself an issue of power. The Victorian moral reformer could look with sympathy upon the poverty of the poor

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waif who stole a loaf of bread. By contrast only very recently have such problems as long-term violence by husbands to wives, when the latter turn to what would otherwise be simple premeditated murder, begun to be regarded in a similar light. It is nevertheless a mistake to see the development of criminal justice and the criminalising

abstraction as simply the perfection of a mechanism of repressive social control. The importance of seeing modernity as a process involving simultaneously mechanisms of liberation and disciplinisation (Wagner 1994) is that neither must be seen as entirely obliterating the other. Indeed each affects the working of the other. If the exclusions mentioned above give a hollow ring to wide areas of so-called liberation, the working of the mechanisms of discipline and regulation have to come to terms with the dynamics of liberation. One side of this is that the masses benefit from the rule of law and the criminalising abstraction. As far as the working class was concerned the rule of law, as the historian Edward Thompson put it, was ‘an unqualified human good … [which] … while it did mediate existent class relations to the advantage of the rulers … mediated these class relations through legal forms which imposed, again and again, inhibitions upon the actions of the rulers’ (1977: 264-5). At the same time the masses have to be progressively brought into and mobilised as part of

the process of control and regulation itself. This is well understood in areas such as the progressive extension of the franchise and the legitimation of independent working-class organisations such as trade unions and labour parties. Also understood is the area of social policy (in the most general sense of the term) as the development, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a concern with governmentality (Foucault 1979, 1991); with the mobilisation of a wide range of disciplinary mechanisms, including private institutions such as the family to secure participation and conduct, in a process of essentially self-regulation or ‘self-carried power’ (Foucault 1977: 201). Traditional jurisprudence and political science have conspired to see criminalisation as the

unproblematic application of clear categories of criminal law exhaustively analysable as discourses and practices of the state including, where changes in the boundaries of criminality are at issue, through the formal legislative process. Such a focus is one-sided. The state remains of course the central institutional locus of the criminalising abstraction precisely because it rises above the particularities and conflicts of society. But it is effective only to the extent that its actions are reproduced and reinforced by a whole complex of attitudes and behaviours in society as a whole. Criminalisation involves much more than the agencies of the state, including their informal and discretionary modes of operation. It is more accurate to say, with Nicola Lacey, that the ‘very subject matter of criminal law and criminology appears to slip through our fingers as “criminalisation” is revealed as consisting of a number of interlocking social practices whose operations leave the boundaries of “criminality” anything but precise’ (Lacey 1995: 17). These practices, like the informal and discretionary mode of operation of criminal justice agencies, should not be seen as imperfection or dilution of criminalisation but rather its essential dynamic. It cannot function in any other way. The working of criminal justice cannot be properly understood except as a set of social relations of which the state is only one component, albeit a very powerful one. This becomes clear if we consider two important arguments which at first sight appear to move off at a tangent. The first concerns the practical boundaries of criminalisation and the second the issue of alternatives to

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criminalisation as a response to individual conflicts and harms.

Reconstructing crime

The understanding that criminalisation is governed by the substantive inequalities of power in modern society can lead obviously to the attempt to find a new set of foundational principles from which to deduce what activities are crime. It takes the form of an attempted return to one side of the dualism of modernity; the discourse and practice of liberation and the inalienable human rights that are its foundation. The motive for such a strategy, among criminologists, is usually one of discontent with the idea of subordinating the subject matter of study to whatever the actually existing criminal law, with its biases and power effects, happens at a particular time to define as crime. One of the classic formulations, within Anglo-Saxon criminology, of the strategy of

reconstruction was provided by Herman and Julia Schwendinger who argued that radicals should reject existing criminal law in favour of a wider definition of crime as violation of basic human rights: Basic rights are differentiated because their fulfilment is absolutely essential to the realisation of a great number of values … [hence] the right to racial, sexual and economic equality. The abrogation of these rights certainly limits the individual’s choice to fulfil himself in many spheres of life. These rights therefore, are basic because there is so much at stake in their fulfilment. It can be stated … that individuals who deny these rights to others are criminal. Likewise social relationships and social systems which regularly cause the abrogation of these rights are also criminal. If the terms imperialism, racism, sexism and poverty are abbreviated signs for theories of social relationships or social systems which cause the systematic abrogation of basic rights, then imperialism, racism, sexism and poverty can be called crimes according to the logic of our argument. (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1975: 136–7)

In the period since the mid-1970s there has, on the face of it, been considerable progress in

areas involving human rights. Many states have, for example, made renewed efforts to criminalise racist or sexist practices, and there has also appeared to be considerable progress in the criminalisation of human rights violations in the international sphere. The reappearance of war and ethnic conflict in eastern Europe, conflicts in Africa, the ending of military dictatorships in Latin America, have all provided contexts in which the notion of crimes against humanity has gained ground (see Robertson 1999). However, the practical problems facing the embryonic international institutions and those who claim to act on behalf of the ‘international community’ help to illustrate some of the problems with this position2 and enable a deeper grasp of criminalisation as a social process involving, but extending well beyond, the state. The main concern of the Schwendingers’ argument was of course less a call to action on the

part of states to extend the boundaries of criminalisation than a call to radical criminologists to extend the boundaries of their studies well beyond those of the official discourses of criminal law and criminal justice agencies. One of the obvious problems was that the discipline of criminology might wander so far from what was publicly seen as crime as to leave the discipline in an ‘idealist limbo’ (Clarke 1978: 44; see also O’Malley 1988). But more important, there are severe problems facing even powerful state institutions in attempting to

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extend the boundaries of criminalisation in the name of human rights. To take an example current at the time of writing, the International War Crimes Tribunal based in The Hague may issue warrants for the arrest of various Balkan gangsters and warlords, and even heads of state, on charges of crimes against humanity arising from recent conflicts involving ethnic cleansing and genocide in parts of former Yugoslavia. The problems of enforcement of such warrants are of course considerable and obvious. NATO troops in the region may be a rather ineffective police force, particularly as regards tracking down individuals – not a traditional military skill. Other key practical assumptions of criminalisation become obvious by their notable absence. Normally criminal justice agencies attempting to apprehend criminals can rely on at least some sections of the public to report sightings or other information and be prepared to give evidence, appear as witnesses, etc. If, by contrast, sizeable populations vehemently reject the legitimacy of the International War Crimes Tribunal as an agent of western imperialism, characterise the individuals concerned as national heroes rather than criminals, and see charges of ‘war crimes’ simply as thinly veiled imperialist aggression led by the United States, then criminalisation as a practical process faces considerable obstacles. These are compounded if the military commanders of NATO troops in the area, mindful of other political considerations transmitted down other chains of command, refrain from seriously searching for the indicted war criminals because the actual arrest of the latter might precipitate a political crisis of unpredictable outcome, then even the very label of ‘war criminal’ stands in danger of becoming de facto meaningless. Finally, others, in particular the victims of activities of the indicted war criminals, seeing the impotence of the ‘international community’ to enforce its warrants may take matters into their own hands and re-launch guerrilla warfare or engage in assassination attempts. In this worst case scenario any notion of criminal justice is rapidly displaced by considerations of low intensity warfare, vendetta and feud. This is more than the simple issue of whether the law will be enforced, but rather whether the criminalising abstraction itself can be effectively sustained. The socio-political preconditions for criminalisation are graphically illustrated in their very absence.3 There is more to the extension of criminalisation than the activities of the state. The extension of human rights and the criminalisation of their violation remain at the level of rhetoric if they are not articulated both in the practical actions of the state and in the dynamics of social relations. A further set of issues concerns the nature of criminal activities themselves. The

criminalising abstraction is concerned with individuals, or entities that can be practically presented as individuals, for the purposes of allocating responsibility. Problematic situations and conflicts can only be dealt with as crime if they can be made to fit this conception. The attempt to criminalise the unintended consequences of the working of organisations is fraught with problems. ‘Rights cannot be enforced if no one can be held responsible for their infringement’ (Benton 1998: 167). The area of corporate criminality furnishes many examples. Even harder is to retain any recognisable notion of criminality in dealing with the outcome of market forces and the general unintended consequences of basic economic processes such as capital accumulation. Yet the table of human rights presented by the Schwendingers includes such entities as imperialism and poverty. In certain circumstances these can be presented as the results of actions by identifiable individuals or corporations. For example, multinational companies paying below poverty wages in poor countries could be prosecuted for violations

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of minimum wage legislation. However, if the corporation is considerably more powerful than not only its victims but also the local state and criminal justice system, this will be less likely even if such legislation is in existence. Such incidents as the Bhopal pollution disaster in India in 1984 in which the alleged criminal negligence of a large multinational corporation allowed escaping toxic gases to kill and maim thousands, provided a graphic illustration (Pearce and Tombs 1993). While powerful offenders bring problems in their wake, the attempt at criminalisation at least makes sense both on an intellectual and a policy level. However, to the extent that world poverty is a result less of the criminal negligence of particular large corporations than of the normal working of market forces and the process of global capital accumulation, the strategy of criminalisation encounters severe difficulties. If companies wilfully violate minimum wage legislation, that is one thing, but if those companies go bankrupt as a result of changes in market conditions, that is quite another, and there is little scope for criminalisation. To regard the growing immiseration of the world’s population as ‘criminal’ in anything other than a diffuse moral or polemical sense of the term is therefore quite misleading. Neither is it obvious that the attempt to coerce such phenomena into some form of criminological perspective, as opposed to the political economy of global capitalism, serves any purpose other than confusion. If the absence of the social preconditions of criminalisation has a negative side where it

impedes the advance of criminalisation in defence of human rights, then it has a positive side in impeding the ability of authoritarian regimes to disguise their ruthless denial of human rights as some form of crime control. An authoritarian political regime may desire to criminalise the activities of those courageous individuals engaged, often with the tacit support and admiration of large sections of the population, in what in liberal democracies would be legitimate oppositional politics. The benefits to the regime and its public image both nationally and abroad are obvious if it can claim it is dealing with a problem of criminality. But when such a process of ‘crime control’ is subject to close inspection it begins to become clearer what is taking place in practice. Who, for example, will report such ‘crimes’ to the authorities and provide corroborating testimony in court? The regime finds that an army of spies and informers will be necessary, their information will be largely fabricated and distorted, uncorroborated by witnesses other than those already in the employ of the political police, and will usually be protected from any process of cross-examination or other scrutiny in court. The judicial proceedings will be a grim parody of due process while the only victims of the process will be seen by the mass of the population to be the very ‘offenders’ themselves. In such situations, as in South Africa under the apartheid regime or in Chile under Pinochet, the violation of human rights and the attempted portrayal of any form of oppositional activity as crime earned worldwide condemnation. The visibility of oppression in these cases lay not only in the periodic revelations of torture, disappearances and deaths in police custody and the tireless work of those who had the courage to expose such occurrences, but also in the inability of the regimes to present their activities in the last analysis as crime control whatever the law stipulated. This was notable in the South African case, where state oppression was heavily codified through criminal law and surrounded with the trappings of legality. What was missing were the social components of criminalisation which prevented political and legal closure.4 As Habermas (1976) remarked, efforts by states to engage in ‘ideology planning’ may well

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deploy a battery of strategies which include the use of law. However, such processes come up against severe limitations in that ‘there is no administrative creation of meaning … . Cultural traditions have their own, vulnerable, conditions of reproduction. They remain “living” as long as they take shape in an unplanned, nature-like manner’ (1976: 70). Criminalisation cannot be controlled solely by the state. When it flies in the face of popular sentiments, grounded in determinate social relations, then it becomes something else.5 Authoritarian attempts at criminalisation are of course an extreme case. In democratic

societies the process whereby criminalisations that have fallen foul of changed culture and attitudes fall into disuse is not dissimilar. If an activity becomes socially accepted and decriminalised in popular opinion, few people will report the offence, police and judicial authorities will become reluctant to prosecute and when they do there will be widespread disapproval with such prosecutions being regarded as a waste of time and public resources. The social underpinnings of criminalisation begin to crumble. Eventually, the criminal law itself may be changed. Such may well be what is happening to victimless crimes such as cannabis smoking in many western democracies. There is thus an objectivity to what is or is not ‘crime’, but it is not an objectivity simply enshrined in actually existing criminal law nor simply in a higher set of a priori principles of human rights. The objectivity is rather located in social relations, in how a variety of social actors respond to situations which they may well regard as the violation of human rights.

Deconstructing Crime

The same issue of the basis of criminalisation in social relations rather than in either state edicts or abstract conceptions of human rights, is illustrated by the converse strategy of attempting to dispense with criminalisation altogether as an ineffective and oppressive method of dealing with harms and conflicts. Starting from an attempt to subvert the disciplinary side of the dual nature of modernity, the argument has been classically stated by the Dutch abolitionist lawyer, Louk Hulsman, who argued that the categories of ‘crime’ are given by the criminal justice system rather than by victims or society in general. This makes it necessary to abandon the notion of ‘crime’ as a tool in the conceptual framework of criminology. Crime has no ontological reality. Crime is not the object but the product of criminal policy. Criminalisation is one of the many ways of constructing social reality. (Hulsman 1986: 34–5)

Abolitionism is the practical policy and deconstruction the theoretical orientation. This

view starts from the opposite end of the argument to the ‘all human rights violations are crimes’ approach. The criminal justice system, rather than arising to deal with the objectively pre-existing problem of crime, insists on stamping the label of crime on a diversity of otherwise quite incommensurable forms of activity. In fact we can deal with conflicts and harms, argues the abolitionist, without falling foul of the dark side of the criminalising abstraction; the forcing of similarity in the face of difference. Hulsman urged us to dispense altogether with criminalising terminology and deal directly with the underlying reality of a diversity of problematic situations, conflicts, harms and ‘trouble’ in relations between people,

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each with its own dynamics and appropriate forms of solution. The practical implication is that we should seek to abolish the criminal justice system as it now stands and transform its agencies into resources for the resolution of conflicts without attempting to impose any external definition on what those conflicts might be. It should be entirely left to individuals to decide they have a conflict, or are involved in a problematic situation with others. The role of the state would be purely that of facilitating the parties coming together. At its most radical, abolitionism might be seen to involve the abolition of the criminal justice system altogether in favour of decentralised dispute-resolution systems, while its minimal version would advocate rather a dissolution of criminal law into various forms of victim-initiated civil litigation. On an obvious level Hulsman is absolutely right. It is not individuals who carry legal

classifications around in their heads. The victim of ‘crime’ often indeed knows only that a rather unfortunate problematic situation has arisen. It is the criminal justice system that decides that it is burglary rather than criminal damage, actual rather than grievous bodily harm and so on. For abolitionism the injunction on the participants in a conflict situation to remain passive in the face of the criminal justice system and its legal categories is replaced by a more active mobilisation in which the state takes a back seat. It brings the parties together but then they have to work out the nature of their dispute and how to resolve it. This type of thinking has, like the human rights approach, not been without influence. Recent decades have seen the proliferation of various schemes, often with overt state support, for community mediation, restorative justice, reintegrative shaming, etc. (Matthews 1988; Braithwaite 1989; Ness 1990; Hahn 1998). In the latter case there has been explicit interest in forms of communal dispute resolution to be found in traditional communities among native peoples, a pre-modern theme to be found in some abolitionist writing (Christie 1977). If there is consensus about what is or is not a harm and the community has sufficient resources to sort out low-level conflicts and apply reasonable censure, then abolitionism makes sense. The systems of conflict resolution that predated the criminal justice system may exist and function alongside and in ambiguous relationship to it. The weakness of abolitionism is generally considered to lie in its assumptions about power

relationships in modern industrial capitalist societies (Lea 1987). The idea that disputants can come together and resolve their conflicts presupposes a particular social structure in which people both have the time and energy to pursue their cases through civil justice or whatever other reconciliation mechanisms predominate, and the power to define what is or is not problematic or harmful and what constitutes a satisfactory outcome to mediation processes. What is presupposed is some version of reflexivity akin to Habermas’ ideal speech situation of open, power-free communication in an as-yet-to-be-realised final perfection of a modernity of rationally communicating free individuals (see Habermas 1987). However, such conditions are, currently, rarely achieved. Even within the relatively cohesive localised communities already mentioned, the dominant definitions of what is problematic frequently exclude whole areas of activity that certain groups see as harmful and wrong. The most obvious example is violence against women. It is hardly surprising that a powerful tendency in feminist politics has been for more, rather than less, criminal justice intervention and application of the criminalising abstraction in the private sphere of the family and of gender relations generally. In a similar vein, as regards much harm inflicted on the weak by powerful corporations, the

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popular demand is less that the parties to the dispute be left to sort out their problematic situation than that corporate executives be hauled before the courts and fined or imprisoned; in other words that the criminalising abstraction is forcefully applied in a consistent manner. The issue is not that the criminal justice system deals with such matters in a more just or effective way, but that the disputants themselves lack the power and resources to sort out their conflicts. Such resources could be returned to them but not without a fundamental reorganisation of society. Even where, as in both the area of sexual violence and corporate victimisation there has been considerable development of an organised social movement, the goal of the latter has usually involved the strengthening of criminalisation (see Pitch 1995). Thus the critique of both reconstructionism and deconstructionism leads to the same

conclusion: that of the dependence of criminalisation on a certain set of social relations of power and interaction which call it into being and which are necessary for its practical working. From a reconstructionist perspective the ability to change the parameters of criminalisation, either in the interests of human rights or in the interests of their suppression, is crucially dependent on the degree to which wider social relations will provide practical support for new extensions of criminalisation. From a deconstructionist perspective the issue is the inability of actually existing power relations to enable a decentralised system for dealing with harms and conflicts in relations among and between individuals and organisations without recourse to the criminalising abstraction administered by a criminal justice system – or something closely resembling it – centred in the state. However, there is an obvious though important qualification to be made. This relationship of

mutual interdependence between criminal justice and social relations of power and culture, which is but a particular example of the general relations of separation and interdependence between the state and civil society characteristic of modern society, is an historical phenomenon. It is not in the nature of things but the product of a particular historical development. Thus abolitionism is only wrong to the extent that it advocates the possibility of dispensing with criminal justice and criminalisation in the existing form of society. As a critique of the repressive nature of criminal justice and a prefiguration of a more egalitarian society, it is an important standpoint. Neither is the argument that there is presently no alternative to criminal justice and criminalisation a denial of the oppressive nature of much crime control by existing states. It is rather to point to the contradictory phenomenon of dependence upon oppressive institutions by virtue of the fact that the organisation of socio- economic and political life in modern capitalist society has deprived the mass of people of any alternative. People hand over their problems to the criminal justice system because they have been deprived of the power to do otherwise. As the Soviet legal theorist, Evgeny Pashukanis wrote: At the Hamburg Congress of Criminologists in 1905, van Hamel, a reputable representative of the sociological school, declared that the main obstacles to modern criminology were the three concepts of guilt, crime and punishment. If we freed ourselves of these concepts, he added, everything would be better. One might respond to this that the forms of bourgeois consciousness cannot be eliminated by a critique in terms of ideas alone, for they form a united whole with the material relations of which they are the expression. The only way to dissipate these appearances which have become reality is by overcoming the corresponding relations in practice, that is by realising socialism through the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat…. The concepts of crime and punishment are … necessary determinants of the legal form from which people will be able to liberate themselves only after the legal superstructure itself has begun to wither away. And

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when we begin to overcome and to do without these concepts in reality, rather than merely in declarations, that will be the surest sign that the narrow horizon of bourgeois law is finally opening up before us. (Pashukanis 1978: 184–8)

It is this historical dynamic which is the main orientation of our argument in this book. The

social relations which necessitate criminal justice have a history, they are part of the development of modernity and their crisis is part of the crisis of modernity. It should not be thought that a crisis in the social conditions which sustained criminalisation and criminal justice is automatically a precursor of the type of harmonious interaction prefigured by abolitionists. Something altogether different may be on the horizon. But this is part of our later discussion. Our task now is to specify with some greater rigour just what are these social relations of criminalisation and crime control to which I have been referring.

The Social Relations of Crime Control

A purely juridical perspective, concerned with the administration of the law, generally deals with a concept of the criminal offender as already in court, and spends little time thinking about the processes, and particularly the informal ones, whereby he or she arrived there. Yet a glance around the criminal court will reveal the importance of the working of a whole series of social mechanisms and relations. Present are not just the judicial and legal professionals but the defendant, and perhaps the victim as chief witness for the prosecution. How did they get there? Who reported the crime and why, and in the face of what obstacles, or under the pressure of what inducements? A central part of the case of the prosecution or defence may hang on the testimony of witnesses. How did they get there? Why were they prepared to get involved? Why were they prepared to give statements to the police? What obstacles were placed in their way or what pressures forced them to comply? Investigating magistrates, lawyers and police officers may have an implicit understanding of these mechanisms since a good part of their working life is spent dealing with them – gathering information leading to an arrest, securing the appearance of a reluctant witness in court or dealing with victims whose fear of the police may be even greater than their fear of reprisals from their attackers. This complex of social relations which makes criminalisation an objective possibility I

shall call the social relations of crime control: an ensemble of actors, roles and interactions which sustains the application of the criminalising abstraction and the management and control of criminality. We can describe the basic dynamics at work in a schematic or ideal type form as a ‘square of crime’,6 a system of interaction between four participants; the state and the criminal justice agencies, offenders, victims, and the various publics and communities involved in the control of various types of crime.

The state and the public

The social foundation of modern crime control is that various types of conflicts have been handed over to the state to sort out. To use Nils Christie’s (1977) terminology, our conflicts have become their property. This handing over has various preconditions. Firstly, the

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categories of criminal law deployed by the state must bear sufficient correspondence to popular conceptions of guilt, justice and harm that citizens will identify broadly the same acts as crimes as the state, and broadly agree with the types of punishments and sentences meted out by the courts. This is often regarded as guaranteed in liberal democratic regimes by the legislative process together with the assumption of a natural consensus around primary criminalisations such as murder and theft (see Cohen 1988). Even where this agreement exists, the public must accept the legitimacy of the criminal justice system and the activities of its various officials. This can vary within wide limits, from a rather unlikely confidence in both the competence and the professional integrity of criminal justice personnel to the more realistic scenario of a feeling that there is simply no alternative in dealing with a particular situation to that of calling the police. The crime control activities of the criminal justice agencies cannot be separated in practice from other activities in which they may be engaged. If a community is systematically harassed by a racist police force who label its young men as already criminalised then that community will be reluctant to call upon or give evidence to the police even where serious victimisation has taken place. Such communities may prefer to deal as far as possible with their own conflicts and troubles. There is, and this will be discussed more fully later on, a whole host of habits of conduct

that citizens must adopt in order to function as an adjunct rather than as rival, or hindrance to the state. How people use and conceptualise public space, read signs of disturbance or irregularity and what consequent action they take, in particular as regards the transmission of information about crime to the criminal justice agencies, are all crucial components of the techniques of governance which extend beyond the agencies of criminal justice and other branches of the state apparatus and permeate the public, local communities and families.

The state and the offender

Which law violations and problematic situations can be effectively criminalised is an important question of power involving both the state and the public. As far as the state is concerned, notwithstanding formal injunctions (present in some criminal law jurisdictions) on the public prosecutor to pursue all reported crimes, the key issue is that of discretionary behaviour. What crimes and the criminality of which social strata will be the practical focus of police action is a key variable. It is generally assumed that whereas offenders are usually more powerful than their victims, they are weaker than the state. Those in danger of criminalisation have differing resources to mount a counter-attack. The young street criminal from a poor community certainly has no power and in any case usually has an already pre-criminalised social status. Others, such as organised crime syndicates, may not avoid criminalisation, but may be able to neutralise its effects through corruption and intimidation both of criminal justice agencies and community and private organisations. Others, such as prestigious business leaders and politicians or impeccably respectable husbands are able to deploy their social status as a mechanism with which to deflect in a number of ways the criminalising abstraction. For example, in criminal trials of highly respectable financiers for various business crimes there is often a lingering assumption that really they should not be in court at all and that the matter could sensibly have been dealt with in some other way. Similarly, the ways in which

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rape trials usually reproduce rather than equalise the power relations between men and women, leading to the criminalisation of the victim rather than the offender, are well known. The weakness of the offender in relation to the state is therefore a crucial component of the

social relations of crime control. It enables the criminal justice system to reconcile respect for the rule of law, and hence sufficient public support to enable a flow of information about crime to the authorities, with the requirement to control crime effectively. The public could collaborate with the police without fear of reprisal from the weak offender or fear that the police themselves were corrupted by the offender. Conversely, the police could rely on a flow of public information available without intrusive surveillance on their part, and in sufficient quantity and quality to persuade a jury to convict even if the offender chose to remain absolutely silent throughout the entire proceedings as was his right. Not only therefore do the rights of due process and respect for civil liberties not interfere with the effectiveness of crime control but the former are conducive to the latter. Respect for due process and civil liberties secures the public legitimacy of criminal justice agencies and enhances the public willingness to collaborate with them. The weakness of the offender complements the role of the community as an agent of informal non-coercive control in enabling the reconciliation of law with order. As noted above, in the case of more powerful offenders this is problematic.

The state and the victim

Victimisation is not simply an automatic effect of the criminal action. Victim is a legal category and a social role requiring a certain type of action in relation to the state authorities, namely, passivity. This involves the handing over not only of technical aspects of criminal investigation and establishment of guilt, but also of the moral righteousness at harm suffered, to the criminal justice system (Christie 1977; Elias 1993). It is the state that is injured by crime. In most western criminal jurisdictions the victim takes a passive role as chief witness for the state, though as I shall note later this is beginning to change. Victim is also a social category, a status. To claim the status of victim in the eyes of the state – and the community – requires a certain type of behaviour. A transition must be made from ‘sufferer’ to victim (see Grant-Stitt 1989). The ‘victimising abstraction’ parallels the criminalising abstraction and in a similar way involves social power relations and cultural attitudes. The individual or individuals concerned need to act in certain ways in order effectively to secure victim status. Nils Christie identified the ideal victim as ‘a person or category of individuals who – when hit by crime – most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’ (Christie 1986: 18). To achieve such status the victim must be seen to be acting in certain ways: for example, doing something entirely respectable at the time of the crime and having no complicating personal relationship with the offender which might cloud the issues of criminal responsibility. The effect of cultural stereotypes and power relations in the criminal trial process itself is no more clearly illustrated than in cases of rape where the matter before the court frequently shifts from the actions of the alleged offender to those of the victim (see Lees 1996). Victims themselves may not wish to claim full victim status and may aim, at least initially, at an alternative status such as that of disputants. Victims of domestic violence, for example, may call on the police but not wish to assume the full implications of a status as victim of crime, rather wishing the

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police to simply ‘calm down’ the situation (Hoyle 1998). That choice may, of course, itself be the effect of power relations.

The public and the victim

The relationship between the public and the victim reinforces and reproduces that of the state. The public must identify with the victim. This is particularly important in equating the power balance between situations where weak victims encounter powerful offenders. Where, for example, the victim’s dependence on the offender will act as a barrier to the claiming of victim status, then the surrounding community must give sufficient support to provide testimony on behalf of, or put sufficient pressure on, the victim to compensate for this dependence. Conversely, the public may obstruct the claiming of victim status through techniques of blaming in which the victim rather than the offender comes to be regarded as the cause of the crime. Such an ideological construct needs to be carefully distinguished from the fact that many offences may arise out of prior interaction in which both victim and offender participate. In cases where the victim is absent, such as homicide or so-called ‘victimless’ crimes, the community has to substitute for the victim in various ways through reporting and providing evidence. Often the public will take the form of a geographical locality, of a local community of neighbours or perhaps work associates who witnessed the crime, saw something suspicious, etc. But many crimes take place elsewhere than in the victim’s own locality or workplace. Members of a wider and more amorphous public must be prepared to respond to police requests for information. It is not so much the location as the activation of community that is important as far as the social relations of crime control are concerned. The forms of behaviour required of the victim – passivity, unambiguity of relations with the offender – may well be required by the community also. By this mechanism social relations of power are reproduced within criminal justice. The community may make or unmake victims. The positive side may be where victims are unaware of what is happening to them except as a result of public mobilisation, as in many cases of corporate crime concerned with pollution or the sale of dangerous goods. The negative side is seen in the denial of victim status through racism or the reinforcing of sexist assumptions concerning culpability in domestic violence or rape cases.

Figure 1.1 The social relations of crime control

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The public and the offender

Ideally, the relations between citizens must be such that anyone who commits a recognisable harm can be criminalised and their other identities and attributes placed in suspension or mobilised to give substantive content to the criminalising abstraction. The application of criminalising abstraction by the community is central to the whole process of crime control. The process of fitting a particular situation to the legal categories involves a complex play of power and conflict both in respect of the relation of the offender and the victim to other members of the community and of the latter to the state. Criminalisation involves the fitting of trouble or problematic situations into the straitjacket of criminal law categories and the effective recasting as criminals and victims of individuals about whose lives and affinities a great deal may be known in a cohesive community. This is the core of the criminalising abstraction. It is not that the public or the victim must first perform this abstraction and then call the police. Rather, the decision to call the police is the first step in a process one of the possible outcomes of which may be the criminalising abstraction. Cohesive communities may have a variety of complex relations with their own troublemakers. They may be simultaneously fearful of and yet benefit from certain forms of support rendered by local ‘villains’ which may range from sorting out petty violence and squabbles to providing a supply of cheap stolen goods. In business a certain distaste for illegal violations and corrupt practices of colleagues may be more than compensated for by the feeling that such matters should be handled in-house and are no concern of prying outside institutions such as the criminal justice system. But to the extent that the latter is able to function, the community at some stage must disconnect from the offender; it must tolerate the interventions of the state, the police and perhaps others, such as defence lawyers, knocking on doors, asking questions, taking statements, etc. It must learn to participate in the crime control process on terms set by the state. Nevertheless, even when the police are not called, the role of local communities and families, or business communities, as agents of informal social control of potential offenders is a crucial part of crime control. These structures of informal power enable the preservation of liberal legality by moderating any tendency on the part of the state to a coercive authority, and the abandonment of the rule of law and civil liberties, in the interests of all-embracing crime control. Liberal legality would prove too delicate for a society founded on coercive authority, were not this authority embedded indistinguishably through discipline in the domain of the normal, of the unremarkable. (Fitzpatrick 1988: 190)

The offender and the victim

Finally, the ideal victim might be thought to be paralleled by the ideal offender as outsider and stranger with no complicating relations with either the victim or the surrounding community. This situation may be approximated in street theft or household burglary by a stranger from another community, or in a clear case of financial fraud perpetrated by a group of professional criminals on a company. The offenders can be criminalised immediately by both victim and surrounding community because they have no other identity arising from a relationship with victims or other members of the latter’s social network. However there is a paradox in that the

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more the offender fits the category of stranger, and is therefore most easily criminalisable, the less information there will be which will enable him or her to be tracked down. The highest rates of crime cleared up by police tend to be where, as in the majority of homicides, the victim was known personally to the offender and the friends, neighbours and relatives have much to say on the matter. But in homicide or brutal violence it is the abhorrent action which demonises and criminalises the perpetrator whatever else his relations with the local community. Even people who have difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that ‘such a nice family man as Dr X’ could possibly have turned out to be a killer, have no problem in applying the criminalising abstraction where the crime is so horrendous a disruption of civilised normality as to unambiguously dehumanise and demonise the perpetrator. However, in communities where violent death is a much more normal part of the brutality of everyday life, a murder may be less of a departure from normality. The idea that crime exists as a distinct entity outside of this complex of relations, waiting, as

it were, to be discovered by them, is revealed in the use of the term by both criminologists and criminal justice agencies of the phrase ‘the dark figure of unrecorded crime’ to refer to matters which are not reported to the criminal justice agencies and processed as crimes. In a strict sense this is a meaningless discourse. Not only is it not clear whether such problematic situations, if reported, would have stood the test of due process in the courts (Lacey 1995), but it is also often not clear how such events would have been conceptualised had they actually been reported and acted upon through the normal channels of criminal justice. For example, respondents to victim surveys, even though the forms of victimisation they are asked to report are usually focused on criminal law definitions, may report incidents to interviewers that they would not report to the criminal justice agencies or which would not have been regarded as crime had they done so. What interviewers are picking up may be in many cases not so much ‘unreported crime’ as some of the silences and power effects of the social relations of crime control. We have described the social relations involved in criminalisation and crime control in

rather ideal typical form. Actual reality departs from them in various ways even in situations where they are hegemonic. But that is precisely an illustration of their precariousness as condensations of social interaction. A number of aspects of their working can be underlined. Firstly, they sustain an organised system of moral censures which underpin criminalisation. As Colin Sumner has argued, ‘[t]he sociology of crime and deviance must … become a sociology of social censures; their structural roots, institutional forms, discursive and practical meanings, systems and policies of enforcement, hegemonic functions, effects and significance for “offenders”, and normative validity’ (Sumner 1990a: 26–7; see also 1976, 1990b). Censure takes a practical form as the identification and labelling of offenders, their segregation and classification as individuals engaged in distinct types of activity – the application of the criminalising abstraction. Secondly, they function as a structure of communication. The flow of information about ‘crime’ or ‘suspicious events’ from the public to the criminal justice agencies, and the structuring and tutoring of public suspicions through requests for information or observations by police or collaborating media institutions, helps to sustain a common language of criminality, together with the renewal and updating of criminal stereotypes. Finally, the social relations of crime control are a mechanism of power involving the handing

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over of discourses and activities to the state, the abdication of the power and right to settle conflicts and the consignment of such activity to negative connotations of vigilantism and ‘taking the law into your own hands’ when it should be in the hands of the state, and the forcing of difference and diversity into the universalist discourse of criminal law. The positive effects of power include the rule of law and the overcoming of difference by that same discourse. But state power and the discourses of criminal law are part of ‘a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localised in them’ (Foucault 1979: 96) but a web which is located in the dynamic of the social relations of crime control as a whole. The object of state activity, of public policy can therefore never be simply the articulation of criminal law and legal power but the wider task of ‘government’ of this structure of relations to ensure its reproduction and functioning.

Crime and Modernity

The study of interactions between the components of the social relations of crime control to reveal the various power effects internal to their operation is part of the task of a criminology dedicated to ‘a fully social theory of crime’ (Taylor et al. 1973). The study of the development of these relations in order to specify their conditions of existence is part of the wider task of an historically informed social theory of modernity. In the rest of this book the aim is to make a contribution to this latter task by linking some of the main developments in the social relations of crime control with the wider changes associated with the contradictory unfolding of modern capitalist societies. The main thrust of the argument will be as follows. The social relations of crime control, despite being a key aspect of modernity, take a long

time to develop and only ever develop partially, meeting with numerous resistances and obstacles. That is the result of the contradictions and tensions of a modernity whose principal engine of development is the accumulation of capital. Nevertheless, during the long period embracing, in England, the latter part of the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century the overall tendency was towards their consolidation. Partly, this was a result of conscious social engineering, of a modernising offensive (Wagner 1994: 20) led by the enlightened sections of the bourgeoisie which involved reforms aimed at the education and socialisation of the working class and the reorganisation of the urban environment. This strategy was possible, indeed it only occurred because, the requirements of profitable capital accumulation and the reform of cities and social life were tied to one another. The first required the second. Capitalist expansion itself provided the resources and needed the results of the process. This was the period in which capitalism, still infused with the dynamism celebrated by Marx and Engels in the early pages of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, was revolutionising the forces and relations of production. The consolidation of the social relations of crime control is inextricably bound up with these

developments. Changes in the structure of cities, communities and in personal behaviour made possible a clearer marking out of the criminal, clearer definitions of crime, and boundaries of legitimate and criminal violence in private and public space. Meanwhile the agencies of criminal justice and social welfare spread into working-class communities and partially

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displaced traditional forms of autonomous conflict resolution, relegating the latter to the status of auxiliary or informal social control. At the same time within the bourgeoisie itself the development of restraint, the calming of the wild excesses of an earlier period of ‘primitive accumulation’ and a framework of legal regulation of economic practices made headway. All this is part of what might be considered one of the greatest projects of the first stage of modernity, that of the governance of civil society. These dynamics will be the theme of Chapter 2. But the new forms of freedom and emancipation resulting from capitalist modernisation

were accompanied by new forms of exploitation, impoverishment and conflict. Crime control was, and of course is, penetrated by these in a number of ways: by the contrast between the benefits of the rule of law and the criminal justice system as a mechanism for the protection of the powerful; by the continual weakening of the social relations of crime control in the face of powerful offenders or community sanctioned social crime as modes of resistance and survival among the poor. Criminalisation never loses its status as a contested process despite its overall tendency towards stabilisation. This will be the main theme of Chapter 3. The middle of the twentieth century is the high point of what Peter Wagner (1994) terms

organised modernity. Through the turmoil of the inter-war period the Keynesian welfare state emerges as a mechanism for social and economic stabilisation. Full employment, Fordism, and a process of breakdown in class and regional cultures through mass education and social and geographic mobility seemed, for a time, to have permanently subdued the conflicts and contradictions of the first phase of modernity. This enabled a further stabilisation of the social relations of crime control through the strengthening of consensus around definitions of criminality, the institutionalisation of urban structures and forms of behaviour conducive to crime control. At the same time social planning enabled the welfare state to join the criminal justice system as a conflict regulation mechanism. The period of the 1950s and 1960s in particular was one in which criminal justice issues were progressively depoliticised and unproblematic. The social relations of crime control could be virtually taken for granted except in a few backward areas of older cities, or regions on the periphery of modernisation which could be seen essentially as hangovers from the first stage of modernity or even pre-modernity. Nevertheless steadily rising rates of crime pointed to important fissures in the stabilisation process. Chapter 4 will attempt to draw together some of these themes. But this period was short lived. In reality large areas were never touched by expansion, but

in any case from the last quarter of the twentieth century modernity has moved into a new type of crisis. The dominant forces have been fragmentation and a weakening of the type of social structure that underpinned the social relations of crime control. This rupture in the dynamics of modernity has been sufficiently profound to have given rise to a plethora of new terminologies and discourses – for example: postmodernity, late modernity, late capitalism, postfordism, risk society – all of which attempt in one way or another to grasp the dynamics of a real crisis in the modernisation process. The ingredients of change are reasonably clear: globalisation, the dismantling of the welfare state, changes in the organisation of urban life and class structure, changes in gender relations, all associated with the changed dynamics of capitalism. These developments, it will be argued, are characterised by a disruptive tendency in which the relationship between the development of capitalism and the development of society has

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changed. Whereas during the nineteenth century the expansion of capital accumulation, despite its contradictions, did lay down the conditions for social cohesion, stable communities, continuities in social and economic life, the forms in which capital now develops on a global scale tend to undermine these older stabilities. Capitalism no longer develops the social productive forces, or at least not in the same way and not in a way compatible with recognisable forms of social stability. The impact on criminality and its control is considerable. There are, it will be argued, two

tendencies gathering pace. Firstly, a reintroduction of some of the obstacles that the nineteenth- century development of crime control had to overcome: blurred boundaries between criminality and normal activities and social relations; crime as an increasingly functional as well as a disruptive element in the survival of both poor communities and powerful corporations; fragmentation of communities and urban space which disrupts stable forms of governance of crime while the latter itself increasingly functions as a form of governance. Crime, by becoming increasingly normalised, begins to lose its distinct identity as crime. Secondly, the same dynamic necessarily characterises the control of crime. The expansion of the latter to the management less of a distinct criminality and increasingly of the poor as a whole, who now reassume the old nineteenth-century mantle of the dangerous classes, blurs the boundaries between crime control and more general social regulation which is itself fragmenting and pluralising under the impact of changes in the nature of global capital accumulation. The discussion in the remaining chapters will attempt to unravel some of these themes. None

of this will of course appeal to those who see crime as an unproblematic legal category and crime control as simply a technical solution to an essentially unchanging problem. But for others it might serve as a set of pointers to a more developed understanding of the role played by criminality in the development and crisis of modernity.

Notes

1 This will be discussed further in Chapter 2. 2 The Schwendingers’ argument was one of a number of contributions seeking to emancipate criminology from too close, or

indeed any, dependence on existing criminal law categories. Their view that the concept of crime itself should be extended to embrace all human rights violations is paralleled by the more recent argument of Henry and Milovanovic (1996) who wish to define crime as ‘the expression of some agency’s energy to make a difference on others and it is the exclusion of those others who in the instant are rendered powerless to maintain or express their humanity’ (1996: 116). See also Pepinsky (1974) who wished to substitute ‘exploitation’ for crime as the object of study.

3 That such a state of affairs, rather than being symptomatic of the gradual emergence of a system of global criminal justice to regulate the affairs of the international society of nation states, portends the future for crime control within nation states themselves, will be argued in Chapter 7.

4 A society in which social support for repressive criminalisation functioned effectively would not be unlike Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial portrayal of public participation in, and support for, Nazi extermination of the Jews (Goldhagen 1996). For a critique of the argument see Finkelstein 1997.

5 The dynamics of authoritarian criminalisation will be further discussed in Chapter 3. 6 This account of the social relations of crime control is derived from earlier work in the tradition of Left Realist criminology

The emphasis in the latter was on the use of the ‘square of crime’ as a framework within which to study the various interactions which constitute the crime control process (Lea 1992; Young 1987, 1992). The emphasis in the present work is that of the historical constitution, development and crisis of that system of interaction itself.

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